Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) is launching a new fee-based service named Wolfram|Alpha Pro. In today's highly competitive environment, you may wonder why W|A would ask people to pay for what many think should be free. Read on: you may decide to willingly open your wallet when you see what's available. Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web. Well, they have and that's what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Search Engines: Wolfram Alpha | Search Features: General | Top News

Bing and Big Think are hosting"Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box," a four hour event today in San Francisco looking at the future of search. We've got various luminaries lined-up. Google will be on a panel. There's that whole Google says Bing is copying them thing that just happened. Plus, Blekko's here -- and it just rolled out a new spam filter seemingly aimed at search enemy number one these days, content farms. Should be a fun day. See our previous post for the schedule. Live webcast will happen off the Big Think home page. Buckle up, and my live blogging begins at 10am Pacific. [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Google: Web Search | Live Blogging | Microsoft: Bing | Search Features: General | SEO: Spamming

At the beginning of Google's "Searchology" event in early 2007 original Google employee Craig Silverstein opined, "If Google had started a year or two earlier, it wouldn't have worked." That's because prior to that time (1998) the internet wasn't yet large enough to require Google or enable people to see the value of its approach. As sites and pages multiplied exponentially Google became an increasingly necessary tool. We're all familiar with the story. Now Google controls a majority of search traffic in most countries around the world. It has become a seemingly unstoppable force. The in [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Search Engines: Cuil | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Open Directory Project | Search Engines: Powerset | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Features: General | Top News

Is Google part of a conspiracy to keep the general public from learning about the "Climategate" scandal? Believers continue to point at the odd comings-and-goings of Climategate as a search suggestion on Google as a sign that the search engine is trying to foist its own political views about global warming on searchers. Not so fast, conspiracy buffs. Google Suggest & Climategate Let's start with supposedly the most damning evidence first. A system called Google Suggest automatically displays search topics that it believes you may be after, when you start typing any word. So con [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Google: Critics | Search Features: General | Top News

Blink, and you might have missed it. Google's now doing synonym searching. It's something they quietly noted in a past Google blog post and one that comes up again today in a post that covers how Google uses experiments to improve the search interface. Back to synonym searching in a moment. The main focus of today's post is how small changes can have a big impact on how users interact with search results. Some before and after screenshots of various search results are shown. Most compelling to me was how by making the + symbol thicker in a "Plus Box" that allows for stock quotes [...]

Related Topics: Google: Search Customization | Google: Web Search | Search Features: General | Search Features: Query Refinement | Top News