Archive for November, 2009

A few months ago at SemTech 2009 we announced that our questions and answers database –launched almost a year ago – had grown to more than 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. “High-quality” means that we use our semantic and extraction capabilities to recognize the best answer from within the sea of information on relevant pages. Instead of 10 blue links, we deliver the best answer right at the top of the page.

This week we’ve achieved another significant milestone by reaching 400 million Q&A pairs, and I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our engineering and product teams who have built one of the largest and most useful Q&A collections on the web.

I also want to share what we’re seeing from our users in response to our Q&A offerings, and to preview what’s next for Ask.

Our Q&A strategy has started to pay off. We see increasing loyalty among users who conduct question searches on Ask. Simultaneously, we’ve seen a pronounced increase in the percentage of users on Ask who conduct queries in the form of a question – we now see 3x more questions on our site as a share of total queries than our competitors. And perhaps most rewarding for us is when we ask Internet users where they go for questions and answers online, they consistently rank Ask.com first, making us the #1 brand for questions and answers online.

Online search in the form of natural-language questions was the ingenious proposition of the original Ask Jeeves in 1996, and frankly, it’s the reason we’re still around today after so many other Internet brands didn’t survive. 

As the leader in questions for more than a decade, one thing is crystal clear: Asking a question isn’t the same as searching.

Our users tell us that their expectation when asking a question is different from their expectation when conducting a search. When asking a question, they have a specific need for a specific piece of information. When conducting a search, they’re browsing for information, sorting through results to unearth the answer they’re looking for. 

Put another way, when asking a question, you expect the work to be done for you (much like when you ask a librarian for a book at the library). When conducting a search, you do the work yourself (skipping the librarian, and heading to the card catalog instead).

Further, with the advent of the social web, asking questions online is now more natural, as we have the ability to broadcast a question to real people, our friends, instead of hoping a computer can understand our inquiry.

I firmly believe that questions are the future of search, but search technologies as we know them today can’t deliver against this future.

And this brings me to what’s next for Ask.

We’re focused on solving the two shortcomings of search as it relates to questions:

1. Traditional search signals don’t work well for answers to questions.
2. The answers to many questions are wrong or don’t exist online.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you’re in the business of answering questions, the volume of inbound links to a given web page – a long-accepted search technique for ranking web sites – doesn’t tell you the site with the best answer to a user’s question; it just tells you the most popular page with relevant information. Nor does another search technique, text matching, sufficiently identify the best answer, as the text in a question is rarely found in the best answer. Same with a newer though established technique, pioneered at Ask, actually, that uses click-through behavior to determine a site's relevance. Unlike presenting a text snippet that merely describes a site and a link, presenting the actual answer requires no click through to the  
destination site.

Below are some examples which bring this to life.
 
 
 
Without a wholly different approach, search engines will never be able to adequately answer all the questions that users increasingly have for them.

More importantly, no method that merely extracts answers from a published web page will ever be able to access the limitless number of answers that are unpublished on the Internet. Indeed, the information that is directly relevant to many questions most certainly exists; it's just that it’s locked in people’s heads or captured in unpublished conversations, and therefore inaccessible by traditional search. Obviously, this is not a trivial deficiency in a world that is increasingly interconnected and clamoring for perspective, guidance, and shared knowledge at an interpersonal level online.
 
At Ask.com, we’re dedicating ourselves to solving these problems and we're approaching the solution in two primary ways: 

1.  Extracting and ranking existing answers
2. Indexing sources of answers that have not yet been published

To extract and rank existing answers, as opposed to merely ranking web pages that contain information, we have and are continuing to develop a unique set of algorithms and technologies that are based on new signals for relevance specifically tuned to questions and answers.

I’ve outlined a few of these below.

    

 
 
Developing a new Q&A relevance algorithm that draws upon these signals is what we’re focused on building here at Ask, honing our ability to extract answers from the published Internet, and allowing us to fulfill a vastly larger volume of questions than can be done with existing search technologies.

But our work doesn’t end with extraction and ranking of existing, published answers. Where our vision really comes to life is in our efforts to index the sources of unpublished knowledge that can generate answers specifically in response to a question, in the moment it’s asked. This is the long tail of questions that are nearly impossible for search engines to answer, but which create incredible value for users when they are.

Here are some examples:

 

As we accelerate our strategy to answer the world’s questions, these “tough questions” are where we see huge opportunity, and where we are also focusing our efforts. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, we will do this unconventionally, harnessing the equity of the Ask brand, and our loyal, question-loving users to build a community of answerers available through Ask.

We’ve learned at Ask that while the existing Web can solve many problems, when you’re in the pursuit of answering questions, relying on published information sources can really only get you part of the way there. There is an infinite volume of answers in people’s heads that isn’t being indexed by the search engines today, and that can’t be successfully deployed against questions until you unleash it, in real-time, in response to the unique needs expressed by the person asking the question. 

