Web Vocabulary #10

ADO - short for ActiveX Data Objects, Microsoft's newest high-level interface for data objects. ADO is designed to eventually replace Data Access Objects (DAO) and Remote Data Objects (RDO). Unlike RDO and DAO, which are designed only for accessing relational databases, ADO is more general and can be used to access all sorts of different types of data, including web pages, spreadsheets, and other types of documents.   Click here for source

DAO - short for data access objects, objects that work with the Jet database engine. DAO objects are generally created with Visual Basic. Once created, a DAO object can be accessed and manipulated by any application that can use the Jet engine. This includes all of the applications in Microsoft Office, such as MS-Word, MS-Access, and Excel.   Click here for source

Google Gears - a plug-in for web browsers which aims to make browsers a lot faster, allow them to store data on a user's machine, identify where a user is via geo-location and provide the ability to write files to the desktop.   Click here for source

Favicon - short for Favorite Icon, a customized icon that is used by Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) versions 5.0 and later. When a user bookmarks a specific Web page, that Web page loads a customized icon into the user's browser, typically a tiny version of a company or Web site's logo. The favicon is displayed next to the Web site's name in the Favorites list and can also be displayed in the Links toolbar. When a site has not created a favicon, IE will load the IE logo into the browser by default.   Click here for source

QR Codes - is like a bar code. It can be read by a mobile phone with a camera. The mobile device must have a QR reader installed on it. The QR code usually contains  a web site address and will automatically connect the mobile phone user to the address of the web site contained in the code. However up to 3 kilobytes of information can be stored in a QR code which is about 3000 text characters.   Click here for source

"New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google"

The article introduces a new online search service on a market – WolframAlpha. The biggest question is whether it can beat Google or not. A creator of WolframAlpha, Stephen Wolfram says that “Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.” There is a big difference between those two. Mainly, WolframAlpha does not search through Web pages, “instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collection of data the company has amassed.” Whereas Google find information that already exists online. “When a user types in a query, WolframAlpha tries to determine the relevant area of knowledge and find the answers often performing calculations on its data.” However, “in its current state there are many queries that WolframAlpha can not answer, either because it does not understand the question or because it does not have the requisite data.” WolframAlpha is based on program Mathematica, which Mr. Wolfram had created.

I think that this new search engine has a potential where it comes to finding specific information from a specific field that has been already gathered. It would really save us a lot of time if we could find the exact answers to our questions Well, we will have the opportunity to test it next week and we’ll see how effective it is.

WolframAlpha is launching next week at www.wolframalpha.com

Click here for article source