Yahoo Finalizes Transition to Bing

After about a week of testing, Yahoo and Microsoft just announced that they have now finalized the transition from Yahoo's own search engine to Microsoft's Bing. Microsoft now powers all of Yahoo's free, organic Web, image and video search results in the U.S. and Canada, though Yahoo will continue to offer its own set of search tools like Site Explorer and Search Monkey. The fact that Yahoo search is now "Powered by Bing" marks the end of a one-year transition period. Last July, after two years of back and forth, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed on a 10-year search and advertising deal.

According to the latest data from comScore, the combined search engine market share of Yahoo and Bing in the U.S. is now about 28%. Google, of course, remains the biggest search engine on the market with a market share of 65.8%. It remains to be seen how Yahoo's users will react to this change, but given the quality of Bing's search results, we don't expect any major backlash against this change from Yahoo's users.

For Microsoft, finalizing the Yahoo transition puts Bing in a far more competitive position than ever before. With close to 30% of the search market, Bing is now a force to be reckoned with.

Even if you don't regularly use Microsoft's search engine, Bing's history of continuously improving the search experience for its users (especially by giving users access to the information they are looking for with fewer clicks) is keeping Google on its toes and driving it to improve its search products as well.

Is Facebook Down for All? Another Facebook Error

 

There have been dozens of reports both on Twitter as well as other media outlets that Facebook has been experiencing numerous problems in some areas of the world. The main Facebook error seems to be one which has to deal with posting status updates and uploading new images. One Facebook member reported that he got the following error while trying to post a new status update to his wall, “Sorry, an error has occurred. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can. Go Back.”

Needless to say, I’m sure technicians are well aware of these issues and will likely correct them within hours at most. Facebook has been known to have errors as well as downtime like most rapidly growing internet sites out there. Having said this, they have a much better record than some of the other social networking companies out there such as Twitter, whose users have come up with a name for the whale that appears when there are site loading issues, “The fail whale.”

Users have been notified that even though an error is occurring, that their status updates are appearing on the friends feeds. The error seems to be affecting a wide variety of geographic locations, and can not be traced to only certain areas.

 

[Posted by Brian Krassenstein on Aug 23rd, 2010]

Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren Officially Divorced

 

Golf great Tiger Woods and his former wife Elin Nordegren are officially divorced. That means Tiger can go back to propping up his inflated ego with living blow up dolls, and Elin can move on with her life.

“TMZ has obtained the divorce documents filed in the Tiger Woods split … in which the marriage is described as “irretrievably broken.”

According to the docs, Tiger and Elin Nordegren reached a settlement agreement way back at the beginning of July — July 3rd and 4th.

Elin says in the docs that she wants her maiden name restored — Elin Maria Pernilla Nordegren.

According to the documents, both Tiger and Elin have each completed a 4-hour parenting course.

UPDATE: We’ve also obtained the final judgment papers. It states the marriage “is hereby dissolved because it is irretrievably broken.” 1. In addition, Elin’s request to restore her maiden name was granted.”

Ha ha ha, she doesn’t even want his name. Good for you Elin!

 

(The original one from sandrarose.com)

The real working life in Google

Lots of people are envious of being a employee in Google. why? For the life there, the feebback culture there, or the atmosphere there? As one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, the real life there is always mysterious for our common people. often we can hear some people in it saying how wonderful working there with those comments like everyone there is super smart, there are 18 different cafes, having free breakfast, lunch, dinner, food is gourmet quality, there is 7 person conference bicycles, every Friday , Larry, Sergei, or Eric takes questions from them (in person) and get free beer.

Seems like a life in the paradise, isn`t it? but we also know that all the things have two different sides, recently, There’s an interesting thread, in which Google employees are asked to describe their experiences working for the Internet giant. And we hear different voice about working life there.

“I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers. It’s a trade-off. Google is at least aware of it and uses incentive programs to entice engineers to spend time in ops roles.

Last, the company is big into ‘generating luck,’ which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off.”

Well, we don`t need much more counterpoints cause we already have known the real situation of the Google employees from words above. As I said at the first part, two sides in a same stuff. A lot of people always wanted to work with Google while most of its employees are constantly in the battle for having their own startup companies. You see, anyway, it's not always about working with a big and famous company, it's about doing what you really like and what's truly rewarding.