Finding the search engine differentiator

I’m still in two minds about Google Desktop, as I mentioned earlier. But deciding on which search tool to use isn’t really the main issue now. It’s more to do with what the search tool can do and how easy it is to do it.

I’ve been trying Blinkx for some while, especially the new version released a week or so ago with some very interesting new functionality. Of all the offerings on the market, Blinkx is the one that is probably closest to a truly integrated search capability – your PC, the web and peer-to-peer resources – and with some real intelligence in its ability to cross-reference your material and link it, whether on your PC or elsewhere.

A potential alternative to the Google Desktop is X1 Desktop Search. While you can’t compare this with Blinkx, it’s much more flexible than the Google offering with support for Boolean search terms and many more types of files it indexes and searches for.

I do like X1. It’s very fast and very accurate. The only negative is that you need to pay a hefty $75 for it if you want to keep it beyond its 15-day trial period.

For simple searching, I’d say most users today would go for the free alternative such as Google Desktop and accept the limitations. X1 is very good indeed, but I don’t see it delivering a quantum leap differentiator, so to speak, in capability or functionality that warrants paying for it. For a more sophisticated approach, I’ve not seen anything that’s gets close to the capability of Blinkx (which, incidentally, it’s also free).

All of these tools are jockeying for a position in a broad market area that looks set to take some evolutionary jumps if all the press articles in recent weeks are anything to go by.

You really are spoilt for choice today with what you can install on your PC to be your local search engine, or access on the web, or a mix of the two. There’s Google, A9, Yahoo, the new MSN Search, as well as the ones I’ve mentioned above. There are also search tools that specifically search information on blogs, such as IceRocket. And no doubt I’ve missed some.

Just the tip of the iceberg. The Financial Times had a thoughtful piece last week on the battle for supremacy that’s now really beginning. And this is where more sophisticated tools like Blinkx could emerge as a winner.

Consider this commentary from the FT article:

Eventually, though, the real battle between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo will be fought out over the quality of the information they can provide, says [Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy]. New and more sophisticated tools are likely to come much sooner than most expect, he says.

These include the ability to keep track of all the information a user has seen on his or her PC (a project called “Stuff I’ve Seen” is underway in Microsoft’s research arm); “active folder technology”, which constantly searches for information relevant to a user’s interests in a folder on the PC; and an “implicit query” function that analyses work being conducted on a PC and searches in the background for relevant information. [These last two are precisely what Blinkx is currently offering.]

Being rooted in the PC, many of these tools could favour an operating system company such as Microsoft rather than an internet company such as Google, says Mr Lynch. Google’s best hope may lie in encouraging users to store more of their personal data on the web, using things such as its Gmail service.

That makes the search wars a philosophical struggle over the future of computing: to what extent will it be conducted on the desktop PC, where Microsoft stands supreme, and to what extent will it pass to the internet, where Google and Yahoo dominate? The answer could determine ultimate victory in the search wars.

Financial Times | On the look-out for the next engine of change (subscription required)