It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bing yourself. (Then again, Google took a few years to become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search , is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.

A few things to try:

• An ambiguous Web search: “turkey” (do you want images, recipes, facts, or a map of the country? The topic guides in the left explore pane will help you narrow your search).
• A travel search: “SFO to JFK”
• Video search: “Simpsons” (hover over the thumbnail to play the video)
• Image search: “Rollercoasters” (notice the infinite scroll).
• A health search: “Sore throat”
• Shopping: “Digital SLR” (sort by price or brand, get average ratings and CashBack).
• Maps: “BBQ” (automatically knows what city you are in and offers up geo-appropriate results).
• News Search: “Bing” (what else?)

Check it out. Try a few searches and then tell us in comments if you will ever go back.

Popularity: 3% [?]

       

In a long-awaited pairing aimed at taking on Google, Yahoo will handle ad sales while Microsoft gets the real prize: data on who’s doing what online

Ever since Microsoft (MSFT) made its $45 billion bid for Yahoo (YHOO) in early 2008, it was clear the software giant was serious about taking on arch-rival Google (GOOG) in the lucrative Internet search business. And now, after years of talks with Yahoo, it seems Microsoft has achieved its goal. In a 10-year deal announced in the early hours of July 29, Microsoft became the clear No. 2 in a market long dominated by arch-rival Google.

In a deal that presages its departure from a market it helped pioneer, Yahoo will scrap its own efforts to best Google in search and instead rely on Microsoft’s recently debuted Bing search engine. Ads placed next to those search results would be served up not by Yahoo’s ad platform, dubbed Panama, but by a Microsoft technology called AdCenter. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz “is essentially giving up on search,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land.

Yahoo salespeople will continue to sell search ads that appear on both Yahoo sites and on Bing, and Microsoft agreed to let Yahoo keep 88% of the revenue on ads that appear on Yahoo sites. But Microsoft will nevertheless reap a reward that’s more valuable in the long run. The data on computer users’ online search and buying habits would ultimately reside on Microsoft’s computers, thereby improving its ability to automatically serve up the most relevant ads. “If Microsoft is running the underlying ad technology, it doesn’t matter who is selling the ads,” Sullivan says. “In the end, Microsoft will hold all the cards.”

He adds that most advertisers place ads by filling out online forms, with no involvement from salespeople. Maintaining control of sales makes the deal “sound rosier for Yahoo than it really is, because in the end Yahoo won’t have the technology needed to compete.”

INSURANCE FOR MICROSOFT AND BING

Microsoft wins in other ways. The deal gives a big boost to Bing. The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft would approach 30%. That’s still far below Google’s 65%, but analysts say it may provide enough of a critical mass at least to stave off further Google advances and help the enlarged search engine gain some ground. At a minimum, the deal doubles as a kind of insurance policy for Microsoft, in case all of the positive buzz about the Bing search engine doesn’t translate into actual market share. By adding Yahoo’s 20% market share, Bing assures its place as the only search engine provider other than Google with size that really matters.

Popularity: 3% [?]

       

Almost lost in May’s whirlwind launches of Wolfram|Alpha andMicrosoft’s Bing and the unveiling of Google Wave, was a quieter announcement that may bring a seismic shift toward the realization of Web 3.0.

While some aspects of the next generation of the Web are taking place, there are major physical and cultural challenges to bring it about.Google’s launch of Rich Snippets may well be a watershed moment in resolving these problems.

Before the term Web 2.0 came into common use, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee outlined his vision of the next generation — what he called the Semantic Web. In a 2001 article in Scientific American, Berners-Lee described a global database of linked knowledge, in a markup format that could be understood and manipulated by computers. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international standards organization headed by Berners-Lee, has a longstanding group that has laid out the tools and protocols for the Semantic Web.

Web 3.0 is here (somewhat)
There are no hard borders between one generation and another, and parts of what is being described as Web 3.0 are already here.

Personalized home pages have been available for years. iGoogle, for example, steps into Web 3.0 territory by allowing users to create a home page with multiple tabs, built by inserting news headline feeds, weather forecasts, Twitter and Facebook feeds and hundreds of other content modules via widgets, and integrating e-mail, calendars and documents into mobile versions. Mobile “lifestream” features, which keep track of personal connections and activities, are widely used through Twitter and similar tools.

Google’s new Wave promises a watershed in collaboration, marrying e-mail, instant messaging, chats and media-sharing in a new communication model that has left reviewers grasping for words.

