Search Engine Update

Chris Sherman of SearchEngineLand.com gave his annual search engine update this morning.  Alas, there are only four really viable search engines around today - and one I had never even heard about!!  As we might expect, Google was one of the four, but Yahoo is still the #1 web property.  Yahoo is trying to re-invent itself in an effort to survive, especially after the merger with Microsoft earlier this year.  Microsoft's Bing is coming up in the competition with good travel results and interesting categories.  The huge surprise for me was number four - something called Wolfram/Alpha.  This search engine only works with  "closed source" data sets.  In other words, it can't answer questions like "who's the fairest of them all" , but is great to give a visual display of distribution of earthquakes in Japan.  This newcomer has been generating a lot of talk in several sessions I attended today.  I think it merits a hard look when I get back on the Reference Desk.