Bing it On

Everybody is talking about Bing these days and I feel compelled to share my experience as well. I have used Bing for 2 weeks and I think that it does its job very well. Its definitely better at answering questions. I searched for "Where is Pisa" and Bing gave me:

Pisa, city, Italy location

• City in central Italy, capital of Pisa Province, in Tuscany (Toscana) Region, on the Arno River, near the Ligurian Sea. The city is a rail and road junction and a tourist and industrial center. Population (1990): 101,500. Latitude: 43.7102° (43° 42’ 37”) Longitude: 10.3971° (10° 23’ 50”)"

followed by a wikipedia entry. And Google gave me link to a wikipedia entry as a first result. I think its small tweaks like this where I thing Bing is trying to be the leader in search innovation although its far from where it wants to be. In shopping and travel search Bing is giving Google serious run for its money. Even though Google is not going to lose huge market share to Bing anytime soon but the competition is getting tougher for the Search giant.

Web Search 3.0 - Solution looking for a problem

This morning I was reading a techcrunch article about Google squared and Wolfram alpha and the evolution of search engines into a new structured, semantically aware direction. To quote from article:

..a search for “camera” sorts the results in different columns by images, description, and manufacturer, resolution, etc.. You can refine results by clicking on a particular column such as manufacturer. A search for “rollercoasters” sorts results by name, image, description, height, length, and number of inversions...

The problem that I see with such an approach is that the web search engines are slowly trying to become meta search engines and almost trying to substitute the content on the web and in the process getting distracted from their core functionality. If I want a list of digital cameras with their description, price range, reviews, ratings, resolution etc I can go to a know review site or just search google for review sites and go to one. eg http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/ does a good job at providing those details and much more in a very organized fashion. Why do I need Google to do that only worse with lesser info for me. If I want to research roller coasters I could go to http://www.rcdb.com/census.htm to find organized roller coaster info, reviews, pictures, details etc.
So the point is that when I have such excellent sources and specialized search engines, why do I need Google to try and do the same in a much less useful way. What Google really needs to do is to make sure when I search for 'list of roller coasters', the above site is the first one in the results and not 'a list of roller coaster records in wikipedia.(roller coaster db was the 9th result). So my recommendation to Google would be to work on improving its core search engine capabilities. When I search for 'list of digital cameras' dont give me list of digital camera brands' in Wikipedia or Deallist page about digital camera deals, instead put that cnet info somewhere in top 5(right now it doesnt figure in top 10 results).
So Google, we dont need Squared, we need a better Google Web Search.