OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world. OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge. Contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices, and low-tech field maps to verify that OSM is accurate and up to date. OpenStreetMap’s community is diverse, passionate,… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
The AI Search War Has Begun
Follow up to Perplexity is cutting checks to publishers following plagiarism accusations See also The Atlantic [unpaywalled] – And tech companies might not be the winners. “Every second of every day, people across the world type tens of thousands of queries into Google, adding up to trillions of searches a year. Google and a few… Continue Reading
Perplexity is cutting checks to publishers following plagiarism accusations
The Verge: “Perplexity is launching a program to share ad revenue with publishing partners following weeks of plagiarism accusations. Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features… Continue Reading
Supreme Connections
ProPublica: “Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Using our new database, you can now search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.” Data is also searchable using specific data: Most… Continue Reading
Our World in Data
Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems – “Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on. Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the… Continue Reading
Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side
The Verge: “Bing’s new search experience puts AI-generated answers front and center while pushing traditional search results to the side. The new layout, which is rolling out for a small number of queries, fills your search results page with AI-generated summaries addressing various aspects of your question. Microsoft has shared an early look at what… Continue Reading
Microsoft’s generative search engine weds something new, something old
ZDNET: “Microsoft has been a major player in the AI race and one of the first companies to unveil a chatbot that’s a worthy ChatGPT competitor — Copilot. Now, the company is returning its attention to the project that started it all: the Bing search engine. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled a new generative search experience… Continue Reading
Google’s Exclusive Reddit Access
404 Media -“We’ve written a lot over the past year about how bad Google Search is getting, but it’s still incredibly useful for searching Reddit. Add “Reddit” to the end of any search query, and chances are you’ll find a useful thread. Due to a $60 million deal that allows Google to scrape Reddit for… Continue Reading
webXray
Wired [unpaywalled]- This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations. A former Google engineer has built a search engine, WebXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”…It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific… Continue Reading
Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet
TechCrunch: “Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet. Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. At 405 billion parameters, Llama 3.1 405B isn’t… Continue Reading
A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, most popular AI chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for president of the United States,… Continue Reading
The FOIA.gov Search Tool Updated
“FOIA.gov, the government’s central resource for information about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) now includes additional functionality to help users locate commonly requested law enforcement and related records. The FOIA.gov Search Tool was updated to add a “Law Enforcement records” pre-defined user journey that helps the public more quickly locate commonly requested information. This user journey… Continue Reading
