Microsoft’s latest offering is the new search engine, Bing, its Live Search replacement and rival to Yahoo!, not Google, it claims.
Coined the 'decision engine', Bing aims to make search easier and more user friendly by serving up results based on similar previous searches. So if a user searches for a holiday or flight for example, they are served price offers, travel guides and destination information, rather than a list of websites. Information is served in tabbed categories such as shopping, travel, news, maps, videos and images. Users will also be presented with a ‘best match' and ‘instant result' without needing to navigate away from the results page.
The service is going live imminently in the US and in Q4 ’09 in the UK, with a beta version in the meantime.
Microsoft claims users abandon 30% of searches due to unsatisfactory results, something they wish to improve on to increase benefits to advertisers and maximise revenue.
- Sam
Friday 29 May 2009
Friday 15 May 2009
Wolfram Alpha – major breakthrough in Search?
To take all of the world’s data and make it immediately computable: an incredibly bold and ambitious goal for a software program. But this is exactly what Wolfram Alpha plans on doing.
The system, invented by scientist Stephen Wolfram, aims to compute answers to specific questions. In doing so it wants to create a system which does for quantifiable information and data what search engines have done for qualitative, or ‘informal’ knowledge, such as texts and documents. All a user needs to do is ask the program a question in everyday language, such as “what’s the GDP of France?” or “how many internet users are there in Europe?” The data is then represented in precise visual formats.
Comparing it to an existing search engine such as Google, which retrieves documents based on keyword searches, Wolfram Alpha aims to act smarter by actually thinking for the user. It claims it can understand the question and will then compute the answer.
Just how the system works based on its in-built models of knowledge fields remains unclear, and whether it will actually launch to any success remains to be seen, but on the surface - and if possible - this would be a hugely significant breakthrough.
Watch a webcast of the system here
- Sam
The system, invented by scientist Stephen Wolfram, aims to compute answers to specific questions. In doing so it wants to create a system which does for quantifiable information and data what search engines have done for qualitative, or ‘informal’ knowledge, such as texts and documents. All a user needs to do is ask the program a question in everyday language, such as “what’s the GDP of France?” or “how many internet users are there in Europe?” The data is then represented in precise visual formats.
Comparing it to an existing search engine such as Google, which retrieves documents based on keyword searches, Wolfram Alpha aims to act smarter by actually thinking for the user. It claims it can understand the question and will then compute the answer.
Just how the system works based on its in-built models of knowledge fields remains unclear, and whether it will actually launch to any success remains to be seen, but on the surface - and if possible - this would be a hugely significant breakthrough.
Watch a webcast of the system here
- Sam
Friday 8 May 2009
Twitter Boosts Search Feature
Currently Twitter’s search functionality offers valuable insight into what users are saying in real-time. However that insight is soon to become even more valuable as Twitter announced this week it is adding additional features to its search tool.
Notably, Twitter will crawl and index the links people add in their posts, not just the text they write. Also it will sort search results by Twitterers’ reputations, not just by chronology. Just how they rank reputation remains to be seen. However these developments certainly increase Twitter’s worth and value to brands and marketers alike.
- Sam
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