A new Firefox extension called Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs (and UI superstar Aza Raskin), has just joined the fray. We know Aza, and we welcome Mozilla's effort to explore a better interface for the most common tasks users perform online every day. Wundrbar users know that this has been our mission from day one. So we've been getting a lot of questions asking our thoughts on Ubiquity, and how the two products differ. We thought this would be a good opportunity for us to illustrate what we see as the advantages of Wundrbar, and invite discussion on this evolving area of interface design.
Wundrbar
First, a little about us.
Launched officially in March of 2008, Wundrbar is an intuitive, intelligent search bar that hooks deeply into hundreds of different online services. We like to think of Wundrbar as one interface, for everything. We have a web version (at http://www.wundrbar.com), a Firefox extension version (available here and here), and will soon release versions of Wundrbar for a variety of other formats and platforms, including mobile devices. All of these versions incorporate a dynamic UI built around real-time command interpretation, an important innovation that helps users refine their searches. This combination of a better interface and broader scope of functionality makes Wundrbar a more compelling, powerful search experience. And we think the emergence of tools like Ubiquity just confirms Wundrbar's position at the forefront of an impending wave of innovation in this space.
The Information Problem
Both Wundrbar and Ubiquity address the same fundamental problem -- namely, that access to information and services online could be greatly simplified and unified. As more sites expose APIs and tear down barriers to their content, the need to visit individual websites and sift through complicated forms becomes increasingly obsolete. Websites themselves become an unnecessary barrier between the user and the desired information or content. Instead, this information could be accessed from a single point of entry, searched and retrieved in one action, eliminating the need for the user to hunt for content that might be distributed across dozens of websites or require extensive form submission, account verification, navigation, etc. In short, the user should no longer have to go to the content; the content should come to the user.
Both products are taking the first steps toward solving this problem by providing a single access point for some of the most popular destinations on the web. Going beyond just traditional web search, Wundrbar and Ubiquity both provide access to deeper searches within such sites as Amazon, Yelp, and Wikipedia. While it appears that Wundrbar has integrated a greater number of services, we've admittedly been at this a little longer, and we're sure that both products will continue to expand their breadth of service offerings in the weeks and months to come.
The Interface Problem
Both Wundrbar and Ubiquity also take strides toward improving upon the traditional search interface, which has been dominated for years by a certain product that we all know and love. When people think search, they think Google. And when they think Google, they think typing in a box and hitting enter.
Aside from auto-complete, this interface hasn't significantly evolved in the past 10 years. But it needs to. Really.
So, the problem is clear. Wundrbar and Ubiquity simply tackle it in different ways.
Footprint Differences
For starters, Ubiquity and Wundrbar take different approaches to the placement and appearance of our interfaces (Ubiquity as a quicklaunch overlay field in the top-left corner of the window, Wundrbar as a persistent search bar with a customizable location within the browser toolbar), and different users will have different preferences. We've worked hard to respond to our users over the past few months, and we think they appreciate our search bar's small footprint and constant availability.
UI Differences
Providing live search results as a person types is, in our opinion, one of Ubiquity's best features. In their Amazon search interpretations, for example, they've integrated the API to such an extent that they bring back search results on the fly.
Wundrbar also brings back certain results, such as gas prices, Netflix confirmations, and Twitter status messages, into the interface as well. We're continuing to bring more and more results into the search interface itself, to give the user as much information and feedback as possible at the time of command entry.
With Wundrbar, we're going a step beyond. Not only do we interpret the action, but we interpret the parameters. So if a user types something like "fly from dc to miami tomorrow," we not only interpret that they are searching for airfares, but we can recognize their origin city, departure city, and date.
And this gets to the heart of the differences between the two products. With Wundrbar, we process the semantic information that a user enters to better understand what they're trying to achieve. By recognizing entities like zip codes, movie titles, and train stations, we can not only provide a user with guidance as they search, but we can better understand the intent of the search itself. It's one thing to redirect someone to Amazon.com with a search string attached -- it's quite another to really understand what that search string means, and to pull in related information that may be relevant to the user, and may not come from Amazon.com at all. Ultimately we think this will be one of Wundrbar's greatest strengths -- to really understand searches and commands, to draw information from multiple services, and to connect users to information in ways never before possible.
Additional Functionality Differences
Finally, Ubiquity seeks to help users interact more deeply with pages as they browse. An example they cite is the ability to paste a Yelp review or Google map into an email without leaving the GMail website. While we think this is a really interesting feature, it doesn't fit with our overall mission for Wundrbar, so it's not a direction that we intend to go in at this time.
Extensibility and Customization
Ubiquity has the goal of letting people build customized commands and service mash-ups. We do too. We'll soon be opening up Wundrbar as a platform, so that users can add services, create shortcuts, and write scripts hooking services together. More on this very, very soon.
In the meantime, users with a Wundrbar account can already customize lots of their most common search specifications. For example, if you do most of your weather forecasts for a certain zip code, or most of you car rentals from a specific airport, you can set these defaults with Wundrbar and never have to specify them again.
These preferences are available system-wide, meaning they can (at a user's discretion) apply to every action the user can perform with Wundrbar. This level of personalization makes using Wundrbar an even quicker, more powerful experience.
Personal Accounts
Ubiquity currently gives users access to a few services like Twitter that reside beyond the additional dreaded barrier of the log-in process. We see this as an important feature of any interface that acts as a single point of entry. That's why Wundrbar not only lets users access Twitter, and additional sites such as Google Calendar, Netflix, and PayPal...
...but we give users the ability to manage these logins through wundrbar.com, so they can register and unregister accounts at will. We're also currently beta testing dozens more of the most popular personal account services, and will be rolling them out soon.
Availability
Ubiquity is currently available as an extension for the Firefox browser. Wundrbar is also available as a Firefox extension (here and here)...
...but we additionally have a website interface at wundrbar.com, meaning users of Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and other browsers can access it. We love Firefox, but we also want to make Wundrbar available to as many users as possible. And we can (and will) be distributing Wundrbar in many other forms, beginning in the near future.
Conclusion?
So, overall, while we acknowledge that there are some similarities between the two products, we also believe that our feature sets are significantly different, and that there's room for both Wundrbar and Ubiquity in this new and exciting area. And we're confident in our approach with Wundrbar. We've been working hard over the last 8 months to continuously build, test, and improve Wundrbar in response to the great feedback we've been getting from our users. By all means, let's keep this conversation going as we all continue to explore the best ways to make using the web as easy, productive, and enjoyable as possible.
