Nerdy News

Microsoft to Discontinue Book Search

ravisandepudi — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:34:37 +0000

Microsoft has announced that it will be shutting down the Book Search section from Live Search in a course of some time in order to focus more on its core product. Live Search, which holds a meager 10.8% market share in the US, has been struggling to keep up with the unending growth of Google’s user base (61.6% US). Microsoft had joined hands with Internet Archive, a non profit digital archive, in 2005 to begin scanning books from various libraries after Google had announced similar plans. Microsoft had also managed to gain access of information from some libraries that had disagreed to co-operate with Google due to the project’s user restrictions.

Now that Microsoft has decided to close its project, Internet Archive will be forced to find alternative sources for funding. However, Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive, affirmed that his company and the libraries plan to continue the scanning process by looking for funds from the public.

Microsoft says that until now it had managed to scan around 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles. It had deals with McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster and Yale University Press to include copyright works in its index. Google, on the other hand claims to have scanned over a million books and plans to scan more than 15 million over the decade. Google had faced its fair share of lawsuits from publishers over this course of time for scanning their literature without their permission. The company has been scanning books from libraries at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library and has announced that it has no plans whatsoever in withholding this project.

Nerdy News has Moved

ravisandepudi — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:21:48 +0000

Nerdy News has moved to a dedicated domain at http://nerdynews.in. So start catching all the latest news there!

Apple to Bring iPhone on both Vodafone & Airtel!

ravisandepudi — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:57:40 +0000

Just a week after it was declared that Vodafone would be the carrier bringing iPhone to India, Apple has announced that it has signed on with Bharti Airtel too. According to BBC, SingTel (which holds 30.5% stake in Airtel) has struck a deal with Apple to launch the iPhone in Singapore and through its associates in India, Australia and the Philippines. I guess Apple is breaking from its infamous single-carrier tradition, to take the iPhone nonexclusive in Asia and Pacific.

Apple to Bring iPhone on both Vodafone & Airtel!

ravisandepudi — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:57:40 +0000

[Update] Yahoo! Glue Pages Uses Google to Display Blog Results!

ravisandepudi — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:51:39 +0000

Yesterday, when I was trying out Glue Pages, I was stunned to notice that they were actually using Google Blog Search to display the blog results! Now, this I think is really sad on part of Yahoo! Being the only closest (direct) competitor of Google, I expected Yahoo to trust its own technology to search blogs. After all, its only a matter of doing the same Web search but only restricting it to blog sites. And I don’t think identifying a blog from a normal website is that difficult.

OneBox and Google Movies (Believes in the Safety of Critics!)

ravisandepudi — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:29:24 +0000

The other day I was searching for Iron Man on Google to read its reviews and know why the hell people are so crazy about yet another super-hero movie, when Google actually gave me the uber-cool One Box result showing the over all rating and a link to various reviews by movie critics. Damn, sometimes I feel Google has somehow implanted a chip in me to read my mind, how else would a website know exactly what I was looking for?

Anyway, I clicked on the reviews link and I found that Google had actually complied all of them on one page. Awesome! But what made my day (along with giving me a real good laugh) was another one of those “Easter Eggs” (not exactly) kinda thing that Google leaves around to amuse its users. Look for yourself:

The page actually says, “The selection and placement of reviews on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. No movie critics were harmed or even used in the making of this page.” LOL.

Visit Google Movies in India (www.google.co.in/movies) to search for show timings and reviews (not yet available on the Indian portal. For Hollywood flicks, you can try google.com/movies) or just type in the movie name in the regular ol’ search box and let Google read your brain and display the One Box result.

Yahoo! Launches Glue Pages

ravisandepudi — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:22:28 +0000

Yahoo! recently launched a beta version of Glue Pages in its Indian portal (www.yahoo.co.in). Somewhat similar to Google’s Universal Search, Glue integrates Web, Image, Blog, Finance, Weather, Wikipedia, Map (and many more) Searches into one page. Why beta in India, of all places? “We have decided to test the concept in India because a unique thing is going in India as internet market expands here. Also, India leads the market in terms of content on internet, so there is strong relevance here,” says Gopal Krishna, head of audience, Yahoo! India.

The type of content displayed on the Glue Page depends on the search query put in. For example, a search on Mumbai shows

content from HolidayIQ, WikiTravel and Wikipedia,
information on Mumbai restaurants and locan train timings and of course,
a map and images from Flickr and elsewhere.

On the other hand, a query on Apple displays the current Stock price, company news and job listings in India. Here’s a sample screenshot of the page:

A problem with Glue Pages is that a particular query may resulted in information being that played that may be irrelevant or useless to the user, partly or even completely (what if by “apple” I meant the fruit but not the company?) Personalization by tracking user patterns, like what kind of websites does the user visit on result pages, may become the only solution in such cases. If a user often clicks on results related to finance, then displaying the Finance module for most of her queries would make more sense, or if it is Wikipedia that she eventually clicks on from the result pages, then showing a Wikipedia module for relevant queries would actually make her life easier.

Over all, Glue Pages is a very good addition, bringing in a lot convenience to the user. Though definitely not as intuitive and smart as Universal Search, Glue Pages surely moves Yahoo! Search a step forward in usability.

[Update] Checkout this post for an interesting fact about Glue Pages.