And some things that were seen as being enabled by the Semantic Web in 2001 are already here without it. For many Americans, persistent mobile connection is a reality — e-mail and SMS-capable phones are ubiquitous, and Web-enabled phones are common. But the full power of machine-understood data, linked across the entire body of information in one global Web, with “agents” focused on personal service to humans, is only in its infancy. The Semantic Web vision is the other part of Web 3.0, which vertically integrates data from a diverse set of sources, according to the W3C’s Semantic Web group.

The challenges to the Semantic Web
The Web, as of July 2008, included one trillion distinct URLs, by Google’s count. The search giant is estimated to actually index less than 5 percent of those, still a matter of tens of billions of Web pages. The overwhelming majority of these pages are meant to be read and understood by humans. The content of the pages isn’t meant to be understood by computers. Search engines can index keywords, but without context.

Semantic Web experts have collected the toolkit of languages and metadata markup systems that will allow machines to understand key words and the relationships between them. Such metadata is already being used in many places. A microformat called hResume, for example, allows LinkedIn.com to tag appropriate resume fields of its public profiles so that the resume data can be understood and reused elsewhere.

The value of such machine-usable data is obvious. Since the infancy of the Web, finding valuable information amid the growing clutter has been a major challenge. Directories such as Yahoo! made their mark by pointing users to useful, hand-selected websites. This manual work could barely keep up with the scope of the Web of the mid-’90s. It also faced growing credibility issues because links were chosen — or excluded — by human editors. Full-text search engines, such as Web Crawler and Alta Vista, gained popularity, but search results included large amounts of garbage. Today’s top search engines have worked to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and increase the value of results by using sophisticated algorithms. Microsoft’s Bing, for example, promises to give more relevant results and aid in decision-making.

The Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” is being hailed as a prototype of what a global database in the Semantic Web could do to deliver high-value information, easily accessed in plain language. And Wolfram|Alphaitself appears to be claiming the turf of global database. With more than 10 trillion pieces of information, and plans to expand significantly, the site says:

“Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

This may resonate with some in the Semantic Web community; a number have seen the task of retrofitting the current Web into machine-friendly markup so daunting that the global database might need to be built from scratch. But on face value, Wolfram|Alpha violates one of the cardinal precepts of the Semantic Web: that the proprietary hoarding of databases behind walls must end — data must flow freely from and to all sources.

And the vision of W3C’s Semantic Web isn’t to replace the current Web, but to enhance it. The question is how to get the work done. There was no organized plan to build the Web. To be sure, there were plans to create the technology and the infrastructure. But most of those tens of billions of indexed Web pages were built by corporations, small businesses, non-profits and individuals, each for their own reasons. Persuading websites to recode Web pages to Semantic Web specifications — or even to do so going forward — will take a powerful motivator.

Google breaks the ice
Google may have provided such a motivator with its May 12 announcement of Rich Snippets. “Snippet” is the name Google uses for the short block of text appearing below a search result, giving more information about the Web page. Google announced in its Webmasters Central Blog (a bookmark for anyone interested in making his or her website more visible to the leading search engine) that it is now applying Google’s algorithms to “highlight structured data embedded in web pages.” Translation, content marked for the Semantic Web. The “rich snippets” will be based on the structured data.

This is a major event for a couple of reasons. First, Google is the poster child for machine learning, which in Web terms means teaching machines to scan plain-language Web pages and cull meaning from them. This is the other end of the spectrum from the Semantic Web vision of coding pages in a special way so they have meaning to machines. Google’s announcement, which explicitly discussed plans to extend support for structured data in new ways as well as to recognize metadata coding developed elsewhere on the Web, puts the company on a course for a synergy between machine learning and Semantic Web practices.

Google isn’t the first major search company to focus on structured data. Yahoo’s Search Monkey platform for Web developers supports a robust package of metadata formats, and urges developers to have at it. But the reality is that Google is the one people are paying attention to where it counts.

This brings us to the second reason this is a major step: self-interest. It’s important to harness the force that created those tens of billions of indexed Web pages in the first place. And Google’s announcement means money.

In the current Web economy, search engine status is a prime motivation. And Google ranking is the Holy Grail. What Google is offering (while explicitly not promising) is the chance for websites to attract the eye of the search engine’s algorithms, and even some measure of control over that vital couple of lines of text that tells a user “click me.” In an environment where every keystroke in a Web page’s metatags is dictated by a Search Engine Optimization guru, and every word of a headline and keyword-packed top paragraphs, Web producers across the Net are — or are about to be — learning metaformats.

And that just may be the sound of a Semantic Web snowball starting down the hill.

Popularity: 8% [?]