New MSN search engine: How good is it?

Written by Nowshade Kabir


If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important arerepparttar search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere.

Microsoft has recently come out withrepparttar 118520 latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one ofrepparttar 118521 most powerful search engines inrepparttar 118522 market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check outrepparttar 118523 search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com .

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches onrepparttar 118524 Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent ofrepparttar 118525 market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind fromrepparttar 118526 competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better thenrepparttar 118527 originals, and clinch larger portion ofrepparttar 118528 market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance of programming languages inrepparttar 118529 early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.

What is new in MSN search?

This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features, which other search engines are lacking at this moment.

Direct answers to plain language factual searches

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsoft's Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what isrepparttar 118530 capital of Russia? You will getrepparttar 118531 right answer atrepparttar 118532 beginning ofrepparttar 118533 result page. Questions like “What isrepparttar 118534 size of a Blue whale?” also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to repparttar 118535 questions related to facts and figures.

Near me

Microsoft's new search engine includes a ''near me'' button that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release, this works only in United States.

Once you press this button MSN search figures out where are you located using your computer’s IP address. However, this can be easily superseded by changing setting preferences. This is important if you are located in New York and looking for something near Boston.

The Move to a New Anti-Virus Model

Written by Tim Klemmer


This isrepparttar first in a series of articles highlighting reasons why today’s anti-virus security solutions don’t work.

Reason #1:repparttar 118519 Basic Model

Anti-virus software vendors still rely on yesterday’s methods for solving today’s problems: they wait forrepparttar 118520 next virus to wreak havoc and then produce a solution. That worked for a long time when a virus would take years to traverserepparttar 118521 world. But in this fast-paced Interet-crazed world we live in today, this type of solution is no longer applicable. Now a virus can traverserepparttar 118522 world and infect millions of computers in minutes.

Inrepparttar 118523 good old days a virus traveled by floppy disk. Put a floppy in your computer and save some data to it andrepparttar 118524 virus would infectrepparttar 118525 floppy. Then unwittingly putrepparttar 118526 infected floppy in another computer and prestorepparttar 118527 new computer would become infected. (I’m skimming over a lot of detail here to make a point). Sorepparttar 118528 virus’ progress was slow and steady. Anti-virus vendors had time on their side. They hadrepparttar 118529 time to get a copy ofrepparttar 118530 virus, dissect it, run it through a series of tests to come up with a signature string (see below for definition), putrepparttar 118531 string into a database of strings to search for when scanning your hard drive (and floppies) and releaserepparttar 118532 new database torepparttar 118533 public. Ten years ago this system worked very well.

But now everyone is connected viarepparttar 118534 Internet. Now, using email as a transport point, it doesn’t take years to gather momentum, instead it takes a matter of minutes. And here is whererepparttar 118535 model breaks. Step back and ask yourselfrepparttar 118536 following question: if vendors can catch “known and unknown viruses” as their literature states, how then is it that we continue to have virus problems?

The answer lies inrepparttar 118537 fact that virus authors have been more creative in coming up with new ways to infect and wreak havoc andrepparttar 118538 software industry has not responded in kind, preferring to stay embedded in its old fashioned methodologies.

Why don’trepparttar 118539 old ways work any more, you might ask? It’s relatively simple. Let’s go throughrepparttar 118540 steps.

A virus author unleashes NewVirus via email. He mass mails his virus to thousands of people. Some, not all, unwittingly openrepparttar 118541 attachment thinking it’s from a friend orrepparttar 118542 subject is so enticing that they are fooled into opening it without thinking it’s a problem (cf. nude pictures of Anna Kournikova). The email attachment immediately starts emailing everyone in his contact list and embeds itself into his operating system so that it’s activated every time he turns on his computer.

The folks he emails in turn get fooled into thinkingrepparttar 118543 email is valid and they openrepparttar 118544 attachment. Very quickly all hell breaks loose. Agencies which monitor Internet traffic see problems arising withrepparttar 118545 sudden spikes in email traffic and they begin to get calls or emails alerting them torepparttar 118546 fact that there’s a new problem. Samples are obtained and sent off to anti-virus vendors. They passrepparttar 118547 emails through a series of tests to analyze what exactlyrepparttar 118548 virus does and how it does it. Additionally analysis is performed to extract a unique string of 1’s and 0’s to identify this attachment as none other than NewVirus. This is calledrepparttar 118549 signature string. It’s important that whatever string is arrived at does not exist in any other program or piece of software; otherwise, you will get what is commonly called a false positive.

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