Stories about: Altavista

One of the joys of being a Web programmer is heading to a dinner party, a haircut, or a reunion and fielding the pitches for everyone's dream for a brilliant Web application. Everyone is always happy to cut you in for 5, 10, maybe even 15 per cent of the equity if you just build out the Web site that's sort of like a combination of Twitter, AltaVista, Eliza, TurboTax, and the corner pharmacy, but cooler.

A search company founded by ex-Google and IBM employees landed US$25 million in new venture funding this week, but remains in stealth mode with no indication of when its technology will be publicly available.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Yahoo. Although Yahoo has since announced it plans to fight Microsoft's takeover and court other suitors, most notably Google, there is an element of shared search technology that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can easily dismiss because of Microsoft's earlier 2008 announcement to acquire FAST Search and Transfer.

Imagine how different the tech industry might have been had Gary Kildall accepted IBM's offer, back in 1980, to license his computer operating system for a top-secret project. CP/M would have been the OS that shipped with the original IBM PC, and the world might never have heard the name of Kildall's competitor, who eventually accepted the contract: a Mr. Bill Gates.

Wikia's project to develop an open-source search engine got another boost with the acquisition of the Grub distributed Web crawler, the company announced Friday.

The most popular Web search engines rarely deliver the same results when identical queries are performed on each site, and the disparity has increased over the past two years, new research has found.

Last February at Purdue University, a student taking "cs390s - Secure Computing" told his professor, Dr. Pascal Meunier, that a Web application he used for his physics class seemed to contain a serious vulnerability that made the app highly insecure. Such a discovery didn't surprise Meunier. "It's a secure computing class; naturally students want to discover vulnerabilities."

Adobe Systems will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organizations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Adobe's Flash Player and Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Administrators often battle with end users over the amount of space they use on mail and file servers. Users would like to keep everything they might need, while administrators would like to avoid buying more disks and upgrading servers to handle huge inboxes and home directories.

Communication among colleagues around the globe who don't speak the same language could become easier with an open source tool that translates Yahoo instant messages on the fly.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week said SQL Server 2005 should eliminate any "last bit of hesitancy" that enterprise users may have about the database's ability to scale. Ballmer spoke with Computerworld at the launch of the SQL Server upgrade, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, discussing the new products and other topics.