Topsy Searches Tweets, Bing Rivals Google

I think many who heard about Microsoft's new search engine expected a flop. But 'Bing' rivals google in search results and may even make some improvements in personality features and search result organization. Slate discusses the new engine on the block here, and mentions the short-lived interest in Topsy, a search engine powered by tweets.

Newly Unveiled Search Engine Wolfram Alpha Challenges Google

Try the new search engine at wolframalpha.com.

Read the review about how it stacks up versus google here.

More On Stephen Wolfram's Radical New Search Engine

Wired article here.

New Search Engine, Wolfram Alpha, Takes Us Closer To Intelligent Search Engine

On May 18th Stephen Wolfram will release the search engine Wolfram Alpha. The program, which is already getting use in the scientific community, employs sophisticated algorithms to answer questions like how high is Mt Everest, what is the fish production in Italy, and what was the weather in London on the day John F Kennedy was killed.

Although not ready to replace traditional search engines like google, Wolfram Alpha shows the potential power 'understanding' searchers questions by utilizing artificial intelligence techniques. (full story here).

When Will We Meet C-3P0 And Will He Be Linked To His Buddies?

In the same way some people ask, "where are the flying cars we all expected to have by now," dvice.com asks, "where the hell are the walking, talking, thinking robots that we imagined filling our future?"

Dvice goes on to interview James Kuffner, a specialist in the field of motion planning and professor at Carnegie Mellon' robotics institute. He says that for him and his team, "The goal is for a robot to be able to search back through its memory and know what it's learned and what the robots before have learned and continue to pass on that searchable database onto the next robot, so that it keeps learning."

A robot that can learn from the mistakes of its peers!? It's an interesting idea–a robot intranet that links similar, learning bots in a sort of collective consciousness. It's not unlike the idea of putting the internet into the hands (or eyes via contact lenses...or brains even) of every human. With the advent of the smartphone we catch glimpses of the sort of connectivity and the potential to learn from the vast store of history's lessons, the challenge is figuring out how to efficiently search the MASSIVE amount of information.

"Eyeborg Man" Plans To Replace Eye With Video Camera

Wired reports today that Rob Spence, a 36 year old Canadian filmmaker who lost his eye in a childhood shooting accident, plans to replace his current prosthetic eye with an ocular video camera. The original cyborg man, Steve Mann, help Spence on his quest to become the Eyeborg man. Spence will literally have the potential to film everything he sees (except for his dreams), making him a superb candidate for personality capture. The trick, once again, is going to be organizing the bountiful video footage. A feat that becomes possible with the arrival of the semantic web in all its multimedia-savvy, search engine glory.

"Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending."

Google's take on Web 3.0:

"In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.

As we're already seeing, people will interact with the cloud using a plethora of devices: PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, and games. But we'll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud. The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react.

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages."

From The Official Google Blog

Beme: How Do You Know If A Search Engine Is Good?

Cuil: a new search engine created by ex-google people for a fraction of the cost. It has the daunting task of challenging the billions of dollars and millions of complex algorithms behind the web crawlers that make google the world's most loved search engine.

Cuil claims, "Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page's coherency."

Beme: With Cha Cha, Humans Answer Your Queries

The makers of Cha Cha aren't content to sit around and wait for Web 3.0.
They complain about the ability of today's search engines, saying, "You may get a series of links to sort through or you may just get an apology because the computer can’t answer your specific question. Wouldn’t it be better to just have the answer sent to you along with the phone number and address?"

Cha let's you text a query to a human Cha Cha worker, who searches the internet and texts you back a specific answer. The service has obvious advantages over the search engines of today, but as search engine quality continues to increase, I wouldn't bet on Cha Cha outperforming the search engines of tomorrow.