Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Google Translate: leveraging the world's largest data store
Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 12:02 pm
How many of you use Google’s translation tools? They’re built into Google Docs, Gmail, and the Google translate website. With support for 52 languages, the tools are incredibly powerful in an increasingly flat world.
While only human translators can really capture the nuance and connotation of human speech, Google translate is the premier online tool for fast translations. Google Docs can be quickly translated, mail can be automatically translated, and now Google’s automatic YouTube transcription services can potentially translate video into other languages as well.
Monday, March 8, 2010
New Google Tool Visualizes Public Data in Animated Charts
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Sunday, March 7, 2010
Google-as-the-Fonz, or: how search upstarts are--obviously!--going to kill Google in the near future
If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching. Far from it. Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful. Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there's a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. "Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can," says Knight.
It goes on to describe three of the most talked-about challengers to date: vertical search engines, search refinement aids, and social search. Google, of course, has integrated each of these techniques into its own engine carefully, and has promised to do even more with vertical search to help users find reliable health information. Already, you can search for "cancer" and see prioritized medical results from Google Health, WebMD, and others.
It's worth a read, but to date, the only non-Google search experiences I've had that lead me astray live inside Apple's Safari browser and are, of all things, visual innovations. Try flipping through your personal history for a page you've recently seen in Safari 4--it blows the text-based histories seen in other browsers out of the water. Or the stolen-from-Chrome (I think) feature: screenshots of your top 8 favorite pages fill a new tab, supplanting bookmarking as the useful way to get to favorite site and more about personal information managemen.t
Friday, March 5, 2010
Bing cashback exploit discovered, Microsoft sends in lawyers
By Tom Warren, 10 November 2009 - 14:09
A Bing cashback vulnerability has been discovered by Samir Meghani of the Bountii Team.
The flaw exists due to a software API oversight that allows users to fake transactions to Bing. Currently, Bing does not detect these faked transactions. The flaw affects both the customer and merchant. According to Samir, in his original posting, "merchants have a few options for reporting, but Bing suggests using a tracking pixel. Basically, the merchant adds a tracking pixel to their order confirmation page, which will report the the transaction details back to Bing." Samir detailed that the process was flawed but didn't pin point exactly how to generate fake transactions.
Bing Cashback is an initiative that pays people to search with Bing. Customers can also get cashback rewards, meaning you could get cashback from online purchases made when Bing is used.
In a follow up post over the weekend entitled "Surrendering to Microsoft", Samir posted a legal letter fromMicrosoft's legal team demanding he remove the original blog post to which he complied. Microsoft also terminated Samir's Bing cash back account. Some may argue that this is a heavy handed approach but clearly Microsoft doesn't take kindly to fraud.
