As the creepy voice in Jacob’s Ladder says, “Dream On.”

This month saw the release of two “new” search engines, Wolfram|Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing.

Wolfram|Alpha is being labeled an “answer engine” instead of a search engine.  The gist of how it works is it takes your query, repeats it to you (so you can make sure you understand it) and then returns the “answers” you’re most likely to want.  Examples are math problems, common cultural trivia, historical trivia and practical everyday knowledge (like what German size is a US women’s size 8 shoe).  It’s a good lifeline if you’re playing Millionaire.

Bing is Microsoft’s re-release of Live Search.  In an attempt to compete with Google, Bing integrates well with Microsoft’s other tools (maps, etc.).  It also supplies what it feels are context sensitive links for other things you might be searching for (for example, if you search for Charleston SC, it will assume you would like to travel and highlight specific travel searches on the left hand side).

We’ve yet to see how Bing will handle advertisements, but we know they will work their way in.  Don’t know how long it will last, but Bing seems to have filtered out a lot of the search spam that Google has (or it wasn’t filtering and was just because those sites spamming Google have targeted their algorithms so well).

I still prefer Google, but the ante has been upped with the shifts in how these two new engines are working (better context links for “types” of searches and just answering your question).

I’ll leave you with some fun (albeit probably hard-coded and not very useful) searches in Wolfram|Alpha:

are you skynet?
all your base
what is the answer to everything?
what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen african swallow?
how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?