Three articles on the action in the search engine space:
News.com writes about how “some major Web portals (Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink) are trying to get an edge in the competitive Internet search market by thinking outside of the browser…and providing access to online searches through a ‘taskbar’ displayed to the side or at the bottom of a PC screen…Advocates of the technology say it offers a simple and direct way for people to call up information such as stock quotes, dictionary definitions and other data without going through the added step of opening a full browser window.”
A second report in News.com discusses Yahoo’s plans to allow external RSS feeds to be added on to the MyYahoo page: “RSS would let MyYahoo users transport feeds from third-party content sites onto their personal pages, intermingling outside links with tailored news, video and financial information from Yahoo. The outside links then direct the reader to content on third-party pages. Such a layout would be a first for Yahoo.”
WSJ reports on Google’s continued expansion of what the search box can do: “Google expanded the types of information that Internet users can search for on its Web site to include such things as area codes, product codes, flight information, vehicle identification numbers and U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers…Computer users, for example, can type in an area code in the search query bar and the top result will show a map of that geographic area. Users can also plug in a vehicle identification number into the search query box to get a link for a Web page with more information about the year, make and model of a specific type of car…Google sees its mission as connecting Internet users to the world’s information, which it hopes to organize and make more accessible.”
So, what it looks like is that we can expect a Unix-style command line interface to search engines, accessible via a desktop taskbar.
[E M E R G I C . o r g]