This is the problem we’re in the process of solving here at Ask: Connecting our users’ questions to the best possible answers on the planet – be they published or unpublished. And as we solve this problem, we believe today’s multi-billion dollar questions and answers value proposition will one day transcend search as we know it today.

I’m very passionate about this, and so is our team at Ask.com. You’ll be hearing much more from us on this in the coming months.

Doug

Doug Leeds
President
Ask.com US

I spend a lot of time dealing with problems users encounter when using Internet Explorer. As a result, when I write about add-ons, I’m usually talking about misbehaving code that is wrecking the browser. However, it’s not all doom-and-gloom out there, and I’m delighted to share my favorite browser add-on with you.

I first came across Ralph Hare’s work when perusing the IE add-on sample code at CodeProject. Ralph and I both liked mouse gestures and wished that Internet Explorer offered them. For those of you who have never used mouse gestures, basically, they allow you to trigger commands like back, forward, refresh, etc, without using the keyboard or clicking on toolbar buttons or menus. While not everyone wants to use mouse gestures, some of us find them incredibly compelling. This sweet spot makes gestures the sort of feature ripe for implementation as an add-on.

Fortunately for all of us, Ralph is a great developer and he put together a fantastic gestures add-on for IE which has evolved and improved a lot over the last six years. I’ve installed his add-on on every computer I’ve used since discovering it, and I now find it annoying to use browsers that don’t support gestures. It’s an ironic turn of events for me, since I’ve been a keyboard snob for over a decade. :-)

What makes this add-on so great?

Respect for the User. The gestures add-on respects your existing browser settings, and does not attempt to change your default homepage, search provider, favorites, user-agent string, etc. There’s no junk (e.g. adware, unexpected toolbars, etc) bundled with it either.

Stability. I’ve tried out a lot of different add-ons over the years, but almost always end up uninstalling each after a few days because they’re unstable and result in occasional or frequent browser crashes. In contrast, Ralph has delivered a rock-solid implementation of gestures; the few bugs I’ve found have been fixed quickly and the updated versions are automatically offered using an automatic notification service.

Best Practices. Ralph’s code is compiled following best-practices for secure and stable add-ons, including linking with the /NXCOMPAT and /DYNAMICBASE flags to opt-in to DEP/NX and ASLR memory protections.

Performance. Many browser extensions are useful from time-to-time, but I’m not willing to suffer a performance penalty when not actively using an extension. For some types of extensions (menu extensions, toolbar buttons) this isn’t a problem, because the add-on code only loads when I actively use the add-on. However, an add-on like Mouse Gestures inherently needs to be available at all times, so high performance is an absolutely critical consideration.

Ralph’s Browser Helper Object (BHO) is written in native C++, and designed and coded for speed. After installing, check out the Load Time column inside the IE Tools > Manage Add-ons dialog:

As mentioned previously, the extension offers an auto-update mechanism, but Ralph ensures that this won't hurt startup performance. He does so by running the check in a background thread, and waiting for about a minute after tab startup to kick off the webservice call. Ralph also sets the NoExplorer registry key to prevent his BHO from loading inside Windows Explorer.

Even the default configuration is optimized for performance: by default, mouse trails aren’t shown, and if a user wants them, they can choose between basic trails:

which work fine with all video cards, and the slightly fancier advanced trails:

which work best with higher-end hardware.

Cross-Version Support. Mouse Gestures is compiled in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors (installed individually) making the gestures add-on one of the very few available for 64-bit IE. The add-on works in all versions of IE and I’ve personally used it on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7 without problems.

Ease-of-Installation. The 32bit and 64bit installers together weigh in just under 1 megabyte. The add-on is packaged using the same NSIS installer that I use to install Fiddler.

If you decide you don’t like the add-on, you can easily uninstall it using the Add/Remove Programs control panel.

Customizability and Power. You can customize its options using the Mouse Gestures… item added to the browser Tools menu. The configuration dialog allows you to assign gestures to built-in actions, define new gestures or actions, and change the appearance of mouse trails.

The most common gesture I use is Down,Right which by default is bound to the Close Tab action. I’ve also bound the Down,Up and Up,Down gestures to the Toggle FullScreen Mode action; this is slightly simpler than hunting for the F11 key on my small but beloved Lenovo X200.

If you’d like, you can bind any gesture to open any of your browser Favorites in the current tab, or a new foreground or background tab.

One of the most powerful features of the add-on allows you to bind a JavaScript file to an action. I use this feature to bind a simple page cleanup script to the Left,Right gesture. When I’m reading an online newspaper or similar page with flashing images or other unwanted distractions, I simply hold the right mouse button and waggle the mouse—all of the images and flash objects are instantly removed, allowing me to read in peace.

