The College Humor video below is NSFW, contains some profanity and mild sexual situations, but we’re posting it here because not only is it amusing, but it is an interesting insight into the relationship between users and search engines. People struggle to find the “magic” set of keywords to describe their information need. As we […]

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v2.0.4 introduces top of page Refinements. Additionally, the Categories introduced with v1.1.4 have also been relabeled Refinements. Refinements are suggested query reformulations based on your query and Surf Canyon’s real-time model of your inferred intent. In a sense, Refinements are personalized reformulations targeted to your “at the moment” information need. Furthermore, these links will send […]

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Cuil just launched their search engine which boasts the largest index on the internet with 120 billion pages. (121,617,892,992 to be precise, as posted on their home page.) While the exact numbers are not always made available, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft also all have 10s of billions of pages in their indexes. Having as comprehensive […]

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Cesar Brea posts some insightful comments on his blog, Octavianworld: “The weakest link here is … being dependent on users structuring their search queries so as to accurately depict their objective as otherwise the in-context Ads will be as useless to the user as the search results. Such a requirement is taxing for the user […]

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Perhaps lost in all the coverage surrounding the extraordinary financial successes of search-related companies is the story regarding growing dissatisfaction with internet search. These stats from an InformationWeek article entitled “The Ultimate Search Engine” are nonetheless becoming more familiar: “People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they’re looking for, and half abandon […]

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