It’s been a year since Yahoo and Microsoft announced a ten-year partnership that will see Yahoo searches powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine on the back end. Now, that partnership is finally on the verge of bearing fruit: according to a Microsoft blog post, Microsoft has begun testing powering Yahoo searches with Bing, and—if things go well—Microsoft may be handling about 25 percent of Yahoo Search traffic with Bing, and begin transitioning Yahoo search partners to Microsoft’s adCenter service this year, in time for the 2010 holiday season. However, for the moment, the test is limited to 2.5 to 3.5 percent of Yahoo’s live search traffic.
“Our two companies continue to work together towards the goal of providing a quality transition experience for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season,” wrote Microsoft spokesperson Carolyn Miller. “An important part of our approach is to do the necessary tests to help ensure all of our systems and processes are in place.”
Microsoft and Yahoo’s search partnership covers a ten-year period: under the deal, each company will continue to manage its own front-end search experience, but Bing will handle all the back-end generation of search results. Yahoo will be responsible for both service’s premium search advertisers, while Microsoft’s adCenter program will handle self-service advertising customers; Yahoo will also get a cut of revenue generated from Microsoft placing ads on Yahoo sites.
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.