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).

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Yahoo SearchMonkey is simply bananas

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.

(more…)

Google – great for finding Yahoo

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Google gave journalists a demonstration of its new iPhone apps at Google HQ in London today (think Segways, free food, Pilates rooms and lots of people looking extremely pleased with themselves).

One of the features it was gagging to show off was that the search engine now guesses what you’re going to enter as soon as you start typing in the box.

So, for example, our demo man revealed, I simply enter the letter W and, lo-and-behold, what does Google think you’re most likely to be searching for? www.yahoo.com apparently.

Cue slightly embarrassed silence and (no doubt) a volley of internal emails urging the developers to rethink their strategy on the letter W.