Can you teach an old search engine new tricks? At a time when search has become almost synonymous with Google this is a tall order -- but Ask.com is having a go. This week, it reinvented itself with a digital striptease, shedding baggage such as intrusive advertising, cluttered desktops, links aimed at raising money rather than informing and even its former name, Ask Jeeves.
The aim? To go for Google. It believes that Google is very vulnerable. This is true partly because of its sheer size. But its squeaky clean image has also been tarnished by criticism from publishers because of its plan to scan whole libraries, from liberals angered by its acceptance of censorship in China and from punters worried that its search for money will tarnish its search for knowledge. Ask, which claims 6 percent of the UK search market, reckons Google's vulnerability could make a 10 percent market share a realizable goal.
The new Ask could claim to be the only "pure" search engine of any size. It is not a portal, it is dedicated to search without Google's "clip-ons" (such as e-mail), has a clear home page and hasn't -- yet -- ventured into China. How clean can you get?
But does it work? The home page has a customizable toolbox on the right, enabling you to directly search images, news, weather, dictionaries and so forth. Search inquiries throw up several sponsored links in a shaded box above the actual search results. The links were interestingly different from Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Whether this was down to Ask's trendy claim to rank results based on popularity within communities as well as number of links is difficult to say -- but it does illustrate a general truth about search engines: it is good to have a diversified portfolio. Most of the time, all of them do a pretty good job, but if you are searching for something special it pays to try a number of them: mouses for courses.
I use Google as my default search engine not because it is better but because it has so many nice add-ons. As a journalist, I find its news search (click on "news" above the search box), which scours newspapers around the world, vital for research.
Google also has its own newspaper, automatically generated and culled on the hoof from the day's newspapers. There is a user-friendly facility for customizing your own paper so all recent stories on, say, the five topics of your choice come up every time you click. No wonder newspaper circulation is falling.
To keep up with what bloggers are saying I use Technorati.com. If you cut and paste the web address of any blog into it, it will link you to comments made by other bloggers. The new trend in search is to look not just at stories that are top of the popular pile but those recommended by like-minded people or experts. Sites such as del.icio.us and ultra-trendy digg.com (mainly technology) will never win design prizes but their content is edited by readers.
It may be strange to think of them as potential rivals to Google. But if there are millions of responses to a search inquiry, it is not self-evident that the most popular links will deliver more relevant content than that provided by like-minded people.
Search is still in its infancy and the "hidden web," the iceberg of buried data, is only now being mined seriously. Search engines such as Blinkx.com are searching videos in an intelligent way. Most engines will search your hard disk and e-mails, but using artificial intelligence to extract the quality from the dross is taking longer than expected 10 years ago, as Blinkx knows more than others.
It would be absurd to complain. Search engines have revolutionized access to knowledge in little more than a decade. The answer to anything is a mouse click away from anyone able to access a computer. The task for the next decade is to ensure the benefits of search are spread to poorer people around the world.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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