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Yahoo! Research Labs
glinden writes "Yahoo! issued a press release today announcing their creation of Yahoo! Research Labs. Although there's not much there yet, it's clearly targeting Google and Google Labs. The battle between MSN, Yahoo, and Google in the "Year of Search" is heating up. And it's still only January."
You can download the 'Open' version of Cyc here http://opencyc.org/
Most, if not all of these guys seem to be from Overture. I read the resumes which are available, simply because I was interested in what their focus for research would be. Everyone who has a blurb seems to have joined from Yahoo's acquisition of Overture..
Makes me wonder, then. Was Overture such a force in the search arena ?
Interestingly, I also notice that some of their developers are just BSc guys.. W00t!:) Its not a PhD/MSc only thing like Google (ok, there are a few PhDs as "senior" scientists)
A heuristic is an estimate of the distance to your goal that you can use to evaluate which node in the seach space to expand next.
Not necessarily. There are various definitions of heuristic, one of which is "a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem". By that definition "water is wet" is a heuristic. Perhaps some people use the term differently, but when I studied AI that was a common definition.
They were the first large portal... and we have all heard the rumors that google also is going that route.
I've heard the rumors, but I don't believe them for a second. Didn't the idea of the monolithic Web Portal site die out around 1999?
Google's core mission, as far as I can tell, is to provide highly meaningful search results in a variety of specific contexts -- News, Shopping, Usenet, etc. That alone does not a portal make.
Likewise, google is establishing a mail service...
From what I've heard, it's going to be an advertising service for emailers, and not the kind of "sign up to get your @google.com disposable webmail address" tools that Yahoo! and Hotmail offer.