search engines

Welcome to another installment of The Grouse's semi-annual lambasting of poor practices on the Web. When I compiled my first list of all things online and terrible six months ago, I thought I'd been fairly comprehensive. CAPTCHAs, tooltip ads, bottomless dropdown menus and audio ads were among the archaic and ill-conceived online "experiences" thrown on the fire. But just six months later, I find myself with a host of new grievances to air.

Heard of Bing yet? If not, you soon will. Backed by a reported $100-million-dollar promotional campaign, Bing is Microsoft's latest grasp at double digits in the war for search engine market share, of which Redmond now owns between 5 and 6 percent (according to Net Applications' Market Share report). After months of beta testing followed by a public preview, Bing officially took over this week as THE search engine powering all of MSN. So, if you use any Microsoft services with even limited frequency, you'll be getting friendly with Bing whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.

But Microsoft isn't going to carve out a fatter slice of market share unless it can convince a new, non-MSN audience to abandon Google and to make Bing its second brain instead. Of course, there has to be good reason to do that. Very good reason. So this week I installed the official Bing add-on to Firefox and put the new kid on the block to the test.

Wolfram|Alpha ... what a name, huh? And I mean that in the worst way possible. Dismal chances of ever entering the lexicon aside, there's a lot of excitement surrounding Wolfram|Alpha, which officially launched last week. If you're not familiar with it, Wolfram|Alpha is billed as a "computational knowledge engine" and is the brainchild of British mathematician Stephen Wolfram. Unlike Google and other search engines you've used before, Wolfram|Alpha doesn't return links to relevant Web pages.

Google's index reached a trillion pages last year, but that doesn't mean it (or other large search engines, like Yahoo) will always understand the exact intent of your search and yield results that have the information you really want.