web

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.

Wolfram|Alpha ... what a name, huh? And I mean that in the worst way possible. Dismal chances of ever entering the lexicon aside, there's a lot of excitement surrounding Wolfram|Alpha, which officially launched last week. If you're not familiar with it, Wolfram|Alpha is billed as a "computational knowledge engine" and is the brainchild of British mathematician Stephen Wolfram. Unlike Google and other search engines you've used before, Wolfram|Alpha doesn't return links to relevant Web pages.

As I sit down to write this week's Grouse column, I find myself having to work through one of those rather dull and annoying headaches, which, I'm almost certain, is from repeatedly slapping myself in the forehead over the course of the last few days. It's not that I'm a masochist -- I'm just upset with myself for not being the first to think of a Netflix-style site for books and book lovers.

It's been 20 years this month since Timothy Berners-Lee proposed the Web as a means of organizing information generated at CERN. And if science enabled its creation, the Web has likewise changed science, providing new ways to observe and analyze information.

Also in today's links: self-doping caterpillars, old buzzwords and new buzzwords, and more.

Yes, and there are lots of ways they can do it. Web pages are a flexible platform for exchanging information, but that also means it can be easy to track what you’re looking at on them. The first method is through third-party content. Say Company A is an advertising or tracking firm. When you visit sites that display A’s ads or use A to track their visitors, A can identify your browser and see what pages you visit on those sites (and more).