CHORUS

CHORUS CHORUS P2P Workshop - 7/24/2008
Chorus P2P Workshop report is now available! (This Workshop was held in Vico Enquense, Italy on June 4,6, 2008)
The First Meta Inspiration Search Engine Oamos - 7/22/2008
Oamos questions search engines for up-to-date news, images, synonyms, music and videos in relation to your topics. The content are streamed audio-visually more or less objective or entertaining, with or without sound, and with or without links. (From AltSeachEngine)
Is it possible to have Intimacy online? - 7/22/2008
Lately, I have been thinking a lot lately about Web 2.0, Social Networking & Romance. With the Next Generation of Web bringing all parts of the World together through Social Media got me wondering what this has done to Love & Intimacy. (From SocialDesire.com by Shana Albert)
Google buying Digg for 200 million ...Why? - 7/22/2008
Rumors are spreading all over the blogosphere that Google and Digg are talking acquisition again as Google will be buying Digg for $200 million and bringing it in under the Google News umbrella, as TechCrunch is reporting (no word if the two parties are holed up in a secret hotel room location outside of MountainView or not).(From Search engine journal by Loren Baker)
Introducing Search Race Engine #208 - pressflip - 7/19/2008
We’re proud to announce the discovery of pressflip, a new persistent search engine that focuses on one simple question: what are you interested in? (From Alt Search Engine)
Pressflip Is A Belly Flop - 7/19/2008
Pressflip is a new blog search engine (it’s actually a relaunch of a site called Persai, which launched earlier this year). The idea is you do a search, train the engine by telling it which results aren’t interesting to you, and then wait for new results to come in over time.(From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
News Video Research Offers SEO Opportunities - 7/18/2008
In a previous article titled New Online Video News Search Study - Is the Business Case Made?, I discussed a DoubleClick Performics study that looked at how consumers interact with online video news, how they use search in the process, and their desire to see more video search results on the mainstream search engines.(From Search engine Land by Grant Crowell)
comScore: Yahoo & Microsoft Gain Share But Google Breaks 7 Billion Searches - 7/18/2008
It's search popularity statistics time again, and I'm starting off with the latest figures from comScore. Finally, a change -- Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Trouble for the Big G? Not really -- because in terms of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google.(From Search Engine Land)
Google Buys Russian Contextual Ads Service for $140m - 7/18/2008
BREAKING NOW: Google is buying Russian contextual advertising company ZAO Begun for $140 million from UK-registered Rambler Media (many Russian firms now base themselves in the UK). (From Techcrunch by Mike Butcher)
LOUD3R Offers a BETT3R Way To Discover News - 7/17/2008
Filtering through the noise to find news on discovery sites can be daunting. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit have been doing very well, and memetrackers, like Techmeme, are also growing in popularity. (From Techcrunch by Calley Nye)
Google Continues To Test A Search Interface That Looks More Like Digg Every Day - 7/16/2008
A couple of days ago we posted screen shots of a new search interface being bucket tested by Google that lets users vote up or down on search results. The resulting interface was very Digg-like, and included a total vote count, etc.(From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Is This The Future Of Search? - 7/16/2008
Earlier today we showed a screen shot of the interface and a video of the search history, recorded by Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango. This new video, however (also recorded by Pike), shows the full Google search experience with a very Digg-like interface. Users vote search results up or down - a down vote makes it dissapear with a “poof,” an up vote moves the result to the first page.(From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology - 7/14/2008
In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms? Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. (From Google Blog by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman)
Scour, social search with a twist - 7/14/2008
Scour is a brand new meta social search engine that encourages voting and commentary on each of its query results drawn from Google, Yahoo! And Live Search. And they will pay you to use their site. (From Pandia Search Engine News)
What Can TV Learn from Search? - 7/11/2008
A few television and cable companies have taken a page from the online marketing playbook lately. Comcast acquired social networking site Plaxo last month to integrate social network-like features that let viewers share programming in a viral way. Meanwhile, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is looming on the horizon with promise of interactivity and the long tail-like content capacity. (From Searchenginewatch.com by Michael Boland)
Searching on an iPhone can be fun - 7/10/2008
You probably agree that nothing can be made too easy. We've been dreaming of ways to make searching on phones easier and more fun. Today, we're showing off our first native app for the iPhone and iPod touch -- Google Mobile App. It combines powerful Google services with a slick interface, so you can find what you're looking for faster and more easily.(From Google Mobile blog by Alastair Tse and Nicholas Jitkoff)
Who’s the BOSS? The Alt Search Engines Respond - 7/10/2008
There are a lot of vertical content sites that will no doubt tap into the BOSS offering from Yahoo, as the strength of Yahoo’s overall search comprehensiveness has been a missing piece of the puzzle for such sites. This also opens a whole new realm of innovation from startups in areas like semantic search and social search in particular, and kudos to Yahoo for opening the door to further push that envelope.(From AltSearchengines by Siva Kumar)
Me.dium Launches "Real Time" Social Search - 7/10/2008
Me.dium has introduced a social search engine that blends results from a "real time" index of what people are currently viewing online with Yahoo's full-scale web index. The result is something I've not seen elsewhere—and despite my long time skepticism regarding social search, this approach actually holds promise for delivering a unique view of relevant content on the web.(From Search Engine land by Chris Sherman)
Online Privacy Hearings See Conflicting Testimony And Recommendations - 7/10/2008
Privacy has re-emerged as one of the most pressing and complex issues for everyone online, including search engines, after a sustained period of relative calm. However the rise of behavioral targeting, domestic spying/wiretapping by the Bush administration, attempts by states to regulate privacy and more aggressive moves by Europeans to protect consumers have created conflicting policies and confusion for everyone. (From Search Engine land by Greg Sterling)
Browse Del.icio.us Bookmarks Visually With FavThumbs - 7/10/2008
While we’ve waited with bated breath for the release of Delicious 2.0 (Yahoo’s been teasing us for months), Ryan Sit, the creator of Swurl, a recently launched startup that offers a lifecasting aggregator for web activity, has been toying around with the Del.icio.us API to bring us FavThumbs. FavThumbs offers a visually-pleasing web application to view screen shots of your bookmarks. (From Techcrunch by Calley Nye )
Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS - 7/9/2008
When you’re the distant second player in web search, you’ve got nothing to lose by making bold moves. So it makes sense that Yahoo has adopted an open strategy with the following idea in mind: woo developers to build on top of your technology, and then display your advertisements to more eyeballs throughout the long tail of the web. (from Techcrunch by Mark Hendrickson )
Did the “Enron of Norway” Pull a Fast One On Microsoft? More Details About the Mess at Fast Search & Transfer - 7/3/2008
Even back in January when Microsoft agreed to pay $1.2 billion for enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer, it was mired in an accounting scandal and trading in its stock had been suspended.
Google Readying Analysis of World's "One Trillion" Images - 7/1/2008
As it seeks to monetize the exploding universe of uploaded images to the Web, which Google says is nearing one trillion, it is developing image processing to more effectively search and organize images. Presently, photos are indexed primarily by text and other metadata.(From Beet TV by Andy Plesser)
Microsoft To Buy Powerset? Not Just Yet. - 6/26/2008
VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company.(From techcrunch by Michael Arrington )
Jogli’s Music Search Streams 500M Songs, 12M Albums - 6/26/2008
Meet Jogli, a music search engine that claims to offer immediate listening access to 500M songs and 12M albums. (From Techcrunch by Roi Carthy )
Build Your Own Semantic Search Engine With Hakia’s APIs - 6/19/2008
Want to create your own semantic search engine, but just don’t have the PhDs? Semantic search engine Hakia is opening up APIs to let anyone build their own semantic search application on top of its technology. (From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld )
Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media - 6/17/2008
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based very early growth metrics. (From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Powerset Unveils iPhone-Optimized Wikipedia Search - 6/17/2008
Powerset, the natural language search engine that partially launched in May, has released a mobile version of their site that allows users to quickly search Wikipedia from their iPhone (From Techcrunch by Jason Kincaid )
Will 2008 Be Google’s End Of Innocence? - 6/16/2008
2008 may be the year that Google’s innocence ends, as media and governments start to cast a less forgiving eye at the behavior of the company that controls 60% of the search market and perhaps as much as half of all online advertising revenue.(From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Yahoo Announces Non-Exclusive Search Agreement With Google - 6/12/2008
Well, it was a little later than we expected, but Yahoo has announced a non-exclusive deal with Google around search and search advertising. Yahoo’s press release is below and their blog post is here.(From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Twingly Blog Search Engine Now Public (With Widgets) - 6/12/2008
Swedish startup Twingly opened up its blog search engine to the public this morning.(From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld)
Mahalo Has Competition (YouBundle Secret Screen Shots) - 6/11/2008
People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. (From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld) More...
Fast Trouble for Microsoft - 5/29/2008
Regulators refer a newly acquired Microsoft unit to criminal investigators in Norway. (From "Portfolio.com" by Liz Gunnison )
The Seeds Of a Good Idée: TinEye Image Search (500 Invites) - 5/26/2008
Image search is a hard problem. That is especially true when you are searching with no information other than the image itself (no tags, titles, or descriptions, just the photo). (From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld)
The Empire Strikes Back: Our Analysis Of Microsoft Live Search Cashback - 5/22/2008
Everyone has an opinion on today’s move by Microsoft to shake things up in the search space. Their new Live Search Cashback product shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users. (From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington )More...
Who’s hoping to become the next Google? - 5/22/2008
It seems like Google has been the dominant search company since time began but in reality it wasn’t that long ago we were habitually using the likes of Lycos, AltaVista and the previous giant of the internet, Yahoo!(From Altsearchengine)
SearchDay: Microsoft to Give Cash Back to Searchers - 5/21/2008
SearchDay: Microsoft to Give Cash Back to Searchers (From SearchEngine by Kevin Newcomb)
Microsoft To Offer Cash Back To Search Engine Users In Effort To Fight Google - 5/20/2008
Microsoft will announce a new search advertising model tomorrow at the Advance08 Conference in Redmond, Washington - some parts of the site are already live on Microsoft now (From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington )
The Biggest Tech IPO of 2008 Is Coming Out of Russia: Search Engine Yandex to Raise Up To $2 Billion - 5/20/2008
The Google of Russia is Yandex, and it is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq in the fall with the hopes of raising $1.5 billion to $2 billion, reports Reuters.(From techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld )
Ijntroduction to Google Search Quality - 5/20/2008
Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. (From Google blog by Udi Manber)
Free business news search engine from Northern Light - 5/18/2008
Northern Light has been around since the beginning of web search. For the last six years, however, Northern Light’s services have been reserved for enterprise customers. Recently, they launched a free business news search engine.(From Pandia)
Google Confirms Friend Connect - 5/12/2008
As we reported on Friday, Google will be launching its own data portability effort called Friend Connect. (From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld )
Powerset Launches Showcase For User Search Experience - 5/11/2008
Today marks another milestone for San Francisco based contextual search engine Powerset. (From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington )
Viewzi May Finally Have Won Me Over to Visual Search - 5/10/2008
Apparently, Viewzi had its private beta launch when I was in San Francisco for Web 2.0 Expo, because how I missed it, I have no idea. I've never been a big fan of visual search, but I'm always willing to give it a try, going in with the expectation that I'll be doing a lot of eye-rolling. (From Profy by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira )
Safari Search Plugin Inquisitor Acquired By Yahoo! - 5/9/2008
Inquisitor, the Safari search plugin billed as “Spotlight for the web”, has been acquired by Yahoo.(From Techcrunch by Jason Kincaid)
Yahoo’s Answer to Google’s Universal Search is Glue (Coming Soon to America) - 5/8/2008
Sometimes the only way to get new products out the door at a big company like Yahoo is to launch it far away from HQ. (From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld)
Google May Run Display Advertisements With Image-Search Results - 5/7/2008
Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, is considering running illustrated advertisements alongside the results of Web queries for pictures, moving beyond its text-based ad business. (From Bloomberg.com by Crayton Harrison and Fred Fishkin)
Enhanced Image Search - What Is It Like? - 5/5/2008
I mainly search for images online when I need a web design inspiration or if I want to decorate a post of mine. Some recent image search engines and search engine applications seem really impressive to me. (From Seosmarty)
Yahoo To Flag Malware Sites In Search Results - 5/5/2008
Tomorrow Yahoo will launch a partnership with McAfee and will integrate their Site Advisor malware scanning product into Yahoo search. (From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Google Experiments With Next Generation Image Search - 4/27/2008
Two Google scientists presented a paper (pdf embedded below) at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last week that outlines their vision for the future of image search.( From Techcrunch by Michael Arrington)
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? - 4/25/2008
As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data keyword search will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips.(From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld)
Search for Mapped Web Pages in Google Maps - 4/20/2008
Google Maps added the map view available at Google Experimental Search. Google extracts the most important locations from web pages and lets you see the search results on a map.(From Google operating system )
Visual, Mobile Search Engine Coming to iPhones in Japan - 4/18/2008
Evolution Robotics is preparing to introduce a new mobile search engine, dubbed ER Search, that incorporates visual search. (From Searchenginewatch.com by Nathania Johnson)
Twing Launches New Search Technology - 4/18/2008
Twing recently announced the debut of its new online community and forum search engine, www.Twing.com. (From Search Engines)
Monday is Alternative Search Engines Day - 4/18/2008
On Monday, April 21st, a unique event will take place as dozens of Alternative Search Engines gather together for one special day organized by them and for them.(From Search Engines)
Google Gets Whois Answers In Search Results - 4/18/2008
Looks like Google's gained a new direct answer service, whois information for domains. (From Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan)
Google likes working with yahoo - 4/18/2008
Two major search engine companies that also offer a variety of competing services: can they be friendly and work side-by-side? (From Search Engine Journal by Julie Kent)
Will Social Networking Kill Search? - 4/17/2008
A provocative headline and somewhat less provocative article in Popular Mechanics argues that social networking will kill search "as we know it." ( From Search Engine Land by by Greg Sterling)
Blinkx Keeps On Keepin’ On - 4/17/2008
Video Search engine Blinkx has announced five ad deals in recent weeks, along with other new initiatives. (From Search Engine Land by Bob Heyman)
Google announces first quarter 2008 results - 4/17/2008
Google's results for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, include the operations of DoubleClick Inc. from the date of acquisition, March 11, 2008, through the end of the quarter, and are compared to pre-acquisition results of prior periods. (From Google Investor Relations)
PicLens improves image search - 4/16/2008
PicLens is a Firefox add on that makes image search fun and easy.(From Pandia Search Engine)
How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It - 4/16/2008
Google owns search for now, but as PM's senior tech editor explains in his biweekly column, the evolving nature of how we use the Internet has left an uncertain future for search—and it's all the fault of you and your friends.(From Popular Mechanics by Glenn Derene)
Nsyght launches beta - 4/15/2008
Nsyght is a human powered search engine and this week Geoffrey and his team launched Nsyght Beta.(From Pandia Search Engine)
Crawling through HTML forms - 4/11/2008
Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we've started experimenting with recently.(From Google by Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy)
News Corp., AOL Pursue Yahoo Deals - 4/10/2008
Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL are closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations(From Wall street Journal By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG, KEVIN J. DELANEY and MERISSA MARR)
Google's App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not Amazon - 4/9/2008
There's no shortage of stories about Google’s newly launched App Engine, but almost all of them get it wrong -- because they compare the new service to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services (AMZN).(From Silicon Alley Insider by Nate Westheimer)
Google's App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not Amazon - 4/9/2008
There's no shortage of stories about Google’s newly launched App Engine, but almost all of them get it wrong -- because they compare the new service to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services (AMZN).(From Silicon Alley Insider by Nate Westheimer) More...
European recommendations for data protection and search engines - 4/8/2008
The European Union's Article 29 Working Group has completed its PDF report on data protection and search engines. The group recommends that search engines only be allowed to hold onto search data for six months. To hang onto data for longer, search engine operators will need to show that such data is "strictly necessary" to offer the service. Google and others have long said that they need to retain data in order to refine search results, prevent click fraud, and launch new services like spell check (which, in Google's case, was built from user search data). In addition, the data that is kept will need to be guarded more closely. The working group concluded that IP addresses could be used to identify individuals; if not by the search engine itself, then by law enforcement or after a subpoena.
Yahoo ! lance une solution de recherche mobile - 4/4/2008
Dans sa présentation au congrès CTIA Wireless 2008, Marco Boerries, executive vice president de Yahoo! Connected Life, a dévoilé Yahoo! oneSearch 2.0, la nouvelle version du moteur de recherche de Yahoo. (From IRT Manager.com)More...
Yahoo ! est la recherche voix - 4/3/2008
Yahoo! OneSearch 2,0, souhaite accélérer les recherches en ligne et faire des millions de liens web plus accessible pour les téléphones mobiles et cela va inclure la voix en partenariat avec vlingo (From Services Mobiles) More...
Windows Live Search Mobile Adds New Mapping Features - 4/1/2008
Microsoft will be adding new capabilities to its mobile search app, Windows Live Search Mobile, later this Spring.(From Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld)More...
Kosmix, a different kind of clustering engine - 3/30/2008
Kosmix is a different kind of clustering search engine. Their spider crawls the web and works hard to categorize the web pages it gathers into algorithm generated topic pages.(From "Pandia")More...
AllPlus Universal Meta Search and Discovery - 3/28/2008
The AllPlus Universal Meta Search and Discovery Engine aims to identify and present the very best search results from the very best information sources on the Web. (From "Searchengine")More...
Privacy Policies And Search Engines - 3/27/2008
A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether or not a web site had a privacy policy. (From "Searchengine" by Bill Slawski)More...
Google expands search box - 3/26/2008
Google adjusts it search box to the length of your query.(From "Pandia")More...
YouTube Now Offering Video Statistics - 3/26/2008
Google has announced that YouTube users will now have access to in depth statistics for their videos.(from "Techcrunch" by Duncan Riley)More...
SearchMedica Powers Search on ModernMedicine - 3/24/2008
Partnership with SearchMedica to enhance web searches on ModernMedicine.com. Exclusive alliance will deliver quality, on-demand content for medical professionals.(From "Search engine") More...
Google Deemphasizes Search In Experimental Mobile Interface - 3/24/2008
Spotted over the weekend by Garrett Rogers, Google has quietly introduced a new, experimental mobile interface called "LCB" that emphasizes browsing instead of search. Something of a radical approach for Google, which is synonymous with search, the site allows users to get to results in top "local search" categories such as restaurants, travel, transportation, retail, entertainment, and sports without having to enter a query. Most results are two clicks down. (From Searchengine by Greg Sterling) More...
Google AdWords Officially Launches Demographic Bidding? Maybe Not - 3/24/2008
On Friday, Google announced they launched demographic bidding to every advertiser in the AdWords program. In short, demographic bidding allows advertisers to show their ads to specific age groups and genders. They did a beta launch of this earlier this year, where they dropped using comScore data for their own.(From "Search engine land" by Barry Schwartz) More...
Answers.com presents WikiAnswers What is it? - 3/24/2008
We all know about Answers.com: as the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia, it’s the best way to get facts and information on over four million topics. If you want to read Madonna’s biography or learn more about London, that’s your one-stop shop. But what about the detailed questions? What if you already know background information about Madonna, but want to know if she is still married to Guy Ritchie? Or you want to know what the best way is to get from London to Paris? (From "Search engine")More...
Fight Cancer with Search Engine GoodSearch - 3/24/2008
The NCRA (National Cancer Registrars Association) Education Foundation is excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and the benefit that it can be to the cancer registry profession. There are several ways that you, too, can become a partner in our progress. One is by using www.GoodSearch.com as your search engine.(From "Search engine")More...
Facial Recognition Video Search Engine Viewdle - 3/24/2008
Viewdle, the facial recognition-oriented video search company, today announced that it has partnered with KIT Capital, a Dubai-based digital media investment group which recently took a strategic investment position in corporate IPTV enablement company ROO Group.(From "Search engine") More...
The iSEEK Search Engine - Targeted Discovery - 3/24/2008
At iSEEK, we wanted to use our advanced linguistic, conceptual, and AI technologies to make web search better - more relevant, direct, productive, and intelligent. But what we built isn’t just a search engine at all. By making “web searches” more intelligent and intuitive, we left “searching” behind… and now offer you Targeted Discovery, the new era of information retrieval on the web.(From "Search engine") More...
Check Out Game Search Engine Gameseekr - 3/24/2008
Gameseekr is a free service that lets you find games on the internet, find friends who have similar interests, create and maintain your game list and share your game lists with your friends. (from Search engine) More...
Some Retailers Oppose Google’s Secondary Search Feature - 3/23/2008
Google started offering secondary search boxes for major sites March 4, and TechCrunch readers split 55% for, 45% against the feature. Now the New York Times reports that some companies oppose Google offering secondary search. (From Techcrunch: by Duncan Riley) More...
Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator - 3/21/2008
Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions.(From Readwriteweb: by Sarah Perez )More...
How Search Has Transformed News Consumption On The Web - 3/20/2008
We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere. Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information provided by any single news source, search has taught us to be active news consumers, so seek out news from the wealth of sources on the web.(From Publishing: by Scott Karp) More...
BlogCatalog.com Adds Cross-Network Search - 3/20/2008
BlogCatalog, one of the oldest operating blog directories is expanding with a with the beta launch of Social Search, a cross-network aggregation search engine that searches multiple social networks. (From Techcrunch: by Duncan Riley)More...
Search team - 3/19/2008
"Most of our tools, such as search engines, are designed for a single person working alone, but this is not the only way we work," says Meredith Morris, a researcher with the group of adaptive systems and interactions Microsoft Research... (from internetactu: by Hubert Guillaud le 19/03/08 )More...
The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem - 3/13/2008
A few weeks ago, we began
Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry - 3/13/2008
Yahoo’s embrace of all things open continues today as they announce that they are expanding their Open Search Platform that we wrote about last month. In that previous announcement, Yahoo talked about their plans to allow third parties to alter and enhance search results with structured data that may be useful to users. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 13th March 2008)More...
Google’s Trojan Horse: Let the Free Ad Serving Begin - 3/13/2008
One of the biggest misunderstandings in much of the discussion about Google’s deal to buy DoubleClick is the perception that DoubleClick actually is involved in selling advertising.(From "The New-York Times" by Saul Hansell) More...
Anticlimax: YouTube Announces More Open API’s - 3/12/2008
YouTube’s big announcement today is more open API’s that will allow developers to upload videos and video responses from any where. From the YouTube Blog: (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 12th March 2008)
PeekYou: Openly edited people search - 3/11/2008
PeekYou is not a people search engine, but rather an openly edited directory or white pages listing people’s online presence. The site lets you locate other Internet users with a presence on the web and access a list of all relevant links to the person being searched.(From "Pandia research news")More...
SearchMe Launches New Search Engine With Heavy Backing From Sequoia - 3/11/2008
Mountain View based SearchMe has been around since 2005 and has raised $31 million from Sequoia, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers. It now joins Mahalo as one of Sequoia’s big bets in search. In January 2007 the company launched a test product called WikiSeek that returned results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. At the time Adams said WikiSeek was just a test product for the technology they developed. Now, over a year later, their ready to put up their main site. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 11th March 2008)
State aid : The Commission is authorising financial aid from France of 99 million euro for the R&D programme QUAERO - 3/11/2008
The European Commission has decided not to raise any objections with relation to the rules of the EC treaty regarding state aid in relation to the financial support of 99 million euro given by France to the R&D programme entitled QUAERO. QUAERO is made up of a consortium of 23 partners which is lead by Thomson. It aims at the automatic treatment of digital multimedia content. The QUAERO R&D programme will represent a total cost of 199 million euro over a period of 5 years. It will concentrate on technologies dealing with automatic treatment of speech, language, music, images and video. (Article in French) (from European Commission, Press Release, 11th March 2008)
eeggi: The Intelligent Retrieving, Responding and Discovering Engine - 3/7/2008
eeggi (engineered, encyclopedic, global and grammatical identities) is the world’s first mathematically-based Search and Retrieve, Response, and Discovery engine (ReDi engine), capable of focusing on the concept of text and not just the text itself.(From "ReadWriteWeb" by Charles Knight) More...
Spot Runner Buys Weblistic: Local Search on Video Steroids - 3/4/2008
Today Spot Runner announced its acquisition of Weblistic, a provider of local online advertising, in an all-stock transition. Spot Runner is an internet-based television ad agency headquartered in Los Angeles. The company says in its press release, “The acquisition of Weblistic will enable Spot Runner to correlate TV and online advertising with phone- and Web-based responses to provide tracking, analysis and results.” The result promises to be an integrated offering of online, TV, and radio advertising for small businesses in their local markets. (from SearchEngineWatch, by Nathania Johnson, 4th March 2008)
Google Gears Goes Mobile - 3/4/2008
Google is bringing offline apps to mobile phones - and this has nothing to do with Android. Google Gears, which allows developers to create apps that run on Firefox and Internet Explorer when offline, is supposed to launch later today under the name Google Gears for mobile. It will support only Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile devices to start (Windows Mobile 5 and 6), but will expand to other mobile browsers eventually. (from TechCrunch, by Erick Schonfeld, 3rd March 2008
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Monetize Your Search Box with PredictAd - 3/4/2008
Too often it is still easier to search the entire Web than a single site. In-site search leaves much to be desired in its ability to provide users with accurate search results, let alone assistance in performing more accurate searches. Israeli PredictAd is attacking this challenge head-on by offering auto-complete functionality for search boxes with an added twist: monetizable real-estate. Already deployed across 6,000 websites and generating millions of monthly impressions, PredictAd is announcing the launch of PredictAdPlus+. (from TechCrunch, by Roi Carthy, 4th March 2008)
Google Offers Secondary Search Boxes - 3/4/2008
Google has started offering search boxes within their search results. In the example above, a search box is offered for Amazon. The new service seems to be restricted to larger sites with a slant towards retails sites. Borders, BestBuy and OfficeMax offer the secondary box, as does a search for Wikipedia and The NY Times.On the surface it would appear to be yet another dilution of Google’s famed simple interface, the very interface that helped put Google where it is today. And yet, some may find it useful. (from TechCrunch, by Duncan Riley, 4th March 2008)
Ask.com to Cut 8%, Revamp Search Plans - 3/4/2008
Ask.com will stop trying to compete directly with Google as a mainstream search engine, and will instead focus on targeting niches where it feels it can prosper, based on the way users are searching with Ask.com now. Reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal quote new CEO Jim Safka saying "We are reorienting the company around where we can grow," and "If we can do a better job of understanding who these customers are and answering their questions, we will grow." (from SearcEngineWatch, by Kevin Newcomb, 4th March 2008)
Virgin Charter Launches Vertical Search Engine - 3/4/2008
Sir Richard Branson launched a new vertical search engine, Virgin Charter, that promises to revolutionize high end corporate travel and last minute luxury travel. Virgin Charters targeting the $30 billion market for private air travel with an online auction marketplace. (from SearchEngineWatch, by Kevin Heisler, 4th March 2008)
Put current events in context with news search engine Silobreaker - 3/4/2008
Silobreaker is a different news search service. It aims to deliver meaning and relevance, not just aggregate and rank news. This is done by providing relational analysis and explanatory graphics to give you contextual insight into news stories and current events.Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. It recognizes people, companies, topics, places and keywords. It understands how they relate to each other, and puts them in context. (from Pandia Search Engine News, 4th March 2008)
Twing Search for Opinions, Forums, Conversation - 3/4/2008
Twing today announced its new online community and forum search engine. Created to be a resource for helping users search and discover opinions, information and conversations that match their interests, Twing includes its own blogs and forums to provide updated community information and an ongoing conversation with visitors and forum owners. Twing’s use of proprietary software and algorithms enables users to search into forum content well beyond the limitations of traditional search engines. (from Alt Search Engines,4th March 2008).
Yahoo Downsizing In The United States, Hiring In India - 3/4/2008
Yahoo’s decision to purge 1000 staff members primarily from its United States operations (some in Europe) has been hot news this year. What we didn’t know when the announcement was made was that Yahoo was planning to expand its base in India. Yahoo is establishing a new lab in Bangalore with a focus on long-term research. The lab will be “a center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies, focused on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers.” (from TechCrunch, by Duncan Riley, 4th March 2008)
Plenty Car Search Engine for Car News & New Cars - 3/3/2008
Plenty Car is a vertical search engine for car news, new car reviews, dealer locations, and other information on the automotive industry, which is based on the Google Custom Search Engines. Also, Plenty Car is a collaborative and filtering automotive news site. (from Alt Search Engines, 3rd March 2008)
IFRA Search - search engine for news publishing - 3/3/2008
IFRA Search, the search engine for the news publishing industry, is online. IFRA will find all information relevant to the news publishing industry drawn from IFRA’s own, partners’ and other high-quality sources.Its vertical orientation ensures that the hits generated by IFRA Search offer quality instead of quantity – the result of a two-year development period based on more than 40 years of IFRA know-how in the news publishing industry. Thus the IFRA search engine offers the possibility to find important contents quickly and precisely.
Ask May Dump Teoma For Google, Layoff 100 People - 2/29/2008
Ask is rumored to be considering switching to Google for search and subsequently downsizing its engineering team. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Ask may abandon or selling its Teoma search engine in favor of using Google for its search results. Teoma has powered Ask since it was acquired in September 2001. (from TechCrunch, by Duncan Riley, 29th February 2008)
Quintura Releases Site-Specific Search Cloud Widget - 2/28/2008
Quintura, a site where you can search the internet with the assistance of a keyword cloud, is releasing a widget that brings the same search cloud to individual websites.Site owners can install the widget (shown below) and the search results will come only from their sites, or from a network of sites if they so choose. Search advertisements will show up in the cloud, and proceeds from click-throughs to those advertisements will be split with site owners. (from TechCrunch, by Mark Hendrickson, 28th February 2008)
Web inSuggest - new Swedish recommendation service for finding relevant web sites - 2/28/2008
Web inSuggest can, according to the owners, not really be called a search service, but is rather a recommendation engine. You tell the service what kind of sites you are interested in and get a list of similar sites in return. This list is based on the interests of other users, so the system is a bit similar to Amazon’s “People who bought this book also bought the following…” Web inSuggest comes in addition to the already existing Image inSuggest, which helps you identify related images from flickr. (from Pandia Search Engine News, by Lars Våge, 28th February 2008)
Semantic Web Search Engine Roundup - 2/27/2008
Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. This article examines a list of Semantic Web search engines that are currently under development including Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE), Sindice, Watson, Yahoo! Microsearch, Falcons, Swoogle , Semantic Web Search and Zitgist Search. (from Semantic Focus : by James Simmons, 27th February 2008)
Eurekster Debuts Improved Swicki Results Pages - 2/27/2008
Site-specific search provider Eurekster is today releasing a new version of its Swicki product that features a set community features on its results and home pages.The free Swicki search widget, used here on TechCrunch in the right-hand column, provides a cloud of popular search terms and leads to a page with results voted on by users and optionally collected from related sites. The new version attempts to bring even more attention to the site-specific Swicki community built around search. (from TechCrunch, by Mark Hendrickson, 27th February 2008)
AdSense For Video Comes Out of Private Beta. Can We Kill the Pre-Roll Now? - 2/21/2008
Nine months after launching its closed beta of AdSense for video, Google is finally opening up the advertising program to any publisher in the U.S. that serves one million or more video streams per month.The ads come in two formats: video and text. Both appear as banners along the bottom of the video. (from TechCrunch, by Erick Schonfeld, 21st February 2008)
Google Launching AdSense for Video - Minus the Video - 2/20/2008
After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the programs pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads. Today the video part is gone, replaced by CPM banners and CPC text overlays. (from ReadWriteWeb, by Marshall Kirkpatrick, 20th February 2008)
Poor People More Likely Use Yahoo, Those Better Off To Use Google - 2/16/2008
New data released by Hitwise yesterday shows that there is a socio-economic difference between those frequently using Yahoo and those more frequently using Google. The graph right demonstrates “Online Representation” based on demographic types. The Y axis represents Yahoo, the X axis Google, with the higher the number, the more that particular group of users uses each service. Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale America.” The size of each circle represents how many in each group have spent $500+ online. (from TechCrunch, by Duncan Riley, 16th February 2008)
Matchpoint Launches Local Business Search - 2/15/2008
Matchpoint, an online service for people to anonymously request and compare offers and proposals from businesses, announced today the beta launch of its service to include over 10 million local businesses across the United States. Consumers now have more options to quickly and privately get competitive offers from local businesses in their neighborhoods as well as from major corporations that operate nationwide. (from Alt Search Engines : February 15th 2008)
Nokia Plays Nice With Google In Mobile Search - 2/12/2008
Nokia is partially embracing Google by agreeing to put Google’s mobile search on some of its phones. It already ships phones with mobile search from Yahoo and Microsoft, so this isn’t that big a deal. But it does show that as Nokia prepares to compete with Google-based Android phones, the cell phone leader will incorporate some basic Google functionality into its own phones as a preemptive move. (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 12th February 2008)
Blue Organizer’s Latest Indigo Release Lets You Surf Things Instead of Web Pages - 2/12/2008
Semantic search applications are finally starting to gel this year. Tonight, Adaptive Blue is releasing the latest version (dubbed Indigo) of its FireFox add-on, Blue Organizer. Put simply, Blue Organizer lets you surf things instead of Web pages. It recognizes when a Webpage that you are browsing is about certain classes of things: books, movies, music, stocks, recipes, restaurants, blogs, wine, clothing, electronics, celebrities, musicians, hotels. And it creates shortcuts to other Webpges about that same “thing” (or object). Blue Organizer was developed by Alex Iskold, a frequent contributor to ReadWriteWeb. He raised $1.5 million from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures back in February 2007, and is going to try to raise a B round soon. (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 12th February 2008)
Two innovative information portals - 2/11/2008
TextMap is an entity search portal. An entity can be a personalily, a town, a country, a company that is often in the news. This engine uses research techniques coming from natural language to extract the occurrance of each defined entity and statistical data display tecniques to present them. This tool allows you finally to sytehsise the geographic and temportal distribution of each one of these entities. Silobreaker is a web portal which allows to to access a considerable number of news items and to put them in perspective across extremely well done display tools. (from Google XXL : by Pierre Ehrlacher, 11th February 2008)
Google Overhauls Korean Search Engine, Adopting Universal Search - 1/30/2008
Google announced that they had done an overhaul on their Korean-language search engine, adopting universal search for the Korean site. Google is attempting to gain significant ground in South Korea, which just happens to be one of the world’s most wired countries. Lee Won-jin, director of Google Korea, said that the results-blending concept of universal searc, which has already been implemented in Google.com, has now been implemented in the Korean language version of the popular search engine. Universal search blends various types of search results, such as your standard website results, as well as videos, images, or even pages of books. It was first implemented at Google in May of 2007, when other top search engines also began employing the method. (by Julie Kent, Search Engine Journal, 30th January 2008)
Zvents makes Local Search pop! - 1/30/2008
Vertical search represents a powerful mechanism to find information on the web, and is a key category to watch in the search wars of the future. Another way of achieving a similar focus, in order to improve the relevance of search results, is by segmenting by location rather than by industry vertical - i.e. create a hyperlocal search engine that limits its search results to a given geographical area. One such alternate search engine is Zvents, which is relentlessly focused on local information, of any sort. This company, which has been around since early 2005, has just introduced an advanced feature called Federated Local search - basically, its own version of Universal Search. (from Alt Search Engines : 30th January 2008)
The Gray Areas of Search-Engine Law - 1/30/2008
The law is always playing catch-up with technology. But in the world of search-engine law, say some scholars, the courts have only begun to recognize the existence of a train leaving the station, let alone chase after it. The legal gray zones of Internet search are vast, says James Grimmelmann of New York Law School. But they still can be outlined and defined. In an article in the November 2007 issue of the Iowa Law Review , Grimmelmann writes that four broad areas of law—intellectual property, free speech, antitrust, and the openness of search algorithms—are still very much up for grabs in Internet search. (from IEEE Spectrum : by Mark Anderson, 30th January 2008)
Delver Comes Out Of Stealth With a New Twist on Social Search - 1/28/2008
Today at the DEMO conference, an Israeli startup called Delver (formerly Semingo) is coming out of stealth and announcing its upcoming launch as a semantic social graph search engine. Delver is attempting to solve two key search-related problems. The first is that current search engines do not take into account the identity of the searcher. The second is that current search engines do not allow users to search for information created and referenced by their own social graph. This is where Delver comes in. Search for “New York,” and the results that will pop up will be blog posts from people you know that mention or are about New York, or Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, and the like. The technology, which has been in development since 2005, combines search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). (from TechCrunch : by Roi Carthy, 28th January 2008)
Gary Price on the soul of Ask - 1/28/2008
The search engine Ask doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Pandia talks to Gary Price, Director of Online Info Resources at Ask about the soul of Ask and how this search engine works to improve your access to online information of all kinds. It’s all about simplicity. Gary demonstrates several Ask features, explaining enthusiastically about present possibilities and future plans. (from Pandia Search Engine News: 28th January 2008)
Find Something That Is “X” And Has “Y” With Circos - 1/28/2008
Keyword search gets you pretty far when looking for pure information, but doesn’t help much on more qualitative searches like trying to find the hippest restaurant in SOHO. Searches like the latter rely on the opinions of people, not webmasters, which is one of the reasons Circo’s has launched their new qualitative search engine. The engine currently lets users search for hotels and restaurants by qualities like size, ambiance, or other qualities pulled from reviews from around the web. They have plans to expand to other categories in the future. Circos is categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines, which currently includes the likes of Hakia, PowerSet, Kosmix, SemantiNet, Quintura, and TrueKnowledge. (from TechCrunch : by Nick Gonzalez, 28th January 2008)
Globally, Baidu Beats Microsoft in Search; Yandex Creeping Up On Ask - 1/25/2008
While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S. In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. (from TechCrunch :by Erin Schonfeld, 25th January 2008)
Warner Music Sues Seeqpod - 1/25/2008
Warner Music has filed suit against music search engine Seeqpod for copyright infringement. Seeqpod offers a music search engine that allows users to play music they find directly on the site. According to comScore the service had over 6 million page views in December 2007. Warner Music claims in its suit that Seeqpod infringes on their copyrighted works by “making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of these works,” making a direct and material contribution to infringing content by presenting content from “pirate sites.” (from TechCrunch :by Duncan Riley, 25th January 2008)
The history of Fast Search & Transfer - 1/25/2008
If you are interested in the history of one of the CHORUS partners, Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian search company that is now to be acquired by Microsoft, you should take a look at the blog of Bjørn Borud of Google’s unit in Trondheim, Norway. He has now written an article series on the history of Fast, a series which opens with the following wonderful paragraph: “About 12 years ago, me and three other friends founded a company. We were young, single and what we lacked in experience and business sense, we made up for with pure hubris and a firm conviction that all problems are solvable.” Admittedly, this was not Fast, but another company that would become a part of the Fast adventure, but the argument holds for Fast as well. You have to believe in yourself in order to succeed as an IT pioneer. These people were the Norwegian equivalents to people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (from Pandia Search Engine News: 25th January 2008)
Sweden’s Twingly To Launch Europe-Focused Blog Search Engine - 1/23/2008
Europe will have it’s own blog search engine - Twingly. According to Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, the focus of Twingly will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two. (from TechCrunch : Michael Arrington, 23rd January, 2008)
Porn only 6% of search terms - 1/22/2008
In this article, Rich Skrenta shows an analysis of AOL Search terms broken down by category. Interestingly enough, both Shopping and Entertainment show significantly more search volume than porn. (from Lightspeed Venutre Partners : by Jeremy Liew, 22nd January, 2008)
Search Engine iMedix named Best New Startup! - 1/21/2008
AltSearchEngines congratulates Amir and Iri and the whole team at alternative Health Search engine iMedix for being named the Best New Startup at the Crunchies! iMedix is a free website that helps you find and share health information. (from Alt Search Engines : 21st January 2008)
Video Search Summit April 2008 - 1/20/2008
Video Search News announces first annual Video Search Summit in San Fransisco.The conference on video search will take place on April 8th and 9th. The arrival of true broadband has turned the Internet into a realistic video distribution tool. The fact that Apple now is letting iTunes users rent videos online proves this point, as does the tremendous success of sites like YouTube. (from Pandia Search Engine News: 20th January 2008)
YouTorrent: Give It A Shot Before It’s Shut Down - 1/19/2008
This article is about YouTorrent, which is a fairly new BitTorrent search engine that has been getting positive reviews of late. The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites (such as btjunkie, The Pirate Bay), then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has. For those not familiar with BitTorrent, the more seeds and peers a Torrent has, the faster the file will likely download. As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 19th January 2008)
Songza Adds More Songs With Help From Seeqpod - 1/18/2008
Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines in the future. Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube. Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 18th January 2008)
A Crazy Job Search Engine - Crazy Like a Fox! - 1/17/2008
Jobfox is the inspiration of Rob McGovern. He was the Founder and former Chairman and CEO of CareerBuilder.com, and wrote the popular career advice book Bring Your ‘A’ Game: The 10 Career Secrets of the High Achiever. behind Jobfox. Their mission: Build the first online job service people love. They’ve built a new job fit engine that’s smart as a fox: it knows how to match people and jobs on The 10 Dimensions of a Good Job Fit. “ We help candidates showcase their unique skills and experiences so that employers will pursue candidates who are a great fit for their company and jobs.” says the Fox. (from Alt Search Engines : 17th January, 2008)
Search Atheism On The Rise - 1/17/2008
A new study from the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has found that a growing number of people no longer believe that search results are reliable and accurate.The survey found that only 51% of people trust information provided by search engines, down from 62% in 2006. Google, as the most popular search engine in the United States, isn’t trusted by nearly half (49%) of the people who use it, an interesting result. (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 17th January 2008)
Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results - 1/9/2008
Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages (Yahoo acquired Delicious in late 2005). Some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages, as well as the tags people have supplied for those pages. What isn’t clear is if Delicious results are impacting search rankings, or if Delicious data is simply being integrated into the existing rankings. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 19th January, 2008)
Could P2P Networks Enable a Google Killer? - 1/9/2008
Word association: P2P = Napster = disrupted the music industry. P2P technology certainly did that. Skype shook up telecoms and Joost may do the same for TV. P2P (Peer to Peer) networks could be a lot more. They could be the last big disruptive technology online. The online world is increasingly getting divided into a few mega firms that can afford to invest billions in server farms (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay) and the rest of us. (from ReadWriteWeb : by Bernard Lunn, 9th January 2008)
Microsoft offers to buy FAST for $1.2 billion; Likely to trigger enterprise search consolidation - 1/8/2008
Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market.The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made some inroads, but for the most part the market is the realm of niche players. Microsoft is about to change that with FAST. You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects. (from Between the Lines Blog : by Dan Farber & Larry Dignan, 8th January 2008)
New Enquiro Whitepaper Shows Impact of Search and Sponsored Listings on Consumers - 1/3/2008
More and more, companies are realizing the importance of creating a strong online presence both in the free organic search results and the paid advertisements that appear alongside those results. The tracking features of website logs and the measurability of pay-per-click ads enable marketers to monitor the traffic of their organic listings and the performance of their online advertising campaigns. However, its comparatively more difficult to determine how the placement of those search listings and online ads affect consumer brand perceptions. (from Enquiro Research : 3rd January 2008)
Chacha launches New Mobile Initiative today! - 1/3/2008
In a landmark move, ChaCha announced today a new service that allows users to text questions of any kind to 242242 (ChaCha on a phone keypad) and to receive text answers on their cell phone. The answers are sent by a live person, called a ChaCha guide. The service is currently available as a free trial. The convenience of ChaCha’s new mobile answers service is unparalleled because it offers answers that people can’t easily find otherwise when they have questions on the go. (from Alt Search Engines : 3rd January, 2008)
The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko - 1/2/2008
Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career - taking on Google. In search. His new site, called Blekko has been started along with five others from the Topix core team. Although not yet funtional, Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 2nd January 2008)
New Search Engine www.WhatsOpen.com - 1/2/2008
WhatsOpen is a social search engine which has rolled out its public beta today. Users on a first come, first serve basis can signup to use the service on the web, iPhone, or Google Android equipped phones. By using proprietary algorithms and allowing users to contribute to the site by inputting their favorite locations, WhatsOpen now has a database to over 50 Million global listings, over 1 Million of which can be found live on the California beta now. Using algorithms for checks and balances, users can add, edit, upload, mash, share, invite, mob, and swarm to favorite locations and hot spots. An entire social platform, which currently powers the private alpha version, is being brought to the public beta in the first part of 2008. (from: Alt Search Engines :2nd January 2008)
France’s Orange Alt: Le Moteur (The Engine) - 1/2/2008
Orange has just launched a new Alternative Search Engine.The GUI is somewhat different compared to what we are used to seeing, but it is just a question of look & feel. The technology behind it seems to be www.voila.fr. According to the author of this article, there is nothing really new or innovative in the new search engine. (from Alt Search Engines : 2nd January 2008)
The Google Algorithm Is Changing - 1/1/2008
Google Operating System points out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content. Indexing recent posts has been a strength for Google, to the point that at least for areas like Blog Search they’ve become the defacto standard as others such as Technorati have struggled to keep up. Perhaps it’s the first step towards Google embracing Web 3.0 with semantic search that learns as it goes, constantly updating its results to suit the user at the time they are searching, complete with contextual awareness as well. (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 1st January 2008)
Google uses human evaluators to improve search results - 12/20/2007
Google continue to use human input for the evaluation of search results, Peter Norvig of Google says.Technology Review has an interesting interview in its January/February 2008 issue. They have interviewed Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. The main points made by Norvig are examined in this article. (from Pandia Search Engine News : 20th December 2007)
Google Wants To Index Your Videos - 12/18/2007
Google has launched Sitemaps for Video, an extension of their webmaster sitemaps program that will assist webmasters in having their videos indexed by Google. To be indexed, webmasters must create a sitemap page that provides a list of videos on each site that is compliant with Googles sitemaps protocol, which since November 2006 is standardized with Yahoo and Microsoft as well. Webmasters then simply submit the URL of their video sitemap to Google for indexing. (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 18th December 2007)
Google Pushes YouTube As An “Alternative” Way To Search for Video - 12/14/2007
Go to Google’s home page and at the top left you are given a number of options for refining your search: “Web, Images, Maps,” etc. At the end is a link for “more.” Click on that and at the bottom of the list, right after “Video,” you will find a new option: “YouTube.” Enter a search term and you are taken straight to YouTube’s homepage. Not the search results page on YouTube for that term. This is odd on many levels, not least of which is that every other search option returns actual search results on Google proper.Obviously, Google owns YouTube and can promote it any way it wants to. But how does this new search option help me as a consumer looking for videos? (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 14th December 2007)
Sequoia Invests in SEM-Automator Kenshoo - 12/10/2007
Sequoia Capital just invested in Kenshoo, an Israeli startup that automates the whole process of creating and managing search-engine marketing campaigns. It is a labor-intensive activity that has given rise to an entire cottage industry. Kenshoo competes with bid-management software from all the giants in online advertising (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture), but it goes a step beyond that to look at the quality of the campagns. (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 10th December 2007)
Health Search + Patient Social Network = iMedix - 12/10/2007
When you are sick or need to research a disease for an ailing relative, the two best places to go online are health search engines like Healthline or patient support group sites like Daily Strength. Tel Aviv startup iMedix wants to combine both: a vertical health search engine with a patient-to-patient social network. iMedix is a social search engine focussed on healthcare that has raised $2 million from angel investors. When you type in a search term, an auto-completed list of health and medical terms pops down to help guide your search. (from TechCrunch : by Erick Schonfeld, 10th December 2007)
Twenga gets €2.6 For Product Search - 12/7/2007
3i has invested €2.6 million in shopping search engine Twenga. Similar to other shopping search startups, Twenga is a meta search engine for products from online merchants. Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons.There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. (from TechCrunch : by Nick Gonzalez, 7th December 2007)
Quintura becomes Alternative Search Engine of the Year - 12/1/2007
Quintura has won AltSearchEngine’s Alternative Search Engine of the Year award. Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines had nominated 10 search engines for the award. Among the favorites were Quintura, French Exalead and the Arabic search engine Onkosh. AltSearchEngines has now declared Quintura the winner. Quintura is a search engine based on a visual search engine technology and makes use of Yahoo’s index. It works quite nicely and we like it. (from Pandia Search Engine News : December 2007)
Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat? - 11/30/2007
New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 million conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored - IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks. IRSeek wants to make sure that future conversations are properly indexed and and searchable. It’s a huge untapped knowledge-base. (from TechCrunch : by Roi Carthy, 30th November, 2007)
Music Search Engines Tread Fine Legal Line - 11/28/2007
Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection. This article examines three of these engines, SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr. All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. However, the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 28th November, 2007)
Finer indexing of video content - 11/28/2007
Although automatic video indexing is developing constantly, with new technologies such as vido search engines, it remains difficult to find a particular passage from a 90 minute long video. In order to meet this need, which has been expressed by students, the Laboratory of Artifical Intelligence and Information Science of Massachusetts has developped a new search engine. This will help teachers to structure their video recordings and will allow students to have easier access to this material, according to James Glass, director of the Group on spoken language systems. On the prototype site, student can make a request among the 200 vdeos of conferences which are available and can play the passages which correspond to the results of their search. (from InternetActu.net : by Hubert Guillaud, 28th November 2007)
Gotuit Powering Video Search - 11/28/2007
Gotuit have made an “about face” when they ditched their online TV product (except for music videos) and refocused on powering video sites. Over the past year they’ve been striking deals to power video services for the likes of Sports Illustrated, EMI, Fox Reality, amongst others. Now they’re powering Extreme Outdoor TV network (XONTV), a web site dedicated to outdoor lifestyle videos. Gotuit’s video suite lets lets XONTV deep tag key points in videos. These tags form part of the meta data Gotuit uses to index and search through movies, making it possible to easily re-order short clips of long videos on demand. (from TechCrunch : by Nick Gonzalez, 28th November, 2007)
CHORUS CHORUS Metadata Workshop - 11/21/2007
The CHORUS workshop on Metatdata Models took place at the IRT in Munich on 21st and 22nd November 2007.
