OVER the past decade the battle between the main search engines has remained intense and, even though Google has long been the dominant player, it looks like the real fight is only just beginning.

Since Google launched, just 11 years ago, the company has become synonymous with the internet and how we find information. But rather than scare off competitors, it looks like the meteoric rise of the search giant has inspired many internet entrepreneurs to have a go themselves.

The problem these hopefuls face is differentiation. Without a new or improved way of presenting search results, why would anyone stop Googling and take up their service instead?

Existing engines are being re-inventing to try and grow market share (the new Microsoft Bing and recently re-branded Ask Jeeves are examples), and new entrants are coming up with big ideas they hope will drastically change the way we search.

While many have tried to develop world class search engines – and failed – developers now have the advantage of access to over 10 years’ worth of data on people’s search habits. Technology firms now know how we want information presented to us and are trying to find new ways to satisfy us.

The end goal of all search engines is to present us with the answer to our question as soon we ask it. Even though search engines of today offer results much more accurately than ever before, it is still sometimes a chore to find specific information. Many companies are investing a lot of R&D dollars in Latent Symantic Indexing. LSI focuses on the meaning of words and the relationships between different phrases, rather than just looking at a word as a collection of letters. Google has invested heavily in the technology and believes that it will allow them to present users with the most accurate results of any search engine.

While accurate Latent Symantic Indexing may still be some way off, several of the latest search engines feature new innovations that its creators believe will allow them to stand out from Google.

Bing, a search engine developed by Microsoft, is officially only a week old, although it is based on the company’s previous offering, Live.com. It is being touted as a “decision engine” as it offers more information to searchers, helping them make choices and leading them to their goal. This is clear with the preview button that appears next to searches, which when clicked offers a more in-depth look at the web page. Reviews so far are very positive, concentrating on a much improved quality of results. These changes have helped Bing receive more traffic than Live.com, but will they be enough to keep this growing after the initial buzz, and $100 million advertising campaign, die down?

Wolfram Alpha is the most important search engine you’ve probably never heard of. Its creators prefer not to have it known as a search engine – instead they call it a “computational knowledge engine”. Rather than presenting users with a list of search results to choose from, Wolfram Alpha tries to answer their question by displaying data from a knowledge base. Putting “Cardiff” in as the search term brings up a page showing the location, population and weather of the city, among other things. It’s this creative way of trying to get us straight to what we are looking for that is leading to this site becoming touted as a future competitor to Wikipedia as well as Google.

Recently there has been a whole host of new Google applications and features, almost too many to follow. It is easy to spot the keyword options that drop down below the search box, but less clear is the “Show options” link displayed at the top of the search results page. It offers more in-depth options so that a user can choose where they want to take the search. Choices include narrowing results by time, such as “Past 24 hours” or “Past week”, and having the option to mix image results with web pages. There is also the option to show the relationships between keywords in a graph, called the “Wonderwheel”.

Will these innovations change the way we search? It’s hard to see how they won’t. All search engines, new and old, are trying to get us to the information we seek far more swiftly. If it wants to continue its reign then Google will continue to develop its technology, either in-house or by acquiring smart sites such as Wolfram Alpha.

(This article was originally written last month for Welsh news website, Waleshome.org).