It seems like it has been years now since Google has had any serious competition as the top search engine. I find that almost 80% of my traffic comes from Google and we all know that the Google Algorithm is great, most of the top results seem good but now we should be expecting more I think.
The only reason that I use Yahoo nowadays is to get sports scores, one of the really nice things on Yahoo is that you can do a search for your sports team and it will show you recent scores and next and previous games above the search results. Google could do this as well but they don’t.
MSN to me, or live as it is now called, does nothing. I find the interface fine but there is not much that draws me to live.com at all.
Google is of course the king of search engines and have great operators like asking the time, getting movie showtimes and even local weather over the search results.
So why do I expect more? Well the internet is not static and even though there are pages and pages created everyday I do not get a feeling for the ebb and flow of news. I go to Digg to get the latest tech and geeky news, I go to various news tracking sites like Techmeme or TailRank or even Newsvine but Google does not seem to be able to do any of this for me.
Perhaps I expect to much from a search engine. A search engine is for finding answers. A portal will only give me the news that I am looking for. And what I want is trends in real time of what the world in general and internet in particular are looking for, at and talking about