queries

According to a report by the New York Times, nearly 25 percent of the traffic handled by search engine Wolfram Alpha comes from Siri, Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant software.

Apple announced a partnership with Wolfram Alpha in October when it released the iPhone 4S and introduced Siri. Wolfram Alpha differs from other search engines in that its results are based on data curated by Wolfram Alpha, not on algorithms attempting to sort the Web like Google or Bing.

Despite early criticism of Wolfram Alpha's self-described "computational knowledge engine," including its initial focus on mathematical and scientific … Read more

If you're not satisfied with the power or flexibility of the Mac's built-in Spotlight search, you should check out HoudahSpot. This app isn't a Spotlight replacement, but rather a more versatile front-end for Spotlight--as it actually uses the technology behind Spotlight to help you find files on your computer. HoudahSpot works in much the same way as Spotlight, and you can pull it up with a key combo or a menubar icon. Once you do, though, HoudahSpot offers many more search options--and it waits until you've finished forming a query rather than immediately returning results as … Read more

In recent years, a software project called jQuery has spread far and wide across the Web, bringing sophisticated user interface features and easing the difficulties of working with multiple browsers.

Now the first version of the software has arrived for the mobile Web, with the release of jQuery Mobile 1.0. The software is prebuilt code to help programmers create Web sites--and even packaged Web apps--using standards such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

The software, whose premier sponsor is Adobe Systems, smooths over differences among many mobile browsers it supports, including those of iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, as … Read more

The tragic BP oil spill was on the minds of Yahoo and AOL search users this year.

According to Yahoo, which released its Year In Review blog post today, more users searched for information about the BP oil spill than any other topic in 2010. It was followed by searches for the World Cup, Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, and Lady Gaga, respectively. Apple's iPhone took the sixth spot in Yahoo's list of the top searches, while Megan Fox, Justin Bieber, American Idol, and Britney Spears rounded out the top 10.

When it came to queries through Yahoo's … Read more

Happy Harvester allows you to extract data from Web pages for use in other programs. There are two primary views: Source Preview and Browser Preview. Type a URL into the Base URL window, and the Source Preview shows the code for the Web page; the Browser Preview shows how the Web page displays in a browser.

Happy Harvester's interface is basic but functional. There's a useful Help file that explains how to use the program's main features and extras. The documentation touts the program's ability to pull source code from Web pages that you can then … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg should be proud: The top search term of 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, was not "porn," "poker," or "Britney Spears." It was, for the first time, "Facebook."

In 2008, Facebook had been the tenth most searched term on the Web, according to the traffic company's annual survey of search queries.

The rest of the list for 2009 is also made up of "navigational" searches, which Hitwise reps say actually always dominate top search queries despite the common wisdom that top searches tend to be for online gambling … Read more

Identify is a small, experimental Firefox extension that quickly analyzes a contact's user name to pull up biographical information, and grab links to their profiles on other social services. For instance, if I were to use it on Rafe Needleman's Twitter profile it would be able to tell me what other services he's using, like FriendFeed, Facebook, Last.fm, and more. The same thing would happen if I checked from his profile on one of those other sites, too.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. It did better on some of my friends … Read more

MySQL has long built a great database. It's increasingly also building a great database business.

MySQL made two big announcements on Wednesday, one product-related (the final release of MySQL 5.1) and the second licensing model-related (improvements to the subscription-only MySQL Enterprise Monitor service with Query Analyzer). Of the two, I believe the latter is the more important as it helps Sun to monetize the research and development investments it has been making in the MySQL product.

The product announcement is that MySQL 5.1 will ship on or before December 6. Sun announced MySQL 5.1 back in April, but now it's ready for release. MySQL 5.1 is not important because it adds transactions capabilities (MySQL has had this functionality for years), but rather because it augments MySQL's sweet spot: industry-beating scalability and performance.

Better than Oracle? Absolutely, as Sun senior vice president of Database Products, Marten Mickos, told me in a phone interview:

Performance and total cost of ownership are the two areas where we beat Oracle. Having said that, we aren't adding new functionality in order to compete with Oracle, but rather to serve our existing market and new markets.

Which markets? As the enterprise moves applications to the Web, that's MySQL wins. That's where we want to be relevant. That's why in 5.1 we have new features in replication and partitioning, for example. Both are targeted at scaling out, meaning that we're delivering enhanced throughput more than syntactical features.

As Google, Facebook, and other Web companies know, MySQL is the gold standard of Web-savvy databases. The more enterprises move to the Web, the better for Sun's MySQL business.

But only if Sun actually knows how to make money with its open-source assets like the MySQL database. This is why the addition of MySQL's Query Analyzer tool to the MySQL Enterprise Monitor service is so important. The Query Analyzer helps database administrators to quickly resolve problems in their database queries, thereby boosting performance. … Read more

Microsoft just announced the obvious: open source is an increasingly critical (and common) component of software today, including proprietary software. The open-source software in question is jQuery, an excellent open-source javascript library that Microsoft will be including in its Visual Studio application development platform.

Of course, this has always been the case at Microsoft, what with MSN Messenger and other products incorporating open-source components for years, but this is perhaps the first time that Microsoft has publicly welcomed open source as part of its software infrastructure, and has shown a desire to contribute back to existing communities. Microsoft's Scott … Read more