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The Grouse

How to Lose Traffic and Alienate People: The Revenge!

Or: why does Google hate this fish?

Welcome to another installment of The Grouse's semi-annual lambasting of poor practices on the Web. When I compiled my first list of all things online and terrible six months ago, I thought I'd been fairly comprehensive. CAPTCHAs, tooltip ads, bottomless dropdown menus and audio ads were among the archaic and ill-conceived online "experiences" thrown on the fire. But just six months later, I find myself with a host of new grievances to air.

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The Grouse

Bing Is Pretty, But Is it Any Good?

The Grouse takes a chance on Microsoft's Google-killer

Heard of Bing yet? If not, you soon will. Backed by a reported $100-million-dollar promotional campaign, Bing is Microsoft's latest grasp at double digits in the war for search engine market share, of which Redmond now owns between 5 and 6 percent (according to Net Applications' Market Share report). After months of beta testing followed by a public preview, Bing officially took over this week as THE search engine powering all of MSN. So, if you use any Microsoft services with even limited frequency, you'll be getting friendly with Bing whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.

But Microsoft isn't going to carve out a fatter slice of market share unless it can convince a new, non-MSN audience to abandon Google and to make Bing its second brain instead. Of course, there has to be good reason to do that. Very good reason. So this week I installed the official Bing add-on to Firefox and put the new kid on the block to the test.

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Illuminating the Dark Web

In its ongoing effort to index the world, Google adds searchability to scanned documents

When a government agency, medical office, or another institution scans a document and uploads it to a Web site, the images are not searchable -- they contain pictures of text, not the text itself. This is the so-called "Dark Web" -- its sinister-sounding name is just a reference to how difficult it is to search.

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Inching Toward Web 3.0

New technology tries to teach computers to understand words like humans do

By some definitions, "Web 3.0" will be characterized by semantic mapping of data. Unlike regular searches which mine information based on keywords you type in, semantic search looks for information you want by connecting the meaning of words. Say, for example, you type in the word "cold." The way search engines like Google and Yahoo run now, you would get results based on the word alone. But "cold," like many words in the English language, is ambiguous and could mean anything from your health to the temperature.

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November 2009: Astronaut 3.0

Inside NASA's astronaut bootcamp and the grueling new training regimen for deep space. Plus, ten young geniuses shaking up science today, one writer's quest to analyze every man-made chemical in her body and more.

Check out the issue's full contents online here

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