End of Home Telephones?: When I bought a new home phone a few years ago, I realized it might be the last telephone I'll ever buy. This week, I unplugged it. No more regular phone. Cell only.

35% of US homes can be reached only by cell phones. Oddly, the less income, the more likely they use cell, but that makes sense: why pay for two services? As usual, US Asians and Latinos are far ahead in cell use. Cell phones go anywhere, they include text messaging and digital cameras, plus they can be personalized with ring tones, music, and games. Verizon lost 4 million landline subscribers (from 39m to 35m) last year. 1 comments

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of search engine. But it's not really a search engine. Google (and Yahoo Search and many others) are search tools: they index billions of web pages. When you use these to search, they find pages that match your search.

Wolfram|Alpha is different. When you search in Wolfram|Alpha, it uses formulas from mathematics, physics, astronomy, geophysics, and so on, plus known data (the elements, scientific data, etc.) to calculate your answer (here's a list of topics) It creates the information for you.

Google, in contrast, can only show you what someone else has already written on a webpage.

For example, let's search for the distance from Earth to Neptune on May 14, 2022. Here is Google's result. None of the first page results are correct. Here is the same query in Wolfram|Alpha

Google can't give an answer unless someone has already written that answer. Google simply reports what it has indexed. Wolfram|Alpha calculates the answer. If we ask for the distance at 8:02 am, 9:12 am, and 3:23 pm on that date, it can calculate all of those. It lets you view data that nobody else has considered. Is there a correlation between earthquakes and diabetes?

Does Wolfram|Alpha matter? Most people use search engines to find people, products, companies, and locations. 85% of searches at Google are either navigational (find something) or informational (learn about something.)

People use search engines to find already-known things because they've learned the limitations of search engines: that's what it can do. Wolfram|Alpha is a knowledge tool: we can use it to create new information. But I wonder if this is "a solution in search of an audience." 0 comments

Google quietly announced a major change in how they index websites. Google has started to use markup code to allow data tagging so Google knows what kind of information it is. Google has begun the process of stating how the web will be structured.

Examples of items that can be tagged:
People: Name, title, role, URL, affiliations, address, photo, etc.
Reviews: Item, reviewer, date, rating, etc.
Companies: Name, URL, address, telephone, etc.
Products: Brand, category, description, name, price, photo, URL, etc.
That's just the beginning. There will be more tags.

What does this mean? You will be able to search like this: "Show me airline tickets from Dallas to Paris between June 20 and June 24 between $200 and $300 with more than 20 ratings at 4 or higher." Currently, that's not possible. With Google's new markup code, it will be very easy.

When companies mark up their data, it will be simple to build software to shop by location, date, price, ratings, and so on. We will see a new generation of comparison shopping tools.

Users will get exactly what they want without having to look at multiple websites. This puts pressure on websites.

This means a rewrite of websites. This also impacts SEO, web design, and overall business strategy.

For details, see the Google blog announcement (and example). See also examples of code and definitions.

Labels: google rich snippets

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I've been watching Rome, the HBO/BBC series, on DVD. It's quite good: lots of detail, introspective, and character development. 0 comments