Bing's toolbar now has Facebook and gets facelift

Microsoft has cooked up a new version of its Bing software toolbar that the company thinks can change the minds of toolbar haters.
"I know what you're saying to yourself--'really, a tool bar?'" Bing Director Stefan Weitz joked in an interview last week. Weitz mused that when he had first heard the pitch about it, his first response had been "are we doing dial-up too?"
But Weitz was pleasantly surprised with the results of the new version of the software, and so were the testers who tried it during the new version's development. "People--when they saw what we built--even if they said they hated toolbars (myself being one of them) said 'hey this is actually remarkably useful.'"
That enjoyment, Weitz said, centered on taking some of the same ideas from Bing--things like bringing more tasks front and center--and making them take fewer steps to complete. One of the big targets for that goal ended up being Facebook, which users had wanted to keep an eye on while doing other things in the browser.
"Now, as you live more and more in the browser, actually pulling in all the disparate data sources that you have or want to use--your mail, or your Facebook status, and all these things across the Web--ends up actually making more sense," Weitz said.
To that end, users are now able to grab information from a broader range of services without having to keep the extra tabs open, or save those pages to their favorites. That's been extended to e-mail as well, so instead of just offering up access to Hotmail, it works with Gmail and Yahoo Mail as well. Users are also able to add multiple accounts for each of these services, so they don't have to pick just one.

Using Facebook from within the new version of the Bing toolbar.
One other change that's been brought over from the Bing side are deep links. These are things like the check-in page when searching for an airline, or the customer service page when doing a search for a retailer. "Deep links are one of those things people love when they're looking at search results," Weitz said. "Now we're pulling in deep links to any entity right here in the search bar."
This is the seventh iteration of the Bing toolbar, which remains an add-on only for Internet Explorer users who are using version 7 or above. The newest version takes design cues from IE9, which had its first release candidate pushed out to users last week. Gone are the rounded corners and liquid-like exterior, replaced instead by an angular look that matches up with some of the company's other modular designs found on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. There are also angled icons for each sub-tool like movies, stocks, and weather, which will be joined automatically by apps that Microsoft decides to push out in the future.
The toolbar continues to be an important part of Microsoft's plan to increase Bing use, as well as improve its results with information like clickstream data, which captures information about what users are clicking on and sends it back to Microsoft anonymously. The feature requires that users first opt-in before it's sent.
Earlier this month, that very habit became a point of concern by Google, which had pointed fingers at Microsoft for "copying" its results after it had a team of engineers seed the toolbar with synthetic queries. Microsoft sternly refuted the allegations, saying that clickstream data was just one of more than 1,000 signals the search engine was using at any given time to create and rank its results. Shortly thereafter, Weitz had told that the whole incident had been "insulting."
"Everyone always asks us, 'are you taking share from Google,' or 'are you taking share from Yahoo, or whoever else?' And the answer is that you don't have to take share from anybody. You can actually grow the pie," Weitz said.
The new version of the toolbar will arrive as an update within Windows Update to current Bing toolbar users. New users can grab it here.

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Windows Phone 7 update to bring copy paste and more, out in March

The Mobile World Congress has now brought news of some much-needed Windows Phone 7 updates, but we wonder if these would be enough to fill all the gaps of the platform’s glaring omissions. Steve Ballmer announced two updates – but not many details were in tow, with no exact release date, or list of features.
We do know that this first update will be due in the first two weeks of March, and will include the much-vaunted ability to copy and paste, apart from performance enhancements. There will also be an improved Windows Marketplace app for the ecosystem. With CDMA-support promised, carriers in India might be just start getting excited about at the implications of a Nokia Windows Phone 7 in the Indian market.
The next update will include some very essential features, with true multitasking including third party programs, using a task switcher ‘inspired’ by the acclaimed webOS card-style. Along with native Twitter support, the update will also bring IE9 to WP7 – implying a degree of built-in hardware-acceleration.
The second, larger update, due sometime in the second half of the year, will apparently offer more than what we know of now, features that will hopefully bring it onto a more level playing field with its tried and tested competitors. The update will be revealed in more detail at developer-centric MIX11 conference scheduled for April – as well as a list of SDK features.

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What to expect in cloud-based communications in 2020

Storing all your personal data in the cloud could get a little 'creepy,' says AT&T's CTO
AT&T's chief technology officer, is making what he calls "creepy" and "spooky" -- but ultimately useful -- predictions for wireless computing and communications in the cloud in 2020.
In one broad scenario, Donovan said wireless users could store all kinds of data about their lives in the cloud and authorize various algorithms and computing systems to analyze it for later use to communicate and, for example, remind them of names, addresses, arcane facts and other important and not-so-important tidbits.
And if the cloud is capable of that, it's possible that we don't need the personalized mobile phones and tablets that we use today, he said in an interview at Mobile World Congress.
In his outlook, someone could drive to dinner at a friend's house and use a wireless device, perhaps over a TV, to make a call or send a message by entering a password or fingerprint scan. The device would then find all of the caller's personal information in the cloud, including the phone number or e-mail address of whomever was being called. Even the names of the user's children would be accessible, for example.

