Competition drives Search Engine innovation

The hot pursuit to get the most relevant results faster & in an appealing way is evident from the way competing search engines are building on each other's strong points.

Before I buy a book, I like looking up Amazon to see not just how many stars it has got but how many people rated it (popular books have a large number of reviews) and also what some of the folks who gave it the highest & lowest rating have to say about it. This kind of opinion aggregation has also been the topic of several academic dissertations.

I was happy to see that both Bing & Google show the user ratings & total reviews that a book has received on Amazon in the search result itself.

Bing introduced the preview search result feature ...

.. and now Google has improved upon that to show visual search results called “Instant Previews” which may include text call outs in orange to highlight search terms in the image-based snapshots