Illuminati Karate

Today marks the official launch of Wolfram Alpha, which is a mathematically based “computational knowledge engine” that derives some of its datasets from the web. Most news outlets will refer to it as a search engine, but the distinction is important:

Traditional search engines, like Google and Yahoo, seek to index pages on other websites and direct their searchers to these pages. Wolfram Alpha’s goal is quite different – it seeks to extract data from other sources to create a massive internal database, which it will then use to answer its searchers’ questions directly. Where Google and Yahoo serve as middlemen directing searchers to relevant properties, Wolfram Alpha contains all of its answers to its own website.

Continue reading “Wolfram Alpha: First Impressions” »

Over the last week you’ve probably noticed the “definitions” (read: ads) in the Twitter sidebar. Until today, they’ve been promoting Twitter’s in-house services, such as encouraging users to add a Twitter widget to their blog. But as of today we’ve started seeing three different offsite ads appearing in this space, pictured in the image to the left. Further investigation reveals that these ads represent the launch of a new monetization strategy for Twitter.

Continue reading “Twitter Gets Ads, Courtesy of Federated Media and Microsoft” »