Posts Tagged ‘search engine’

Posted on October 2, 2009 - by admin

Google bites Bing back, recovers all usage losses since spring

If the last two months should be interpreted as Microsoft suggests, with Bing’s gradual ascent in usage share against Google as a sign of Bing’s inevitably catching up, then a similar interpretation of September’s numbers from live analytics firm StatCounter should be taken as a sign of Bing’s ultimate demise. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world’s top three search services, Google’s usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November’s peak of 81.14% — meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on August 13, 2009 - by admin

Google’s next search engine: What’s the difference?

Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it’s describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling “Caffeine,” although perhaps intentionally, it isn’t yet explaining just what the differences are.

In Betanews’ initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google’s current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 10, 2009 - by admin

Bing swing: search engine boosts Microsoft

The new search engine Bing has launched Microsoft’s share of US Web searches into double digits for the first time in two years.

But Bing’s early gain is no predictor of future success. The last time Microsoft’s share was this high, it had resorted to paying people to use Bing’s predecessor, known as Live Search.

Read the full story at SMH

Posted on June 6, 2009 - by admin

Does Bing have a future?

Carmi Levy: Wide Angle Zoom Microsoft’s search addiction could save it. Or kill it.

I’ve never been addicted to drugs, but watching Microsoft’s seemingly never-ending drive to introduce a search engine that sticks helps me understand why the company simply can’t say no.

First, the Redmond software giant’s bread and butter, Windows and Office, are failing businesses. Although they’re still hugely profitable, selling boxes of disc-based software is yesterday’s business model. Microsoft needs to replace those revenue streams. Soon.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 3, 2009 - by admin

Bing vs. Google face-off, round 2

Why should a search engine expect you to know what you’re searching for in order that you may find it? Today, we test Google and Bing on uncertainty.

The way we left things yesterday, we gave Microsoft’s newly revamped Bing search engine some moderately tough, everyday search tests, and gave Google the same treatment. After three heats, the score thus far is Bing 2, Google 1, with Bing performing quite admirably in the computer parts shopping department.

Search engines are fairly good for finding something you know you’re searching for. In the real world, folks don’t often know what or who it is they’re searching for, which is why they’re searching for him. So suppose someone sends you out on the Internet to find…

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 3, 2009 - by admin

Bing vs. Google face-off, round 1

For the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s search engine to be as functional as Google, it needs to carry some heavy loads.

Easily the biggest single change to the way I do business over the past quarter-century — bigger than the ubiquitousness of e-mail, bigger than the mouse, bigger than push-button piracy — is the search engine. Google is an invaluable research tool that my colleagues and I might have invested literally thousands in to be able to use, were it available two decades ago; though in all fairness, the search engine that truly blazed the trail in functionality in the early days of the Web was AltaVista.

Even AltaVista has some unique linguistic tricks that, if they could be applied to Google’s colossal index, would yield mind-boggling results; so the notion that Google cannot be bested is probably false. But this time it’s Microsoft once again that’s laying down the gauntlet. This time, its search engine’s latest revamp sheds what some had seen as its biggest liability: its brand name’s ties to Windows, as if using Windows Live Search had anything to do with using Windows. The choice of Bing as the final title indicates that most of the good dot-com names really have already been taken; but that criticism aside, Bing deserves a fair shake.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 2, 2009 - by admin

First Impressions: Blah-da Bing

It appears as though Microsoft took Bing out of the oven before the kitchen timer rang. As of Day 1, its travel section doesn’t top Yahoo’s; its shopping section features rather bland products; and its page arrangement is inconsistent. If this is what Microsoft is taking to battle against Yahoo and Google, it’s got a lot of tuning up to do.

Like many others, I was salivating at the thought of getting my hands on a new, faster search engine, and so I was impatiently waiting for Wednesday when Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) was scheduled to unleash Bing on the world.

When it made Bing available on Monday instead, I leaped on the application and began running searches on the Web with little cries of joy.

Those cries soon changed to gurgles of dismay — Bing is not yet ready for the big time. In fact, it isn’t ready at all.

Read the full story at Technology News

Posted on May 29, 2009 - by admin

Microsoft re-invents itself in search with Bing

Reigning software king Microsoft has launched Bing, its attempt to assert dominance in search.

Today, Microsoft officially unleashed Bing upon the world. It’s a brand that will be associated with intelligent search, and is hence classified as a “Decision Engine,” rather than a search engine. Rollout of the new service (to be located at www.bing.com) begins over the next few days and will be completed in under a week, with the target deployment date of June third.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on May 23, 2009 - by admin

Can a Semantic Kumo Wrestle Google to the Mat?

In the realm of search, Microsoft trails far behind Google and Yahoo, two engines that deliver search results mainly by matching keywords. Can adding a little semantic technology give Microsoft’s search engine a better idea of what’s on the searcher’s mind — and thus attract more users? Redmond is expected to deliver such a product, known as “Kumo,” in the coming weeks.

In about two weeks, Microsoft is expected to launch Kumo, its sort of old, sort of new search engine.

Microsoft regards Kumo as its Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) killer, according to analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, and the software company is banking heavily on it despite deep internal divisions over the project.

Kumo will reportedly take over Microsoft’s Live Search and incorporate semantic Web search capabilities, which could be the next wave in search engine technology.

However, in some ways, the semantic Web is already creeping up on us — we just don’t know it yet.

Read the full story at Technology News

Posted on May 19, 2009 - by admin

Wolfram|Alpha Launch Sparks Cheers, Curiosity, Confusion

The new search engine Wolfram|Alpha is ready to deliver results, but the information it provides may not be the same sort of results users are used to getting from Google or Yahoo. The engine’s databases collect and curate objective data, and it attempts to answer questions rather than provide page after page of links to other sites.

For the past few weeks, the arrival of the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha was hyped as the next stage of search engine technology — a “Google-killer,” a new way to ask the Internet a direct question. So naturally, a few enterprising technology writers and bloggers wanted answers to some very specific queries when the Web site finally went live over the weekend.

The Atlantic Monthly asked if Wolfram|Alpha knew the name of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee (it didn’t.) Tech blog Mashable asked the musical question, “How many roads must a man walk down before he can call himself a man?” (Wolfram|Alpha: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind, according to Bob Dylan.”)

Ridiculous/sublime questions aside, a quick Monday test-drive of Wolfram|Alpha, which is billing itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” resulted in some long page-load times, more than a few non-responses and plenty of analysis from technology observers. That discussion focused on the viability of search algorithms that promise specific answers to specific questions — not redirection to Web sites a la Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) — all culled from a Wolfram-generated database.

Read the full story at Technology News