3 New Search Engines

Last week I tried out three new search engines; two have received a great deal of attention and one I found out about through a colleague and haven't heard mentioned outside library circles. Guess which one I like best?

If you said the latter of the three, you are correct! Here's your prize:

SBDS Prototype
From the National Library of Australia, the SBDS prototype is very nicely done: federated, faceted, excellent relevancy ranking, all with a nice, clean interface. (Apparently SBDS stands for 'Single Business Discovery Service'.)



The two other search engines you may have heard of already: Wolfram|Alpha and Microsoft's Bing. Here's my take on them, as they now function:

Wolfram|Alpha
When I read about Wolfram|Alpha I thought of the fictional 'Epic' search engine/content generator in the Epic 2014 video ( http://robinsloan.com/epic/ ).

Most of my searches came up empty on Wolfram|Alpha; the exceptions were

- why is the sky blue (a gimme)

- anything to do with government statistics

- nutrition data

Surprisingly, 'how many edges does a cylinder have?' was not answered. There was a link to Wolfram MathWorld in the bottom right of the screen that was easy to overlook (a few weeks ago I used Wolfram MathWorld to look up the answer to this question).

To conclude: Wolfram|Alpha isn't the be all and end all (not a Google Killer) at this point, but great for nutrition data, human biometrics (growth charts, BMI charts, etc.) and any kind of statistics question which you might refer to government documents.

Bing
Ho-hum, though it is still in a 'preview' version right now. The consensus seems to be 'it doesn't suck'.