Microsoft has been working hard to raise its share of the Internet search market, aggressively promoting its Bing search engine and striking a ten-year deal with Yahoo to have Bing power Yahoo searches. And the latest search engine share numbers from media analysis firm Comscore suggest some of that effort is paying off, with Microsoft sites showing the greatest month-to-month increase in the industry. However, the growth doesn’t seem to be slowing Google; in fact, it seems to mostly be coming at the expense of new-partner Yahoo.
Comscore’s latest rankings cover U.S. Internet users for November 2009; according to the figures, Microsoft sites (including Bing) saw a 0.4 percent increase compared to October 2009, jumping to a 10.3 percent share of the U.S. search market. However, Yahoo sites saw a 0.5 decline during the same period, dropping from an even 18 percent of the market in October to 17.5 percent in November.
Google, in the meantime, continued to expand its U.S. marketshare, going from 65.4 percent in October to 65.6 percent in November. Most measurements put Google’s share of most overseas markets substantially higher than its share of the U.S. market.
Comscore’s figures also have Ask.com and AOL losing 0.1 percent of their market share between October and November, dropping to 3.8 percent and 2.8 percent of the search market respectively.
Bing’s growth is good news for Microsoft: increasing search share makes it easier for Microsoft to sell advertising via Bing, and that in turn gives Microsoft the means and motivation to continue developing and innovating the service. But at a certain point, Microsoft is going to have to find ways to cut into Google’s dominance of the Internet search market, rather than merely siphoning away search share from Yahoo.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.