Friday, July 01, 2005

Google Earth Released

Google Earth has been available for the past few days for download (although temporarily put on hold). It is quite an impressive program (it's a 10mb file) - and streams the content it requires as you view different parts of the world. You can rotate, zoon and even tilt the map which is really quite amazing to look at, it gives the impression of 3d even though it's a flat 2d map.

Monday, June 27, 2005

Yahoo! 360 Opens

Previously open to those with invites only - Yahoo 360 is now open to all. Much like Microsoft's Wallop (which is still invite only) Yahoo 360 allows you to share your thoughts, photos, music and more between a grouped network of friends.

Microsoft Neural Net

MSN Have introduced something called Neural Net Technology to try to improve MSN search results. Microsoft posted an article about this in their blog. Around this time they also updated their search results.

MSN Search now has some advanced searching commands - these now include;
inanchor: - This command allows you to search the anchor text of links
intitle: - Allows you to search the title tag of any page. For example you could search for all pages containing the phrase bmw 330.
filetype: -Filters the search results to only show you results matching the filetype specified here. For example filetype:doc will lists just document (.doc) files.
linkdomain: - This search all the links pointing to a specified site, what makes this different from the standard link function is that you can view all links to a domain even deep links. As far as I'm aware only Yahoo had this function up until now.
Contains: - Returns all documents which contain links to the filetype specified.

For more information about Neural Networks read this document. There is also an interesting document entitled Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent by a Microsoft Researcher called Chris Burges.