Search is hot lately, with two new search engines being announced in recent weeks. As the world’s only easily-searchable database platform, we’re happy to see attention being paid to finding relevant data easily.
The first new search engine to come out is Wolfram Alpha, founded by physicist/inventor/crank Stephen Wolfram. I would describe Wolfram Alpha as a cross between Google and Wikipedia for technical topics: math, physics, chemistry, and so on. It’s neat that I can type in sin(x) and see a graph, or type in benzene and see everything from its molecular structure to a phase diagram. Then again, I’m a nerd. Outside of scientific fields, it does poorly. If I type in Brazil I see only a smattering of factoids about the country. Compare this to Google’s entry for Brazil, which gives me images, maps, recent news, and so on; or Wikipedia’s entry, which is simply awesome, and shows Wikipedia at its best.
The second recent search engine to be unveiled is Microsoft’s Bing. It copies recent Google innovations like chunking out search results into different areas (news, maps, facts, weather) and providing suggestions for refined or related searches. It also has some very useful new features, like a mouse-over preview of the content of each search result that a user can skim before deciding whether to follow the link.
All of this innovation shows that search is as important as ever. We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we built the world’s only searchable database. Type in what you’re looking for, like you would in an Internet search engine: phrases, people, dates, numbers, and so on. TrackVia translates your request into a search that’s appropriate to your data model, and presents a highlighted list of matching records from your database.
You can then edit the data right in the results page. You can also search notes that colleagues have added to database records, and search the built-in change history that TrackVia keeps for every record. And you can use advanced tricks like phrase searches, exact matches, negative matches, field binding, and even searching for blank values. All of this with a single search box, and a button labeled “Go.” No queries or wizards required. Did I mention it’s really, really fast – even with a hundred thousand records in your database?
It’s sort of like TrackVia is the Google/Bing/WolframAlpha of your own data.
