Recent studies have shown that retail sales in stores all across the US this holiday season are on the rise because of online information. People nowadays do research on the products they are interested in from online catalogs and make decisions whether the said products are the ones they really need and then go to stores to do their purchases manually. Manually because these online catalogs do offer online purchase options but it shows that people are still driven by their senses, they think using the net but still enjoy the hunt in the store itself, handling the product and making the purchase.
This attitude exhibited by us humans is compared the thrill of the hunt wherein we go out-kill-go home with catch. Well, we don’t kill anything in stores for much of the stuff are already dead we simply have the urge to go out and get the stuff we need and then reward ourselves as we bring it home to use and enjoy.

The technology is there, the only problem for today’s internet users? It isn’t FREE. The internet has remained the same since it was put up as a system to link computers and aid in America’s Nuclear Defense strategy. Today, it has become the biggest social networking system man has ever known. The internet is a simple place to get information that you need when you need it. Just do a search on any of the many search engines and you get what? Millions of results that would be insane to go through one by one which would take forever. But what if the answer or information you were looking for was in the last few hundreds? That is where the future of the web lies, semantics technology in the form of AI systems that allow searches that yield the best possible results. A search would give not only the exact same words you are searching for but it takes into account what you mean and how you used these words. That way, you get the highest probability of relevance in doing searches. Google has already launched it’s expanded search facility onto the global theater and others would surely be not far in doing the same.

It is quite sometime now since Netflix, one of the web’s largest movie rental businesses has posted a challenge worth $1 Million. To date, no one has taken the top prize was for a recommendation system that would improve products movement more than the one they already have. Many have been working on the said challenge with only one team who has managed to get the statistics up by a meager 8% which was done by taking all the most stable recommendation systems available, combining it into one humungous recommendation application using the NetFlix data. All that work for so little an increase, whew. The prize is still up for grabs and a better result from an application has yet to be delivered so what do you think? Can you do it?

Many companies got so engrossed in the design and facilities of their web sites that they forgot to put their mouths behind their said web sites. Many of these so-called killer sites utilized the latest technology in their stunning graphics and visual presentations. Many even winning design awards based solely on the way their sites look and work..work? Now that’s where the trouble started, many of the sites which we choose not to mention have all the workings of a movie production with development costing the company millions. The only problem was that the visuals do not count in terms of the functionality and amount of information people were really after. They looked good and sound good but other than that did next to nothing. Many say it would have been better to pick-up the phone and call the company to get the information you needed as a faster method of getting what you want as you need it. This defeats the purpose of the web site which was supposed to provide most of the information they needed whenever they wanted.

Google, one of the biggest web based searched engines has announced the launch of it’s expanded search capabilities to the global market. Google�s powerful custom search was previously available to the US market and with this announcement makes it the premier search engines of the world. The said Custom Search feature uses the latest technology which allows users to do semantic searches rather than word matching technology of most search engines. Semantics searching can be compared to artificial intelligence in a sense that a phrase that is searched is done so not only based on word matches but also taking into consideration the meaning, context and actual information that is required by the user. This allows less wasted time into searching millions of search results that simply have the searched phrase within them.