Let’s start with Microsoft’s offerings.  Earlier this week, a post on the official Live Search blog discussed playoff searches.  Type in "NHL," "NBA," or a player’s name, and you’ll get what people in Redmond call an Instant Answer that includes stuff like scores and schedules.

 

Try the same thing with "mtv awards" before May 31st, and you’ll see links to promo videos and a voting site.  Or do it afterwards, and a list of the different winners should be presented.

A look at Yahoo then returns us to the world of sports.  On the Yahoo Search Blog, Yuko Kamae wrote, "Starting today, when you search for your favorite major league or college sports team on Yahoo! Search, a new shortcut appears with the real time score, the last game’s score, and the date and time of the next game.  You’ll also find quick links to the team’s page, as well as news, scores, schedules, stats, and photos."

Finally, Google stepped up with fresh OneBoxes tied to tennis and Roland Garros.

A few sports and entertainment sites may resent these features, but it seems that the three search companies have done a great job of making timely information more accessible.

Instead, Sadeesh Duraisamy, a software engineer, and Alok Goel, a business product manager, explained the feature on the Official Google Blog.  “To make it easier for you to indulge your interest in a game John Fowles characterized as ‘chess made flesh,’ we’ve simplified your search for cricket scores.  Just type [cricket] in a Google search box and you’ll see a brief score of all the current cricket matches.”

The pair also noted, “A single click will also give you access to a detailed cricket score card.”

That’s all well and good – excellent, really, for cricket enthusiasts.  Fans of other sports may be led to wonder where their OneBoxes are, however.  And Ionut Alex Chitu (of the Google Operating System blog) discovered one more questionable aspect of this development.

“In true Google spirit, the OneBox links to three sources of information, some of the best sites about cricket, but it’s interesting to see that the links contain oi=prbx, the same value used for the Bourne Ultimatum promotion,” he wrote.  “‘Prbx’ probably means ‘promotion box’ and that doesn’t look very good for Google.”

Neither, really, does the abandoned UK Press Centre.  Google India’s Press Center is also pretty empty.

Queries like “time in china” and “what time is it in uk” now return OneBox results with a clock icon and the appropriate place and time zone.  Pick something slightly vague, like “time in austin,” and you may get more than one result (Austin, Texas and Austin, Colorado are not in the same zone).

It’s also possible that Google will get it wrong – a search for “time lexington” yields results for cities in Massachusetts and Illinois, but not Kentucky, where the WebProNews offices are located.

Oh, well.  Now you more easily make sense of those Japanese news stories that appear to have been written one day into the future.  Or you can schedule international phone calls without spending five minutes squinting at maps.  “It seems time difference calculations can not be triggered though,” notes Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen.  “Entering time difference germany china and similar will not show any onebox, even though it might be helpful.”

Again, Google’s clock feature isn’t going to change the world, but it’s a nice little add-on.

Ohmert’s younger critics took to the blogosphere to smear the Prime Minister’s name through use of a tactic called the Google bomb. By linking the phrase ‘kishalon charutz’ to an online profile for Ohmert, a number of bloggers were able to make that a top result on Google.

Kishalon charutz means ‘total failure’ as noted in a story from the TotallyJewish.com website. They described the Googlebombing as a prank perpetrated by bloggers:

A similar prank took place when opponents of President George W. Bush subjected him to the same treatment. Searching for ‘miserable failure’ on Google brings up the President’s profile on the official White House website.

Google took a lot of criticism from Presidential allies over this. That led to Google placing a OneBox result linked to a statement from company VP and director of consumer web products Marissa Mayer explaining Googlebombing to those critics.

Bush’s fans in turn did the same thing to Senator John Kerry, when he was running against Bush for the presidency in 2004. People linked the word ‘waffles’ to the junior Senator from Massachusetts, and even today the top result for the word is Kerry’s official website.

Many other Googlebombings of political figures have taken place. The Wikipedia entry about them shows their use in other countries.

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Microsoft hopes to offer search tools that would protect workers from the abundance of information available. Gates predicted that office workers spend up to 30 percent of their computer time simply looking for information. “Faced with the endless deluge of data that is generated every second of every day, how can we hope to keep up?” he asked rhetorically. His answer, of course, is Microsoft’s own search tools.

One example is the Windows Live Search client, which will become available in test form this summer. This software will allow users to separately examine any of Microsoft’s four major search systems: Windows Desktop Search for PC hard drives, SharePoint Server for company networks, and MSN Search and Windows Live for the Internet.

Google is entering the fight with search algorithms in servers that businesses can install for themselves. The company’s OneBox APIs, introduced last month, can search through data in popular business applications. IBM also joined the fray, offering software that searches text fields, documents, and multimedia files, and can create statistics on business performance. Another competitor is the Intranet search company Fast Search & Transfer. Although not as well known as Google or IBM, this company has made deals with Deutsche Telekom, Getty Images, and UPS, and recently acquired data cleansing technology.

Google and Microsoft have both unveiled future plans for more complex, more integrated, and more powerful search systems. Despite his position as the underdog in this fight, which is in and of itself a true rarity, Gates seems confident. “It’s about not just finding the information, [but] are we using it, getting insights into it, sharing it with other people?” With Microsoft’s next generation of search software, he hopes to do just that.

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The new feature, known by the mouthful “Google OneBox for Enterprise,” is built into boxes Google sells to businesses. They help create custom search systems for employees inside organizations or for consumers on the company’s own Web site.

Over at the Google Enterprise Blog, they reveal more details. And at the Official Google blog, Dave Girouard explains how the new feature will help corporate employees.

…employees already know how to get movie listings, weather forecasts, and flight information through simple Google queries. So it won’t surprise them (in fact it may delight them) to learn that they can get real-time contact info, sales forecasts, and customer information the very same way. We launched an initial set of OneBox modules with Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com; some of these partners talk about that here.

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Google describes its OneBox features this way:

Dave Girouard, VP, Enterprise for Google, noted in a blog post that “employees already know how to get movie listings, weather forecasts, and flight information through simple Google queries.”

OneBox For Enterprise works the same way. But it returns information of a business nature in the OneBox. Girouard cited contact info, sales forecasts, and customer data as samples of information that can be retrieved.

“We launched an initial set of OneBox modules with Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com,” said Girouard. Cisco, Employease, and Netsuite were also listed as current OneBox partners.

That gives Google an impressive array of business applications and data it can access. Microsoft and IBM are conspicuous in their absence from the list, but as this is a new release, customer demand for modules that tap products made by those two tech powers may appear in the future.

Girouard rationalizes the new OneBox function as a response to the way people work online. For many Internet users, a search engine tends to be front and center on their desktops. Enterprise intranets don’t always make their search service so easily found.

Google thinks corporate types should rethink their view of search and its importance to employee productivity. The quicker one can find necessary information, the faster it can be used for other purposes.

The company also announced the release of a new version of the Google Mini search appliance. They noted it is 25 times faster and half the size of the previous iteration.

Google claimed in a presentation about the Mini that 80 percent of visitors will abandon a website if it has a poor search function. Since users can’t help but use what is on their business network, Google feels its appliances like the Mini can improve the experience for employees.

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