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Google Announces Personalized Search

Posted by Matt on Jan 23, 2006 in music

I once heard an interview with Google founder Sergey Brin in which he evangelized about encorporating artificial intelligence into search. I remember day dreaming about all the possible ways that artificial intelligence could impact search. Well today, Google took another major step towards encorporating AI into search by releasing personalized search.

What personalized search does is keeps track of the sites that you’ve read in the past and suggests sites based on what it knows that you like. This is very cool and completely scary at the same time. I would love to have great sites suggested to me but I’m also scared that suggestive search could limit my viewpoint. After all, how narrow minded would I be if I never attempted to broaden my horizons? At any rate, I can’t wait to try personalized search and will surely be posting a review once I’ve had a chance to play with it a little. You can try personalized search yourself here.

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Garage Band 3

Posted by Matt on Jan 23, 2006 in music

I had a chance to play with Garage Band 3 on a friend’s Intel iMac over the weekend. The main new features are podcasting and iMovie HD 6 integration. The podcasting features are kind of cool. There is a canned podcast Garage Band template and there are a bunch of loops that are designed to be used for podcasting. I didn’t get to play with the iMovie integration portion but I like the idea of being able to easily compose movie scores in Garage Band.

Although the changes in Garage Band 3 are pretty minimal, the enhancements are pretty cool and I give it a thumbs up. The only thing that really bugs me about iLife 06 is that most of the new features such as iWeb require you to have a .mac account which I’m really not interested in. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little less .mac dependance in these features. I think it would be cool if you could use the new tools to publish to any website (within reason).

While some of the publishing features in iLife 06 don’t really appeal to me, I can see their potential. iLife 06 and iWeb are going to enable people to easily publish rich content. The more people writing the web the better it will be. I love any sort of technology that takes publishing to the masses and enables people to post their content without having to be bothered by technicalities.