Items tagged with search engine
Once upon a time, if you had a question about something and hoped to find the answer on the web, you might have been compelled to Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) for the answer. These days, Google is so popular that its search functionality has become a verb, as in, "Why don't you Google it?" Bing is the other big search engine, but could Apple—and by extension Siri—be next? Quite possibly. We already know that Apple loves to have control everything, from the custom iPhone and iPad chips it builds, to whatever else it can manufacturer and manage in-house. Even its Mac systems are moving away from Intel chips, in favor of Apple's own custom silicon (based on Arm). And on the software side,...
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There's a good reason why Google is the default search engine in Safari on iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. It's all about the Benjamins, which collectively totaled $1 billion in 2014, the amount Google paid Apple as part of a revenue sharing agreement to keep its search engine as the default on iPhones and iPads. To put that into perspective. Dr. Evil initially wanted to hold the world ransom for $1 million before upping the ante to $100 billion.The fact that Google pays big time bucks to hardware and software partners to feature its search engine as the default option has long been known. But until now, it was never confirmed how much Apple gained from its relationship with Google. That...
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Microsoft this week announced that web searches made using the company's Bing search engine will soon be encrypted by default. In actuality, users have been able to encrypt searches made via Bing for around a year and a half now, though sometime before summer comes to an end, it will be a standard option for all users. The move will level the playing field with Google and Yahoo, both of which already offer encrypted searches by default. Of course, the bodies at Microsoft still need to eat and so the company will conintue to pass along referrer strings to marketers and webmasters that identify traffic as coming from Bing. What won't be included are the specific search query terms that users input,...
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If you’ve ever searched for information at the Congress website, you’ve used The Library of Congress’ venerable THOMAS system, which has been around since 1995. (That’s THOMAS, as in, Thomas Jefferson.) Search now at Congress.gov, and you’ll be using an entirely new search engine that is designed to provide an improved search experience. The search engine, which is still in Beta, was developed with open source code. The major change is the single search field. Like Bing, Google, or just about any modern search engine, Congress.gov now lets you simply type your search term into the box. The search engine searches all sources of data at once, meaning you spend less...
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Google has released its Caffeine indexing technology. As the most significant change Google has made to the basic technology that crawls the Internet and ranks Web pages since 2006, Caffeine has been in the testing phase for almost a year. According to Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered." In a blog post announcing the completion of Caffeine, Google Software Engineer Carrie Grimes explained how Caffeine is different from the company's previous indexing system: Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update...
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As part of its latest attempt to make its site more useful, Yahoo announced a partnership with Twitter. Although most of the new features won't be available until later this year, one of the upcoming features will allow anyone with a Twitter account to tweet and see the updates of people they're tracking while they are logged in to the Yahoo Web site. One change has already taken place: Yahoo is now displaying a wider range of Twitter updates in its search results. Google and Microsoft have been displaying Twitter search results since late last year. Like its rivals, Yahoo will pay Twitter for better access to its data. Prior to this announcement, Yahoo had been using Twitter's free tools to...
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As you will recall, Microsoft and Yahoo announced an agreement back in July to team up in hopes of improving their competitive position against Google. Now that the deal has been unconditionally cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, the partnership is one step closer to reality. Under the terms of the agreement, Bing will become the search engine for both Microsoft and Yahoo sites. Yahoo, in turn, will focus on attracting the big advertisers. The automated auction of search ads that will be used on both companies' sites will be handled by Microsoft; Microsoft will pay Yahoo a portion of search ad sales generated on Yahoo pages. By combining forces, Microsoft and...
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We can't exactly say that hell has frozen over here, as Google has actually went against its unofficial no-ad policy at least once before. But then again, that whole ordeal was something entirely different than this. We've known that the search engine giant (and now operating system contender) has been looking into the TV ad business for some time, but it has yet to come forward with a splash as big as the one you'll probably see tonight. That is, if you're watching the single biggest sporting event of the US sporting calendar.If rumors are correct, Google will air a Super Bowl ad of their own tonight. It will be a 30 second spot, and it will likely air during the 3rd quarter of play. The Super...
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Investors have had a couple days to digest the strategic partnership Microsoft and Yahoo jointly announced this week, and they aren't exactly pouring money into Yahoo's coffers. The company's stock price (Ticker: YHOO) has fallen nearly 20 percent over the past five days, from its July 27 price of $17.31 to today's $14.44 (as of this writing). Microsoft's stock is up very slightly over the same period, from $23.11 to today's $23.81, but a flat trend doesn't constitute a ringing endorsement. "I was myself kind of surprised by the market reaction," Ballmer told a meeting for financial analysts at Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle. "Nobody gets it. It's a little bit complicated. Nothing...
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For quite some time now, Google has enjoyed the top spot in terms of search traffic. As you can imagine, Microsoft is not content to simply exist in another company’s shadow, so the company has been attempting to put a dent in Google’s search traffic with a new search engine of its own. Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched June 3rd. While Google is still No. 1, Microsoft has enjoyed two continual weeks of growth according to industry tracker comScore Inc. According to comScore, Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S. rose to 12.1% for the period of June 8-12. A week prior (June 1-5), Microsoft enjoyed 11.3% of the search result pages. Prior to Bing’s introduction, Microsoft enjoyed...
