Science and technology news blog

Upstart search engine Powerset has just secured an exclusive license for natural language processing technology from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. It’s a move that some are claiming will allow the small firm to someday challenge Google.

Steve Newcomb, one of Powerset’s founders, characterizes the PARC technology as “the most sophisticated natural language technology known to man” and claims that it will give his company a major advantage over keyword-based search engines like Google.

The company has been operating quietly so far, but has recently been profiled twice in the New York Times and other major media outlets as it gears up for a private beta release of its flagship search engine. The company has not yet made details of the deal available, but the Times is reporting that PARC gets an equity stake in Powerset, while Powerset gets access to its technology and to researcher Ronald Kaplan, a leader in the field of natural language processing.

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It might be Christmas Eve, but the blogs are still abuzz—mostly with speculation about the big changes in the tech scene that we may or may not be seeing in 2007. Over the past couple of days, momentum has been building on a number of stories that are starting to paint what might be one of the first concrete trends we see for ‘07. Will the coming year be the year of the “killer,” the year when big and not-so-big companies join forces to try and topple the products that seem to have a stranglehold on certain niches of the tech market?

It all sounds very Justice League, doesn’t it? (Or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, depending on your generational affiliation.)

Most notably, there was yesterday’s announcement, reported in The Times and brought into the blogosphere by TechCrunch, that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has decided to take on the megaliths of search with a new product called Wikiasari. The search engine, a new arm of Wales’ Wikia product line, is slated for a launch next year, possibly as early as the first quarter. Wales has already been vocal about wanting to take on some of Google’s most noticeable flaws—in particular, the tendency for useless or spam-ridden results to pop up.

Wales has also already had to deny a whole bunch of rumors, most notably that Wikiasari is a partnership with Amazon—Amazon recently pumped a lot of money into Wikia, but there is no concrete correlation to the new search engine. Additionally, an alleged “exclusive screenshot” posted on TechCrunch has been dispelled by Wales as inaccurate.

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.

Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.

However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support to the venture in the future.

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A study from security vendor McAfee found that search query results returned by Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead viewers to dangerous Web sites than they were six months ago. The study also found that Yahoo and MSN are not following that trend toward safer search results.

McAfee’s study crunched the new numbers over a six-month period as a follow-up to its May 2006 survey. That survey found that nearly 5 percent of all search results served up by Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com led Web surfers to malicious sites designed to infect computers with spyware, viruses, pop-up ads, junk e-mail, or other malware.

For the purpose of the study, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor organized a list of 2,500 keywords to evaluate the first five pages of search results for each keyword on each of the five search engines.

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GOOGLE has launched a new search service allowing internet users to search through the more than seven million patents granted in the United States.

The beta, or test, version of Google Patent Search lets people sift through patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office as long ago as 1790 by using inventors’ names, filing dates, patent numbers or key words.

Searches return information about the inventor and provide patent details online page-by-page.

“We’ve all heard about the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell – famous inventors whose creative minds changed the course of history,” Google software engineer Doug Banks wrote in a company weblog.

“But there are many more like them and millions of inventions…from useful everyday items such as adhesive tape and contact lenses to, er, things useful in specific situations, like this shark protector suit or this amusement device incorporating simulated cheese and mice.”

Google Patent Search uses much of the same technology that powers the California-based company’s online book search service, so users can scroll pages and zoom in on text and illustrations.

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines were marked as either “red” or “yellow” by SiteAdvisor, indicating that they presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May.

SiteAdvisor is a service provided by antivirus vendor McAfee that rates sites based on their affiliation with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and junk e-mail. Edelman used the tool to run 2,500 popular keywords through several search engines, including Yahoo, MSN Search (now Windows Live Search), AOL Search, Ask.com, and of course Google.

The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent).

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Don’t think Google will just use facial-recognition technology it acquired from its purchase of Neven Vision for Picasa, its free photo-organizing tool used by consumers to search for pictures on their desktops. That’s not Google’s modus operandi. If it can, Google will employ Neven Vision’s technology in its online search engines to improve the way to find photographs on the Web.

The only word about the Neven Vision acquisition from Google came from a blog posting Tuesday on its Web site by Picasa product manager Adrian Graham, who explained that the facial-recognition technology automatically extracts information from a photo. “It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects,” Graham wrote. “This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don’t have any specific features to show off today, but we’re looking forward to having more to share with you soon.”

Analyst Charlene Li, who tracks Google for IT adviser Forrester, says the technology also could be used in Google’s people search tool. “It’s going to lead to a lot of other things,” she says of the facial-recognition technology. “They don’t usually buy technology for one offering.”

Among the 14 facial-recognition patent applications filed by Neven Vision founder Hartmut Neven is one for an image-based search engine for mobile phones with camera. Because of Google’s aloofness, and the inability to reach the inventor [calls to Neven Vision’s phone number listed on the Web were greeted with a recording saying it was disconnected], it’s not publicly known if Google acquired that technology, too. (more…)

Privacy advocates and search industry watchers have long warned that the vast and valuable stores of data collected by search engine companies could be vulnerable to thieves, rogue employees, mishaps or even government subpoenas.

our major search companies were served with government subpoenas for their search data last year, and now once again, privacy advocates can say, We told you so.

AOLs misstep last week in briefly posting some 19 million Internet search queries made by more than 600,000 of its unwitting customers has reminded many Americans that their private searches for solutions to debt or bunions or loneliness are not entirely their own.

So, as one privacy group has asserted, is AOLs blunder likely to be the search industrys Data Valdez, like the 1989 Exxon oil spill that became the rallying cry for the environmental movement?

Maybe. But in an era when powerful commercial and legal forces ally in favor of holding on to data, and where the surrender of ones digital soul happens almost imperceptibly, change is not likely to come swiftly.

Most of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN collect and store information on what terms are searched, when they were queried and what computer and browser was used. And to the extent that the information can be used to match historic search behavior emanating from a specific computer, it is a hot commodity. (more…)