This is going to be a great year for the web, as we are seeing a lot of new and wonderful developments in on the web. This all started with the launch of Wolfram|Alpha and counting with the announcement of launch of new products like Bing from Microsoft and Wave from Google. So, here’s a brief introduction to the new market hopper:
- Wolfram Alpha: Rather than a search-engine it is an answer-engine. It is an online tool to get answer of all your factual queries. It computes the answers of you queries directly from structured data, rather than providing link to sites, that may contain the result of the given query, like most search engines do.
- Yahoo Glue Pages: It is a specialized kind of search, where you get results of wiki, images, videos, articles and all other stuffs over a single page. It provides regular search results with option to other related stuffs.
- Bing: This is going to be the upgrade of Microsoft’s Live Search. The notable change in this version would be the explorer pane, based on semantic technology from PowerSet which gives the related search results.
- Wave: It is proposed to be a perfect blend of e-mail, instant messaging, wiki and social networking. It will have live features in e-mails like instant messaging. That means e-mail is going to change for-ever. It will also have features of using documents with multiple users, that means a group of people can now work easily after the release of wave, which is supposed to come later this year, though there no word of release date from Google itself.
So, I hope things are going to be interesting this year, specially in the field of web. Just wait and watch, what’s in the store for all of us.