"Answers to everything will be at our fingertips, and [the information will be] more mobile and more ubiquitous," Donovan said.
As a result of having such a rich repository of information in the cloud, people will become independent of devices like smartphones and tablets, Donovan said. "Software will converge, and devices will disintegrate, and we'll have fewer devices that belong to us anymore," he said. "I don't see the need to carry mobile devices to visit you at your house; I'll borrow one you have and authenticate myself on it."
AT&T is already experimenting with the cloud concept in its labs, he said. One study uses information about calling and data usage patterns that carriers have known for years. One well-known pattern is that a preponderance of people call home on Sunday nights.
That kind of pattern analysis will ultimately make communication and access to information more convenient, Donovan said.
Donovan said that AT&T researchers have even used him as a guinea pig. For example, engineers in recent weeks took all of his communications, including calls and e-mails, and uploaded logs from them in order to find patterns, not to study the messages word for word. The lab analysis spit out a list of Donovan's top 30 best friends and ranked from 1 to 30. To his relief, "my wife was at the top," he said.
"They told me, 'Here's who we think your best friends are,'" by analyzing who got the longest calls, the most e-mails, the most texts, and even who got the longest texts from him, among other patterns.
The value of that kind of list is that it would help an automated system populate favorites, much the same way that Netflix suggests movies someone will like, Donovan said. In one example, Donovan said a TV today will turn on to the last channel watched, but it could be set up with a profile for every member of a family to turn on to the most-watched channel for each person.
"This is the difference between discovery and search, and [then] find," he said.
To expand on the concept, he said that with mapping tools and location data, algorithms could, for example, compare the day of the week with the city a user is in and then tell authorized members of the user's contacts list that the user may be on a vacation or business trip.
The level of detail that's possible from the AT&T lab experiments seems so personal and so invasive that Donovan admits it will initially be controversial to most people, even "creepy."
"The order of my 30 best friends that the list gave me was better than the order I gave it," he said. "It was creepy."
He explained that when he analyzed the list, it made him realize that he should have been in touch more often with a good friend who is an amateur hockey coach. Since it had been too long since they were in touch, he took the prompting from the list as an opportunity to send the friend a trash-talk text about hockey.
"This kind of conceptual stuff is going to move from creepy to spooky to mainstream" in coming years, Donovan said.
"As I look at the horizon, this industry is just beginning to hit," he said. "It's not just mobile and cloud where things can be detached from devices, whether it's the TV or the laptop." What Donovan called "disintegration" of the user from the device will allow a "lot of flexibility," he said, adding "we'll see socially amazing things."
One analyst attending MWC, Kevin Burden of ABI Research, said Donovan's ideas aren't that far-fetched, although he said the idea of keeping personal information in the cloud will be controversial to most people.
On one hand, Burden said mobile users have already reached the point where they expect the Internet to be available almost anywhere they travel. Donovan's ideas "aren't that big of a leap, but do we want that?" Burden asked.
He also said it makes sense to find ways for users not to have to carry all kinds of devices with them. People have moved beyond the point where a mobile phone is a kind of fashion accessory or status symbol, so they might not mind using devices that they don't own personally.
However, Burden also said that the October 2009 loss of Sidekick personal data stored in cloud-based servers run by the Danger subsidiary of Microsoft should serve as a warning to all.
"A lot of people might not want that model," Burden said. "It's a very personal thing putting my information in the cloud. People could be at risk and not want it."

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Microsoft has a change of heart on how to keep Internet safe

Microsoft has a change of heart on how to keep Internet safe
Should ISPs be the ones who keep hacked PCs off the Internet? Microsoft's chief security executive used to think so, but now he's had a change of heart.
Speaking at the RSA Conference Tuesday, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney said that he no longer thought it was a good idea for service providers to be the ones on the hook for keeping infected PCs from the rest of the Internet.
"Last year at RSA I said, 'You know we need to think about ISPs being the CIO for the public sector, and we need to think about them scanning consumer machines and making sure they're clean and maybe quarantining them from the Internet,'" he said. "But in the course of the last year as I thought a lot more about this I realized that there are many flaws with that model."
Consumers may see security scans as invasive and a violation of privacy, and with more and more people using the Internet as their telephone, quarantining a PC could amount to cutting off someone's 911 service, he said. "You see the scenario, right: a heart attack, I run for my computer, it says you need to install four patches and reboot before you can access the Internet. That's not the experience we strive for."
Then there's the biggest problem of all. ISPs would have to bear the cost. "It puts a lot of burden on the ISPs, because they're the ones who are getting access to the Internet. Charney said.
ISPs have experimented with different ways to cut down on infected computers. Comcast, for example, has a service called Constant Guard that warns customers when they have a security problem.
But cutting off service to infected customers is an expensive proposition. "It just takes one phone call from a consumer for you to lose your profit margin for the year" on that user, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist with network monitoring firm Arbor Networks, in a telephone interview.
Labovitz said that technology companies have been coming up with new ways to rid the world of infected machines for about two decades now, without success. "Even if we do force end users to keep their patches updated there are still a huge number of zero days," he said, referring to unpatched software flaws that can be used to take over a fully patched PC. "It's an arms race that keeps going. There certainly isn't any single bullet."
Still, Charney thinks that there are ways to improve things.
He thinks that Internet companies could take a page from organizations such as the World Health Organization and find new ways to keep infected PCs away from the rest of the network -- to "enforce goodness," he said.
Maybe the solution is for consumers to share trusted certificates about the health of their personal computer -- including data on whether it's running antivirus or is completely patched -- Charney suggested. He called this "collective defense." An example? A bank could ask customers to sign up for a program that would scan their PC for signs of infection during online sessions. If there was a problem, the bank could then limit what the customer could do -- topping transactions off at $2,000, for example.
That might end up to be a more workable model for the Internet, Charney said. "The user remains in control. The user can say I don't want to pass a health certificate," he said "There may be consequences for that decision, but you can do it."

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Is Google Corrupt?

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a long piece by David Segal describing in painful detail exactly how Google's search results have been totally pawned by J.C Penney. Over the holiday shopping season, the retailer received an extraordinary bounty of Google love, ranked number one in searches for "dresses," "bedding," "area rugs," "furniture," "skinny jeans," and dozens of other terms (including, probably, "Easter suits").
Is J.C Penney really the destination of choice for all these categories of products? Hell no. But Google couldn't tell the difference, because it had been gamed by J.C Penney's black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) firm, SearchDex. (SearchDex isn't talking, but J.C Penney fired the company shortly after Segal called with some pointed questions. Draw your own conclusions.)
Apparently, SearchDex buried links attached to those search terms on thousands of dormant, fake, or abandoned websites, all of them pointing back at J.C Penney.com. Google's bots detected all those links, drew the erroneous conclusion that J.C Penney was all that when it comes to skinny jeans and area rugs, and drove millions of Web shoppers toward the site. J.C Penney had one of its best online shopping seasons ever.
The problem? This is known as link farming, and it's banned by Google's Webmaster terms and conditions. With its billions, Google can afford to pay people to do nothing but sniff out suspect search results driven by link farms and punish them. You'd think with an example this egregious Google would have noticed -- especially since it had warned J.C Penney three times before about dicey search results. But no.
NewYork Times:
Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google ... sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
Or maybe it strives not to anger companies like J.C Penney, whom the Times points out spends millions on Google ads, in addition to lord only knows how much on SEO trickery. Cutts says the idea is absurd; the European Union, on the other hand, is investigating Google for this very practice. Segal writes:
Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It's the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.
Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: "Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google's natural search." And: "Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google's natural search?"
SEO is in the news more than ever thanks in part to AOL's swallowing the Huffington Post last week for $315 million. HuffPo is many things, but one thing for sure is that it is SEO-driven. HuffPo owes much of its success to its ability to manipulate the treatment it receives at the hands of Google (and Yahoo and Bing).
Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote a funny piece last week discussing how HuffPo's SEO success isn't going to last forever. He was immediately attacked in the comments by SEO professionals defending their turf.
Hey, everybody does SEO, or tries to. There are perfectly legitimate things you can do to make your site more Google-friendly. On the other hand, many SEO "pros" are the cockroaches of the Internet -- turn the light on them and they all scatter.
Operate any website for any length of time and you will be approached by one of these bottom feeders. They will offer to "exchange links" or even pay you about the cost of a nice lunch for placing an article on your site or even just a few link-rich sentences. Many people do this, because they figure, why not? Nobody else is paying them to write this stuff.
The downside: If Google catches you, it lands on you like the circus fat lady falling off a high wire. After the New York Times revealed just how thoroughly Google had been punked by J.C Penney, it manually "adjusted" the PageRank for all of those terms that used to be number one down into the boonies of Googledom.
In other words, J.C Penney isn't feeling lucky any more.
If you're relying on page rank to drive business to your site, then you probably want to play it safe. But if you already don't get any Google love, it's a no-brainer -- take the money and the spammy links and run.
This is a war Google won't win. Or, at least, Google's users won't win. Because on the Web, the search race is not to the swift or the strong but to those who are willing to pay a dirty SEO firm to cultivate link farms. And you know what link farms require? A whole lot of manure.
Do you trust Google search results? Post your thoughts below

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Chrome Extension Provides Search Quality Signals, Blocks Content Farms

Google's Matt Cutts has indicated in recent weeks that Google is working on projects that will deal with some of the search engine's quality issues with regards to content farms. It looks like one of those projects is now here. Google has launched a Chrome extension that lets users block sites from search results.

