New search market analysis numbers from media tracking firms Comscore and Nielsen show that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is managing to increase its user base…and while some figures have Bing largely gaining share of the U.S. market at the expense of new partner Yahoo, other analyses show Bing starting to erode Google’s mammoth share of the search market…although it’s to early to say whether that’s a trend or just an aberration.
Media analysis firm Comscore has released figures for the U.S. search market for August 2009, and finds that Bing managed to push its share from 8.9 percent of the market in July to 9.3 percent in August. The numbers are somewhat lower than recent figures for the U.S. search market recently released by Nielsen—which serves to highlight how soft the numbers in the media metrics market can be—but shows the same general trend for the month. However, unlike Nielsen (which showed Bing’s gains coming at Yahoo’s expense in August) Comscore finds that Google’s share of the U.S. search market declined by 0.1 percent in August to 64.6 percent , while Yahoo’s share remained unchanged at 19.3 percent. Overall, Comscore found that the volume of queries in the U.S. search market was up 15.5 percent from July, and 19.2 percent higher than August of 2008.
In the United Kingdom, Nieslen found Bing managed to increase its share of the UK market by 5 percent during August 2009—and a portion of that gain came at the expense of Google, which found its share of the UK search market decline by 1.7 percent during the month.
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.