More Special Reports

Special Report: Next-Generation Search

Scouring the Web for information is becoming faster and easier. Could this new rise in search tools and navigational technologies be a threat to Google's dominance?

What's Microsoft's Bing Strategy?

Nipping at Google's heels, Bing focuses on refining product-related searches.

Making Search Social

A new engine can turn a difficult search into a communal quest.

: More-Searchable Flash; Information from millions of Web pages that use the animation software is now available to search engines.

Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts

Yahoo's new open-search platform is giving semantic search a helping hand.

Searching as a Team

An innovative tool aims to help users search the Internet together.

: Building a Better Search Engine; A new natural-language system is based on 30 years of research at PARC.

Q&A: Peter Norvig

Google's director of research talks about the evolution of Web search.

Digging Deeper in Web Search

A personalization search tool reveals links buried deep within page results.

: Better Search in Virtual Worlds; Second Life's new search tool helps users find 3-D objects.

Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off

Our exclusive test shows how the two Web engines compare when given the same queries.

How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed

Some say that Twitter may be as important to real-time search as YouTube is to video.

: A Smarter Search for What Ails You; Software searches through medical information by analyzing the structure of sentences in a new way.

Microsoft Searches for Group Advantage

A new search algorithm looks for connections between people.

A Google Killer Stumbles

Cuil's rough launch shows the difficulty of challenging major search engines.

: Search Engines' Chinese Self-Censorship; U.S.-based search engines are choosing what they censor in China and could be blocking more than they have to.

A New Perspective on Search Results

Google is experimenting with different ways to serve up search results. But will any of them stick?

Social Search

A new website will offer personalized search results based on the user's social network.

: Jennifer Chayes; The director of the new Massachusetts-based Microsoft Research lab wants to use mathematics to design better search engines, recommendation systems, and online auctions.