
Can we live without Google? asks James Harkin in The Times. A reader taunts Harkin: “Can we live without GOD? YES. Can we live without GOOGLE? Silly Question. Of course, We can, if we want.”
Harkins reminds us that eight out of ten people prefer Google, a search engine that is now worth roughly £100 billion. “In the space of a single decade, internet search has changed the way we look at the world beyond recognition. Google has become our binoculars and our window on to the net.”
But, reminds Harkins in the same breath, that the power of the website is under threat from rival search engines and firms that manipulate its results.
“At the austere end of the search business came WolframAlpha, launched last month and named after the British physicist Stephen Wolfram. It promises to be an ‘answer engine’ for researchers, returning rock-solid data in response to statistical or factual queries by scanning only authoritative databases.
“Last month Larry Page, one of the Google’s founders, admitted that his company was falling behind in the race to publish immediate and ‘real-time’ information to Twitter, the latest online social networking craze.
“And then there is “Bing”. Bing is designed to replace its MSN Live Search…and boasts intuitive new technology, which claims to stand a better chance of finding what its users really want rather than bogging them down in links.
“So can Bing, WolframApha and Twitter loosen Google’s iron hold on the search business?” Read the full article here…