|I recently read an article called, At I.B.M., That Google Thing is So Yesterday. James Fallows wrote the article and it was published in The New York Times. The article discusses the new and improved methods to search the web.|
The most common search engine is provided by Google. Google has been extending its search mechanics to include some beta version of Google Scholar and Google Suggest. I suggest you try them both out as Google is certainly changing how people are searching the web. Google took the first generation of searching with simple keyword matches and created the second generation of searching with web-based search which uses keywords and many other indictors to match a query to a list of sites.
Microsoft planned to break into the search innovations with its "WinFS" file system that would allow users to search and manage information on their own computers. Originally, Microsoft planned to include WinFS in its next version of windows called Longhorn. The latest news from Microsoft is that WinFS will not be ready for Longhorn and probably not even for the release after that. This pushes Microsoft release of WinFS to at least five years.
IBM recently released OmniFind, a third generation search program with an unstructured information management architecture (UIMA) to retrieve computerized data. IBM is trying to match and reverse what Google has achieved. One example is an assortment of news headlines similar to Google News, but from non-English language sources that automatically translated the headlines and lead of the article. Once you choose an article, another translation is done on the entire content for reading.