Price. Mouse Gestures add-on is clearly a labor of love, and Ralph makes it available for free. If you’d like, you can help defray his web hosting costs using the unobtrusive “Donate via Paypal” link buried at the bottom of his site.

Conclusion

If you’re willing to get hooked on a new way of interacting with your browser, give Ralph’s Mouse Gestures add-on a try, and join me in thanking Ralph Hare for his great work!

Eric Lawrence

Posted by Jon Feldman and Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research, NY

The 50th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) was held a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta. This conference (along with STOC and SODA) is one of the the major venues for recent advances in algorithm design and computational complexity. Computation is now a major ingredient of almost any field of science, without which many of the recent achievements would not have happened (e.g., Human Genome decoding). As the 50th anniversary of FOCS, this event was a landmark in the history of foundations of computer science. Below, we give a quick report of some highlights from this event and our research contribution:

• In a special one-day workshop before the conference, four pioneer researchers of theoretical computer science talked about historical, contemporary, and future research directions. Richard Karp gave an interesting survey on "Great Algorithms," where he discussed algorithms such as the simplex method for linear programming and fast matrix multiplication; he gave examples of algorithms with high impact on our daily lives, as well as algorithms that changed our way of thinking about computation. As an example of an algorithm with great impact on our lives, he gave the PageRank algorithm designed by Larry and Sergey at Google. Mihalis Yannakakis discussed the recent impact of studying game theory and equilibria from a computational perspective and discussed the relationships between the complexity classes PLS, FIXP, and PPAD. In particular he discussed completeness of computing pure and mixed Nash equilibria for PLS, and for FIXP and PPAD respectively. Noga Alon gave a technical talk about efficient routing on expander graphs, and presented a clever combinatorial algorithm to route demand between multiple pairs of nodes in an online fashion. Finally, Manuel Blum gave an entertaining and mind-stimulating talk about the potential contribution of computer science to the study of human consciousness, educating the community on the notion of "Global Workspace Theory."
• The conference program included papers in areas related to algorithm and data structure design, approximation and optimization, computational complexity, learning theory, cryptography, quantum computing, and computational economics. The best student paper awards went to Alexander Shrstov and Jonah Sherman for their papers "The intersection of two halfspaces has high threshold degree" and "Breaking the multicommodity flow barrier for O(sqrt(log n))-approximations to sparsest cut." The program included many interesting results like the polynomial-time smoothed analysis of the k-means clustering algorithm (by David Arthur, Bodo Manthey and Heiko Roeglin), and a stronger version of Azuma's concentration inequality used to show optimal bin-packing bounds (by Ravi Kannan). The former paper studies a variant of the well-known k-means algorithm that works well in practice, but whose worst-case running time can be exponential. By analyzing this algorithm in the smoothed analysis framework, the paper gives a new explanation for the success of the k-means algorithm in practice.
• We presented our recent result about online stochastic matching in which we improve the approximation factor of computing the maximum cardinality matching in an online stochastic setting. The original motivation for this work is online ad allocation which was discussed in a previous blog post. In this algorithm, using our prior on the input (or our historical stochastic information), we compute two disjoint solutions to an instance that we expect to happen; then online, we try one solution first, and if it fails, we try the the other solution. The algorithm is inspired by the idea of "power of two choices," which has proved useful in online load balancing and congestion control. Using this method, we improve the worst-case guarantee of the online algorithm past the notorious barrier of 1-1/e. We hope that employing this idea and our technique for online stochastic optimization will find other applications in related stochastic resource allocation problems.
  

The FOCS conference (along with STOC and SODA) has been the birthplace for many popular data structures and efficient algorithms, with far-reaching applications. Many researchers and engineers at Google are trained in these research communities, and apply these techniques whenever possible. Google researchers will continue to contribute and learn from these conferences.

Posted by Mike Belshe, Software Engineer and Roberto Peon, Software Engineer

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog.

Today we'd like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate. Today, web clients and servers speak HTTP. HTTP is an elegantly simple protocol that emerged as a web standard in 1996 after a series of experiments. HTTP has served the web incredibly well. We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support.

So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance - pages loaded up to 55% faster. There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions. However, we believe that we have reached the stage where our small team could benefit from the active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community.

For those of you who would like to learn more and hopefully contribute to our experiment, we invite you to review our early stage documentation, look at our current code and provide feedback through the Chromium Google Group.

The leaves’ color transforms to an autumn palette as the brisk cool breeze sweeps through Silicon Valley… change is in the air and My Yahoo! is no exception. Below are some recent changes on My Yahoo!… and yes, preview on the Mail Preview app is back!

