Bing Adds New Features

Trying to make further gains on the two search leaders Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft's Bing team have announced the inclusion of results from Wolfram Alpha and a few other changes. According to the NYTimes Bits Blog "Over the next few weeks, Bing will also add a handful of other features and revamp existing ones in what Microsoft calls a “rolling update.” They include localized results for weather and events, a revamped shopping section and an updated preview feature, which lets users see a snapshot of a Web page directly on the search results page. A video describing each of the features is available here."

Even so, it will be a hard slog for Microsoft.

Google docs To Be Spidered, If Published By Owner

A recent post in the Google docs help forum states "In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines." This has a few users concerned about the security of their online docs to which Google says "Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn't apply if it's only set to 'Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)'."

The following steps can ensure that your docs are safe from the spiders, if that is what you intend:

-Go to the 'Share tab'
-For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'

-Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'

This will have to be done for each document, though if you had set a document to be published then one would assume that your intent was to have people view it anyway, and having the search engines spider it's content may provide you with greater exposure to your works.

Microsoft To Spend Big In Fight Against Google

Microsoft is preparing to launch "Bring", a new search engine, and is prepared to spend big to make the name stick. Reports are that Microsoft is prepared to launch a $100 million ad campaign to get the name out there, that's twice the amount considered to be large for a new consumer product. "I don't think they can win this game with a better mousetrap," said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor & Associates, brand consultants. "They have to compete with Google on a brand front — there's no other way to skin this but go head-on against the Google brand."

Source: CBC

Google In The Holiday Mood

Check it out! Perform a Google search for anything that contains the word Christmas and you'll get an Easter Egg, or should I say Candy Cane. The results page will displays a string of candy canes, or holly dividing the results from the ads on the right hand side of the page. Hanukkah and Kwanzaa also work. Thanks for spreading the holiday cheer Google!

Another Search Engine, Cuil!

A new search engine is launching today in an attempt to challenge Google, and interestingly enough the developers are four former Google employees who actually created another search engine before joining the search giant, only to be bought up by Google in 2004. The new service Cuil, pronounced "cool", is backed by $33 million in venture capital funding. Cuil's search index is reported to span 120 billion Web pages which Cuil developer Anna Patterson believes is at least three times the size of Google's index although that's unconfirmed since Google stopped reporting their number of pages indexed about 3 years ago. Perhaps Cuil's launch is a little premature though, I'm getting the following "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."

Being unGoogleable

I found this interesting article while browsing for something completely different, but the topic caught my attention and set my mind to contemplating the dilemma of the author and his former colleague. How many of us can say that they have never been tagged in someone's flickr photo, or don't have a Facebook account for that matter? If you've ever been named in a blog post, on a company website, or in a local newspaper article, how can you truly remain unGoogleable?

“UnGoogleable? I don’t think it’s possible,” says Nilhan Jayasinghe, the head of natural search for online marketing firm iCrossing, a company that specializes in Search Engine Optimization and online reputation management for the likes of Toyota, Coca-Cola and Lego. “The problem is you simply have no control over all the outlets that publish something about you.”

If this is true then how can you manage what is out there? “With many clients, we have been able to help them suppress it [the critical chatter], provided they have enough positive material they can use to build up their reputation,” Mr Jayasinghe says.

Microsoft Willing To Pay You To Use It's Searchengine

Microsoft is offering cash in the form of rebates to persuade users to shop online using it's Live Search engine. The scheme has Microsoft paying back to the consumer between 2% and 30% of the purchase price of over 10 million items from over 700 retail partners. Barnes & Noble, Sears, Overstock.com, Home Depot, J&R Electronics and a host of other retailers have signed on to the plan. The cash back will come in the form of a PayPal credit, cheque, or credit to the users bank account. In addition Microsoft is providing advertisers with incentives by implementing what it calls a Cost-Per-Acquisition approach rather than a Cost-Per-Click as used by Google. This approach means that advertisers will only pay when their ad results in a consumer actually buying something rather than clicking on something, that may or may not result in a sale.

CNET's Charles Cooper says: "Truth be told, it's not the worst idea. What's the harm in giving it a shot? In a recession consumers are open to bribes or rebates. But the reason people use Google is because it works better. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows this. That's why he still thinks making a move for some of Yahoo's assets makes sense."

BBC Story Here.

Google experimenting with search again

From the Official Google Blog comes an update on new functionality for Google search results being tested. There are three new views available when you join the "Alternate views for search results" experiment.

