July 5th, 2005

You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written on July 5th, 2005.

EU Software Patents Legislation May Be In Trouble

A number of online news sources including Reuters are reporting that the proposed European Software Patents legislation may be in trouble. This is good news for the anti-Software Patents lobby but the vote has to be taken on July 6th. The EuObserver also reports that the legislation may be in trouble.

Lobbying has been rife and the pro-patent lobby has been planting stories all over the Irish media. PR operations claiming to represent the Irish software industry have been trying to get MEPs to vote for software patents. The reality is that these people only represent their backers, typically large multinationals with armies of lawyers ready to corrupt the European patents system so that it becomes a mirror of the failed US patents system. The Irish software industry is very much against software patents.

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Written by John McCormac on July 5th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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Microsoft Launches “Irish” Search Engine

One of the biggest problems with running a country level search engine is getting a good search index. Microsoft has a reasonable index but the Irish index seems to be based on links from Irish sites and Irish IPs. Unfortunately Microsoft is not good at building country level search indices. Then again even Google has problems when it comes to country level searching.

The promo for the launch didn’t quite go as planned. ENN.ie picked up on the UAE results problem. But the results were coming from an unfiltered search. The ‘pages from Ireland’ option is not the default option. Perhaps Microsoft Search should spend less on researchers looking at the “semantic web” and more on people who know how to build search engines and search indices.

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Written by John McCormac on July 5th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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