The much awaited search engine Wolfram Alpha has finally gone live with a few glitches here and there. The search engine is believed to be of Google's stature is speculated to give tough competition to its popular rival. Wolfram Alpha was in development stage for five years before it was finally launched on 18th of May. Brainchild of physicist Dr Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha is first of its kind "computational knowledge engine" i.e it stores and searches its own huge database to give specific results. Unlike Google, yahoo or any other search engine it does not come out with useless search results not even remotely related to the topic. If it is unable to find the required information it pulls up a error page but does not pull out gibberish. In short, it tries to understand the user query first and then reply with specific answer if available.

Interesting changes are headed for twitter search in the coming days. Santosh Jayaram, the Twitter’s new VP of Operations, said, “Twitter Search will begin to start crawling the links which are posted in tweets and index the content of those pages. Instead of simply indexing the tweets of its users, Twitter Search will now offer search technology which will transform it into more of an open window of the live conversations and real time indexing which is happening within the Twitter community.”

Jimmy Wales announced a few days ago, the closure of Wikia Search due to the ongoing economic recession. Wikia Search was designed with the primary purpose to allow users determine the rankings of sites and pages for all other users.

Wales summed up the decision like this,

“In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

Tim Armstrong, (ex Google executive) replaces AOL CEO Randy Falco, who was on the job since November 2006. Armstrong was associated with Google since the year 2000 and it is not the first time when AOL has recruited a Google executive for its chief positions. According to a Press Release by Rachel Metz, AP Technology Writer:

You read it right. Inquisitor is now on iPhone. The announcement is made by the Official Yahoo! Blog and users can get this plugin on their iPhones right now!

“Inquisitor Mobile Search auto-completes your search and gives suggestions as you type to refine your search. When you type in your query, websites and suggestions appear immediately below the search box. Inquisitor also speeds up your search by quickly loading site summaries and allowing you to navigate between results and the browser with just one click.” – Ariel Seidman and David Watanabe,
Yahoo! Search

According to Hitwise Data (PDF FILE),

1. More than half of all search queries are at least three words long.
2. More than a third are four words or longer than that.

That means that Internet users are typing long words in different search engines as a part of their search queries. Have a look at this table that gives us a deeper insight on all the observations concerned with search queries:

Mobile phones have come a long way since the initial days. Search engines are available at your fingertips, stock market revolves around your mobile set and cricket scores are just a click away! What else can you ask for!

Further the availability of iPhone and Android, has even added a new dimension to this local live search. They come with GPS navigation and help one to access all content, data and maps in seconds. And now Google has even refined the appearance of its search page when you browse through your iPhone or iPod touch.

Chinese search giant Baidu has received lots of suspicions for its so-called “Baidu Bidding Ranking program”. China Central Television and main competitor Google were the main critics of the program run by Baidu.

News has spread that some competitors have even filed a lawsuit in the local court to get a justified answer.

Amazon is taking opportunity of Thanksgiving day by releasing the bad news of shutting one of its web service i.e. Alexa Web Search. This service provides programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine. Introduced in 2006, the service is already closed to new customers but the existing users can utilize it till January 26, 2009.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has launched its fifth annual State-of-the-SEM Market Survey.