What does Google fear about Bing.com?
About 3 months ago I was in the deep bowels of Google’s “even more” section and found a question based search engine that was being developed. This was not your grandmother’s search engine, oh no, this was a search engine that would allow you to ask a question and have Google come up with a smart answer. Think of climbing the mountain to ask the wise monk the meaning of life or maybe why Twinkies are so popular.
Its purpose was to give you an answer that was insightful and based on all the data Google had indexed and a “thought process” algorithm applied to that data. It is important to understand that this is the theoretical “Holy Grail” of search engines. Why? Imagine a team of scientists working on finding a way to improve the effectiveness of solar panels. They are stumped with a particular problem so what do they do? They ask Google what the answer is to the problem that has them stumped and like a really, really smart person Google answers the question or gives major insight into the answer. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants! We will one day be able to stand on not just the insights and information of a few, but of all information contained on the web.
I thought this answer based search experiment of Google’s was pretty neat stuff but obviously needed more work. That must have been why it was buried in the Labs section of Google’s tools. I toyed with the search and then moved on to other things that were on my mind, like work and paying bills.
Enter…..Bing.com. Weeks after I stumbled upon the question based search engine of Google’s, Microsoft launched Bing.com. It was touted as a new kind of search engine that was smart and able to “think” of answers for your questions and searches. This made me think of the question based search engine I had found on Google a few weeks earlier. So I went back to look and compare Google’s engine to Bing’s engine. To my surprise Google’s question based search engine was gone! Nothing, nada, zip. Not even evidence that it had ever been there just a few weeks earlier.
I don’t know what to think about this other than this is Google pulling their cards closer to their chest so their competitors can’t gauge their progress on the next generation of search engines. This does make me wonder what Bing has that Google fears though.
**Please note that this was not Google Answers at Answers.google.com, which was retired back in 2006.
