Information Retrieval Gupf

As reported by Scoble: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/01bbb409/i-love-that-bing-means-is-not-google-very
I agree — very clever and quite funny.  A recursion that all computer scientists should appreciate, tipping its hat to similarly-constructed acronyms, such as GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix) and Pine (Pine is not Elm).
It’s interesting, too, how the new generation references the older generation, i.e. the final character in Bing is [...]

I just came across a Wired article today on a new search push from Microsoft, which will supposedly be named Bing. It touches on some of the issues that we were discussing in yesterday’s comment thread, in particular: 
People thought online e-mail was just fine and more or less converged on the same specific set of [...]

I have a question that has been bothering me, kicking around in my head, for at least half a decade now.  And I can’t seem to come to any solid conclusion on it. I suppose it can’t hurt to throw it out here onto the web, and see if one of my 3 readers has [...]

This was a particularly busy week, and I did not get a chance to post many thoughts.  Instead, I’ll do a quick roundup of articles that I enjoyed reading this past week+.
First, a tongue-in-cheek post from Nick Carr entitled For Whom the Google Tolls:
It’s amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able [...]

Google finally acquiesces, and starts exposing more advanced, user-controllable search result refactorization options.  See here, here, and here:
But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand [...]

Two pieces of recent news have my head spinning. Both are instances of technology companies acting in exactly the opposite manner from their ideals (and public statements). The first is Microsoft announcement of an open-source version of BigTable: 
Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene [...]

Google is an information retrieval company that prides itself on the purity of its results.  It does not allow the integrity of its ranked list ordering to be tampered with by sponsored results. It also has claimed for years that it does not engage in hand-coding (aka hand-crafting or hard-coding) of results. Everything that it [...]

In a recent response article, Danny Sullivan takes Forbes CEO Spanfeller to task on the whole Google vs. The Newspapers issue.  There are a lot of things I agree with Danny about, and an equal number of things that I disagree with.  But I feel compelled to propagate one nugget from Spanfeller:
Spanfeller: Search is not [...]

Apropos to my post yesterday, Technology Review has a short comparison of Wolfram Alpha and Google.  Here are a few samples:
Here’s what I entered, and what I found.
SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple
WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got side-by-side tables and graphics on the stock prices and data on the two companies, plus a chart plotting the price of [...]

It is good practice to rotate the mattress on your bed, to prevent lopsided wear-and-tear from shortening its useful life.  The same thing applies to car tires; they need rotating.  Smart travelers know to rotate the airlines from which they purchase tickets, as the accumulation over time of per-ticket better prices often outweighs the rewards [...]