http://selberg.org Erik Selberg's Homepage & Blog Wed, 21 May 2008 07:10:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Check it out now... http://search.live.com/cashback Lots of coverage out there; I saw Todd report it first. I'll post some more tomorrow when I can play with it a bit more. Initially, it looks like Live Search Cashback is basically eBates on steroids. They've got a number of ... http://selberg.org/2008/05/20/live-search-cashback-is-up/ It looks like Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Yahoo! has come to an end. Apparently, $46 billion wasn't good enough, but $50 billion would have been. So what's $4 billion between friends? Ah well. Mini already has a post up having popped a cork, and I'm sure MSFTExtremeMakeover will have something ... http://selberg.org/2008/05/04/and-so-it-ends/ Dr. William Chang, gave a number of talks at WWW2008. A brief history: PhD from Berkeley, one of the main developers of InfoSeek, long time advisor and lately (Jan 2007) CTO of Baidu. Here's some distillation of them, and as always just my interpretations of what he's said: Working in China He ... http://selberg.org/2008/04/24/william-chang-cto-baidu-on-search/ I'm attending WWW2008 in Beijing this week. It's turned into a big of a monster conference... nine simultaneous tracks over three days, not to mention a day of workshops and tutorials! Yow! And I'm seeing a number of colleagues from the usual haunts here as well. Both Kai-Fu Lee, head ... http://selberg.org/2008/04/23/themes-from-beijing/ So in a surprising move (well, to me at least... ) Microsoft purchased FareCast, the latest startup from my advisor, Oren Etzioni. for a paltry (heh) $115 million. FareCast is a great concept... simply take historical price data from the airlines, and predict whether the price will go up or ... http://selberg.org/2008/04/21/microsoft-acquires-farecast-2/ I haven't posted lately on the Microsoft / Yahoo bid. It's been interesting seeing things unfold... I thought Yahoo would have been much more receptive to the offer. Or, more to the point, I thought Microsoft and Yahoo had already come to terms and this was more the public ... http://selberg.org/2008/04/06/the-2-strategy/ been having random DB problems, so let's see if 2.5 actually solves things. http://selberg.org/2008/04/05/upgraded-to-25/ My advisor, Oren Etzioni, gave the second keynote at WSDM today. His main focus is on his latest work which is a new paradigm in search using open extraction.His hypothesis: Use Machine Reading - Information Extraction + tractable inference. For example, who did what? E.G.IE(sentence) = who ... http://selberg.org/2008/02/12/my-advisors-wsdm/ Right now, there's about 40 +/- 10 people from Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google in close proximity, along with other associated industry folks. So, as you can imagine, there's a lot of scuttlebutt about the Microsoft / Yahoo acquisition. Here's some of it (names withheld to protect the guilty... and ... http://selberg.org/2008/02/11/gssp-at-wsdm/ I'm attending WSDM 2008 down in Stanford, CA. Lots of people from the big three (at least for now ;) ), and other usual suspects. Hector Garcia-Molina is giving the initial keynote, and has a great slide going over a number of "Holy Cow" moments. In order: WWW (1993) Link ... http://selberg.org/2008/02/11/hectors-keynote/