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In 2008, Cuil was hailed as the first serious potential rival to Google’s search engine. With an employee roster of former Google employees and a supposedly superior search function, Cuil looked set to succeed. So what went wrong? Tune in to learn more.
Google Goggles has come to life as a new way to search – visually: Use pictures to search the web With your camera phone you take a picture of something. Google defines “something” as: a landmark, book, business card, artwork, place, wine, logo (what, no barcodes?). Then Google uses the photo as a search key [...]
Last night I saw an article by Tim Weber on BBC News that described Yahoo’s changes to its home page. It’s a nice, clean look and I like it a lot, personally. But you also have to note something else when you visit — Yahoo’s opened up its page to other online properties.
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.
Wanna get paid for answering questions? Join Mahalo and start typing.
Peter Kafka wrote a post about it the All Things Digital blog yesterday, in which he explained how Jason Calacanis’s search site is changing. Unlike most search engines, Mahalo provides search results compiled by people, rather than from computer algorithms. Until now, Mahalo employees and other people online working as volunteers have been writing up search results pages. Now, however, Mahalo will let civilians take responsibility for results pages and split whatever money the page makes through advertising.
As Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch points out, you can go to Mahalo and claim pages for yourself. But don’t expect to get paid just like a regular employee — you’ll be paid in Mahalo Bucks, which can be traded in for American dollars, or you can spend your Mahalo Bucks on the site later. The exchange rate for American currency is 75 cents to the dollar.
It’s amazing the response computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha has received since its launch last Friday. It was getting pumped up pretty well by the Internet Hype Machine and, based on what I have been reading, most people seem pretty satisfied with it. I am, so far.
I’ve been watching announcements about Wolfram|Alpha for a few weeks. It’s a computational knowledge engine that’s supposed to be launching next month. I signed up for early access to the site but have yet to receive my code, so most of the information I’ve read about it comes from the company’s Web site.
While you were out boiling events in your life down to 140-character snippets, Twitter’s added some functionality that should get you added to Google‘s hot list. That’s right, the now-famous microblog/time-waster/marketing tool/what IS that thing (depending on whom you ask) has tweaked the titles of its user pages to make them show up better in search.
As TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters pointed out, his page title now says “Robin Wauters on Twitter,” instead of “Twitter/Robin Wauters.” He ran a test on people he knows who use Twitter, and the results show that this little change makes the Twitter pages appear higher in the search results than they had. Founder Biz Stone told Wauters the change was made yesterday.
So what does it mean? It means that Twitter is trying to get its users more exposure, which is especially helpful for those people who are using the service to market their businesses.
One thing that’s fun about the technology industry is that the media keeps wanting to make everything a war. Take, for example, the browser war, once fought between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator. And then, of course, Microsoft came out on top. So the war was over. Except it wasn’t, because then Mozilla rose from the ashes of Netscape and there’s a brand-new browser war.
So there’s a search war between Google and Yahoo, and … well, a whole bunch of other people who have much smaller shares of the search market. Microsoft is one of them, and of course it wasn’t that long ago that they were talking to Yahoo about an acquisition that hasn’t happened (yet).
So what’s Microsoft doing about it? They’ve been working on Kumo, a new search technology that The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher said will be the successor to Live Search.
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