Videos
Podcasts
Blogs
Quizzes
GamesPosts Tagged: ‘Microsoft Bing’
Hey Google? I don’t think Microsoft‘s playing around anymore. And here’s what makes me say that: The company has struck a deal with Wolfram|Alpha to provide some of its high-powered data search results. So now Bing lets you search some seriously reliable information vetted by professionals at Wolfram Research, and Wolfram|Alpha has a very high-profile client that’ll help the company show off its mettle.
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch wrote about the development, shortly after Stephen Wolfram made a post on the Wolfram|Alpha blog about the copious amounts of new information added to the database and other refinements they’d made to the computational knowledge engine over the summer. As Schonfeld points out, the Microsoft deal wasn’t mentioned in the post.
Schonfeld said that Bing may be the start of many licensing deals for Wolfram|Alpha, since the site has difficulty driving traffic. He feels that the site just isn’t very impressive in its presentation
Just the other day, Jonathan Strickland wrote about Google’s Caffeine, and if you missed it, the American search giant is trying to redefine the way it crawls the Web, indexes pages and ranks search results. As Jonathan pointed out, some think that Caffeine is a response to Microsoft Bing, but even as fast as Google moves, it still couldn’t rush a brand new search system to market that quickly. I mean, it was no secret that Microsoft was working to replace Live Search, but similarities between the two systems are likely to be fairly coincidental, unless there was some serious leaking of proprietary information going on.
But why would Google have been working on a new way to rank pages in search? Google’s lead may seem commanding — 65 percent to a combined 28 percent for Yahoo and Microsoft, as The New York Times’ Miguel Helft pointed out — but that’s not the whole story.
It’s pretty clear that Google doesn’t subscribe to the philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The company is currently working on a massive, yet subtle, overhaul of its search engine technology. The code name for the project is Google Caffeine, and you can start using a preview version of it right now.
If you click that link, you’ll see a search engine page that looks amazingly similar to the current Google page. In fact, it will look identical apart from the URL. That’s because the Google Caffeine project isn’t about updating Google’s user interface. Instead, the company is trying out new ways to index Web sites and organize them for searches.
Google developer Matt Cutts blogged about the project on Monday. Cutts explains that casual users won’t really notice a difference in their search results and even power users may find differences to be hard to spot. Cutts points out that search results will change but it may take an eagle eye to notice it.
Tech news is always a little slow coming off a holiday, but I saw something that caught my eye late last week that I just didn’t have time to write about until today. Microsoft’s next-generation search tool, Kumo, may be unveiled at the D: All Things Digital conference this week, as CNET’s Ina Fried said in an article on CNN.com last Thursday. It was hyped a while back because it’s supposed to be totally revamped. For instance, you can search on a topic and break down the results by category. It’s a neat idea (or I think it is, I’d like to see it in action. It sounds useful).
But Yahoo and Google are already incorporating some of the ideas from Kumo into their own search engine – and they’ve already shown their hands to the public, so any hope Microsoft might’ve had in making a splash with their new search engine may be over.
Recent Postings by Category
BrainStuff
- Thank You and Best Wishes to Marshall Brain
- Contest – Design a $300 house and win $25,000
- How the Philtrum works – the place under your nose where your face comes together
The Coolest Stuff on the Planet
- Traveling on the Orient Express
- Deep-fried Goodness at Carnival
- The Colors of the Running of the Bulls
Keep Asking
- Why can a 5 foot 8 inch man dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim while some people of taller stature can’t?
- What happens to our sun once it runs out of fuel?
- How do we know the age of the universe?
Stuff Mom Never Told You
- Who invented the Christmas card?
- How the Kinsey Report Fueled Whiskey Sales
- How to Get Your Wedding Announcement into The New York Times
Stuff to Blow Your Mind
- Blow Your Mind: In the Lair of the Rat King
- Mandala: Memory Palace, Inception and Simulated Worlds
- Virgin Galactic: $200,000 Ticket to Ride
Stuff You Should Know
- The Southern Death Cult, the Maya and Georgia
- Deformed Baby Spider Brains
- Amazing Medical Conditions: Maple Syrup Urine Disorder
The Stuff of Genius
CarStuff
- Was Chrysler’s “It’s Halftime in America” Super Bowl commercial a little too political?
- Why is NASA studying car safety?
- Tips for in-car Navigation Systems
How-to Stuff
- How to Make the Most of a Gallery Crawl (When You’re on a Shoestring Budget)
- How to Swim with Dolphins (When Deep Water Terrifies You)
- How to Cure a Homemade Cookie Craving Without Turning on the Oven
PopStuff
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 40: Did movies ruin love?
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 39: Urban Legends
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 38: Defending Disney Princesses?
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff to Change the World
- Who will own the Arctic?
- Obesity: The New Global Crisis
- Bill Gates Makes For A Pretty Decent Cartoon
Stuff You Missed in History Class
- Butch Cassidy: Should we read between the lines?
- Are we rooting for D.B. Cooper?
- Party Time: A Look at Unconventional Politics
