At a time when Google holds 90% of the search market in Germany and Spain, and almost 75% in Britain and it is generally acknowledged that European companies in spend far less on research than those based in other parts of the world, one of the many fragmented ‘EuroGoogle’ efforts is about to receive state funding. Continue reading
I’d like to share in some of the optimise shown by …?… (alarm:clock euro posts are never signed apparently) on the subject of Exalead the French Search Engine. I would. But I can’t. Continue reading
Two Swedes in the Net news.
Twingly pulls in blog RSS feeds from all over the world, showing them accumulate in pillars on a rotating 3D globe. Post titles scroll by; click on any title to display the post and have the globe flip to the blog’s physical location.
Hackzine calls it “Fun eye candy for a spare computer.”
Its the Oscars tomorrow and The Prate Bay have opened a torrent search website for the occasion where you can find torrents for the Oscar nominees films and then cast your vote if you like, the results will be shown tomorrow evening.
via | Digg
French start-up Criteo, the distributed recommendation service, is dishing out their ‘collaborative filtering technology’ for use in the blogosphere with the AutoRoll widget.
The idea is a dynamic blog roll made up of similar sites that the people who visit your site have an affinity with. It’s a community thing I suppose, a kind of MyBlogLogs for recommending other sites or blogs. Continue reading
If you can you sing it or whistle it, or piece it together on a virtual piano, or even tap it’s rhythm on your PC keyboard, then there is a chance you might find out where that song comes from with a little help from The Open Music Encyclopedia.
Musipedia has been under constant development since it was first started by Dutchman Rainer Typke ten years ago. What began life as a music search engine called Melody Hound has since turned into a Wikipedia-like collaboration site, building an expandable and editable collection of tunes, melodies, and musical themes. The option of searching for MIDI files anywhere on the Net was added last year. Plugins are available for Firefox, Explorer and Konqueror (for the ‘whistle & sing it’ option you need the Java plugin).
I really enjoy coming across independent websites like this one. It’s nothing flashy, it’s just a good idea put into place by someone hacking away at it. The step taken in 2004 to open it up to a wiki-type collaboration was the right one to take I think. Well done Rainer Typke, currently at Utrecht University working on his Ph. D. in Computer Science.
FAST, the Norwegian company leading the search engine project known as Pharos – Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces – has announced an €8 million grant from the European Commission.
“This research fund is validation of the key tenets and concepts behind PHAROS…†said Bjørn Olstad, FAST’s CTO and designated Technical Director of PHAROS.
Pharos will lead to “the establishment of a new audiovisual search platform that will allow businesses in various sectors to create compelling, next-generation audiovisual applications.”
Advanced search technologies giving better access to the exploding volume of audiovisual data – they are all the right words put in the right spaces and sounding very much like the spin around Quaero.
“FAST is spearheading innovation in information access technology,†said John M. Lervik, FAST’s CEO. Let us hope the 13 companies involved (list) from 9 countries (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK) see more eye to eye than the preceding French/German project.
To anybody left wondering what ever happened to Quaero – the Franco-German Internet search engine that was scheduled to be officially launched in early 2006 – it appears to have taken yet another two steps backwards into Franco-French.
At an IT Summit in Potsdam the German Economics minister, Hartmut Schauerte announced that the German Government is pulling out of the joint venture. “The co-operation is at an end and although we won’t be cutting all ties, the project will in future be a national German project with the political and economic aims of this summitâ€.
The Quaero project had large ambitions from the start, touting itself as not just a text-based search engine but one that “will use techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents operating in several languages. There was also mention of automatic recognition and indexing of imagesâ€. Wikipedia
It was said to be in France that the research for this relatively new field of ‘image mining’ was taking place, although according to Hartmut Schauerte the French were more interested in pursuing a ‘conventional search engine’ whereas the German Government expressly did not want to go into direct competition with Google and others and wanted to concentrate more on the development of the semantic web. To pursue this aim the German Government will be creating a new project under the name of ‘Theseus’.
via Hiese.de & MutiligualSearch
more reading – International Herald Tribune