In today’s world where we have an option of which search engine to use, we find our­selves per­plexed regard­ing the ques­tion: Is Google the best that search can be? Even for those of us who con­sider our­selves to be Web savvy, find­ing the right search term can often be tricky. And once we get the search results, we must screen through an abun­dance of infor­ma­tion in order to find one or two truly desired results.

To under­stand a lit­tle more about the world of search, let’s go through our time machine, and check back on how search started.

Excite was one of the most rec­og­nized brands on the Net when the “dot­com por­tals” boomed in the 1990s. Excite was founded as Archi­text in 1994 by six Stan­ford under­grad stu­dents who had the clever idea of using sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of word rela­tion­ships to make search­ing more effi­cient. After years of sign­ing exclu­sive dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ments with com­pa­nies like Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, Excite went pub­lic in 1996. In 2003, Excite Italia (the oper­a­tor of Excite Europe) took con­trol of the Excite por­tals in most of Europe, and was later acquired by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com). In Octo­ber 2007, the GoAdv Group,– a pan-European media com­pany, announced the com­ple­tion of its acqui­si­tion of the Excite Europe group of com­pa­nies while IAC Search and Media acquired Excite in the US. Today, Excite offers a vari­ety of ser­vices, includ­ing search, web-based email, instant mes­sag­ing, stock quotes and cus­tomiz­able user home­page — with con­tent that is col­lated from over 100 dif­fer­ent sources.

Going back a few years in time, a small search engine named Google was started in Jan­u­ary 1996 by a cou­ple of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity stu­dents who hypoth­e­sized that a search engine that ana­lyzed the rela­tion­ships between web­sites would pro­duce bet­ter rank­ing of results than exist­ing tech­niques, which ranked results accord­ing to the num­ber of times the search term appeared on a page. The domain google.com was reg­is­tered in Sep­tem­ber 1997 and the com­pany was incor­po­rated as Google Inc. in Sep­tem­ber 1998. Since 2001, Google has acquired sev­eral com­pa­nies, mainly focus­ing on small start-ups. In 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube. The entry of Google marked a major mile­stone in the his­tory of search engines, as it used a “page rank­ing” sys­tem on the basis of num­ber of links to a par­tic­u­lar site.

In June 2009 Bing — for­merly Live Search, Win­dows Live Search and MSN Search — became Microsoft’s cur­rent web search engine devel­op­ment. Adver­tised as a “deci­sion engine,” Bing has a catchy “Stop Search­ing. Start Decid­ing” slo­gan that allows its users to feel in con­trol of their searches. Bing cat­e­go­rizes searches allow­ing for improved image and video searches along with pre­view searches, and its “deci­sion engine” asso­ciates infor­ma­tion on the Web to help its users make bet­ter deci­sions about things like travel reser­va­tions, shop­ping online, your health and more. In August 2009, only two months after Bing became pub­lic online, it gained 9.3 per­cent of the United States Inter­net search mar­ket, caus­ing Google some con­cern about its mar­ket share.

Today, Meaningo is an Israel-based startup spe­cial­iz­ing in Nat­ural Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing (NLP) search appli­ca­tions. In sim­pler terms, Meaningo is a seman­tic search engine, guid­ing users to find the exact prod­ucts they are look­ing for in a more refined and effi­cient man­ner. Find­ing the right search term can be a time-consuming process, as many search results have lit­tle rel­e­vance with their goal find­ings. Meaningo was designed to increase the effec­tive­ness of online search­ing, so users search­ing the Web can suc­cess­fully find what they’re look­ing for with­out much name refin­ing in the search engine.

Meaningo was specif­i­cally designed in hopes of over­com­ing com­mon imped­i­ments Web users are faced with when search­ing for infor­ma­tion online. Meaningo pro­vides its users with an eas­ier way of defin­ing, refin­ing and con­trol­ling the qual­ity of the search while pro­vid­ing very accu­rate results even for com­plex inquiries. Watch my video below where I inter­view Meaningo’s Founder & CEO, Dr. Zach Solan, and find out the true mean­ing of Meaningo.

Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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