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Everyday people use search engines to navigate the web, and without search engines people will not be able to find their ways around the world wide web conveniently.  Since hundred of millions of people are flocking to search engines to carry out their daily web surfing, the search engines’ creators/owners take the advantage of the crowd by selling ad-spaces.  A perfect example of this case is Google.  Google is so dominant in this area that Microsoft has to rebuild its search engine’s brand once again in hoping to gain an edge over online advertising dollars.  Microsoft is going to rename its Live search engine to Bing and shelling out about $80 million to $100 million ad campaign.

Not too long ago Microsoft wanted to take over Yahoo in striving to boost the number of search market share, but the deal failed to materialize.  It’s not a surprise for Microsoft to change the brand of their search engine since Google has continue to dominate the search market.  Google provides better search experience than many other search engines, and Google serves up search results blazingly fast.  Bing will have a hard time to convince that it will be able to outdo Google, but the rumor suggests that Bing is a much more capable search engine than its predecessor Live search engine.  Bing will be launched on June 3rd.  More on Bing…

U.S. Army is forgoing Windows XP in favor of upgrading to Windows Vista.  Instead of upgrading to Windows 7, U.S. army prefers Vista.  Windows 7 is not yet out but will come out around august of this year.  Why not Windows 7 but Vista?  Maybe because Windows 7 is still very new, and the OS may carry critical bugs that nobody has yet discovered.  Windows 7 is still very new, and so implementing Windows 7 seems a bit riskier than Vista.  Upgrading to Windows 7 is also more expensive than Vista.  The U.S. Army figures that Vista is a lot more secure than XP, and so the move to Vista is obvious.

If the U.S. Army is willing to train their soldiers to use Linux, they probably have save a load of cash.  At this moment Linux virtually has no virus.  Implementing Linux properly, the U.S. Army doesn’t have to fear too much about computer security.  You can’t always compare which OS is more secure than another OS, because in the end it’s only matter who is using the OS.  You place a person who is really good at Windows but not so good at Linux on Linux, he or she won’t be able to configure Linux to be as secure as Linux should be.  The same can also apply to Windows.

WolframAlpha

Google gives you links that may lead to whatever that you are trying to find.  On the other hand, WolframAlpha allows you to query its complex engine in computational form.  Let say if you type “how big is earth in miles” in Google, you get 28,400,000 links more or less, and you yourself have to sift through this incredible amount of links before you get to the right web-page that has an answer of how big is earth if it is to be measured in mile.  To find answers to this sort of questions, it is may be best to use WolframAlpha.  If you type “how big is earth in miles” in WolframAlpha, you get a result of 3956.6 miles and other various conversions.

WolframAlpha is not something that is competing against Google, but it’s something new and refreshing.  You can use WolframAlpha for quick computational questions (search queries that can be computed), and in this sense WolframAlpha is not a replacement of Google.  Sometimes it’s better for you to land on the right web-page that has thorough details about the topic that you’re searching for, and Google can offer you the links to the right web-pages for your topics.

In a way WolframAlpha is like a prototype web AI (Artificial Intelligence), and this web AI tries to answer the best it can with a preset algorithmic data.  Type “wine” in WolframAlpha and you see a generic answer  to wine.  Try to type “wine” in Google, and you’ll see something else.