Will you use the Chrome extension to send signals to Google about search quality?

If you're a Chrome user, you can now block any content farm you want, on a personalized basis. And while it may be personalized, there's more...

"We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content," says Cutts. "One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users."

"If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," says Cutts. (emphasis added)


Now that's interesting.

However, we can only assume that a pretty small percentage will actually take advantage of this tool, so how much weight will such a signal actually carry? Only a certain percentage of Google users use Chrome in the first place, and I'm guessing only a small percentage of Chrome users will go to the lengths of actually installing this extension, and that's of the ones that actually know about it. Then, how many of those that find out about it, and install it, will actually use it on an ongoing basis, looking to send Google search quality signals throughout their daily lives. I'm guessing not a lot.


Is this the grand solution to the content farm/search quality problem? Probably not. But it's a start. At the very least, those concerned about the quality of their search results have a new way to filter their own personal Google experience. One issue is that some of the content farms actually do have some quality content. I'd hate to miss out on the good stuff, just because I don't want the majority.

Of course, that's the approach Blekko has taken. DuckDuckGo also has an interesting strategy, which founder Gabriel Weinberg shared . He says it's easier for a StartUp like his to take action on content farms than it is for Google. "From Google's perspective it's a lot harder because they can get in trouble...they're under government scrutiny, and all sorts of things," he told WebProNews. "They can get in trouble for censorship...it's much easier for a startup to do it (like us) than it is for Google."

Does it have to be all or nothing with content farms? I guess time will tell. Cutts has said they want to solve the problem algorithmically, as opposed to using human editing.

I wonder which sites will be blocked by users the most. That would be an interesting list to see. I wonder if it will be similar to Blekko's banned list.

The extension is called the Personal Blocklist Extension.

Do you think this is the right direction for Google to take to increase search quality? Share your thoughts.

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Full-duplex breakthrough can double Wi-Fi capacity

Stanford University researchers have found a way to double the capacity of wireless networks, while at the same time making them more reliable and efficient.
Their discovery supports full-duplex connections -- allowing data to be transmitted between devices in both directions at the same time rather than in just one direction as has been the case until now, the researchers say. Both Wi-Fi and cellular networks could benefit.
The speed in either direction remains the same, however. So if a wireless network has a speed of 15Mbps, that doesn't change with the new technology, it just opens up the channel so both ends can send and receive at 15Mbps simultaneously. With current technology, one side sends then waits while the transmitter at the other end takes its turn.
"This technology breaks a fundamental assumption about the way wireless networks work," says Philip Levis, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, one of the leaders of the research.
Equipment initially used to demonstrate this new capability has been refined so it requires two rather than three antennas, and details of this upgrade will be made public in a paper next month. This summer, the researchers will look into making commercial products based on their research, he says.
Using a cancellation technique, the researchers make it possible for both parties in a wireless conversation to talk at the same time without drowning each other out. This can help reduce the number of failed connections on Wi-Fi networks that are dense and busy, researchers say.
Until now, the volume of a transmitted radio message overpowered the relatively weak incoming signal from the radio at the other end. Or as the researchers put it, "when a node transmits, its own signal is millions of times stronger than other signals it might hear: the node is trying to hear a whisper while shouting."
Technology developed at Stanford cancels out the signal created by sending machines so they can pick up the relatively quiet transmissions coming at them.
That assumption was that if both ends of a radio connection spoke at once, the signals being received would be obscured. The traditional way around the problem is to have radios communicating on the same frequency take turns transmitting so the outgoing signal doesn't interfere with the incoming. That's why people carrying on a conversation over wireless say, "Over," when they are done talking so there is no overlap.
Most of the time this isn't a problem in Wi-Fi networks because conversations take place between access points and individual end-user devices with little likelihood of simultaneous transmissions, Levis says. But in crowded environments, such simultaneous transmissions do occur and none succeeds.
With full-duplex transmissions enabled, when an access point starts to receive from an end device, it can immediately send a message back saying it is busy so other end devices in the area know not to transmit, Levis says.
In cellular networks where carriers use repeaters to extend the range of base stations, this technology could be used to make transmitting boosted signals from cell phones to base stations and base stations to cell phones more efficient.
The researchers' design uses two transmitting antennas, one receiving antenna at each node. Both transmitting antennas send the same data, but the receiving antenna is placed so it receives signals from the transmitting antennas that are out of phase so they cancel out. The result is there is no signal - or at least a very reduced signal - for the receiving antenna to receive.

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