Google managed to steal some of the thunder from the launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, by unveiling its own communications system, Wave. Both are initially focused on PC platforms, but will come to smartphones soon.
Wave provides instant communication in multiple forms, such as email, IM, blogging and wikis, taking the unified messaging idea a stage further and linking into social networking. It also supports formatted text, photos and video and Google will open source the code in order to bring Wave to mobile devices, and into the cloud.
The web-based app was developed by the Google Maps team, and has the ambitious target of using a single communications model to span all the systems in use on the web in ‘one continuum’, also crossing over different device formats and media types. Though Google said this was created to spur added usage of its web services, not with a particular competitor in mind, it is clear that, if the concept can be made to work and extended to mobile platforms, it could make Outlook look terribly twentieth century.
With the tools, a user creates a ‘wave’, often beginning with an instant message, and adds people into it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos and feeds from elsewhere on the web, and can insert a reply or edit the wave directly.
Developments like this, especially when open source and multi-platform, inevitably put Microsoft on the defensive, but the Windows giant is also thinking in terms of pushing web software frontiers. Its new search engine ‘ or ‘decision engine’ as it insists on calling it ‘ was codenamed Kumo, but has now morphed into Bing. Like Wave in communications, it aims to build on current search engine experiences and go a step further, with more intuitive tools that support specific, common user behaviors and decisions. Initially it will focus on four key vertical areas ‘ making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.
A mobile client is apparently in the works, but no date has been given for it to launch, though an innovative search engine would be valuable to boost Windows Mobile’s flagging fortunes, which have never been helped by the clunky mobile implementation of IE.
‘Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,’ said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. ‘When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web.’
Meanwhile, Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz was also talking about enhancing the search experience and said she aimed to offer a tool that was ‘more personal’ than Google. She also said she would consider a search deal with Microsoft ‘if there’s boatloads of money and the right technology involved’, while speaking at the D7 All Things Digital conference last week.