Live.com

Live.com, the new internet initiative of Microsoft, had many innovative ideas at the beginning. However as Vista's official release date gets closer, it has become a much more traditional search engine. Besides the technology advances in their algorithms, which Microsoft hopes will enable it to compete with Google, there are/were many UI enhancements as well. There used to be, for example, an infinite scrollbar in Live.com - but this seems to have been removed for the final public release.

Most innovations in the image search interface have been kept though - the tiered zooming feature is the most blatant one. Live's Image Search offers seamless user experience enhancements. The infinite scrollbar functionality fits very well and saves you from the hassle of clicking and waiting. And Scratchpad functionality allows you to pick your favourites and compare them smoothly.

Overall we can conclude that Live's interface, when compared to old MSN and Microsoft sites, got more simple and Google-like.

Technology Advancements

Search for Meaning by Hakia

Hakia's motto is "Search for Meaning". Founded by seasoned nuclear scientist Riza Berkan, Hakia has raised more than $30M so far, mostly from European private investors. With Hakia you don't search keywords, instead you directly ask questions to the search engine. Hakia makes deep semantic analysis on the pages they crawl. It introduces a new mosaic-like indexing method called QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction). Despite all these nice promises, currently Hakia does not always return the correct results. However they're still in public alpha release and the company is set to debut its full operations in Jan, 2007. After this date, we will have a better chance to judge Hakia's capabilities. Note that Hakia works on top of Microsoft technologies.

Clustered Search of Vivisimo and Ask

Neither Vivisimo nor Ask are new companies. Both offer clustered search, which means fragmenting the results of your query so that users can see related terms and go deeper or broader in their data mining. Vivisimo was the first to offer it and it's very useful in cases where you are researching a topic that you're completely new to. Ask's approach is less dense than Vivisimo's and is somehow similar to Live's related results feature. But as stated above, clustered search is probably not something you'll need all the time - it's more a side feature that may be helpful in some cases.

Intent-Driven Search by Yahoo!

This is a brilliant idea. Yahoo's research project Mindset brings you results according to your search purposes. For instance, when you enter "Rolex Watches" in the search box, you may be willing to buy a Rolex Watch or make an encyclopedic research about the company. Yahoo's intent-driven search allows you to specify your intent and get the most relevant results.

Note that intent-driven search is still in a very early phase, but it's very promising for mainstream users.

Google's Ori Alon

In April this year, Google bought a patented technology that allows them to show related terms after your query. For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, this technology gives you a list of related words - like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion. The patent was taken by an Israeli phD studying in Australia. Google has not released this feature yet on Google or SearchMash, but it is expected to be shown soon. Also, it is rumored that Microsoft and Yahoo were also after this patent, but Google won the race.

Del.icio.us and Power of Masses

You may ask, what is del.icio.us doing in between all these search sites - isn't it just a bookmarking system? Well, the answer is both yes and no. While it's true that it's a bookmarking site, Yahoo probably didn't buy them just for bookmarking. Actually del.icio.us is also a great tool that empowers the search results of any search engine. Because when you bookmark a site, this indicates the site is a useful resource - so its "pagerank" should be increased. In other words, del.icio.us can actually be used as a search engine, fueled by the power of masses principle. And del.icio.us is not alone in this - Wink and Snap are also trying to use the power of masses in their search offerings.

Supposedly, Google also uses some sort of power of masses with their Personalized Search and Google Toolbar offerings.

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