Microsoft Bing Questions Google's Universal Search TheoryMicrosoft Bing Questions Google's Universal Search Theory

With the launch of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, "Decision Engine," or "search decision experience," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer observed that search engines "don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find."

Bing attempts to address that situation by treating major search topics differently. On Thursday, for example, Microsoft launched Bing Travel, a subsection of Bing that combines the organizational and e-commerce options of a travel portal with search. The idea is that travel searches require special treatment.

Microsoft is challenging Google's universal search initiative, a 2-year-old effort that gathered previously separate search indexes for different media types into a unified multimedia index. Thanks to universal search, Google users can now find Google News, YouTube video, and Google Image links, among other media types, in their search results.

There are signs that Google is aware that universal search, at least on the interface level, has shortcomings. At its Searchology event last month, the company introduced Google Search Options, a set of options to alter the presentation of search results and to filter data, and announced Google Squared, a way to display Google search queries into a set of structured values in a spreadsheet.

In a blog post announcing the availability of Google Squared on Thursday, Alex Komoroske, associate product manager for Google Squared, sounded almost as if he were addressing Ballmer's assertion that search engines don't help people use the information they find.

"While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically," he said. "Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the Web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them, and presents them in a meaningful way."

Google Squared, in other words, enables people to use the information they find, at least for queries that lend themselves to structured lists.

Mark Simon, VP of industry relations at search marketing firm DidIt, characterizes Google Squared as part of an effort by search engines to improve usability as searchers become savvier and more demanding.

"After analyzing search habits and needs, search engines have developed greater enhancements into their algorithms to deliver the kinds of results that they believe the end user is seeking out," said Simon in an e-mail. "As this learning curve continues, we will see how search technologies offer a user interface and results that will hopefully satisfy the searching population's sweet tooth -- leading to a whole new phase of search engine evolution."

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are still trying to figure out whether certain categories of queries can be served better outside the standard search results list paradigm. Microsoft is making a big bet against the search results list as a universal search interface. If Microsoft is right, Google may have to rethink its commitment to universal search, to search as the command line of the Internet.

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