Posts for 'Searching on the Web' Category

From diapers to funeral supplies, Walmart has everything the American consumer needs from birth to death. The nation's largest retailer has begun selling caskets and cremation urns on the company's Web site, but area funeral homes claim they are not worried about being undercut in price. Ed English, managing partner at Lane Funeral Home on Ashland Terrace, said a number of companies already have been selling caskets and funeral supplies online.

"No, we're not worried about it at all," he said. "I believe in a free and open market system." Cade Williamson, owner of Legacy Funeral Home in Soddy-Daisy, agreed. "I've looked at them, and they are really not priced all that much different," Mr. Williamson said. "In fact, some of the ones they have are more than ours."

Read the complete story

Microsoft has kicked off the Technical Preview of Office Web Apps, and I've been testing out the tools to see what Microsoft has come up with. One of the primary advantages of working with Microsoft Office applications in the cloud is the ability to access and work with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and notebooks from any Web-enabled PC, from anywhere in the world. As long as you store your files on SkyDrive, you can travel without a laptop and still have access to your data.

An even greater benefit of working through the cloud is that you can share files and collaborate with anyone else in the world. After all, the Web is the cloud, and the Web is a platform for sharing information--generally in the form of Web pages.

The fact that files and data reside in the cloud rather than within a firewalled network or on a user's local hard drive means that anyone can share and access the files. The default folder structure on SkyDrive is similar to what users see in Windows Vista and Windows 7. You get a My Documents folder, which would ostensibly hold most of your data, along with a Public folder, where you store the files you want to share.
default the Public folder allows everyone to view files but restricts users from modifying or deleting files. Because it is the Public folder, you cannot modify those permissions.

Read the complete story

Iranian protesters have showed the world what a powerful tool the Internet can be against oppression. On the other side of the world we've seen the other end of this tug-of-war, as Chinese censors have had to admit the failures of their plan to impose Internet censorship by fiat.

We're referring to "Green Dam," spy software that Beijing was poised to mandate for all personal computers in China. That order was supposed to go into effect today, but last night state media announced it was "delayed." We hope that's code for "will never be implemented," but it's too soon to say.

Green Dam was billed as antipornography software, but it actually does much more. It censors political speech, stores screenshots of users' computers and has the ability to shut down non-Internet applications if a user is typing something it doesn't like. A California-based software company, Solid Oak, says the software copies portions of its proprietary code and has threatened to sue computer makers that install it. Green Dam is also poorly designed: The porn filter doesn't work well and it has programming flaws that make users of the program susceptible to hacking.

Read the complete story

Amid a flurry of Internet search developments by other companies recently, Google today sought to demonstrate that it’s not ceding any leadership in the Internet’s most valuable territory. At the company’s Searchology event.

At its Mountain View headquarters, Google announced several new and upcoming features that indicate neither Twitter nor WolframAlpha nor Microsoft is easily going to vault past Google. The overall goal, according to Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering for core search, is for Google search to understand people and what they mean.

Since blog software problems prevented me from liveblogging the event, I tweeted the basics on my Twitter stream this morning, and others have covered the details. So I’ll just summarize the announcements here: Search Options allows you to open up a pane on the left side of the screen that lets you narrow results by time, including the past 24 hours (hello, Twitter), and "genre," starting with videos, forums, and reviews but growing to other categories later. You can also look at different views of the results, including one called "Wonder Wheel" that offers related results in a circle around the original query. These features are being rolled out gradually today.

Read the complete story

Nobody "surfs" the Web anymore. Some 80 percent of all online sessions now begin with a search. Google proves the point by making over a billion dollars every quarter on search ads. Nobody ever made than kind of money selling browsers.

But plain old Web searching doesn't do the trick anymore. Most Web searches either yield too much random data, or they don't give you what you need when you need it.  If you're an efficient searcher, you know to hit the Web running. Here are some tricks that will help you get what you want when you want it—sometimes before you ask for it.

Read the complete story

IE8 has been in development for several months. If you've been using the pre-release betas or the most recent release candidate, then today's release won't be all that new to your eyes. Aside from some minor tweaks, the code is very much the same as what's been publicly available for almost half a year.

However, if you're coming to this release with fresh eyes, upgrading from Internet Explorer 7 or (heaven forbid) Internet Explorer 6, then you'll notice huge improvements across the board. Internet Explorer 8 is a thoroughly modern browser.

Most significantly, it has been engineered to improve the performance of web applications. As more of our productivity tasks are moving off the desktop and into web apps like Gmail and Google Docs, this is an essential next step in the evolution of every browser.

Read the complete story

Google Inc.'s stock snapped out of its recent funk Tuesday after new data showed the Internet search leader is becoming even more dominant in the most lucrative part of the online advertising market.Internet research firms comScore Inc. and Nielsen Online both said the volume of search requests at Google has climbed substantially over the past year while rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are losing market share.

The statistics, based on October search activity, bodes well for Google's fourth-quarter revenue because the Mountain View, Calif.-based company makes most of its money by showing ads alongside search results.

Fielding more search inquiries generally gives Google more opportunities to show ads and pocket a commission.

Read the complete story

Searching is the most popular way to find information on the Web, and search engines, which are online software programs designed to help users locate relevant Web sites, are some of the most highly trafficked sites out there.

They have the capability to search the Internet faster and with more precision than any human could. But with this capability comes a flood of information, only a portion of which will be useful to you.

Understanding how search engines work will help you get the results you want and sort through the irrelevant, misleading results you’ll undoubtedly encounter.

Read the complete story

Google is reportedly weighing into the Internet voice search arena with a free application that lets iPhone users surf online by speaking queries.An article published in The New York Times said the software could be available at iTunes online store as early as Friday.

Google will be stepping into an arena with rivals Microsoft and Yahoo, which already let people using "smart" phones scour the Web with spoken queries.The Internet powerhouse already offers a toll-free GOOG411 telephone service in the United States that people can call and speak to a computer system that fetches contact information they seek.

The iPhone application will be Google's first foray into voice-based Internet search.Google in 2006 received a US patent for a system that "provides search results from a voice search query.""Current speech recognition technology has high word error rates for large vocabulary sizes," Google wrote in the patent application.

Read the complete story

The festive red, white and blue graphics have been designed. The production rehearsals have been held. The Web servers have been adjusted in preparation for a great influx of traffic. Now Yahoo News is waiting for the election results to start streaming in.Yahoo News, by some measures one of the most popular news Web sites in the country, has repeatedly broken its own traffic records during the election year. The news arm of the search engine expects Tuesday’s day of voting and Wednesday’s day-after to raise the bar higher still.

“Yahoo has taken its place as the great starting point for any big event,” said Neeraj Khemlani, the vice president for programming and development. With an increasing number of people using the Internet for news, sites like Yahoo are treating election night as a prime programming occasion, the way the television networks do.

Web sites have introduced and refined new ways to track the election, from multiple streams of live video to real-time graphics of voting patterns. Perhaps the most significant innovations are the interactive maps of state-by-state polls and potential Electoral College outcomes. On Yahoo, users of the “Political Dashboard” spend an average of 10 minutes constructing red- and blue-state outcome and seeing how they match up to prior elections.

Read the complete story