Webscalers, a startup at the Innovative Technologies Complex at Binghamton University, has a new slant on search engines that could obsolete Google. Instead of crawling the web and cataloging results, Webscalers will harness all the small search engines at individual sites to pool results. Other so-called meta-search engines exist, but they just pool results from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Webscalers, on the other hand, will ignore the big-name search engines, because they only search the 60 billion "surface" web pages, whereas the small specialized search engines on individual web sites reach down into the "deep" web of over 900 billion pages--15-times more information. Check out their prototypes at www.allinonenews.com which combines the results from 1,800 news services in 200 countries.
BOTTOM LINE: Webscalers approach promises to find results to queries that are much more accurate and targets when compared to all the chaff you have to sift through when using Google. Ultimately, Webscalers promises to be able to answer questions directly instead of just returning relevant web pages. As their press release puts it: imagine asking "What do Americans think of universal health care?” and getting a report indicating trends in opinion based on what has been posted to the Web. Webcrawlers is still years away from a product, but if they can deliver on their promise, then Google may be relegated to becoming nothing more than an ad server for web pages.
