the sephone blog

In today’s online world, search is essential. How many times per day do you head to Google to find something on the web? Google’s reign on the search market is pretty clear: the site handles roughly 75-80% of U.S. search traffic. But is Google always the answer?

Over the last couple of months, the search landscape has really caught on fire. New services are trying to chip away at Google’s lead by offering a different set of results for search queries. Here’s a brief look at three of these sites that may help you find the information you need more quickly.

Bing

Microsoft recently launched a massive rebranding campaign for its Live Search, renaming the engine to bing.com. Bing follows in the footsteps of other mainstream search engines of Internet past; in addition to general web results, Bing also provides local, image, and refined links based on your search. Microsoft has held one of the top three search spots for quite a while, and Bing is the corporation’s latest attempt to grab a bigger slice of the pie. Here’s a search for Maine on Bing.

Twitter Search

Looking for something a little more recent? Twitter Search may be what you need. A Twitter search will yield results posted by Twitter users over the last month or so. It’s a great way to know what people are saying about something in an up-to-the-minute way. We’ve previously offered some Twitter searching tips if you’d like to try a search or two. Here’s a search for Maine on Twitter search.

Wolfram Alpha

If you’re looking for data, check out Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha will give very context-sensitive results: everything from statistics to graphs to maps, depending on your query. Here’s a search for Maine on Wolfram Alpha.

What are your favorite ways to search the current landscape of the web?

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