ReadWriteWeb

It can really feel like you've stepped into the future when you pick up your smartphone, hold it to your face and search for something simply by speaking. When you ask for "car parking" with a thick Boston accent, however, Google might think you're searching for the late great Tupac Shakur and the future suddenly seems a little less bright. Luckily, Google has introduced personalized voice search, which hopes to account for any number of variations in how we say what we say.

Blekko has a refreshingly different interface to search, and a generous data-sharing philosophy, but what I didn't realize was how innovative its underlying technology is. Last week I sat down with CEO Rich Skrenta and CTO Greg Lindahl, and they took me on a fascinating tour of the system they've built.

Starting with the hardware side, they have around 800 servers in their data center, each with 64 GB RAM and eight SATA drives giving each one about eight terabytes of local storage. The first thing that caught my attention about this setup was when they explained why they avoided RAID.

Google has announced it's made a change to its search algorithm to better account for negative online reviews. The action is a result of a story in Sunday's edition of The New York Times that told the story of one woman's experience with an online vendor.

According to the article, the company in question had managed to get to the front page of a Google search in part by cultivating terrible reviews: "Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. [The company owner] closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: 'I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.'"

Yahoo! Mobile has teamed up with the second largest mobile applications store, GetJar, to integrate mobile apps into its search engine results. Starting now, users conducting searches on their mobile phones via m.yahoo.com, will see a separate section called "apps" which will feature relevant results from GetJar's collection of over 75,000 downloadable applications.

One of the joys of the last decade has been the growing ubiquity of Unix, and one of its most useful tools is grep. Even if you're using an IDE for your development, the odds are that you'll be able to search your code faster and more flexibly once you learn this command line tool. It's not always obvious how to access all that power though, so I'll show you some of my favorite techniques. The examples have been tested on OS X's GNU grep, but should be applicable to most versions. You can download Cygwin if you want to run this and other Unix tools on Windows.

Ask.com, a well-known innovator but distant runner in the search race, has decided to give up algorithmic web search, according to a report today from Brad Stone and Brett Pulley in Bloomberg.

The news marks the end of an era. IAC's Barry Diller told Bloomberg that it was a concession to the incredible search power of Google and company execs say they intend on shifting the product to the social Q&A it unveiled this Summer. That's another field that's already crowded with competitors. The passage of Ask as search marks the end of a number of interesting experiments.

The author of the web's first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dresses as a medieval warrior and goes to battle on the weekends and a woman who follows World of Warcraft, acupuncture and ballet, have raised $24 million dollars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got incredible press coverage when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week - but they are probably going to get slaughtered.

In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they've built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger. Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we'll use it well - for as long as it lasts.

As I type this, it seems silly in a world dominated by Google. But "search" is hard, requiring a lot of resources. And yet, the ability to crawl, index, and retrieve data from sites - both internal and external, from behind the firewall and from the open internet - is crucial.

But today Google has announced Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance, promising to bring about a more comprehensive search tool for on-premise and cloud-based content, all from within a single search box.

Facebook and Bing just announced a new search partnership during a joint event at Microsoft's San Francisco offices. With this new partnership, Bing wants to take personalized search to the next level by tapping into the knowledge of your friends on Facebook. Microsoft looks at this as "the beginning of how search gets better because of your friends." According to Microsoft, "search is not just about the connections between data but also about the connection between people."

We're doing our live stream today at 12:30 pm PST from Lucene Revolution, where we will be discussing big data and the role of open-source search.

We'll go for 30 minutes to an hour.

I posted the basics on Plancast.