Subscribe / Renew |
|
Contact Us |
|
► Subscribe to our Free Weekly Newsletter |
home | Welcome, sign in or click here to subscribe. | login |
June 22, 2012
Q. When are search engines at their most prophetic?
A. When you start typing the first letters into the browser's search box and it races ahead to guess your query, probably based on what others in your region have searched for, says Swapnajit Mitra in IEEE Spectrum magazine, who ran ABC tests on Google and Microsoft's Bing, the two most popular engines. “The results can be surprisingly accurate or amusingly off base,” depending on the search engine used. “But together Google and Bing offer a snapshot of the world's 536.6 million English-language-using Internet searchers.”
. . .
Previous columns: