Netizen: Near real-time

Once you have figured out that there are four screens - the phone, the browser, the desktop, the wall - it is easy to see search is pregnant territory, rich with possibilities. Search, content, distribution. There is so much to do.

Search is of special interest to me. There is one clear leader, but the challenger is not lacking in money. And for the leader the competition is but one click away. If there was ever an innovation challenge, this is it. Could Microsoft innovate, or find a startup or two that might? That second possibility is more likely. But then Google has been in competition with itself. It never stopped innovating in the search domain and boasts a larger index than anyone else. And its algorithms are still the ones to beat.

Microsoft should try and eat into Google territory. Google should try and eat into Microsoft territory. The consumer will benefit. Search and operating systems are fair game.

Technology Review

What's Microsoft's Bing Strategy? "We are going to compete hard on the core results, but where we are going to differentiate is in organizing results more effectively and providing tools to help searchers make decisions"
Making Search Social
More-Searchable Flash
Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts
Searching as a Team
Building a Better Search Engine
Q&A: Peter Norvig
Digging Deeper in Web Search
Better Search in Virtual Worlds
Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off
How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed
A Smarter Search for What Ails You

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft Searches for Group Advantage
A Google Killer Stumbles
Search Engines' Chinese Self-Censorship
A New Perspective on Search Results
Social Search
Jennifer Chayes
Wikipedians Promise New Search Engine

How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users Technology Review Doing things in or near real time puts a lot of pressure on the system because the live-ness or freshness of the data requires you to query more in real time. ...... There's too much data updated too fast to stick it in a big central database. That doesn't work. So we have to separate it out, split it out, to thousands of databases, and then be able to query those databases at high speed. ...... "Like" became one of the most common actions in the system. ........ a tremendous wealth of photos being uploaded and shared ......... Then we went and built our own storage system called Haystack that's completely built on top of commodity hardware.
Twitter's Growing Pains a large-scale, ground-up architectural revamp ...... it will reduce its reliance on Ruby on Rails, and will move to a "simple, elegant file-system-based approach," to replace its original unwieldy database system. ........ a communications-class technical infrastructure that supports unpredictable activity.
Social Networking Is Not a Business
How Facebook Works

More Angry Investors Say, Throw the Boards Out

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Search: Pregnant Territory