Just happened to notice which search engine is being used to access this blog today. Percentage numbers are Google 94.02%, Yahoo 2.99%, Bing 2.72% and Ask .27%.
In the UK the regulator has been forcing BT to lose market share due to its significant market power. I wonder why it doesn’t do the same thing for search.
That’s all…
Doing the rounds today is news of the removal of the RSLOG.net site. The italicised text is from their temporary holding page.
“RLSLOG.net was suspended by its German hosting company after removal request from law firm representing Universal Music, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative.
We found a new host and moved our site, but it wasn’t powerful enough to handle the site.
We should be back tomorrow on more powerful server.
Check our forums in the meantime: rlstalk.net.”
Now I’ve never been on RSLOG.net. A quick “Google” tells me this about it:
Links. RSS | IRC | Contact · New releases | posts · AuTo.RLSLOG.net · NewTorrents.info · NTi forums · Leecher’s Lair · PornLeecher · Rapidshare King …
It doesn’t look like my kind of site. I then did another quick Google on “NewTorrents.info” and it came up with about 1,950,000 results. That’s a lot of sites promoting free availability of copyrighted material (presumably).
The Government was naive in the extreme to think that filtering websites would go anyway towards solving the problem of unlawful copyring infringement. It is a complete waste of time, effort and money that also establishes a very dangerous precedent.
If this ludicrous law somehow sticks I’d like to see the Government take on Google, Bing (Microsoft) et al and trefor.net. We are all accessories to unlawful activity here.
Having discussed the suitability of “bing” as a name for a search engine someone mentioned that they had recently found a site called WolframAlpha. Now that’s what I call a name.
WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine”. It is worth a look. I suspect that it has a long way to go before matching google though. I typed in a simple question: “how many IPv6 addresses are there” and it didn’t know where to look.
Also it is fairly flawed in other ways. I typed in my birth date, December 9th, 1961 (it likes it the American way round) and whilst it did come up with some really useful statistics such as the fact that I have now been on this planet for 17,338 days it could only come up with some actor called Joe Lando as having been born on that day. Huh!
Interestingly, site founder Stephen Wolfram went to Eton with our CFO Jonathan Radford.
As a footnote to the bing post I have already seen some favourable comments on it on Facebook. Time will tell.
I see that Microsoft has launched “bing” as its latest offering to compete with Google. I checked and this isn’t April 1st so it must be true. All I can say is it better be good at what it does because the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue and it will need real customer loyalty for people to go to the site.
Ping would have been hugely better but no chance of getting that domain name. Microsoft will have spent millions researching the name!
I wonder whether bing is the Urdu word for white elephant? I’ll check.