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According to a report by the New York Times, nearly 25 percent of the traffic handled by search engine Wolfram Alpha comes from Siri, Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant software.

Apple announced a partnership with Wolfram Alpha in October when it released the iPhone 4S and introduced Siri. Wolfram Alpha differs from other search engines in that its results are based on data curated by Wolfram Alpha, not on algorithms attempting to sort the Web like Google or Bing.

Despite early criticism of Wolfram Alpha's self-described "computational knowledge engine," including its initial focus on mathematical and scientific … Read more

Apple and Amazon took home the best grades in customer satisfaction among people who did their holiday shopping via a mobile device.

ForeSee Results' "E-Retail Satisfaction Index" looked at the top 16 retail sites out of a possible 40 to gauge which offered the best mobile experience for holiday buyers. Apple's score of 85 out of 100 and Amazon's score of 84 handily surpassed third-place Dell with only 78.

Foresee Usability Team Lead Matthew Dull said both companies place huge value on the customer experience and carry that into their mobile environments.

While Amazon has both … Read more

Recognizing that it's no longer the only search engine in town, Google recently shed some light on how it keeps tweaking its algorithms to improve its search results.

Last year, Google made more than 500 improvements to its search algorithms. In a blog published yesterday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal explained how each new change may be based on a clever idea. But if it doesn't pass the company's rigorous testing, it doesn't get added to the mix.

A video posted with the blog and displayed below tapped into comments from Google engineers, each offering their thoughts … Read more

Facebook may be one of the most popular Web sites around, but it doesn't seem to be one of the most loved.

The social network scored dead last in a new study out today that tracked customer satisfaction among a variety of Web sites and companies. Produced in partnership with analytics firm ForeSee Results, the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report analyzed how users feel about news sites, search engines, and social networks.

Although Facebook's reputation actually grew 3 percent from last year to reach 66 out of 100, the site was at the bottom of the … Read more

Authors and other content creators will now be able to link their stories to their profile pages on Google and other sites, giving them a better chance of showing up by name in search results.

Through a pilot kicking off yesterday, authors who link their Google profiles to their content can participate in the program. For those who want to join in, Google has put together a Help Center page with steps on how to set up your profile and author pages.

In certain cases, search results can now list your name and photo taken from your Google profile next … Read more

Developer Dave's Ultimate Football Results is a free Google Chrome extension that fetches results from the most popular soccer leagues from multiple BBC Sport pages and displays them in one page in Chrome. It's the fastest way to check the latest results for your team, league, or association.

Ultimate Football Results is compact and, like most Chrome extensions, installs almost instantaneously. It placed a soccer ball icon in Chrome's address bar; we clicked it to access the extension's setup options. This involved selecting feeds for four tabs, each with four separate frames containing a drop-down list … Read more

Google recently updated its algorithm to take down Web sites that use SEO to game search results and up their ranking, but spam still dominates results. Search for something like "how to lose weight" and a flurry of content farms will appear.

Content farms simply hire low-paid freelancers to write articles about every topic in existence, allowing their Web sites to rank high in Google search results. The result? Unqualified, haphazardly written posts that can bury more reputable sources and delay the time it takes to get the answers you're looking for.

In response to these content farms, you can now permanently block Web sites from search results. Make use of this tip (in the video below)--Google is likely noting users' blocks to identify Web sites it should manually lower the ranking of.

… Read more

Editors' note: The video battery results for the Motorola Xoom were corrected from the original post. The original post contained results not in line with our final testing methodology. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

During the deluge of iPad 2 coverage last week, you may have missed CNET's handy tablets table. In it we gave an overview of the major non-Windows tablets already released and those soon-to-be released.

For the few tablets we actually have in the CNET Labs, we're able to go a bit more in depth with what each has to offer. … Read more

Yahoo's overall revenue is still declining, but its fourth-quarter numbers were in line with expectations as the company continues to tread water.

For the period ending December 31, Yahoo reported gross revenue of $1.5 billion, which when traffic-acquisition costs are factored out results in net revenue of $1.2 billion, just ahead of analyst estimates. It's a 4 percent decline from last year's fourth quarter, and can be mostly blamed on the loss of search advertising revenue as Yahoo transitioned its search technology to Microsoft under their 2009 agreement.

Net earnings, however, rose 104 percent to $… Read more