algorithm

The Texas attorney general's office has demanded Google turn over a broad range of internal documents as part of an antitrust review of the search giant, including its formula for determining advertising rates.

The investigation seeks information on the company's closely guarded algorithms that run its search engine and AdWords, Google's system for displaying ads with keyword search results, according to a letter sent last July by Attorney General Greg Abbott's antitrust division and first reported today by Bloomberg News. Investigators are seeking documents related to possible "manual overriding or altering of" search result … Read more

After noticing curious search results at Bing, then running a sting operation to investigate further, Google has concluded that Microsoft is copying Google search results into its own search engine.

That's the report from Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan today, who talked to both companies about it and presented Google's evidence. According to the report, a mechanism could be the Suggested Sites feature of Internet Explorer and the Bing Toolbar for browsers, both of which can gather data about what links people click when running searches.

The story began with Google's team for correcting typographical errors … Read more

In a blog post last week, Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, wrote about the progress the team has made in reducing the amount of spam in search engine results. In that post, he hinted at some changes in the works to push spam levels lower, including one that affects sites that copy content from other sites, as well as those that have low levels of original content.

Clearly, there's a blurry line there--or a "slippery slope," as Larry Dignan referred to it in his own post that waved some red flags over how the … Read more

Most people remember Daedalus, if they remember him at all, as the maker of the wings his son Icarus used to fly too close to the sun, but the Edison of the ancient world also constructed the notorious Labyrinth that trapped the Minotaur. He's a fitting namesake for Astrolog's Daedalus, a free program that creates and solves labyrinthine mazes in just about any geometric shape, in up to 16 dimensions, and viewable from a wide range of perspectives, including overhead and first-person 3D views. Really obsessive types can even create infinitely long fractal-based mazes with more than 1 … Read more

In what would be a stunning blow to the massive search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo, Google is apparently zeroing in on a deal to grab the algorithmic search business for Yahoo Japan, said several sources.

The agreement between Yahoo Japan and the U.S. search giant could be announced as early as today in Japan, sources said, and could be part of a larger deal between the two companies around mobile or other products.

Financial terms of such a deal were unclear.

News of the deal could come when Yahoo Japan announces its financial results at 3:10 p.… Read more

These days, in pretty much every sport, there is no hiding from statistics. Coaches, team owners, fantasy leaguers, and fans are tracking and analyzing a player's every move, fitness level, and more.

And now, thanks to a chemical and biological engineer at Northwestern University who is also a self-proclaimed football fanatic, we can compare our number-crunching with a much-touted new algorithm.

Professor Luís Amaral's rating system, unveiled Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE, was first put to the test after the 2008 European Cup, when it ranked the 20 best footballers that played--a list that … Read more

I'm just sooo happy to be sitting here reading through an eight-page PDF on algorithms. Seriously. Nothing in this world makes me happier than poring over phrases like "detailed results of the 5-fold cross validation of various components of the algorithm are summarized in Table 2."

If a new sarcasm-detecting algorithm out of Jerusalem's Hebrew University really knows what it's doing, it should be able to tell that I was just kidding there. Yeah, right. No, actually I was.

After an exhaustive look at word, syntax, and punctuation patterns in written user-generated content, the researchers came up with SASI (PDF), or Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, which can recognize sarcasm in online sentences and assign each sentence to a sarcastic class (not all sarcasm is created equal, of course). Meager attempts at sarcasm aside, this is a pretty novel idea that could possibly aid those pure souls who lack a sarcasm and irony meter--and could even have commercial applications.

One idea here is that automated sarcasm recognition could help improve review summarization and opinion-mining systems, since the inherently subtle and ambiguous nature of sarcasm sometimes makes it hard even for humans to decide whether a comment is sarcastic. According to the researchers--Oren Tsur, Dmitry Davidov, and Ari Rappoport--studies of user preferences suggest some consumers find sarcastic reviews biased and less helpful.

The Hebrew University team--which will present its findings next week at the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, D.C.--closely examined some 66,000 Amazon reviews for 120 products including books, music players, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, e-readers, game consoles, and mobile phones.

Identifying cues common to sarcasm in online communication (excessive use of capital letters as in: "Well you know what happened. ALMOST NOTHING HAPPENED!!!"; puns; and explicit contradictions), the researchers created a complex algorithm in which a small number of sarcastic sentences "teach" the software to recognize sarcasm. They say the software precisely identifies sarcastic sentences 77 percent of the time--no small feat given the elusive nature of sarcasm, its intractable relationship to cultural context, and differences between the spoken and written varieties. … Read more

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) may be small, but they're costly, so researchers have devised ways for them to fly in GPS-denied urban and indoor environments where they could otherwise get lost or crash.

Existing highly-precise, non-GPS navigation units are too large, heavy, and expensive to install on an MAV. But the Robust Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory addressed this problem by developing algorithms that allow a miniature robo-quadrocopter to estimate their relative position, identify a clear path and then fly through dense air space.

"The size, weight, and budget limitations of … Read more

There's no longer a need to purchase that handheld calculator that's bigger and heavier than your cellphone and always gets lost in your backpack or purse. This nifty app can handle all your big-number calculations, and you don't have to worry about its battery running low in the middle of a tricky operation.

Hpmbcalc launches a rather cheesy, plain interface--a largely white pane with brightly colored buttons, with its different colors associated with numbers and types of functions. Despite the low design aesthetics, the app proved to offer powerful capabilities in our tests.

We liked the ease … Read more