This week has given me two new toys to play with, and you could probably say both were bought at the dollar store. The first was Microsoft‘s release of Rebranded Live, aka Bing. Bing’s search results have been poor (for me), but not much poorer than Google‘s. Just enough poorer for me to see no [...]
Posts Tagged ‘google’
Two new toys: G^2 and Bing
Posted: 3 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: bing, google, google squared, image search, information retrieval, knowledge engine, search engines, wolfram alpha
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First Impressions of Wolfram|Alpha
Posted: 16 May 2009 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, google squared, knowledge engines, natural language processing, search engines, stephen wolfram, wikipedia, wolfram alpha
Perhaps you’ve heard of the latest brainchild of the Wunderkind Stephen Wolfram: Wolfram|Alpha. Matthew Hurst nicknamed it Alphram today and I agree that’s a much better name. Wolfram|Alpha (W|A henceforth) is not a search engine, it’s a knowledge engine. It will compete with Google on a slice of traffic that Google really isn’t all that [...]
Much ado about nothing
Posted: 26 March 2009 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, computational linguistics, disappointment, google, hype, information retrieval, search, semantic search
There has been much ballyhoo in the blogosphere touting Google’s so-called foray into semantic search. The blog post announcing the new feature doesn’t even mention the word semantics, but it does say it looks at associations and concepts related to your query. I see no mention of tuples or anything of the sort and the [...]
It is bad journalism when
Posted: 8 February 2009 in UncategorizedTags: bad journalism, blagoblag, energy consumption, google, houston chronicle, journalism
It is bad journalism when an old news story is debunked and continues to be rehashed! How sloppy! Shame on you, Houston Chronicle! Back around 2000, when Palem began thinking about the future of computer chip technology, power consumption wasn’t a big consideration. Only speed mattered. But today, the energy consumed by information technology – [...]
Adwords Fail
Posted: 8 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: adwords, email, fail, germany, gmail, google, israel, nazi
These are the gmail ads presented to me upon receiving an email with the subject “Nazi Israel.” The text of the email contained no mention of Germany.
Google App Engine Hackathon
Posted: 15 November 2008 in UncategorizedTags: atlanta, computing puzzles, google, google app engine, hackathon, langwar, project euler, python, stack overflow, web apps
I just spent the day with a couple of friends at the Google App Engine Hackathon in Atlanta. We got to see Google Atlanta – or the public part of it anyway. We weren’t permitted in the cafeteria or in the actual office area, which would have required signing non-disclosure agreements. The office was about [...]
Microsoft U Rank
Posted: 25 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, information retreival, mahalo, microsoft, u rank, user-driven search, web search, wikia search
Microsoft just announced a research project called U Rank, which aims to do pretty much just that. You rank search results, share with friends, blah blah blah. Basically it’s Mahalo with Microsoft branding plus a few trinkets. And it’s backed by Live Search so you can feel confident the baseline results will be easy to [...]
Relevance-based language modeling
Posted: 14 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, information retrieval, language modeling, queries, relevance, search engines
I just finished reading about relevance-based language models for information retrieval (Lavrenko and Croft, 2001). It’s an old paper, but some new stuff I was checking into relied on something else which relied on it — you know how the story goes. In information retrieval, there are many retrieval models that have been used over [...]
Cuil Fail
Posted: 28 July 2008 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, cuil, fail, google, search engines, spam, startups
The blagoblag is abuzz with word of cuil, a search engine launched by some former Google engineers. After many hours of downtime, I was able to check it out a short while ago. The unfortunate result: it blows. It’s so bad that it’s as bad as your brain can comprehend. Supposedly there are three times [...]
