most user-friendly: You don?t have to trawl around for the right answer

Google has so firmly staked out its place as the Internet search-engine leader that it has even earned a place as a verb in the English lexicon. Paradoxically, because of its popularity, there may be no better time to try something different.

Google?s success has forced competitors like Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves to hustle with releasing new product features, search controls and improved behind-the-scenes programming. The resulting bonanza of tools brings more search capabilities, presented more intuitively than the Web has ever seen.

But despite the advances, it may be users? search habits that present the biggest obstacle to improving the search experience. The pressure to produce isn?t just coming from Google. In April 2003, Ask Jeeves (ask.com) added ?Smart Search? to its engine, which tops search results for definitive queries like ?Who is George Washington?? with answers ? like an encyclopaedia citation and a photograph ? in addition to Web links.

That same month, Yahoo provided shortcuts to its own topic pages on popular subjects. The top result for ?weather in New York,? for instance, leads to Yahoo?s New York City weather page, with current conditions and a five-day outlook.

Associating database content with queries caught on. AOL Search now provides information from partners? content and its own; these ?snapshots? in fields like entertainment, sports and shopping link to editor-selected information from publications within the Time Warner media universe, including Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated. Likewise, MSN Search returns links to information from its own specialised databases, like MSN Music, msnbc.com and Microsoft?s Encarta encyclopaedia.

?Having the trusted data, what we know is a right answer, and not asking them to trawl around, that?s a huge advantage for the user,? said Ramez Naam, MSN Search?s group programme manager.

Ask Jeeves will introduce technology this spring that will further the question-and-answer abilities of its engine. The new feature, Direct Answers From Search, will search across the entire Web, rather than simply from its own database, to find answers to natural-language queries (that is, those phrased as questions rather than mere search terms).

?This allows us to answer far more questions than would be possible using editors or structured databases,? said Jim Lanzone, the company?s senior vice-president for search properties. ?When you?re diving into structured databases, you?re limited in your coverage. We want to harvest the power of the 2.5 billion English-language documents in our index, to more broadly answer people?s keywords and questions.?

In comparison, natural-language queries performed with other engines not matching specialised content yield a list of links closely associated with the phrase ? with more consideration for popularity than accuracy. For example, searching for ?Who invented the Internet?? on Google, Yahoo and MSN yields a top result exonerating Al Gore, rather than crediting computer scientists like J.C.R. Licklider. Other Google rivals are focusing their product enhancements on offerings that try to bring simplicity and relevance to the search experience.

Microsoft?s updated MSN Search tries to make searching easier by complementing Boolean terms like ?and,? ?or? and ?not? with slide controls (under ?results ranking? in Search Builder) that can be adjusted to determine how broadly or narrowly to search. In addition, a ?NearMe? button can return results based on proximity to your location; the company says about a quarter of all searches make reference to geographic information.