Google Picasa 3.5: First Look – Wow

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Hot on the heels of the latest Photoshop Elements 8 (click for full review) comes the new Picasa 3.5.

This adds a few  features across the board, such as a revamp of importing and various interface tweaks, but the clear focus of the new release is on in-depth tagging of images via a new side panel that offers three tabs for applying text-based tags, locational geodata and new face-based tags.

To be honest my heart sank when I heard this – what I’ve always liked about Picasa is that it keeps things simple and doesn’t treat managing your photos as a full-time job. Moreover I’d recently come away less than impressed with Photoshop Elements 8’s new face tagging not so much because the technology doesn’t work (it does though imperfectly), but rather because the gains aren’t worth the effort.

So how does the new Picasa 3.5 shape up? (more…)

9½ things Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know

Monday, May 18th, 2009

So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

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Welcome to the future of search

Monday, March 9th, 2009

A few months ago, I wrote in very vague terms about something wonderful that I had seen. Something incredible, groundbreaking, which tears up all the rules. But I couldn’t tell you anything more about it.

However, I did promise that I would tell you more just as soon as I could.

Well, today is the day. Ignore the bitching on ars technica. Instead, go to Wolfram’s blog – Wolfram|Alpha is coming - and then head to www.wolframalpha.com to sign up.

To quote the blog: “Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that… one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

“But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.”

We’re still two months away from launch, but when that day happens Wolfram promises us his new search engine will have the answer. So sign up and just wait patiently for a little longer.

Search suggestions: a window on the soul of the net

Friday, February 13th, 2009

You know the little search box in the top-right of the Firefox window? Then you doubtless know that as you type search terms into it, Firefox brings up suggestions as to what it thinks you might be looking for.

You’ve probably never given this feature much thought. I hadn’t, until yesterday when I was searching for some obscure technical fact and (perhaps because we’d just been talking about natural language recognition on this week’s podcast) I absent-mindedly started to phrase my search query as a question. I didn’t get far in – just one word in, in fact – before realising this was unnecessary.

But that one word was enough to give Firefox an idea as to what I might be searching for: immediately it brought up the impressively varied suggestions you see above. (more…)

Google voice search finally arrives

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Google’s had a dedicated search application for the iPhone for a while now, but the long-rumoured voice-recognition update has belatedly arrived in iTunes after a few hiccups last week. If you haven’t tried it yet I’d strongly recommend it as a way to pass a dull few hours – it’s livened up my morning no end.

Now, it’s important to realise that this isn’t a high-end dictation program, with training exercises to improve its accuracy and accomodate regional accents.

It’s just a basic free app, created and (we assume) trained in-house by Google’s Californian engineers – when enabling the feature you’re even warned it works best for “North American English accents”. It doesn’t speak Geordie yet, then.

To use it, you simply load up the app, hold the phone to your ear and wait for the beep, then speak. (more…)

Why Yahoo’s 2009 is looking a little limp

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

I remember a time when Yahoo was the king of search. If you wanted to find anything useful in the morass of the web, you turned to the friendly editors at the California-based firm and, likely as not, you’d get what you were looking for.

But then a certain Google went and changed everything and Yahoo has struggled to maintain a foothold ever since.

It still is, by the look of things. Yesterday I attended a Yahoo 2009 preview event, held in modest surroundings in London’s East End, where the firm was showcasing upcoming developments and changes. The key message seemed to be that a) we’re still big in search and b) we’re going to be more ‘open’. In fact I encountered the word ‘open’ in its various forms more than 20 times during the various presentations (I was keeping tally, just in case you were wondering).

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Not so Cuil

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

If you haven’t tried it yet, Cuil is supposed to be the next hot search engine. So I tried it while fixing a problem with a Domino server, expecting a much quicker search experience than was the case with dear old Google. Here, “Quicker” means less junk results and more useful technical snippets – something I find one can get, generally, by using more than three search terms.

So imagine my surprise at following cuil’s first match result to my search : A page solely concerned with showing you that the guy writing it can’t diagnose the source of his problems, no matter which bit of software he’s looking at. It has some random and unsubstantiated comments about mail rules: it contains no examples, no code, no fixes – just a raft of inaccurate statements about fossil versions of the product that nobody uses any more.

Why, one wonders, does Cuil rank this page higher than the tens of thousands of pages retreivable from IBM’s documentation and support forums? On one machine I tried this search with, all I got back from Cuil was 2 results – the Computer Gripes one, and another one from openntf (which is at least apposite, if not well chosen). Only by turning off the safe-surf filter, did I get any of the other common resources for Notes agents, rules & security information.

Credibility in search technology is a perennial problem, as the googlewatch people will tell you: but this strikes me as a repeatable example of downright odd results.

Are viewers “two-timing” their televisions?

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

If you were watching BBC2 last night you may have noticed that PC Pro was mentioned on a little show called Dragon’s Den. This has done interesting things to our web traffic, which lets us see just how watching TV has changed.

A couple of months ago I wrote a story about how people now routinely surf while watching TV. It seems that 70% of us now split our attention this way, for a variety of reasons; TV shows are generally slow-paced and dull, for one, and the internet lets us research what we see in real-time and add to the experience. Thanks to this unique opportunity we can dig a little deeper to see if this is true.

Between 9pm and 10pm last night – when the show was broadcast – we experienced a jump in traffic of around 1,100 new users. This is down to the fact that my review for the Very PC Treeton is the second result for “Very PC”, the company who kindly plugged us by waving its PC Pro award around, on Google. Clearly, people were searching for the company while watching the presentation.

However, if you assume that most browsers would click on the first link – 90% perhaps – then you only have a figure of 11,000 people “two-timing” their television with their laptops – a tiny percentage of its total viewers.

Mind you, PC manufacturers aren’t going to grab the attention of the average viewer, so perhaps the jury is still out on this one.

Life at Cuil: strawberries, muffins and porn

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

A new search engine launched this week, prompting a surprisingly huge response online. To be honest, I was just as guilty of getting excited as anyone else.

Whether it was the David-versus-Goliath appeal of a tiny startup going up against a company that can boast to be both a household name and a verb, or whether it was the pure controversy – several Cuil engineers have come directly from Google, after all – I don’t know. But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.

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The invisible Internet pioneer

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

A museum has opened in Mons, Belgium, with an exhibit to internet pioneer Paul Otlet.

No, I haven’t heard of him, either.

Although, after reading about him, he seems like one of the most brilliant minds of the past 100 years – and one of the nuttiest.

In short, he proposed the Internet as we know it – and Wikipedia – and begun to develop his ideas into a feasible system. Except he started work in 1934 – a damn site earlier than Tim Berners-Lee and his pals started putting together the modern Internet.

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