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Just what the world needs, right? Another search engine. Before you just pass Microsoft's efforts up as futile, we should point out that 'Bing' does actually look rather promising. Of course, Wolfram Alpha is but a long lost memory in most minds by now, so it remains to be seen how much traction Bing will receive when staring down the almighty Google.Smartly, Microsoft has angled Bing as to not be a direct competitor to Google. Instead, it's being described as a Decision Engine and consumer brand, which aims to provide users with a "first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions." Think Decision Support System, but for the everyday Joe. Essentially, this new engine...
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As instantaneous as the Web can be, most search engines--Google included--suffer from a bit of a time lag. The search engines can only link to pages and sites that the search engines have scraped with their Web crawlers or spiders and other indexing tools. This means that the latest entries on the quick-changing-content sites like Twitter or Digg won't be searchable via Google or other similar search engines until well after the content has already been replaced with even newer entries. Where Google leaves off, the new search engine, Scoopler looks to pick up. Scoopler is a search engine that indexes the content of a number of popular social-networking sites, and delivers real time search results:"Scoopler...
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At a time when many advertisers are cutting spending, Yahoo is making changes to its core revenue engine in order to make it more powerful and hopefully keep the attention of advertisers. The new ad targeting features announced today could mean you’ll be seeing more and more advertisements based around your searches at Yahoo in the future. One of the new technologies behind these changes is called search retargeting. Search retargeting lets marketers target people with tailored display ads based upon the search terms used in Yahoo’s search engine. Search retargeting is just one of three new features Yahoo is rolling out in order to tailor ads based on your behavior. The other two new features...
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Sometimes we have to remind ourselves here at HotHardware that us editors and our loyal readers do not necessarily represent typical Internet users. Many of us consider ourselves to be "power users," and feel we know how to leverage the available tools to find exactly what we are looking for online. Which is why it came as a surprise to us to learn that on average, "the percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day... [is] just under one-half (49%)." This revelation comes from a recent survey conduced by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. We were under the (mistaken) impression that search engines were such an integral pat of online life that nearly anyone who...
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Microsoft and Yahoo aren't the only companies looking to compete with Google in the search business. In fact, this morning a new startup called Cuil opened its virtual doors for the world to start using its search engine. So, on this morning we ask, how is Cuil different from all other search engines? The site claims: "Cuil (pronounced COOL) is a search engine that combines the largest Web index with content-based relevance methods, organized results, and complete user privacy. The company's next generation approach to search is the result of proprietary breakthroughs in search architecture and ranking algorithms."Ciul claims to have an index of 120 billion pages, which it states is "three times...
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No, we (China) really, really don't want you to hear anything about the Dalai Lama. Or so that's the theory behind search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Windows Live Search being redirected to Baidu.Various reports indicate that YouTube, Yahoo, Google, and Windows Live Search are all being redirected to Baidu, in a possible move to block out news of the Dalai Lama's receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal.Such a move would not be surprising, considering China has already done something similar in the past. In 2002, it redirected Google surfers away from the site ahead of the Communist Party Congress meetings.In what should surprise no one, there's been no comment from Chinese authorities....
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Jimmy Wales, founder of the immensely popular Wikipedia, has decided to build a rival search engine to compete with Google. He calls his new search engine Wikiasari. Like Wikipedia, the new search engine will rely on the support of a volunteer community of users. The idea is that Web surfers and programmers will be able to bring their collective intelligence to bear, to fine-tune search results and make the experience more effective for everyone. "If you search in Google, a lot of the results are very, very good and a lot of the results are very, very bad," says Wales. What that shows, Wales says, is that mathematical formulas alone do not produce...
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Google is going to make Microsoft look like a lemonade stand if they keep releasing useful things at the rate they're going. The latest is a customizable search engine: Not satisfied that it has given Web users enough tools to refine data on the Internet, Google will launch Custom Search Engine Tuesday, a product designed to cull search results from only those sites specified by the searcher. Users who create their own topic-specific search engines with the new tool, and share them via a search box on a web site, will be able to make money from ads placed by Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) on search result pages as part of the company's revenue-sharing AdSense program. Now that...
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Well, the life of the pocket protected just got a little easier. Google has gone live with a search engine for computer code. Google is applying the same machine-driven techniques it uses to help consumers search the Web for text, images, video and books to help professional programmers as well as computer enthusiasts overcome stumbling blocks to writing code. Searchers can seek out specific programming terms or computer languages and dive deep into compressed code to locate specific features. Users also can narrow a search to find software code based on specific licensing requirements, which is a big deal in warding off future patent litigation. Google already has dozens of search engine types,...
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In the words of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, internet search is still in it's "DOS era". Ballmer freely admits the mistakes Microsoft has made along the way, but boasts about the progress of their search engine. According to the March Nielsen/Net Ratings, Google owns 49% of the U.S. search market, Yahoo! with 22.5% and MSN Search with 11%. "I like to tell our people, 'I like the years when we make at least a year's progress in a year,'" Ballmer said. "I think we've made more than two years' progress in the last two years, so I'm excited about that. And yet, we have a whole lot more innovation that we want to bring...
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With the largest search engine companies being based in the US, French President Jacques Chirac is proposing the creation of a rival search engine named "Quaero". One inteseting feature that's being planned for, is a translation tool that can translate audio."The ambitious project will probably not be available anytime in the near future. Quaero is still in the earliest stages of development, so early that none of the major players have yet ventured a guess as to how much the project might cost. When Quaero does launch, it will have a great deal of catching up to do. Google currently has a tight hold on its position as the world's leading search engine, and it shows no signs of loosening...
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