Bing!

So Microsoft has a new search engine called "Bing," apparently intended to replace Live Search. (Meanwhile I'm still wondering what happened to Live Search Academic).

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear this word is the Ned Ryerson character in "Groundhog Day" using it repeatedly as in "Ned Ryerson, got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate! Bing! Ned Ryerson, dated your sister Mary until you told me not to. Bing!"

So I guess the word is being used appropriately to denote the "aha" moment, the "sound of found," as Microsoft says.

The site itself is not available yet; it goes live next week. Microsoft has apparently been previewing the functionality to the press, and there are several reviews available.

Searchengineland.com (Posted using ShareThis) has a particularly thorough review including a search-by-search comparison of Bing and Google.

Computerworld also has a nice hands on review titled "Hands on with Microsoft Bing" (also Posted using ShareThis)

Finally, there's a more newsy piece on the release in the New York Times.

WolframAlpha

The New York Times today talks about a new search engine from Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica software. The engine is not a Google/Yahoo-like web crawler, but rather a query interface to a large collection of data. WolframAlpha can answer queries like "ldl 120," for example, with charts of cholesterol levels in the U.S. population. This kind of search engine is less of a competitor and more of a complement to search engines like Google.

Is Perl dead?

As a young programmer working in the Systems Office at a large academic library in 1996, I discovered the wondrous utility of Perl for text processing and web programming. I hacked together a primitive service request program for users to report problems with desktops and dumb terminals from the old Geac GLIS 9000 System.

Lately it seems that Perl has fallen out of favor. Whether it's merely a generational thing or due to fundamental technical merits is a debatable question. The very question of whether Perl is in fact dead spurs lively discussion online. To wit, see the tersely worded site at isperldead.com. To see more, just google "is perl dead" to see some fun results.

There have been a number of languages to emerge in the last 10 years that one could use instead of Perl to get the job done. Ruby, PHP, and Python are the first to come to mind, but there are many others.

We still have a significant Perl codebase where I currently work, although we are moving more and more code over to Java. I'm just wondering what everyone else's experience is out there. I'd love to hear from you about this!

Local search

I just stumbled on EveryBlock last week when a friend emailed me a link to inform me that the Chinese food truck on the street where we work was closed down by the Licenses and Inspection Department. Coincidentally, I was browsing the New York Times website this week and was surprised to find a story there on EveryBlock.

EveryBlock aggregrates data from a number of sources, including government information such as health inspection data. It's a neat site--you can find out about home sales and police reports in your neighborhood as well as seeing if anyone has geotagged a photo from your block in flickr of late.

New article in code4lib

Issue 6 of code4lib is now live, and contains an article by none other than this blogger. code4lib's mission is to "foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future." The article I wrote fits nicely in with this mission statemtent; it's about using tree structures from GUI libraries to represent hierarchical data. Check it out at:

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1083

Google Visualization API

The Google Visualization API allows you to display "structured" data using a variety of different visualizations.

An overview and documentation is available at: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/. You can view some samples at the Google Ajax APIs Playground. Some of the interesting examples include an annotated timeline and a motion chart (of the housing price index against the unemployment rate).

Data Rot on Sunday Morning

David Pogue did a piece about "data rot" on CBS's Sunday Morning this weekend. In case you are not familiar with the term, it means the process by which data formats and hardware become outmoded or physically deteriorate over time, thus rendering the data on them unrecoverable. One woman in the segment talks about how she can't watch her first movie for film school as there are no longer any machines to play it on -- even though school was not that long ago for her. Also, the CIO for the Library of Congress was interviewed about LOC's efforts to preserve historical and culturally significant information.

Check out the story at the CBS news website.