Competition for Google?

Many economists view competition as ubiquitous.  It is everywhere and threatens the position of dominant firms if they fail to innovate.  I don't know which products will be market winners but consumers will certainly win.  Ned Potter describes Wolfram's computational engine in "The Answer Machine? Wolfram Alpha Debuts," (ABC News, June 1, 2009).

Wolfram Alpha. It sounds like a code name from World War II, or perhaps a term a wildlife biologist would know.

Instead, it's the name of an audacious, if quirky, Web site led by the scientist Stephen Wolfram -- not a search engine, and not meant to be the "Google killer" that it was sometimes described as being, but a "computational knowledge engine." It is a Web site that will answer your questions -- at least some of them -- even if nobody has ever asked them before.

"What we're trying to do is much more ambitious," said Wolfram, 49, the lead developer of the technology behind the project, on which he says he has worked 25 years. "We're trying to take the question you ask, and automatically produce for you the answer, not giving you a collection of links, and saying, 'Go read this Web site, go read that Web site.'"

Gordon Crovitz "Google Gets Some Competition," describes Microsoft's Bing search engine (Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2009).

Microsoft says Bing, which goes live on Wednesday, will distinguish itself from Google and Yahoo by focusing on delivering answers, not just search results showing potentially relevant links. Microsoft says it's built a "decision engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions."

The goal is to understand what you're trying to know and to come up with answers, categorizing results in more useful ways. Bing has a separate approach, for example, to searches for factual research versus, say, searches for the best price for a new camera.

Finally, John Timmer describes Google's latest product enhancement, Google Squared in "Google squares the Web, hilarity ensues," (ars technica, June 4, 2009).

Yesterday, Google Labs took the wraps off its Google Squared service, which takes a spreadsheet-like approach to finding information on the Web. It's tempting to speculate that this is a bit of a response to Wolfram Alpha, the online computation engine that went live last month. But, although a spreadsheet implies calculation, Google's squared simply uses a cell-based presentation to organize data—the approach to the actual data is actually radically different from Wolfram's. We took the service for a bit of a spin and found it interesting and potentially useful, but only for those willing to put in a fair bit of effort.

The idea behind Squared, which Google announced back in May, is that users often want the results of what's essentially a multidimensional search. So, for example, if I wanted a collection of demographic information on several major US cities, I might need to perform multiple searches, one for each city. Google squared allows you to extend a single search into a second dimension—it's possible to create a square where each city has a row, and each column contains the specific demographic information you're interested in.