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…
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.
If you’re still using Ubuntu 8.10, then you should have update your Ubuntu to 9.04. The update process can be done online if you already have installed Ubuntu 8.10, and you have a fast access Internet connection. Before you update to Ubuntu 9.04 you should completely update your Ubuntu 8.10 first. Then after that you need to type in Alt+F2, and type in the pop up box with “update-manager -d” without the double quotes. You should see “New distribution release 9.04.” Just click Upgrade and follow the self-explaining instructions.
During the upgrading process, the system will try to get the packages that aren’t yet available on your system by downloading these from Ubuntu’s reposistories. After downloading the necessary packages for upgrading, you should see that your system tries to install the downloaded packages. You may get ask about keeping certain old system files, or replace with the new system files. If you know what you are asking of, then you should keep your system files/configurations, otherwise I suggest you just replace the old system files/configurations with the new files. The whole upgrading process takes about 35 minutes or more depending on your Internet connection speed and the upload speed of Ubuntu’s reposistories.
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