In the current Read/WriteWeb poll (see below), we’re asking what ‘search 2.0’ concepts
you think stand the best chance of beating Google. The results so far are interesting,
because Artificial Intelligence is currently top pick – despite having a history of
underachievement in the tech industry and there being no real AI search contenders yet.
Hakia, which we profiled
recently, is one such AI (or natural language processing) search engine. But Hakia is
at this stage a fair way off being a finished product.
Poll results so far:
1. Artificial Intelligence (e.g. Hakia, Powerset) 23% (123 votes)
2. People Powered Search (e.g. del.icio.us, ChaCha) 21% (115 votes)
3. Vertical Search (e.g. SimplyHired, Technorati) 15% (81 votes)
4. Personalized Search (e.g. Collarity) 12% (63 votes)
5. Clustering (e.g. Clusty, SearchMash) 11% (58 votes)
6. Social Search (e.g. Eurekster, Rollyo) 7% (37 votes)
7. Visualization (e.g. Quintura and Kartoo) 6% (33 votes)
8. Previews (Snap, Live Image Search) 5% (25 votes)
Alex Iskold, in his R/WW post The Race to Beat
Google, was skeptical of AI search:
“Based on what we have seen so far, it is difficult to see how these companies can
beat Google. Firstly, being able to enter the query using natural language is already
allowed by Google, so this is not a competitive difference. It must then be the actual
results that are vastly better. Now that is really difficult to imagine. Somewhat better
maybe, but vastly different? Unlikely.”
But it seems R/WW readers beg to differ. 23% of you think AI search is the most likely
approach to challenge Google.
Disagree? Well, let us know in the poll which search 2.0
approaches you favor. You can choose more than one:
