Entries Tagged 'Search Services' ↓

It always gives us joy to tell our readers that Microsoft is actually doing cool things. The company's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth, a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged.

Today, the Live Labs' latest creation has launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks great and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

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The official demo video is was pretty cool, but is proving unembeddable. Instead, take a look at this onstage demo from Neowin:

In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established. Or, on a nerdier note, think about riffling through decks of Magic: The Gathering cards, zooming in for larger-than-life detail of the card's artwork and then zooming out to see how each was related or linked to others in the set.

This probably reminds you - as it did us - a lot of Wikipedia. But imagine Wikipedia as an infinitely scannable, shuffleable, expandable, retractable, linked, and yet still detachable deck of digital cards; and then you have an inkling of how Pivot looks and feels.

Collections can be created by anyone, including third-party developers. Types of collections include simple, linked, and dynamic, which are each progressively more difficult to create. Developers are also encouraged to create collections from existing online datasets, such as the Internet Archive or data.gov.

It's very exciting, indeed; and it's available for Windows users only at the moment. Mac users, we're sorry. Why don't you go write some complaint letters on your beautifully designed, virus-immune machines? We'd love to rub it in some more by posting a few screenshots with gloating captions, but we're too busy trying to get this machine to stop being so Windows-y and just run the software

Right now, the service is invitation-only. We encourage you to Google around for your invite codes or check in here later to see if the kind folks at Live Labs have passed along any to us.

Microsoft just updated Bing's mobile interface. The new interface features tabs and is optimized for high-resolution touch-screen devices like the iPhone or Microsoft's own Zune HD. The earlier version of Bing Mobile worked reasonably well, but the interface was rather generic. The new version, on the other hand, makes good use of the iPhone's touch screen when searching for movies, for example. Bing now shows a list of movie posters that you can scroll through with a sideways swipe.

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New Features: NFL Updates & Flight Search

The Bing team also added a few new features to the generic mobile search. Users can now search for NFL teams and players and get real-time updates about games, stats and scores while a game is on. This feature is only available in the U.S.

In addition, Bing has implemented a flight search feature. You can now type in the airline code and flight number and Bing will return the latest gate information and departure and arrival times.

But Will Anybody Use It?

The new mobile interface for the iPhone and similar devices looks a lot better than the earlier version and is also more usable. Given that users can only switch between Google and Yahoo as their default search providers on the iPhone, however, it's questionable how many iPhone users will actually use Bing's mobile search.

We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.

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A recent IDC white paper reports, "The digital universe is messy...95% of the data in the digital universe is unstructured, meaning its intrinsic meaning cannot be easily divined by simple computer programs. There are ways to imply meaning to unstructured data, and the semantic web project is promising to develop the tools to help us do that in the future."

Two such "divining" projects include CoPhIR (Content-based Photo Image Retrieval) Test-Collection and IBM's MUFIN (Multi-Feature Indexing Network). These projects tie into SAPIR's back end by extracting data from the Flickr archive and indexing features such as scalable color, color structure, color layout, shape edges and texture.

As shown in the video of Madrid's Plaza de España, SAPIR identifies matching media in the same way that humans derive intrinsic value from visual and sensory clues. Users can also choose to combine search terms with additional text to further drill down in search results. As is the case with regular search, if you already know the city where your image was taken, you're one step closer to finding your result. Additionally, SAPIR also has the ability to index sound and video files.

While the catalogue of media is still very limited, theoretically we may one day be able to search for almost anything using this technique. If Ashton Kutcher wears a pair of sunglasses we like, we can scan the image and search for the storefronts stocking them. If we're looking for the name of a town square, we can find it in the tags of similar images. And finally, if we're looking to self-diagnose we can compare photos of ourselves against jaundice or malaria patients.

The advantage of this tool is that we may one day have a chance to collect up the disparate bits in the digital ether and identify them as useful points of information. To test SAPIR in its early research stage, visit the homepage. You may also want to test out MUFIN to compare results.

Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads on the site. In July, Bing's sponsored click rate fell slightly to 5.5%, even though in June, it still saw an impressive growth in paid clicks.

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As for the other search engines, Google continues to hold steady at around 73.75% market share (down from 73.90% last month), though Yahoo lost a full percentage point and is now at 15.6% after seeing its search volume drop 3.3% compared to last month. In total, Compete estimates that a total of 12.5 billion queries were served by all the major search engines combined in July.

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete's Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo "will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks." While Microsoft's data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

Dorthy.com, a site we've been hearing about since late last year, has just raised $4 million from angel investors for their "new agey" concept of a search engine for dreams. Currently in private alpha, the site makes fluffy claims about how they're "reversing the traditional search process, continuously filtering and focusing the Universe of online content, to connect you with the best stuff around your interests and aspirations."

If you're not clear on what exactly that means, don't feel bad...but don't write them off either. Instead, think of Dorthy.com as a new take on the old 43Things, the site which encourages users to list goals, share progress, and cheer each other on. Dorthy does the same but gets you there by making interesting use of Web 3.0 technologies like AI and natural language search.

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Semantic Search for Dreams

According to Jim Anderson, the About.com co-founder who was hired as Dorthy's CTO earlier this year, the site's search engine doesn't use keyword-based search but rather has the user enter a fully formed question, statement, or phrase like "run a marathon in 4 hours." Not only does the search engine parse the semantics of your input using its proprietary algorithms, it also learns from you, incrementally enhancing your results upon every visit.

As an example, Anderson describes how a fictional user named Jennifer might search for information about a trip to Paris. Because Jennifer had previously shared other background information like the fact that she's an avid marathon runner, fluent in French, wants to learn to cook French food, and hates cruises, Dorthy.com will retrieve specific information related to those interests. The results would be filtered to highlight info on cooking schools, shopping, and popular running routes in Paris - things that would be interesting to Jennifer specifically.

This example doesn't even necessarily count as a "dream," it seems - you could plan an actual trip to Paris using Dorthy's technology, too. However, the overall point of the service is to provide you with information about a particular goal or aspiration and then connect you with others who feel the same.

Using Dorthy

When performing searches on Dorthy, you'll have the option to create your own page on a specific topic or view the topic pages others have already created. These pages feature popular articles, videos, photos, and blog entries from the web and are constantly being updated with new content. When you find content you like, even if it's on someone else's page, you can easily copy it over to a page of your own.

After this initial "discovery" process is complete, you can use Dorthy's "Connect" feature to meet others also interested in your topic so you can share your progress and encourage each other on, much like how the above-mentioned 43Things operates.

In the future, Dorthy hopes to expand their offering to go beyond simply being a consumer targeted web-based service to one that could benefit the enterprise (think "I want to go to a virtualization conference in Las Vegas"), or so reported eWeek earlier this year. They also plan on moving to mobile at some point, too.

At the moment, Dorthy.com is in private alpha, but you can sign up to join here.

Real-time search outfit OneRiot announced today some updates to their search algorithm, which parses data in real-time social streams to index and rank links.

Although results based on freshness alone are available through the search engine's real-time firehose setting, the results returned through the Pulse Rank setting are weighted based on several factors that riff off similar considerations for the static web and Google's PageRank system.

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Although Pulse setting searches have been around since OneRiot's launch, the company announced today in their blog, "We made a couple of changes to our algorithm today to improve those results even further."

Pulse results will now be a product of the following considerations: Timeliness, domain authority, individual reputation, and acceleration. The new algo attempts to weed out spam links (or links from known spammers) and give preference instead to "more thoughtful sharers whose links tend to get retweeted and dugg."

According to the blog, the algo tweaks will also improve detection of whether a page is trending or whether it's simply a large, popular destination and always has been.

"We're also getting a lot of leverage from our Artificial Intelligence systems that constantly 'learn' how to improve the way we rank results," the post continues.