Archive for August, 2008

Trexy successfully migrated to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) a few months ago.

Last month I migrated the much larger Turbo10 cluster (our sister search engine) into the Cloud. Turbo10's advertising network currently receives over 30 million search hits per day and close to 1 billion searches per month, so its capacity requirements are much higher than Trexy.

We launched over 20 machines in the Cloud to service Turbo10's incoming load and were alarmed when many of the machines turned red. The load was way too high. "Quick! Launch more machines!!"

Then suddenly we received this message from Amazon, "Sorry - machine quota exceeded." SNAP!! It seems we'd stretched the 'elastic' in elastic computing too far. What followed was an anxious wait until someone from Amazon manually increased our quota.

Things are now running fine and both search engines are now happily situated in the Cloud. Phew!

Now I'd better get back to designing the next version of Trexy ...

Nige has been invited back to speak at the Search Solutions 2008 conference for a third time.

This annual event is organised by the British Computer Society's Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) and will be held in London on Tuesday, 24th of September.

Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there's just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page, orkut scraps and blogger). If you're chatting in Hindi, when you type 'haal kaisa hai janab ka?' the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as 'हाल कैसा है जनाब का?'

There are currently 5 transliteration bots - Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with "@bot.talk.google.com". To use one of these bots follow these three steps:

1) First add the bot that you want to your friend's list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.
2) Start a chat session with your friend
3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.



तो शुरू हो जाइए...

Beta Blogliners,

We launched a new skin for Beta.bloglines.com. The revised skin comes after much review by Blogliners (Bloglinites?) who have been keeping us posted on their likes and dislikes of the redesign. Here’s a quick peek:

We’ve also launched display advertising in search results and an ad unit on the Classic Start Page. We’re in the process of developing monetization methods ($$) which work within a feed reader. We look forward to listening to Blogliners and working with 3rd parties to develop the next generation blog and feed networks. You’ll see more of the redesign soon.

Enjoy!

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

We were really happy & proud to see yesterday the report from Compete which ranks Snap as one of the fastest growing sites in July 2008. Thanks!

Blogger will be unavailable Friday (8/8) at 4:00PM PDT for about 10 minutes for maintenance.

Update: This is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

Additional Windows Live services are available by clicking on the Windows Live jewel:

Usability Improvements
Based on usability studies and feedback from you, we've added a confirmation prompt to prevent accidental deletions of gadgets and feeds, renamed "Add Stuff" to "Add Content" and increased the visibility of the link, changed "Edit" to "Customize" in the gadget chrome and added more space between the Customize link and the delete gadget "X" icon.

Delete Confirmation:

Usability improvements to the gadget chrome:

 

IE 8.0 and FireFox 3.0 Support
My.Live.com now supports the Beta for IE 8.0 and the final version of FF 3.0.  Users will now be able to access their pages and feeds using these browsers.

Add Content Directory Updates
Check out the Add Content directory for new feeds and gadgets.  The updates are part of our on-going effort to ensure quality content, provide better organization, eliminate dead feeds and redundancies.

New items include the full line-up of content from Xbox.com, selections from Office Online, MSN Video, WeatherBug, and more!

Minor Bugs and Glitches Fixed
As part of our switch to My.Live.com, embarrassingly, we forgot to change some of the wording on the site to reflect our new name!  That's been fixed, along with some minor quarks and hiccups that have been reported.

Suggestions and Feedback Forum
Because you asked for it, we've created a My.Live.com Suggestions and Feedback forum on Microsoft.com Forums.  This forum will provide users with a way to interact with our development team by telling us what you think, ask questions, and provide your suggestions for what you think will make My.Live.com better.   Access the forum at http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en/MyLiveCom/threads/.

What's Next?
We'll start planning for our next update to My.Live.com, aiming for a minor update in the Fall.  Right now, most of our time is being devoted to another project that we'll have more information about in the coming months.  Until then, we hope you like the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback in our new forum.

- The My.Live.com Team

With summer knocking at the door, some may dream of being on an exotic beach, drinking mojitos and dancing to some Latin beats. That’s what I’m thinking of now.

If you’re sharing the same mood, now is your chance to check some Fiesta party tunes on the brand new Yahoo! Música México, the first Yahoo! Music site launched in Latin America.

Bursting with great local content, it features a partnership with MTV in a program called Blog & Rock. Users are invited to tell their stories, and the best one will be performed by a Mexican rockstar and may become the next big hit in the Latin world. How do you like that?

Yahoo! Música México has joined our worldwide music network bringing Yahoo! Music International up to 14 sites. If you feel like experiencing some global sounds, there are many ways you can enjoy and entertain yourself. Explore one of the Yahoo! Music sites in the Americas (Canada, US in Espanol, Mexico), Europe (UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy) or Asia Pacific (Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Australia).
Wondering if Enrique Iglesias is still the number one in Spain? Check their Top 100 Charts. What about the latest music trends in Taiwan… awesome! Looking for more familiar tunes? Dive into some Transcanadian music.

Yahoo! Music embraces thousands of artists and genres worldwide and serves a music community of 60 million users every month. We’ll be launching some more new international sites later this year so stay tuned for more global news, and in the meantime enjoy those worldwide beats.

ciao,

Nicola Ghezzi
Yahoo! Music

Additional Windows Live services are available by clicking on the Windows Live jewel:

Usability Improvements
Based on usability studies and feedback from you, we've added a confirmation prompt to prevent accidental deletions of gadgets and feeds, renamed "Add Stuff" to "Add Content" and increased the visibility of the link, changed "Edit" to "Customize" in the gadget chrome and added more space between the Customize link and the delete gadget "X" icon.

Delete Confirmation:

Usability improvements to the gadget chrome:

 

IE 8.0 and FireFox 3.0 Support
My.Live.com now supports the Beta for IE 8.0 and the final version of FF 3.0.  Users will now be able to access their pages and feeds using these browsers.

Add Content Directory Updates
Check out the Add Content directory for new feeds and gadgets.  The updates are part of our on-going effort to ensure quality content, provide better organization, eliminate dead feeds and redundancies.

New items include the full line-up of content from Xbox.com, selections from Office Online, MSN Video, WeatherBug, and more!

Minor Bugs and Glitches Fixed
As part of our switch to My.Live.com, embarrassingly, we forgot to change some of the wording on the site to reflect our new name!  That's been fixed, along with some minor quarks and hiccups that have been reported.

Suggestions and Feedback Forum
Because you asked for it, we've created a My.Live.com Suggestions and Feedback forum on Microsoft.com Forums.  This forum will provide users with a way to interact with our development team by telling us what you think, ask questions, and provide your suggestions for what you think will make My.Live.com better.   Access the forum at http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en/MyLiveCom/threads/.

What's Next?
We'll start planning for our next update to My.Live.com, aiming for a minor update in the Fall.  Right now, most of our time is being devoted to another project that we'll have more information about in the coming months.  Until then, we hope you like the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback in our new forum.

- The My.Live.com Team