What do you love? - Google's new web service!

Google’s new web service! - WDYL
Google has launched “What Do You Love?” web service recently! Type wdyl onto address bar - you get a 404 error page! The actual address is http://www.wdyl.com. You may use this as a mash up service by Google for all its products such as You Tube, Google News, Google Books, Picasa, Google Image search, Google patent search, Google groups, Google trends and what not?! Type in the search query to get a single page which links to all of the Google’s products at one shot...
Google has silently launched this service in addition to its currently popular “Google Plus”, the social network venture by Google to put a tough competition to Facebook! Does WDYL do anything intelligent?! A gimmick to popularize their own products and existing web services…
A regular syntactic search for the query over all its products by using all Google APIs and providing results on a single search page. It does provide the ease of traversing to all of Google’s web services and products by a click from a single page. Try out for yourself to get funny results as the one below for the search query - “apple my favorite fruit”!

Yahoo Search Direct??? Google Instant???

One week since Yahoo launched it's new search feature, "Search Direct"! "Search Direct is the fundamental shift in search in more than a decade, We believe Search Direct will be the simplest and fastest to find answers and not links!" says Yahoo on the launch of beta version of the feature @US..

Yahoo Search Direct starts as soon as you click inside the search box where as Google Instant does after a few words are typed in search box.. The outcome? If instant and most importantly "relevant" information is given, it does really keep users smiling and give them a way away from "wild goose chase" to find answers for their simplest of queries... Yahoo Search Direct does provide the top 30 results and provide the top most 10 likely searches and for each of those the top 3 results.. On the user selection of a site, it is directly rendered without the unnecessary result page... This does reduce the time between entry of search query and getting the results in a way although Google Instant also helps one to frame the search queries faster!

Despite all efforts, there is a strong opinion that both engines do not render "relevant and most wanted results" - they are still yet to become "What you think is what you get" kind of search engines...... We should of course mention that the various features coming up these days on both the search engines do reduce the search efforts in terms of framing the query.. The "semantic" proximity of the search results to the query are yet to go a long way...... What i mean is that the search engines are still syntactic in the very sense...........

New feature of Google Search - Block the results from selected websites!!! How far does it help???

Google Search has come up with a new feature, "Block what you don't want!"

It comes as a feature after your first search query... Say you would want to block http://www.w3.org/ search results from the query "Owl", you will have to do a first search on OWL.. Go to each of the results, on a click back to google search home page from each result, a new feature "Block all w3.org results" appears next to cached and similar links.. On clicking "Block all w3.org results" link, the future results shall not be from "w3.org". The link appears even though the user has not signed in, but blocking requires the user to sign into the google account. Although the feature could help in blocking results which are offensive or are of low quality or pornographic stuff, it requires efforts from the user in traversing to the search result page of the site you would want to block.. Is'nt this a burden on the user? Would it not be better to have a settings feature where the user can first block/unblock domains he would not want in search results? Or on the first shot, on a search, the search results can directly have a link to block the corresponding domains from future search...

This feature being previously available as Chrome extension is now rolled out for both IE and Firefox users.. Developed by search quality engineers, "Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang",
the new feature might add value to increased personalisation for the users with extra burden of traversing each link which the user would want to block..

Read more from Official Google Blog

Wikipedia -- In India!

Wikipedia, the world's most accessed encyclopedia, is all set to open it's office in India... Says Sue Gardner, Chief of Wikimedia, "India was chosen due to it's vast population accessing internet through Mobile phones and an environ known for free speech, culture of intellectual debate, valuing education!".. Being the first base abroad, Wikipedia in India will focus on expanding database in Hindi and other regional languages... New office would encourage more people to push data in the regional languages, thereby expanding the database in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam and Punjabi..
Proud to know that first international base of Wikipedia is to be opened in India! Although there do exist many articles in regional languages, many software impediments still persist, in editing the same.....

Link to official news by NDTV

Google Refine - How well does it refine????

Google released a new tool - Google Refine last month.. Allows one to deal with messy, inconsistent data...... Most useful capability of this tool being a desktop application... No fear about the trust required to put data on the cloud! But, it comes with a cost.. All the data has to be in RAM for processing, thus limiting the size of data sets to be processed .. It can run via a web browser, provides for cleaning the data, dealing with all inconsistencies... Although the tool has varied capabilities, does it solve the problem of data refining? Yet to use and see..

Here's the video - by Google - how Google refine can be used?
https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/Screencasts

Link to official blog of Refine :
http://google-refine.blogspot.com/

ADmantX - Web Service to Emotionally target online Ads!

ADmantX - a newly launched web service is all about targetting the online Ads world emotionally! ADmantX can help brands to analyse the contents on their web pages, how the content influences the reader emotionally, re-structure web pages and target the Ads world more accurately..Uses Semantic Web technology to precisely find real time information on how people react to the web content... Assists companies to hit the right note with regard to online advertising targets..
Currently in beta stage, Brroke Aker, CMO of ADmantX quotes, "Emotion is what motivates human behavior. After understanding the psuchological context, ADmantX plays on the connection between the ad and the reader, it significantly increases the ad performance."

More on ADmantX:

Live Example - Best Buy

One of the leading US Retailers, Best Buy, used the embedded semantic markup - RDFa, to enrich it's web pages with semantic content and has been loaded with tons of success.......

The store's address, GEO info, customer details are all marked up with RDFa, which has given lot more visibility to it's web pages... Just to describe RDFa briefly, a way of adding meaningful "Semantic" markup to the existing web pages, standard created by W3C, is enabling both machines and humans to process data rendered on the web pages at almost the same level of understanding?!

Lead Web Development Engineer at Bestbuy admits that it has increased the search traffic enormously! RDFa shall soon see the transformation in the way machines look @webpages!..