First off, we’ve improved the speed of the page by about 500 milliseconds (1/2 a second). This performance improvement may not seem like much, but if you are coming back to the site a few times a day and so is everyone else that uses My Yahoo!, we are literally saving all our visitors over 300,000 minutes every day!

We have a new comics App by GoComics that will give you easy access to dozens of comics. Save a few of your favorites and check them out every day.

There is now an updated design for the Mail app that mimics the layout found on the Yahoo! homepage. We originally had removed the hover preview feature (hover your mouse over an email and get a preview of the message) but have now put it back. Thanks for all the feedback letting us know how important that feature is to you. We actually have several new features coming soon that should make this even better… but that is a secret for now.

If you have ever saved multiple locations on the Yahoo! network used to get weather data, they were not all recognized by My Yahoo!. We have merged all of these so that you now have one saved weather location repository. You can check it out on the Weather app.

We’ve also fixed several bugs and minor issues… the link in the TV Listings App for changing your time zone is fixed. Just click on “Options” and select “Settings” then click on the “change” link. The local news feeds that started showing stale data should be fixed now. The Fantasy Sports App should be more reliable and stable.

Lastly, we’ve been shutting down some old content delivery mechanisms. We have replaced the old feeds with news ones. As a side effect, you may see a duplicate of a feed on your page. If this happens, simply click on the “Options” menu and select “Remove” to delete the duplicate.

Apps showcased in this post:
- Add GoComics
- Add Mail Preview
- Add Weather
- Add TV Listings
- Add Fantasy Sports

That’s it for now. I’ll leave you with me singing and dancing about Yahoo! with Kimberly Caldwell of American Idol.

Michael
- My Yahoo! Team Lead

We recently launched a new, improved Google Checkout acceptance logo. When you display the new logo, shoppers can now not only see that you accept Google Checkout as a payment method, but they can also read reviews from Checkout buyers who have completed a purchase at your online store.

Want to highlight your reviews? When shoppers click on the acceptance logo, a new window opens to display your Checkout reviews page. This page lets shoppers learn more about the kind of experience to expect from your store by showing your average rating and previous buyers' comments. The page also includes links that allow shoppers to easily find reviews about customer service, shipping refunds, and returns. In the case where you have responded to a buyer's review, your response will be displayed below the review to provide any necessary clarification.

Adding the new acceptance logo to your website is easy. Simply copy and paste the code snippet located in your Google Checkout merchant account into your website's HTML. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Posted by George Reis, Software Engineer and Heather Folsom, Business Product Manager

Today marks the premiere of a new program named Health Tech Today, which features informative interviews with some of the world's top health leaders; compelling health-related personal stories; and the latest new technology and IT innovations.  The show is hosted by Dr. Bill Crounse and the premiere episode features an interview with eHealth adovcate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Here is the complete list of guests from the first episode. Archbishop Desmond Tutu – eHealth & human rights advocate, South Africa Dr. Kim Pittenger – MD, Medical Director, Virginia Mason, Kirkland, WA Don Detmer – MD, MA, Professor of Medical Education, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA Andrew Cull – CEO, Remote Medical International Cornelia Ruland - PhD, Center for Shared Decision Making & Nursing Research, Oslo, Norway Chris Otto – CEO & Founder, Halo Monitoring

So what does this have to do with Messenger and why are we writing about it on the MessengerSays blog?

Besides being a great show on a topic that many of us feel passionate about, we’re happy to say that Windows Live Messenger was used to conduct all of the remote video interviews.  A few weeks prior to the recording of the first episode we were approached by the producers asking if we thought the Messenger video call functionality would work for the live interviews they wanted to conduct with guests from all around the world.  We said ‘of course’ and after a quick discussion it was clear that Messenger would indeed meet all their needs.

The producers explained to us that they would typically have to transport the guests to a studio and pay a hefty fee to setup a live satellite-link.  They were very excited at how simple it was to setup a video call and not only did they save money (free!), but the guests didn’t even have to leave their homes to do the interviews.

This was a great win-win situation for everyone (except maybe the satellite-link owners) and the team is looking forward to hearing about more instances where our technology was used to bring things like this together.

Check out the episode for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/healthtechtoday 

Try a video call yourself!

Thanks,
Tolga & Lonn
Windows Live Messenger Team

by Helen Kang, Software Engineer, Blogger


Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.

We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!

You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.

This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.

Today, we're excited to launch the Product Search Marketplace Partner program with our initial partner marketplaces eBid, eCrater, and Etsy. These marketplaces will submit product data for their sellers frequently and with all relevant attributes, so online shoppers get the up-to-date information they need to make smart buying decisions. Additionally, these marketplaces are a great solution for merchants who don't have a standalone retail website because they provide online visibility for the merchants' products. You can learn more about the program and our partners here.

Posted by Vivek Tata, Product Marketing Manger, Google Product Search