News and Reviews....

    KUMO to ARRIVE  May 2009

    By Bob Lieto

    At next weeks (May 26-28)  "All Things D" conference in Carlsbad, California, it has rumored that Microsoft's new search engine "KUMO" is somewhat scheduled to debut. I say "somewhat" debut because Microsoft has declined comment on the exact day. The screenshot images of the overhauled engine shows a three-column search results page showing useful tools and related searches, a single-session search history for backtracking, and a set of search categories that relate directly to the query. Searches for a musical artist, for example, would bring the artist's bio, while searching for a product would bring up categories for images, reviews and manuals. It is hard to say, however, what the final scheme will be at this time. But, it is likely to be like a semantic search -- the capability for a computer to understand exactly what you are looking for based on your natural language query. Last week the much anticipated Wolfram Alpha débuted. Wolfram Alpha is geared toward fact-based information and not indexing Web pages like Google or Live Search, but this shows that semantic capability is becoming the next major leap forward in search and for computers in general. no one has quite mastered the semantic search as yet but they are getting closer.

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