Internet search: the new better than Google Bing?

Bing updates and took the opportunity to highlight its encouraging progress, which would be on the back of Google.

Since a few days, US Internet users confident their search engine Bing of Microsoft are benefiting from a new interface. The latter is being deployed in Europe and particularly in France, and displays a redesigned home screen, more adapted to the display of the search engine on the shelves according to the Publisher. Idem, the results pages have been cleaned. On the other hand, the new community features launched in the United States have them, not even crossed the Atlantic. Idem, the search for images that have a new algorithm is not yet available here.

At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Microsoft managers responsible for Bing explained that Google sees its reputation and its brand down following the controversies that have had courses concerning its practices relating to the personal data of Internet users. They see a good opportunity for Bing to propose a relevant alternative, showing with graphics that Bing continues to gain on the back of Google market share. Thus on the past year, Bing market share would have progressed 14.38-15.41%, and even 25,63% taking into account all of the portals integrating research by Bing, as Yahoo.

Research results more sanitized...

Best, according to the exposed information, the rate of relevance of the results of Bing would for the first time surpassed those of Google. Over the past three years, Google saw its rate of relevance of 55.1% to 59.9%, while at the same time that Bing climbs from 51% to 61.4%. Unfortunately, impossible to know how these figures are obtained. And without clearly exposed methodology, this remains of the illustration without value. Damage.

Read More

Mobile Internet: the Orange flows are the best

The thirteenth edition of the surveyon the quality of mobile networks is available. Let's take ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The authority of telecom us some figures on the quality of mobile networks in order to ensure that the consumer can use his mobile phone under good conditions. Various tests were carried out on the field with a new feature this year, adding measures of Web browsing.

As in previous years, the GSM network used for voice is always good, whether inside or outside a building or traveling in a vehicle. For cons, the quality degrades compared to last year when communication in TGV or on motorways in France, with significant differences between operators. Good for calls in the suburban trains and trams for their benefiting from a better result with an increase in the quality and maintains the communication of 2 to 4%.

A large disparity in average rates was observed between operators

The following figures were established via the 3G dongles for different operators, where the fastest downloads reach more than 9.2 Mbit / s and 3 Mbit / s when sending files. For the average flow is the order of 3 Mbit / s (40% better than the previous survey) and 1.3 Mbit / s for sending (1.2 Mbit / s above) . However, a large disparity in median flow is observed between the operators, with 4.8 Mbit / s for Orange France, 2.8 Mbit / s for SFR and 1.2 Mbit / s for Bouygues Telecom. What about joining the point made by DegroupTest few weeks ago.

With the new test for Web browsing, ARCEP using smartphones for measures giving amazing results, the average throughput for download is 2.4 Mbit / s against 3 Mbit / s on USB 3G, and 1.4 Mbit / s against 1.3 Mbit / s on USB 3G upload.

The full report of the survey, containing the description of the test protocol and the detailed results of each operator - which is also very well written - is available on the website of the ARCEP. In addition, work should soon extend this survey to departments and territories overseas.

Read More

Store 60 x Internet in a single data center

Want to store all Internet? This is (almost) possible. IBM will indeed build a data center with a capacity of 120 storage... Po. The Po (Petabyte) is the unit above To (terabyte) and a Po contains therefore 1,000 To according to the international system. What store sixty times the biggest "backup" of the Internet known, that of archive .org. Currently, the largest data centers are limited to about 15 inches according to IBM.

The set contains approximately 200,000 hard disks (at least 600 GB, probably more) and the file system used is the GPFS (General Parallel File System) of IBM. This file system is adapted to the data centers and uses some techniques of type RAID internally for faster transfer rates, but also to protect the data in the event of failure. And when 200,000 hard drives, failures are "common" and the system is able to adapt: If a disk is defective, the system is for example able to recover the data on other drives and rebuild all without loss of performance, the data being "reconstructed" in the background on a new hard disk. If massive degradation (several hard drives defective at the same time), the system will speed reconstruction on new disks, at that time at the expense of performance. IBM details not capacity reserved for the protection of data, but it is a priori consequent on a system of this type, which must be able to face the judgment of several hard drives at the same time without losing data.

IBM tries everything and keep its hard disks in good condition: hard disks use a liquid cooling system, in place and place of the usual fans which allows to stabilize the temperature.

Note that it will have to wait a few years to find this capability in our machines: from 5 MB to 750 GB in a computer, it took about 25 years (from 1981 to 2006). If you follow the same curve, 120 inch hard drives should not disembark before 2032...

Read More

A minute on the Internet, it is...

It is crazy what can make Internet users around the world in a single minute on the Internet.

695 000 articles updated in Facebook, 600 new videos available on YouTube, 70 registered domain names, 13 000 downloaded iPhone applications, 6 600 photos added on Flickr, 370 000 voice via Skype conversations or 695 000 searches on Google... And all this in small 60 seconds! It is the activity of the social Internet condensed on computer graphics proposed by the Shanghai Web Designers.

Note that other tools exist on the Web to measure the activity of the major social platforms, as developed by Gary Hayes that simply allowed to run a minute before you compare the results with those of this graphics. If there are important disparities between these results, particularly with regard to the Google Research (695 000 per minute according to these designers, 1 400 000 depending on the tool of Gary Hayes) e-mails sent (168 million emails sent every minute here against 205 million), or the rest of the results about glue. Anyway, we can well imagine that measure this activity is a real puzzle and that the results are to take purposes only...

Read More