Illuminati Karate

Rumors have been floating for some time that Microsoft would be rebranding its Live search engine, especially after its acquisition of Powerset last summer. Although recently leaked screenshots implied the name might be Kumo, AdAge is reporting today that the new engine will be named Bing.

Along with the rebranding comes a reported $80 million advertising campaign spanning TV, radio, print and online, created by New York’s JWT advertising agency. The ads will try to convince consumers that although they may be happy with their current search engine (i.e. Google), they don’t know how good the experience could be.

How Microsoft plans to migrate its current users to the new domain remains to be seen. Certainly they will lose some of their users in the switch, but we think the move makes a ton of sense. Here’s why:

Continue reading “Bing – Microsoft’s New Search Engine” »

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” »