Posts Tagged: Search Engines

Children’s Information – Who Cares? By Maarten Sprenger

By Miriam Rasch, February 13, 2014

‘For children searching the internet is like riding a roller coaster in an amusement park. How to choose one’s own route and get useful hits when searching? How to avoid delay and distraction? How to distinguish between nonsense and reliable resources? It’s hard for adults, but even harder for children.’ Children’s Information – Who Cares? [...]

Thomas Petzold: Search Industry’s Five-Percent Gamble

By Catalina Iorga, November 11, 2013

Thomas Petzold started the second session of Society of the Query #2, ‘Search Across the Border‘, on a more positive tone as he gave kudos to the search engine. He commended it for still being a great tool, one that has had a huge impact on not only the collective memory of our species, but also on [...]

Dirk Lewandowski: Why We Need an Independent Index of the Web

By serenawestra, November 11, 2013

Short interview with Dirk Lewandowski from network cultures on Vimeo. How can we create real alternative search engines? German professor Dirk Lewandowski spoke as third speaker in the session ‘Google Domination’. He argues that we need an independent index of the web. “We don’t need publicly funded search engines. Instead, we need publicly funded search [...]

Russia challenges Google and Yandex by unveiling plans for a new search engine called “Sputnik”

By vince, October 15, 2013

The world is familiar with Sputnik as being the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. But this time, the famous name is being used for another ambitious project that competes with the US industry – a search engine that would challenge Google and even the local Yandex. The project comes [...]

Google unveils new “Hummingbird” search algorithm

By vince, September 30, 2013

On par with its 15th anniversary, Google just recently revealed a few updates to its search engine, containing a major refresh to its search algorithm which has been given the name “Hummingbird”. Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google, mentioned that the new algorithm influences about 90% of all searches and its purpose is to sustain [...]

Seeks – a collaborative search engine

By vince, September 18, 2013

Seeks is a free and open source venture accredited by the Affero General Public License 3, which allows users to share their queries to search engines and thus provide an alternative to the existing market leading search portals. Seeks works by grouping users with similar queries so they can share the results as well as [...]
Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level...

Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool

By admin, December 4, 2012

Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level commenting enabled to facilitate discussion). I’ve just read an article which explicitly considers the evaluation of search engines with respect to their epistemic functions under a social epistemological perspective. There’s a pre-print available http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/simpson/simpson_index.html and the citation is: Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool, Metaphilosophy [...]

Deep Search ll: Panel 4, Contextual Modeling and closing discussion

By Shirley Niemans, July 11, 2010

Panel 4: Contextual Modeling An unstorable and unmanageable amount of data is coming at us, bringing with it a host of new strategies for grasping and analyzing the huge amount of bits and bites, such as visualization models. mc schraefel: Beyond Keyword Search Dr schraefel is reader in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at [...]
During my research internship at the Institute of Network Cultures...

Define: Web Search, Semantic Dreams in the Age of the Engine

By Shirley Niemans, July 8, 2010

During my research internship at the Institute of Network Cultures in 2008/2009, I was given the opportunity to explore the broad field of Web search using the Institute’s elaborate network and the extensive knowledge of its staff, and to deliver an editorial outline for the Society of the Query conference. This research also culminated in [...]

Deep Search ll: Panel 3, Rent and Bias

By Shirley Niemans, June 26, 2010

Panel 3: Rent and Bias After dwelling in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century in the morning panels, Felix Stalder comments that the program’s strict chronological order will now lead us into the twenty-first century. Keeping the metaphor of the map and the mapmaker alive, the next two speakers will talk about the politics and [...]