martes, 5 de febrero de 2008

Image Search Engine in third place!!

My friend Javier Montoya [1] (he has a MSc in Computer Science and his field is image recognition) and me suspected that image search was already a trend, but that was an assumption based in our observations and requirements, today we read that Google Image Search is the third engine most popular [2]. This corroborate that vertical search engines could be a serious competence for the classical engines, you could say that this image search engine is just another feature in Google engine, thats truth but the fact that is the third one most used means that is already an important type of query and I’m convinced that the merge of image retrieval and web intelligence could make a really useful and powerful tool that has many interesting features, is just the beginning of a new era??.

[1] http://www.lis.ic.unicamp.br/~jmontoya/

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7226100.stm

lunes, 4 de febrero de 2008

Yahoo in the middle??

After read some articles about the Microsoft move, its obvious that is a big issue especially for Google that is concerned (Microsoft is worry too in a different way). Google has a point when it said that Internet openness and innovation are very important for the users. About the openness its important to develop web-apps (web-services) with the industry standards in order to avoid monopolies approaches and use the best, innovation on the other hand is the core of the Internet’s success and growth, they also have another point when they addressed: “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?”[1]. But the Internet is a complete different platform than the operating system (OS), this runs on many servers (most of them use Linux) that are distributed around the world, this mean that the information / knowledge (data) is in many servers and not in a unique computer, which makes the Internet a perfect environment for innovations. With that type of environment like cloud computing (users can store information and use apps in a complete online environment), could be the next default step for users and Google might be developing now some OS for that (they are already building an OS for mobiles), maybe Microsoft is afraid about that possibility. At the middle of this issue is Yahoo because it has useful apps and millions of users, but I think that it cannot develop a new OS that could run on a cloud computing environment (that’s Microsoft possible one concern now) and also it cannot eat more slices from the advertising cake that Google eat up more and more (75 percent [2]). So that puts Yahoo in the middle of both companies.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-internet.html

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/
02-03Statement.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7225599.stm

[4] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/
how-google-could-keep-yahoo-from-microsoft/index.html?ref=technology

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/technology/
04yahoo.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

viernes, 1 de febrero de 2008

Microsoft and Yahoo merge??

When I read that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for 44.6 USD billions, I just said WOW!!. I don't think that Yahoo is worth that, especially now that its shares are down and they could not make a real competence to Google last year (2007), the company is clear losing territory on the Web arena, while Google is still growing and making a lot of money. For me is obvious that Microsoft has realized that there is some king of Googlelization going on, that's a threat for them, but the point is that Google has figure out long time ago (maybe since its beginnings) that software has become a service and should be free in some cases. This paradigm works complete different because the product must be on the Web, friendly and very useful, it must give value to the users' information and those things has been Google's goals. Another threat for Microsoft, Yahoo and also Google are the vertical search engines that are going to be more popular, those engines will have more web intelligence (Web 3.0) algorithms, so the user experience will be complete different, I mean the websites are going to be more intelligence and the merge between the Web and the virtual worlds will definitely change the way we perceive the Internet. About Microsoft and Yahoo they will have to work together in putting the Office suite online, that's basically the main product of Microsoft and Google is developing that, actually they have already a suite online, on the other hand Yahoo has Flickr that has many users and has become an example of how users interact with the applications and also has a huge image database, the challenge that both companies have are enormous, they must eat up more slices from the advertising huge cake and put more software as services, they might have to re-design their business model.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222114.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222199.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/technology/
01cnd-subyahoo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin