There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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New York-based Vizibility announced today that it raised a follow-on seed round of $1.3 million, bringing its total capital raised to over $2 million. The company, which struggled to raise seed funding after it was founded in 2009, was oversubscribed on this round.

Vizibility is a tool that allows users to control how they appear when someone searches for them on Google. They can add key words that they want to be associated with their name, such as their employer’s name. Each Vizibility customer gets a SearchMe button, which they can add to any Web page. When people click on the button, they get right to the curated Google results. Members also get QR codes that they can add to business cards and other marketing materials in order to guide people towards their Vizibility search results.

As founder James Alexander told Xconomy in May, he was inspired to start Vizibility when his “two first names” made it impossible for anyone to search for him on the Web. He developed the Vizibility platform and began marketing it, mostly to … Next Page »

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Ever since the invention of search engines, entrepreneur James Alexander has been frustrated. “I could never find myself on the Internet,” says Alexander, who gets lost on the Web because of his common name, or as he puts it, his “two first names.” So in 2009, he started playing around with the “advanced search” option on Google—a feature that only 5 percent of Googlers use, he says. He found that if he strung together 25 descriptive words about himself—voila—he appeared at the top of the 11 million search results for “James Alexander.”

That experiment inspired Alexander to launch Vizibility, a tool that lets anyone control how they appear on Google when someone searches for them. Sign up for Vizibility via its website (currently in beta form), and you can curate your Google results in a few easy steps—adding key words that you want to automatically be associated with your name, and ranking the results that you’d like to appear in the top five. And you get a SearchMe button, which you can add to any Web page. Anyone who clicks on it will get directly to your curated Google search results. “When people push that button they actually get me,” Alexander says. “Before, I didn’t show up anywhere in the first 15 pages.”

Vizibility recently revised its mobile version and started providing “QR Codes,” which are personalized barcodes you can add to business cards, resumes, and the like. That way, people who have barcode readers on their smartphones can scan you and get right to your Vizibility search results.

With the unusual name Arlene Weintraub, I don’t really have a problem getting confused with other people on the Web. But as a recently published author, I certainly recognize the value of linking my name with certain terms—i.e. the name of my book, Selling the Fountain of Youth. So I was intrigued enough to give Vizibility a try.

As soon as I signed onto Vizibility, the site informed me that if I did nothing to curate my Google results, 45 percent of the results for a search of “Arlene Weintraub” would end up being about me—not bad. But all I had to do to boost that number to 100 percent was add my place of employment, Xconomy, and the name of my book.

If I had a less common name, I could add up to 25 terms describing me—perhaps the names of former employers, or the address of my book’s Facebook page. (Yes, it does have its own Facebook page. Self-promotion is vital when you’re trying to sell a book.)

What I found most useful about Vizibility was its ranking feature. The site allowed me to see how Google would normally order my results. I could then re-sort the first five so the most important stuff would end up at the top of my Vizibility-curated results. If I didn’t do that, the top five would be filled with … Next Page »

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[Updated 3:30 pm. See below] It took a while, but we now have a ruling in a case that has major ramifications for the online travel industry.

The U.S. Department of Justice said today it has proposed a settlement in the case of Google’s $700 million bid to acquire ITA Software, a Cambridge, MA-based airfare pricing and shopping software firm. Essentially the deal can go through provided that Google plays fair with travel competitors—with some stipulations about how the Mountain View, CA-based search giant (NASDAQ: GOOG) is to use, develop, and license ITA’s technology.

Under the terms of the proposal, which would stand for five years, Google will be required to continue licensing ITA’s QPX software, which organizes airfares and itineraries, to other airfare search websites on “commercially reasonable terms,” according to the DOJ release. Google must keep developing and investing in ITA products (such as InstaSearch, an airfare search system) and offering them to other travel websites.

Interestingly, the DOJ is also requiring Google to implement firewalls to “prevent unauthorized use of competitively sensitive information and data gathered from ITA’s customers.” There are a few more stipulations, but the main point is that federal regulators will be watching Google’s behavior in online travel closely, to try to ensure fair competition.

The Google-ITA deal was formally opposed last fall by a coalition of travel companies including Expedia, Kayak, Hotwire, and Sabre Holdings (Microsoft’s Bing Travel also joined). The DOJ agreed with some of their complaints, saying today that “the acquisition, as originally proposed, would have substantially lessened competition among providers of comparative flight search websites in the United States, resulting in reduced choice and less innovation for consumers.”

The coalition against the Google-ITA deal, called FairSearch, said today’s DOJ decision to challenge Google is “a clear win for consumers,” and called it “an important victory.” In a statement, FairSearch added: “By putting in place strong, ongoing oversight and enforcement tools, the Department has ensured that consumers will continue to benefit from vibrant competition and innovation in travel search.” [This paragraph was added to include the opposing coalition's reaction---Eds.]

In a Google blog post today, senior vice president Jeff Huber wrote that Google is “moving to close this acquisition as soon as possible, and then we’ll start the important work of bringing our teams and products together.” He hinted that the Google-ITA combination will enable people to type into Google things like “flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May,” and get back flight times, fares, and a link to where they can buy tickets.

We’ll be watching for more fallout from this deal in terms of the competitive landscape in online travel—as well as Google-ITA hiring and growth trends in the Boston area and beyond.

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BrightEdge, a San Mateo, CA, company that introduced its Web-based search engine optimization platform for businesses last summer, said today that it has brought on Ming Lei, chief architect at leading Chinese search engine Baidu, as a strategic advisor. Lei is expected to help the company expand its platform so that customers can increase incoming traffic from multiple search engines in multiple languages around the world. “Our clients asked us to extend the platform’s reach so they can drive the same ROI globally that they are seeing in the U.S.,” BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu said in a statement.

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Here’s an interesting snapshot of a small startup working with a tech giant to change how people check out local establishments on the Web—and also how those establishments advertise online.

The startup is Newton, MA-based EveryScape, which creates 3-D panoramic tours of restaurants and other businesses from photos of their interiors. The tech giant is Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which has been ramping up its efforts in local search (among other things). Today, at a Microsoft Search Summit in San Francisco, Bing and EveryScape are announcing that they’ve teamed up to deliver “immersive imagery” for businesses across all of Bing’s local search results.

The partnership is a major extension of the collaboration the companies announced last June, which involved creating 3-D views of Boston-area restaurant interiors on Bing. The new deal makes EveryScape’s virtual tours available in Bing’s local search results for all establishments that EveryScape has catalogued—which amounts to “thousands” of businesses worldwide, the company says.

What this means is if you search for a nearby restaurant on Bing, say, and if EveryScape has stitched together the necessary imagery, you can click on the “step inside” button (see lower part of screenshot below) and get a virtual tour of the inside of the restaurant. Presumably this gives you a better feel for the ambience, and can help you decide whether you want to go there for a business meeting, private dinner, lunch date, or what have you.

Financial terms of the Bing partnership were not disclosed; EveryScape declined to comment on whether it will receive technology licensing fees and/or a cut of advertising revenues.

From a strategy perspective, EveryScape is now pursuing an interesting mix of big distribution partnerships (Bing for example) and consumer-focused software—its iPhone app, released last summer, provides visual restaurant guides for several U.S. cities. But the company seems to have shifted more of its sales focus to local advertisers. “The deal with Bing is an important step in our strategy to bring immersive advertising and search into the mainstream,” says Jim Schoonmaker, EveryScape’s CEO, in an e-mail. “Bing is a fantastic anchor tenant that provides an important source of local search traffic.”

EveryScape was founded in 2002 by chief technology officer Mok Oh. In 2008, the company raised $7 million in Series B financing from Dace Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic, and Launchpad Venture Group.

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This is one of those weeks when it feels like we’ve been overrun by news. Nothing really major, but a lot of things to think about. To get caught up, here’s a sampling of what’s been going on in the Boston tech community today:

—E Ink, the technology maker behind many popular e-reader displays, said that Beijing-based Hanvon Technology will be the first company to sell a color display based on E Ink, starting in March. The New York Times and other media outlets reported the news. The color display, which E Ink told us about a few months ago, works by putting a color filter over E Ink’s standard black-and-white display. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and other big e-reader makers—not to mention Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)—aren’t using the technology yet, but are watching closely.

—Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) is losing Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) as a video-streaming customer (to competitors Level 3 and Limelight), according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com and Frost & Sullivan. Rayburn estimates that Netflix’s business is worth $10-15 million to Akamai, and that the change will occur over the coming months.

—Rob Go, the co-founder of NextView Ventures (formerly of Spark Capital), has posted a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community.” It’s a quick guide for new entrepreneurs in town. One highlight: Go gives his list of five “scaling companies to watch (i.e., probably hiring)”—Gemvara, CSN Stores, SCVNGR, HubSpot, and DataXu.

—Cambridge, MA-based Backupify, an online data management startup, has released a backup and archiving service for Facebook Fan Pages. The service is geared towards businesses and other organizations that need to keep records of all of their activity on Facebook and other social media sites.

—Boston-based Goby, an activity-based search engine startup, has hired Mike Bennett as its first chief revenue officer. Bennett is a social media entrepreneur and sales and marketing exec who has previously worked at Cheapflights.com, Healthetreatment.com, and Monster.com. (Revenue is a good thing, so hiring a chief revenue officer must be too.)

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Just over a year after announcing plans to team up on search engine and advertising efforts, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) have completed a sizable leg of the search transition—Yahoo search results are now powered by Microsoft’s Bing in the U.S. and Canada, the companies said today.

The ten-year agreement that puts Redmond, WA-based Microsoft in control of search engine technology for both companies, and Sunnyvale, CA-based Yahoo in charge of sale and distribution of advertising for its search engine as well as Microsoft’s Bing, was finalized last July after more than a year of negotiations. As part of the deal, Microsoft agreed to pay Yahoo $150 million over three years for “transition and implementation costs,” and hire 550 Yahoo staffers to aid in the transition. The deal was approved by U.S. and European regulators in February.

Bing began testing its systems in preparation for the transition last month, and is ahead of schedule in rolling out its Bing-powered Yahoo U.S. and Canada search. The search capability is only available in English for now, but Bing says it will be adding new languages over the next few weeks and the months thereafter.

The next major transition in the works for the companies is the migration to Microsoft’s ad search platform, adCenter. Microsoft’s senior vice president of the online services division, Satya Nadella, wrote on the Bing blog that the companies are “optimistic about completing this phase later this fall.”

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Drivers of GM vehicles can now click on an eNav button on Google Maps results that will allow users to send turn-by-turn directions to the OnStar units in their cars. Xconomy reported the OnStar Google partnership a few weeks ago and now the system is live. In case you don’t get it, GM has a YouTube video explaining how it all works.

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There’s not much distance, in the minds of many Web merchants and publishers, between the terms “search engine optimization consultant” and “snake oil salesman.” That’s partly because SEO—the attempt to bring more traffic to a website by improving its ranking in the unpaid section of a search results list—is a messy art with many complex variables. It’s also because so many “black hat” SEO consultants prey on gullible clients, and try to game the search engines through underhanded tactics like keyword stuffing and invisible text.

Now there’s a new SEO gun in town—San Mateo, CA-based BrightEdge. Through better measurement and what it calls “pure white-hat SEO” techniques alone, the company can vastly increase the revenue its customers earn through traffic from unpaid search results, according to founder and CEO Jim Yu. (Also called “organic” results, these are the links that appear in the central column of a Google, Bing, or Yahoo search page. Which implies, I guess, that the pay-per-click ads in the margins are “inorganic.”)

BrightEdge announced the general availability of its Web-based SEO platform today, after three years in stealth mode and closed beta testing with a handful of customers like VMware, MySpace, and Branders, a marketer of brand-customized promotional products. BrightEdge’s service, designed for large enterprises managing extended Web properties, can provide a precise understanding of the return companies are getting for their SEO efforts, not unlike the statistics provided by paid-search platforms such as Google’s AdSense, Yu says.

There’s certainly room for improvement in what passes for SEO today. One study by Boston-based search engine marketing firm iProspect shows that AdSense ads on Google pages attract only 28 percent of users’ total clicks, while the other 72 percent go to organic results. “If organic search is driving three or four times the value of paid search, why do marketers focus first on the paid side? It’s because you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Yu says. “Google has done a great job of helping marketers measure the return-on-investment of paid search…but to do the same thing in organic search is nearly impossible. Our goal at BrightEdge is to make [organic] SEO as simple as pay-per-click.”

BrightEdge isn’t the first company on the enterprise SEO scene. Xconomy’s San Diego editor Bruce Bigelow has chronicled the rise of San Diego-based Covario, for example, as it helps giant customers like Intel, Adobe, and Procter & Gamble track the success of both their paid-search spending and their organic SEO efforts. But Yu, who formerly helped to run Salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, says that his 25-employee startup, which has raised $8.5 million in financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures, offers truly different methods for quantifying and improving revenues from organic search.

One element in BrightEdge’s offering is what it calls “closed-loop analytics.” That’s really about the ability to track the impact of specific SEO-driven changes in a website’s content. BrightEdge’s servers constantly poll the search engines to see where a given page ranks for hundreds of key search terms. Importantly, they monitor incoming traffic to see how … Next Page »

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It has been a busy week for little bits of technology news, amidst some more prominent deals. Here are three items in particular that caught my eye. The common theme among them, I would say, is the importance of relationship building in business.

—Microsoft’s Bing search engine, one year old this month, has been in the news a lot. Besides the strange Google experiment of adding dramatic background images, which drew obvious comparisons to Bing’s visual interface, there were other parallels made between the sites. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz posted a detailed analysis of search engine optimization and ranking elements between the two search giants and concluded that “Google and Bing are remarkably similar,” so that building separate sites to target the two engines separately is “a waste of energy.”

Bing also distinguished itself in terms of “social search” this week, rolling out a new search page that grabs public and shared updates directly from Facebook and Twitter. Social and real-time search has been a consistent point of effort for Bing, which first included some tweets in its search results last July, and formed early strategic partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to include real-time status updates last October. Google has similar efforts in the works, of course.

—Facebook, the Palo Alto, CA-based social networking giant, announced it has settled on office space for its Seattle engineering outpost. There had been much speculation about which neighborhood the office would be located in, ever since the company announced it was coming to town last month. Facebook’s office will be at 101 Stewart Street in Seattle, near Pike Place Market. It is slated to open in late July and could eventually house around 30 workers. (Interesting post here on the personal story behind the Seattle office.)

—A Shanghai real estate mogul named Jiang Zhaobai is visiting Seattle next week to scout out promising companies who want to do business in China in green tech, clean energy, new media, mobile, and biotech, according to a feature in the Seattle Times. Jiang has a new venture, called the Shanghai American Enterprise Center, which aims to invest in small and medium-sized U.S. companies and incubate them in Shanghai, helping them grow into the Chinese market.

I first got wind of Jiang’s local efforts from Rogers Weed, the director of the Washington state Department of Commerce, at an MIT Enterprise Forum event back in January. “We’ll make sure that guy gets a bang-up tour of Washington when he starts looking for investments,” Weed said at the time. Sounds like it’s going well so far, despite rising economic tensions between the U.S. and China.

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Tech giants Microsoft and Yahoo announced today they have received clearance for their search and advertising agreement from U.S. and European regulators. The news means the companies can move forward with their plan to transition Yahoo’s search platforms to Microsoft’s Bing (which should be complete by the end of this year), while Yahoo will handle sales for both companies’ search advertisers globally. The Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance was first announced last July, and is seen as a major effort to compete more effectively against Google in search and online advertising.

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In the fascinating maelstrom that is Google in China, one thing is clear: this affects all of us. It’s not about whether Google’s decision to draw a line in the sand is based on ideals versus profits. It’s not about whether the Chinese government will open up its Internet policies and play ball with the rest of the world. It’s about the future of every company on the Web—including Microsoft, Amazon, RealNetworks, and all the smaller companies out there.

In case you haven’t been following every twist and turn, earlier this week Google said it might pull out of China following its investigation of a cyber attack that it says originated in China, targeting at least 20 large companies (including Google). One apparent goal of the attacks was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google said it is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Google’s statement is very carefully worded. It doesn’t explicitly accuse Chinese officials of any wrongdoing. But the reactions of a lot of people, from the media to tech-business leaders to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have helped portray the situation as a cut and dried “Google (and freedom of information) vs. China (and censorship)” issue.

I want to tackle one piece of this sprawling puzzle. And that is the huge, ongoing cultural challenge that Google, Microsoft, and other western companies face in setting up business operations in China. No, this is not a new issue. But one part of the Google announcement was particularly telling: “We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today.”

Google has now been up and running in China for four years. That is not a lot of time to build deep relationships. And it certainly doesn’t help that Google’s biggest competitor in China, Baidu, is backed by the Chinese government.

Heading up Google’s China effort until recently was Kai-Fu Lee, the controversial ex-Microsoft vice president who founded Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing in 1998. Lee, a Chinese high-tech celebrity and education leader, was head of Google China from 2006 until last September, when he left the company to create an incubator in Beijing for Chinese high-tech startups.

In my view, it may not be a coincidence that the current situation has come about so soon after Lee’s departure. Frankly, I’m surprised this all didn’t come to a head much sooner for Google. But perhaps it was through Lee’s efforts that it didn’t—or maybe, conversely, it’s part of why Lee left Google. (I’ve pinged him for comment, but haven’t heard back on this topic.)

Which brings me to some analysis. Back in 2003, while he was at Microsoft, … Next Page »

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There is something oddly human about Stephen Wolfram using his iPhone to look up the mass of the “cascade hyperon,” a subatomic particle with who-knows-what properties. That’s what Wolfram, one of the world’s most distinguished experts in physics and computing, was doing on the day we spoke a few weeks ago.

Maybe it stood out because it means that even Wolfram—whose depth of scientific knowledge seems to exist on a different plane from other humans—needs a smartphone these days. Or maybe it’s just funny that anyone would use an iPhone app to look up such a thing.

In any case, Wolfram, 50, is a renowned scientist, author, and business leader. Born in London, he resides in the Boston area, but his company, Wolfram Research, is global, with headquarters in Champaign, IL, and 600-some employees spread around the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Last May, he launched an ultra-ambitious project called Wolfram Alpha, a kind of “knowledge engine” that answers queries about everything from geography to statistics to finance by “computing” the answer from an extensive database. It’s different from a search engine, which returns a list of links and documents. But the two can work together: in November, Microsoft announced it had formed a partnership to incorporate Wolfram Alpha into some of Bing’s search results.

So it was high time I checked in with Wolfram, whose career I have followed over the years. Interestingly, he calls Wolfram Alpha “the most complicated project I’ve ever done.” That says quite a lot, given that Wolfram spent more than a decade writing A New Kind of Science, the 1,200-page tome he released in 2002 that potentially turns every field of science and technology on its head. He is also the creator of Mathematica, a software program used widely for scientific and technical computing (things like modeling, simulations, and visualizations)—it’s the main reason Wolfram’s company has been profitable since 1988.

We spoke by phone on a quiet December afternoon just before the holidays. I asked him about the technology and strategy behind Wolfram Alpha and the future of search engines and knowledge engines, as well as business lessons learned from building his company and running it remotely. (I also couldn’t resist asking for his take on the massive physics effort at the Large Hadron Collider, the Swiss-based particle accelerator that amounts to the biggest science experiment in history.)

If you’ve ever interviewed Wolfram, you know to choose your questions wisely. It’s not just that he doesn’t suffer fools, but that he answers every question so thoroughly that he will embark on tangents that turn out to be mind-blowing—much more interesting than the path of the original question. Which is a bit like the best queries in science, business, and Wolfram Alpha itself, come to think of it. (You should try the site here if you haven’t yet.)

Here are some edited and slightly condensed highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: Tell me about the organizational structure of Wolfram Alpha. How big is the project?

Stephen Wolfram: Wolfram Alpha has about 200 people. The parent company is Wolfram Research, and headquarters are in Champaign. It’s quite a distributed operation at this point. There are pieces in Boston and the U.K. We have one or two people in Seattle. Our people are scattered literally all over the world. I set a bad example by being a remote CEO starting in 1991. For many kinds of things, it’s tremendously productive.

X: What are your tips for managing a company remotely?

SW: My theory is the most productive form of meeting is conference calls with Web conferencing. You can have more people in the meeting, and you’re not wasting anyone’s time. They can work on other things, and if you need them, you just say their name. I’ve found that it’s what I spend my life doing. The Wolfram Alpha project is the most complicated project I’ve ever done. It’s remarkable for what it … Next Page »

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The World Wide Web is an overwhelming collection of information, especially when one is faced with the task of sifting through it—and it’s only expanding. In the last few years, the induction of social media into the online realm has added more content to the Internet than that of the decades preceding it combined. Picture searching through this information influx as if you were reading a map—the more destinations, roads, and pit stops you have to hit along the way, the more difficult the map is to navigate and the more time-consuming the journey. Moreover, if you’re crossing the border, your information may need to be translated.

So what do the leading tech companies have in store for our Web surfing future? It’s full of countless possibilities. At least, that was the message echoed to attendees at Monday night’s Xconomy Forum on The Future of Search and Information Discovery. In a packed University of Washington lecture hall, five of Seattle’s most knowledgeable experts in search and computing weighed in (see event photos here), and their remarks pointed to compelling innovations in the works from everyone—from startup underdogs to industry leaders like Google and Microsoft. And they’re all in a race to do it better. The hot topics on everybody’s to-do list: mobile search, semantic analysis, and user interfaces for search that are both vertical and comprehensive.

“How many people had to print out directions to get here?” panelist Brian Bershad, Seattle site director for Google, posed to the audience. Bershad’s point was that our searching capabilities, specifically on mobile devices, should integrate intuitive advances like voice recognition and location-based services. “My phone should just text me at 5:55 with directions,” he said. “GPS and voice direction should be integrated into the machine.”

Others on the panel pointed out that the smartphone has become the frontier line for mobile search. “I think we’re very far from the endgame for search on these devices,” said professor and entrepreneur Oren Etzioni, the founder and director of UW’s Turing Center. The way he understood it, the question came down to how many different gadgets a person could, or would, carry in their pocket at any given time. “It wasn’t the Swiss Army Knife approach until the iPhone came out. So basically, people prefer a single solution as long as it works well. Once you have something that answers all your questions correctly, people will gravitate toward that,” he said. “You get your answer and you move on.”

The idea of the “Swiss Army Knife” search doesn’t stop at mobile devices. Now search providers are looking for ways to incorporate that all-encompassing, personal user experience into a better, more efficient, and faster search catered specifically to each user’s needs.

“I don’t think of Google [search] as ‘one box,’” said Microsoft corporate vice president Harry Shum, who heads the Bing engineering team. Instead he noted that the future of information discovery is increasingly about getting the user to fine-tune and “reveal their intents” as they search. Using the iPhone as an example for Google’s vertical search capabilities, Shum addressed the disconnect between the amount of online information out there and the infrastructure needed to adequately search it. “If you have thousands of applications, how can users find what they’re looking for?” he said. Shum suggested that search engines involve users in their queries, which may develop better applications and generate more positive search results.

With both Google and Microsoft on the panel, one audience member posed a provocative question: What, he asked, are the weaknesses of each company’s culture and organization, and what are … Next Page »

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The teams behind Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha announced today they have teamed up to enhance Bing’s search results across topics like nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Financial terms weren’t given, but the partnership gives Bing users access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and curated data. The move fits with Bing’s goal of helping people make decisions more efficiently. Led by Stephen Wolfram, the renowned physicist and mathematician, Wolfram Alpha debuted in May with the goal of making “all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

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Microsoft and Yahoo officially announced this morning that they had reached a search engine and advertising agreement. Amid intense speculation, and after more than a year of disagreements over minor and not-so-minor details, the two companies have signed a ten-year agreement that puts Redmond, WA-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) in control of both companies’ search engine technology, and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) in charge of the sale and distribution of advertising for both its own search engine and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

As part of the announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo launched a website dedicated to explaining and promoting the agreement. “It establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in the press release attached to the website. Microsoft now owns an exclusive license to the Sunnyvale, CA-based company’s search technology, including the right to integrate it into its own search platforms, a process that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a conference call with reporters and financial analysts this morning.

Even before that integration, the Bing search algorithm developed by Microsoft will be used on the search engine sites of both companies. According to Ballmer, expanding Bing onto Yahoo will give the fledgling search engine, just a few months old, the room to compete more effectively, both in terms of users and advertising dollars. The press release does not mention Google, the colossus of Internet search, by name, instead referring to it as “one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search.” But it’s hard to imagine Microsoft and Yahoo would have reached an accord without Google overwhelmingly outcompeting them. At the moment though, Google employees are not allowed to comment on the deal.

On the other end of the deal, advertisers wanting to use either company’s search engine will have to go through Yahoo, although this only applies to so-called premium advertisers. Yahoo will use Microsoft’s AdCenter program to run this business, and AdCenter will still be the program for self-serve advertising. Although Yahoo is in control, both companies will still have their own … Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based Internet search service provider Infospace announced the launch of a new search website focused on charity. DoGreatGood.com,which compiles search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and ask, will donate money to charity when used, similar to Infospace’s original search engine Dogpile. Like Dogpile, the donations go to animal charities. Half of the revenue generated by DoGreatGood will be donated, and the site has already raised over $50,000 for charity.

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CrowdEye, a new Twitter search engine, launched yesterday, according to a press release from the company.  The Seattle-based startup was founded by Ken Moss and his wife, Becca, last fall.  Both Mosses were long-time employees of Microsoft, where Ken was head of the search engineering group, the creators of Bing.com, for the last five years.  CrowdEye, which is currently privately funded, allows search of text, tags, and links as well as related topics on Twitter.

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Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, is raising the position of the Redmond, WA-based company in the search engine market, according to a study released today by comScore, an Internet research firm based in Reston, VA, with an office in Seattle. The study showed that “daily searcher penetration” rose 0.9 percent this past week to 16.7 percent, a 2 percent increase overall since Bing launched early this month.  In the press release, comScore senior vice president Mike Hurt wrote that these numbers show a “continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

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