Search giants Google and Microsoft recently updated their search engines to provide better results for search queries.
Microsoft Live Search introduced two new features: Instant Answers, designed to give users specific pieces of information about their queries, like team standings or scores for the NCAA tournament; and Active Answers, which provides live information on queries like flight details, gate information and delays — either directly, or via a flight-specific search box.
Examples of a search for "college basketball" (from the Microsoft blog):
And "Alaska 328,"which can be typed in directly, or found from the Microsoft "flight status" search box:
Google is also rolling out a dynamic duo of new enhancements: an expanded list of useful related searches, and longer search result descriptions.
The first application offers more useful related searches (terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page). For example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google's algorithms lists "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" as related terms. The expansion of related search terms also applies to other languages, Google said.
The second enhancement has to do with what Google calls snippets, the few lines of text after the dark blue title that help convey what each page is about. Snippets show how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.
For longer queries (i.e., more than three words), Google has increased the number of lines in the snippet to reflect more of the words users typed in the context of the page, to give more context to the query.
Last year Google began testing new features in search results, including enhanced page descriptions for select publishers, auto-correct for misspelled words, and the ability to jump to sub-sections.
In February, Yahoo began piloting Yahoo Search Pad, a note-taking application that lets users take notes and organize searches, which — unlike Google notebook or other note-taking tools — lets users remain on the same page while taking notes and organizing their research.
