Windows maker Microsoft today announced that Bing for iPhone and Android now makes it easy to find images faster than before, without typing or by typing less.
The new search experience is now live on iPhone and Android devices in mobile browsers and lets you search images with “no typing required to discover more”.
Apple has quietly acquired Ottocat, reports TechCrunch, a little-known startup with some interesting search tech. The deal went down a few years ago—sometime in 2013—but its impact is still being felt today. The site believes the company's tech is behind the App Store's fairly new 'Explore' section.
There's little evidence of the acquisition, except for a patent granted to Apple that lists Ottocat co-founder Edwin Cooper as an inventor. The patent is titled "System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFIDF," and clearly incorporates Ottocat's tech.
You'd think that searching through your photos should be an impossible task. Unlike a text document, there are no actual words you can look for in a photo. But your photos can hold very precious information that can help surface some details about your shots. If you have Location Services enabled for your iPhone camera app, then all your shots contain location metadata, allowing you to perform very specific searches in the stock Photos app of iOS.
And with the release of iOS 8, Apple has included some very powerful features to help you find that one photo you were looking for.
Embattled CEO Marisa Mayer just bought herself some more air cover by spinning off Yahoo's 15 percent stake in Alibaba into a new public company. But Mayer is still under pressure to boost Yahoo's core biz which has been eroding steadily. Now, MacRumors passes along a transcript of Yahoo's conference call when Mayer praised Apple's Safari browser as the premier search platform.
She called fans of the Apple web browser “among the most lucrative users in the world” and expressed interest in Yahoo becoming the default search engine in Safari.
Yahoo's main search-focused iPhone and iPad application has received a refresh today. In addition to an improved navigation system focused on the new side panel accessible by swiping, Yahoo 5.4 for iOS now integrates latest local news headlines and finally lets you comment on stories within the app.
“Today we’re bringing local news to your fingertips with the Yahoo App,” writes the Internet company. “As you move around the country, you’ll be able to see what’s going on in your area.”
Microsoft's mobile Bing apps for the iPhone and iPad are getting a major makeover today, with the translate extension that debuted in the iPhone app two months ago at last available on iPads.
On the iPhone, you can now tap anywhere underneath the search box to check out Bing's image of the day in uncluttered full-screen view. You can also swipe from the left to see yesterday’s image of the day.
Another handy addition: weather information, trending news and images of the day zoom to full screen smoothly when swiping from the bottom of Bing's Home screen.
The search monster Google this morning posted a major update to its main search app for iOS.
The company says it's enhanced the software by bringing out support for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus screens, a fresh new look with Material Design appearance, Maps alongside search results, easier-to-find recent searches, a “G” button that lets you start a new search from anywhere within the app and more.
You can grab the completely rebuilt Google 5.0 app for the iPhone and iPad free of charge in the App Store.
Facebook on Monday confirmed that it's at last gearing up to launch Graph Search in its mobile application for the iPhone and iPad this week following what has turned to be an incredibly extensive period of testing.
Tapping Facebook's vast database, Graph Search uses natural language queries to surface content information from within a user's network of friends that would be impractical or impossible using the standard and fairly limited search feature.
Another way to describe Open Graph: this tremendously powerful tool makes it easy and fun to explore the world through the eyes of your friends.
According to a report Tuesday by The Information, a technology website started by The Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Lessin, both Microsoft and Google are “fighting” to boot Google search from the iPhone and other Apple devices.
If true, the move wouldn't be unheard of: Apple teams up with alternate search providers in markets like China.
Apple earns a small commission from search ad revenue each time a user performs a Google search from Safari's address bar on the Mac, iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
With that deal expiring sometime in 2015, Microsoft and Yahoo are now hoping the Cupertino firm won't renew it and will instead make their respective service the default search choice on iOS.
The popular micro-blogging service Twitter yesterday announced that it's finally indexed every tweet, allowing anyone on Twitter to find any public tweet sent since 2006.
Advanced search is now available on the web and mobile, but not in third-party Twitter clients. Once the company opens up the Search API to developers, apps that analyze and map search terms over time will get better.
The biggest benefit of searching through Twitter's public archive: no longer do you have to download your entire Twitter archive periodically just to be able to re-visit your old tweets. Before, Twitter search was limited to tweets from the past couple of weeks.
Noting it's always been its long-standing goal to let people search through every tweet ever published, Twitter shared a number of technical details on the kind of search index infrastructure needed to make the feature a reality, a considerable feat given users have published hundreds of billions of tweets since the first tweet went live over 8 years ago.
First demoed at WWDC 2014 back in June, Microsoft's Bing translation widget and custom actions for Safari and the Notification Center in iOS 8 is now available by way of an update to the free Bing Search app for the iPhone and iPod touch devices. Available free of charge in the App Store, the new Bing Search 5.0.1 also contains bug fixes.
As shown on the screenshots top of post, enabling the Bing Search Translation action in Safari requires that you bring up the Share sheet in Safari.
The Internet giant Google on Friday refreshed its native Google Search application for the iPhone and iPad with enhancements to the built-in Google Now feature in the form of new cards for personalized TV recommendations and traffic information.
Furthermore, version 4.2 of Google Search for iOS now includes better Chromecast integration allowing owners of the $35 HDMI dongle to ask Google “what’s on Chromecast?” to open the Chromecast for iPhone app and start casting.