Search Engines

Facebook has unveiled a new social search engine at an event at its Menlo Park headquarters. The feature, currently in beta, will allow users to search Facebook content, returning personalized results. The social network giant has also partnered with Bing to provide certain web results to the service.  Read More

Conventional search engines are definitely something of a paradox – you use them to find out new information regarding a certain topic, yet the top hits that you receive mostly contain information that everyone already knows. Not only does this hinder peoples’ efforts to think about things in new ways, but it can also reinforce mistruths and stereotypes. That’s where YossarianLives! comes in. Named after the main character in the paradox-centered book Catch-22, it’s a “metaphorical search engine” that’s designed to generate new knowledge instead of reinforcing existing knowledge.  Read More

While Google is still by far the most dominant search engine on the Web, it can't afford to rest on its laurels with Microsoft constantly adding new features to its Bing search engine. At Google's 'Inside Search' event, the company has announced several new features designed to ensure it stays on top of the lucrative search engine game. Users will now be able to search using images, enter search terms by voice and have the top search results pre-rendered so they appear instantly.  Read More

Google doesn't have a lot of competition in the search world – it rose from obscurity in the late 1990s to its current position of utter dominance on the back of its clever results ranking algorithm; Google is the megalithic entity it is today, because for the last decade people have chosen its results over MSN, Yahoo and other search options. And now it seems Microsoft's new(ish) search competitor, Bing, is copying Google results in order to make its own search results better. In an embarrassing sting operation, Google claims it has proven that Bing is taking Google search results and displaying them as if they're coming from the Bing engine – and you'd have to imagine the guys at Google are absolutely delighted.  Read More

Nearly all companies with a big Web presence, and search engines in particular, are known for gathering the user's browsing history and other personal information to improve on the services they offer, such as by offering better targeted advertisements. A preliminary report compiled by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) addressing the lack of transparency and user control over how companies gather Internet browsing data from their users, proposes a "Do Not Track" feature for Internet browsers that would allow users to opt out completely and protect their privacy.  Read More

Earlier this month we took a look at Recorded Future, a company that uses information scoured from thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to make predictions about the future. Now, Yahoo’s Barcelona research lab has created a similar prototype news search engine called Time Explorer. It creates timelines based on search queries that not only provide a way to check the accuracy of past predictions, but also allows users to view predictions that are yet to occur.  Read More

If you are trying to search the web using a language other than English and you don't have the correct keyboard handy, well, there's bound to be a problem. Google has come up with a solution by integrating virtual keyboards into its search engine. Now up and running in 35 languages, the on-screen keyboards allow input in a local language script without any additional software and no matter what computer you are using.  Read More

Text-based searches might be great for hunting down relevant chunks of text-based information, but searches for multimedia content can be a little more hit and miss. Searches that rely on manually assigned metadata and often misleading titles can return off topic results, while searches that require the unpacking of compressed data can slow up the search. DIVAS is a new multimedia search engine that addresses these problems by using digital "fingerprints" that, according to its developers, return more reliable results.  Read More

Google latest innovation has taken the power of its search engine and our insatiable lust for music and combined the two. Those lucky enough to live Stateside can now enter an artist, song title or lyric into Google's normal search window and the first results offered will link to audio previews, information and details of how to buy.  Read More