1. Map View plots some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map;
2. Timeline view does the same thing as map view, but for dates found on the web; and
3. Info view which reveals text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images in the results.

The results returned are the same but the new views may help to identify the most relevant search result for your purpose. I've not tried it yet but intend on joining the experiment.

Have you ever Googled yourself?

A report released on Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, says 47% of American adult Internet users have used Google or another search engine to looked for information about themselves. The number is over double what it was when a similar study was conducted in 2002. According to Wired, "Americans under 50 and those with more education and income were more likely to self-Google - in some cases because their jobs demand a certain online persona" and "53 percent of adult Internet users admit to looking up information about someone else, celebrities excluded." Well, if you haven't already done so... perhaps you should just go Google yourself!

Google's knol project - "a way to help people share their knowledge"

The official Google blog has an interesting post about a new project that Google is calling "knol" which according to them "stands for a unit of knowledge". The idea is to identify the author of content much like a book has the author's name on it's cover. My impression is that it is a lot like Mahalo in some ways. "We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest."

The trouble with the web has always been that you have to be careful of what/who you choose to trust as a reliable source of information, these types of projects may help us to determine "the wheat from the chaff"! I for one will be interested to see how reliable the sources turn out to be. The project is currently by invitation only so you can't give it a try just yet, unless of course you were invited.

MIT creates search engine to aid students to find topics within video taped lectures

Wow, 2 AI / natural language recognition search related posts in one day! Faculty and students of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a search engine that allows students to search video taped lectures as they might a text based web site. Lectures that have been video taped are fed to speech to text software that captures a transcript, the text is then divided into groups of words, or topics, that are analyzed for key-word density. Students can then query the search engine for topics and be guided directly to the portion of the video that best matches the query, therefor saving the trouble of scanning an entire lecture to find a specific portion. Best of all it's not just for MIT students, in fact its openly available thanks to MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative. Guess I know how my weekend is going to be spent! Give it a try! (Requires Real Player Plug in)

Natural Language Search Engine [true knowledge]

TechCrunch tipped me off to this new search engine, [true knowledge]. It's currently in private beta, which I'm hoping to be accepted to, but the video below does a fine job of spelling out the features / advantages to natural language searches. I've been playing with natural language chatbots for a six or seven years and have always had a soft spot for the technology. It will be interesting to follow [true knowledge] to see if others find the technology equally interesting. I think that those new to the Internet (if there still is anyone out there) will find this very intuitive, it's also a much more efficient way to find simple one line type answers. It will be interesting to see if those who are accustomed to the current search engine methods will see the benefit of natural language type queries. Also interesting to follow will be the success of the user contributed responses, have they found a way to keep people honest and thwart the attempts of those who would try to deceive others?

Good luck [true knowledge], I'm anxious to give it a try!

Playing in Google's sandbox

If you are looking for a new way to experience searching ala Google, give SearchMash a try! It appears to be where the Google search engineers are trying their hands at a Web 2.0 interface to Google search, though I've not tested to see whether or not the same results are returned in both cases. The landing page is, as you'd expect, very sparse, but the results pane is much more functional. You can tab between results for 'Web', 'Images', 'Video', 'Maps', 'Blogs', and 'Wikipedia'. The site also uses Snap to provide a snapshot image of the pages returned and mousing over an inconspicuous tab on the left hand side of the page presents a list of resent searches. It's very usable and I'm kinda digg'n it!

Animated search engine from Microsoft

Microsoft has launched a new search engine to showcase it's, flash competitor, Silverlight animation and video player. tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is a slick application that puts some fun back in searching. The animated interface allows you to quickly flip from results of web searches, news, rss feeds, images, or even searches within books (if the publisher has agreed to allow it). The "shelf" function lets you to drag and drop search results to shelves, stack results, and place labels upon them. There is also an interesting tree view that presents your search results as leaves on a tree, you can spin the tree 360 degrees around it's trunk or prune the branches, a neat interface but maybe not so practical. There are some nice features, I particularly like the collaborative tools, but I'll have to play with it a bit more before I pass judgment on the quality of its search results. Cool just the same.

Google's "Guge" too close for comfort for Chinese company

Google is being sued by a Chinese company over the name it is operating under in China. Beijing Guge Science and Technology Ltd is claiming that Google's Chinese operation known as Guge is causing confusion and costing it money. Apparently the company is receiving many inquires about the search engine giant because Google is not listed in the telephone directory and calls are being routed them by operators. Google opened Guge in 2005. BBC Story Here.