Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Search

Instant Search - The Real Live Search Bing API experiment

Dan Fay — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:41:24 GMT

If you’d like to see instant results while you’re typing in your search query try out “The Real Live Search” from Long Zheng from istartedsomething – it uses the fast Bing AJAX APIs and the JSON results to give you information as you type. It’s really neat to see – here’s an example doing a WorldWide Telescope search The image doesn’t do it justice – try it out yourself.

I wonder if it could be integrated with the Windows 7 via the Federated Search support – much like Long was able to do with the Flickr Search Connector for Windows 7

The Real Live Search – Bing API experiment - istartedsomething

A “Search Taste Test” – do you really know the difference?

Dan Fay — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:42:24 GMT

Michael Kordahi created a way to see how Bing search results compare to the other big search players - it gives you 3 columns of results and you can vote which one has the best results. If you’re using IE you can also add BlindSearch as a IE search provider.

The “Search Taste Test” – do you really know the difference?

So there is plenty of talk about Google being the best search engine out there, but with some pretty amazing improvements recently made to Live Search, and now particularly the launch of Bing, our new “decision” engine, it’s really time to see if Google really is the best – for you personally. One fun way of doing this is to use this fun little utility that Michael Kordahi wrote (a teammate of mine) called Blind Search.

Basically, you head over to http://blindsearch.fejus.com, enter your search term, and click the search button. The tool goes off and searches for your terms at Google, Bing and Yahoo. You get the three sets of results back – all formatted anonymously so you don’t know which column of results was returned by which search engine. Then you can either “vote” for the search engine that gives you the best, most appropriate results for you personally, or you can simply click on one of the results themselves and head off on your way like you would if you were using the actual search engine.

One really cool thing is that if you’ve been using Google and want to try out Bing, but aren’t quite ready to make the switch (personally I now use Bing as my favoured search provider but hey, you never know), you can actually use Blind Search as your default search provider.

The odd ramblings of a geek pretending to not be "all grown up" : The “Search Taste Test” – do you really know the difference?

Bing Trucks

Dan Fay — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:40:23 GMT

I’ve been seeing the Bing Trucks around town – take a look if you haven’t seen them

Windows 7 Federated Search Providers

Dan Fay — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:39:34 GMT

I just updated two of my machines to Windows 7 RC and one of the neatest features is the ability to have Federated Search Providers – simply run an XML configuration file (.osdx) to add a search provider to your machine and you can search directly from windows explorer.

So for fun I created two: One to search the Microsoft Research website and one to search my blog. I also created one to search against internal SharePoint sites…really handy.

BHandler has a post with some links to other .osdx files and David McGhee has other ones…

Windows 7 Federated Search Providers

Microsoft MSDN Blogger, David McGhee, is recommending adding Windows 7 Federated Search Providers from the Windows Seven Forums. (Support: How to Video & Implementer's Guide)

MSDN Blogger Recommends Free Windows 7 Federated Search Providers - Windows Live

F# – Sept CTP available and units of measure checking/inference

Dan Fay — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:07:22 GMT

The September 2008 CTP of F# is now available for download. F# is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework and really should be looked at by scientists/researchers. Also check out the F# Developer Center on MSDN for more info and resources.

There are a lot of new features in this release – here’s a sampling:

Broadly improved Visual Studio 2008 integration, which allows F# users to scale from scripting and explorative development, up to large-scale component and application design, all within Visual Studio.
Improvements to the F# language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular.
An exciting new language feature, Units of Measure, which extends F#’s inference and strong typing to floating point data.

The Units of Measure checking and interference feature is very exciting feature and potentially most scientifically revolutionary programming language features around - scientists and engineers to check out. This is because the F# compiler knows the rules of units

When values of floating-point type are multiplied, the units are multiplied too; when they are divided, the units are divided too, and when taking square roots, the same is done to the units. So by the rule for multiplication, the expression inside sqrt above must have units m^2/s^2, and therefore the units of speedOfImpact must be m/s.

Take a look at the SolarSystem sample - A Solar System simulation application, taking advantage of Units of Measure in F# to do physics simulation. Andrew Kennedy, who researched, architected and implemented this feature has all the details.

Other F# resources:

Microsoft F# Developer Center

Environmental Scenario Search Engine Research Project Portal

Dan Fay — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:36:14 GMT

Here's a link to a Russian based project - where they are mining environmental data archives. It even has NASA WorldWind visualization plugins....there is also a web based test site.

Environmental Scenario Search Engine Research Project Portal

The main idea behind ESSE is a flexible, efficient and easy to use search engine for data mining in environmental data archives. What makes it so different from conventional text-based search engines is that it actually searches inside the numeric datasets. With ESSE scientists will be able to find specific parameter values, conditions, and scenarios among the huge amount of available environmental data. ESSE will help you find useful data even if you don't know exactly what you are looking for.

By using its fuzzy logic capabilities you can construct complex queries using vague linguistic terms, such as "very large" or "average", or set fuzzy numeric thresholds (for example, "about 100"). If you are an experienced researcher you can still use exact parameter values in your queries. ESSE uses Common Data Model for internal data representation, thus acting as a bridge between the user and the multiple heterogeneous data sources.

Environmental Scenario Search Engine Research Project Portal