There is a lot of hype right now around new types of search engines and will anybody ever challenge Google.    First there was the launch of the Wolfram Alpha engine that delivers answers instead of lists of websites and now Microsoft has announced the launch of Bing which they are calling a "Decision Engine." 

WolframAlpha is an "answer engine" that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a "search engine" might.  

 Microsoft has today announced a new web search engine called Bing that is designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking on the internet.  Looks like based on some early reviews Bing is vastly better than Microsoft Live (that would not be hard) but does not outshine Google when it comes to general internet search.  

The heat is on Google and am I sure they will respond with something more intuitive in its search engine.  I think users are looking for more than just list of websites.   I like the the idea of aggregated data from a number of sources on a single page in response to a search query and I think that this is where search is heading.  Users are looking to the internet to provide answers, not just lists.