Entries tagged with wikipedia - Channel 10

Bing Reference is the Semantic Web in Action

Sarah Perez — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:44:00 GMT

Thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of semantic search startup Powerset last year, the new “decision engine” Bing has access to semantically indexed Wikipedia content which is used to deliver special types of search results for faster answers. A recent post on the Bing community blogs delved into these semantic features in a bit more detail to explain how they're used

When you’re searching for something which has a Wikipedia entry, for example, you’ll notice a “one box” result for Wikipedia at the top of your search results page. The result provides a snippet of text from the Wikipedia article along with links to the article subsections, too. However, clicking the link “Enhanced View” actually takes you to a special kind of search result right within Bing.com – the Bing Reference result. Here’s an example of a search for “Albert Einstein:

When you click the “Enhanced View” link, you’ll end up on another Bing.com page which is actually just the Wikipedia page framed within Bing.com. You’ll still have Bing’s search box at the top of the page and the “Explore” sidebar to the left. However, the sidebar here may link to other verticals (like image search, for example) but also to related queries. To see an example of related queries, check out the Bing Reference page for “Facebook.” In the Explore sidebar there are links to applications, services, developer platform, proxy, and history. Click on any of those links to be immediately taken to a new set of search results for that term.

So why are these Bing Reference pages better than simply hitting up the Wikipedia article itself? Well, for one thing, related searches as described above are only a click away. Or if you need to move on to a specific vertical like “news” or “videos” those links are not just up at the top of the page, but they’re pinned above the article itself:

Plus, the page displays the Wikipedia “Article Outline” in a box to the right of the content which stays with you even as you scroll up and down the page. That’s really handy! And it has a “top” button attached to it that moves you back up to the very top of the page whenever you’re done reading – quite helpful for when you’re navigating around a long article:

To search within the Bing Reference vertical directly, you must start your search from within one of these “enhanced” Wikipedia pages. But when you do, you’ll have another powerful feature at your disposal: highlighting. For example, look at this query for “who acquired Texaco” to see the highlighting turned on. Thanks to Powerset technology’s ability to understand natural language, Bing also knows that’s a much different query than say “who did Texaco acquire” even though other search engines would not.

I still wish there was a link to go to Bing Reference directly, like say Bing.com/reference, (hint, hint!), but overall, these features make for a much better way to research topics than doing a typical web search. Next time you need to quickly “look something up,” try Bing.com instead and see what you think. Or better yet, set Bing as your default search engine so you don’t even have to remember to make the switch.

Put Wikipedia on Your Windows Mobile

Sarah Perez — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:55:00 GMT

The Pocketnow blog points us to yet another great application for Windows Mobile users – it’s an app called “WikiPock,” and like you may have guessed, it puts a copy of Wikipedia on your mobile phone. Actually, the application installs to a storage card of about 4 GB, not the phone itself, which is even better. For people who don’t have a data connection or try to limit its use, it’s a great alternative to having to surf the net for a quick answer to something. For others, having an offline app like this is handy for when you’re traveling and away from a signal. The application currently contains a whopping 2.8 million articles, all of which are indexed and searchable through the WikiPock interface.

You can buy this app for $20 if you don’t have a storage card – the company will ship you one. If you just want to download it onto a card you already own, then it’s only $9.99. You can check out more info on the WikiPock homepage.

Expanded Wikipedia Results in Live Search

Sarah Perez — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:23:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just announced a change to the search results that will now show more of a Wikipedia entry than before. This is a great new feature since many times when you’re doing a search, you just need a quick answer and Wikipedia is usually the link you click to read the info you need. So now in the Live Search results, there’s a good portion of the first paragraph available from the Wikipedia article under the link to Wikipedia. Do you love it or hate it? Let the team know. Personally, I’ve found it useful enough to make Live Search my Wikipedia search engine of choice.

Mark Pesce, Only Connect

Nick Hodge — Mon, 26 May 2008 04:18:00 GMT

Mark Pesce, Futurist and Inventor, gave a thought-provoking keynote on a Twitter+Wikipedia Future.

The socially, hyper-connected revolution we are living through will have significant impact on the future. Not only of our social, after-hours work lives: but also within the cube-farm.

Watch the video. How will your live be changes where everyone in your world streams their consciousness online?

Customizing Vista's Search

Sarah Perez — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:49:00 GMT

Remember how I told you that you could add Wikipedia to your choices in Windows Vista's default search? Well, there are other ones you can add, too, like these:

Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+

IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+

Dictionary Search: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%+

Now what I need to know is how I can use all of them - the gpedit.msc section (see earlier instructions on this) only lets you pick one. I want them all! Any ideas?

Wikipedia / Virtual Earth Mashup

Sarah Perez — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:48:00 GMT

Now this is a cool mashup and its built right into Virtual Earth! In Wikipedia, you may have noticed that some articles have coordinates in the upper-right hand side of the page that locate that place on a map. (See this example). Clicking on the coordinates from the Wikipedia entry will take you to you a map. But if you want to go the other way - from a map to Wikipedia - then you've got to check out what the Virtual Earth team has done. They've been indexing all these links in their Spatial Search and Explore indexes so you can surf the maps with Wikipedia displaying in the sidebar. If you want to try it out for yourself, turn on Live Map's Explore feature and then select the Wikipedia Tag, or just click this link to see it in action now.

Search Wikipedia from Vista's Start Menu

Sarah Perez — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:48:00 GMT

If you're a fan of Wikipedia, you're going to love this Windows Vista hack I found on ITworld.com. You can add a "Search Wikipedia" option from the Vista's Instant Search box that's on your Windows start menu. It's really not that hard, if you are familiar with using the Local Policy editor. Here are the steps:

Press Windows Key + R and type in gpedit.msc, click "OK"
Open the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Instant Search\Custom Instant Search Internet Search provider policy setting.
Enable the policy setting, type Search Wikipedia in the first textbox and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%w in the second textbox, and click OK.
Open a command prompt and type gpupdate/force to immediately apply the new policy setting.

After you do that, you'll see 3 search options: in addition to "Search Everywhere" and "Search the Internet", you'll now see "Search Wikipdedia," too! How cool is that?

This probably works for all languages, if you substitute "en" with your country's code.

The next generation of Wikipedia

Laura Foy — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:51:00 GMT

Irene McGee, our San Francisco reporter (who you may recognize from MTV's RealWorld), is bringing us her first report. She managed to steal some time with Jimmy Wales who founded Wikipedia. He's up to something new and in this clip you can learn all about it.