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Search Engine Inventions Personalize Your Results
Let's say, hypothetically, that you wanted to do a search online for cantaloupes. If you're like 64 percent of online users, chances are you'll go to Google and type the word into that all-familiar 3-inch box. Google, then, will return a series of hyperlinks displaying wildly diverse information – all of which you'll need to pick through to get the facts you need.
Read more articles from the May 2009 issue of InventHelp's newsletter for inventors |
We at InventHelp® wonder if sorting through search results is really the most effective use of our time. If one of our dedicated InventHelp employees needed to know where cantaloupes originated and another employee needed to know the nutritional information, they'd each get the same batch of results. Wouldn't searching online be faster and easier if engines could sort data based on our web usage or if we could hear the latest news in real time?
The answers are yes and yes. And luckily, some tech-savvy folks agree with us and are working on a slew of new search-engine inventions!
Let's start with the current talk of the town, Twitter. With news flashes reaching readers at warp speed, five minutes after it happens is just too long these days! A chunk of this urgency can be credited to Twitter, the go-to source for real-time searches of online buzz. Search "global warming" on Google and you'll come up with a Wikipedia page. Search for it on Twitter and you'll find microblog posts by the second.
And yes, we at InventHelp have joined Twitter-mania. Be sure to check out us out on Twitter for the latest updates from the "Invent Help People".
Other search sites aren't trying to be the new Google; they'd just like to complement it. Wolfram Alpha, just launched recently, is more of data cruncher than a search engine. Alpha, its trendier moniker, utilizes vast computing power to answer questions that may have never been answered online before. It does this by sorting searches created from existing data sets and approved by its math-minded staff, rather than displaying results that make the most sense statistically.
"It's not a new Google. It's not supposed to be. It's a new thing. It's very complementary, in a way, to what search engines do," Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, told CNN.
Other new search engine inventions, like Twine, try to understand their users before trying to interpret their searches. Twine is designed to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, Web pages, products – and organize it by topic. Twine works by utilizing your search history and combines it with results generated when your rank their search results in order of relevance. The more you use Twine, the better it gets at understanding your needs and interests.
There's even a new search engine invention for visually minded users. Tired of sorting through hyperlinks? Searchme offers aesthetic interfaces that allow users to sift through photos and images instead of the usual list of links.
Nova Spivack, a technology guru who watches search engine trends and inventions, told CNN that he thinks personalized and real-time searches are the future of the industry.
"Right now, one of the problems with search is that it's really one-size-fits-all. It's not very personalized," Spivack said. "The fact is when I'm searching for certain kinds of things, the way that the results should be ranked might quite be different than if someone with a very different background or interests was searching for those same things."
Now, don't get us wrong. Google is smart, advanced and it has resolved more trivia questions than we can count. It's even a regular verb in our vocabulary. We at InventHelp are looking forward to seeing how Google reacts to this new wave of competition. No matter who's the winner – faster, smarter search engines make life easier for everyone!
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