Search Engine News
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
As a reminder that there are other search engines besides Google, two search-engine related stories came to my attention this week.
CNNMoney.com reported that Ask.com (described in the story as “basically roadkill in the search-engine wars”) is abandoning the strictly algorithmic approach, relying instead on actual humans to answer queries. The new approach is the latest in a series of attempts (and mostly failures) to overcome the basic inability of computers to deal with complex questions. (Why not just ask a librarian? We are humans who have been handling complex questions for years.) Click here to read the story. The new Ask.com is currently in public beta, but you can request an invitation to try it out. Click here for more information.
And listening to NPR as I do every morning while getting ready for work, I heard this story about how James Fallows is conducting a week-long experiment to use Bing instead of Google to track down facts.