Pictures as hyperlinks - 11/19/2007
The research centre of Nokia in Finland organised an event named The Way We Live Next, to present the concepts on which the telephone manufacturer bases its work in the R&D centre. One of the services on exhibition, named Point&Find had as as its objective to connect the real world and virtual world via mobile phones. However the service risks being imperfect for a long time, as it depends obviously on the size of the database it is able to index. (from Internet Actu : by Hubert Guillaud , 19th November 2007)
Songza experiments with a transparent interface - 11/16/2007
Songza is a new music search engine that is based on a truly remarkable interface. The particularity of this service is to propose a transparent interface where all the functions are superimposed when clicked on or when the mouse passes over them. The result is a page that is extremely easy to navigate and results that are very easy to read. The interface used in Songza has been described as a human interface, as it is so user-friendly. Songza was created by Asa Raskin, the president of Humanized, a company that specialises in this type of interface and that proposes a very specific product. (from Fred Cavazza.net, 16th November 2007)
CHORUS NAVS Fall 2007 Concertation Meeting , Brussels, 13 - 14 November 2007 - 11/13/2007
CHORUS was present at the NAVS concertation meeting that took place in Brussels on 13th and 14th November. The meeting was attended by active FP6 projects, as well as some new FP7 projects. The work of the group is organised around three clusters, User Centric Media lead by Citizen Media, Media Delivery Platform lead by Astrals and Audio Visual Search, lead by CHORUS.
True Knowledge Launches Natural Language Search Engine - 11/8/2007
UK-based company True Knowledge released its natural language search engine into private beta on 7th November. Like the much-anticipated Powerset, the company aims to give appropriate answers to natural language queries, even if key query terms are not included in the data being indexed. Current search engines are unable to return appropriate results for these queries. At first glance True Knowledge and Powerset are competitors - but in fact they really aren’t. Powerset is both indexing the web and working to convert natural language queries into database-understandable queries. (from TechCrunch UK : by Michael Arrington, 8th November 2007)
Linqia - Social Network Vertical Search - 11/5/2007
Linqia is the world’s first online community and group aggregator and meta search engine. It has the largest directory of online communities and groups worldwide. Through the Linqia Community and Group Profile, you can immediately determine if an online community or group is a perfect fit for you. Linqia easily connects you to any online community or group that feed your passions, share your interests and fit your needs. (from Silkcharm Blogspot : by Laurel Papworth, 5th November 2007)
China Mobile Uses Google Search - 11/4/2007
Google technology is being tested on China Mobiles handset-accessible portal to search a variety of content, including sports, entertainment, news, ring tones, games, images and video. (By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek, Nov. 4, 2007)
Checkmate? MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial - 11/1/2007
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. (from TechCrunch : by Michael Arrington, 1st November 2007)
Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web - 10/31/2007
A new open web API called Open Social has been launched this week, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Googles own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide. (from Blog PMarca.Com : by P Marca, 31st October 2007)
Live Search Maps Getting Better At Giving Directions - 10/29/2007
Microsoft’s Live Search Maps have finally released its 3D Bird’s Eye view a couple weeks ago. Microsoft has also upgraded some of the basic features of its maps. For one thing, it has fixed what is considered to be a major bug in most mapping apps: overly-detailed driving directions. You can now have the option of skipping the first nine “turn left at the stop sign two blocks from your house” type of directions and just start the guidance from the nearest major highway—which you probably know how to get to anyway. Thank you, Microsoft, for treating us like humans. (from TechCrunch : by Erin Schonfeld, 29th October 2007)
Microsoft’s Live Search Maps Out to Beat Google Maps? - 10/29/2007
Microsoft is really serious on gaining a good ground in the web search arena. New features after new features are being slowly carried out by Live Search. The most recent of which are ten new features of its Live Search Maps.The Live Search blog enumerated these 10 new features and in brief here are those 10 nifty features. (from Search Engine Journal :by Arnold Zafra, 29th October 2007)
The next big thing: User-contributed metadata - 10/29/2007
User-generated content is a manifestation of Web 2.0, the participatory Net, which companies like Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), Fox (MySpace), etc. are feasting on. In parallel, users are contributing a potentially far more lucrative Web currency–metadata about themselves. In addition, users are also contributing structured (meta) data about data, which will help the semantic Web to flower. User contributed metadata is part of transforming the Internet, improving the signal to noise ratio and allowing more structure and intimate connections to permeate the Web. (from ZD Net : by Dan Farber, 29th October 2007)
Google’s SearchMash Adds Snap Shot Previews. But Why Is It In Flash? - 10/25/2007
Google’s Web 2.0 search playpen, SearchMash, now has a Flash version. The Snap Shots are powered by Bill Gross’ search engine Snap.com. Flash is so pretty, but can it truly be as fast as Ajax? Maybe not, but it is getting fast enough for me. SearchMash is playing around with the search interface possibilities of each with two different versions of its site. Which is better? (from TechCrunch : by Eric Schonfeld, 25th October 2007
Pixsy to Power Search Engine on Lastminute.com - 10/23/2007
Media search platform provider Pixsy has signed a deal with bargain hotel and travel site lastminute.com that will see Pixsy operate a travel focused video and image search engine at lastminute.pixsy.com. The new service will allow users to search millions of travel photos and videos while simultaneously shopping for travel services. Pixsy was named a Top 50 Coolest Website by Time Magazine and first reviewed by TechCrunch in August 2006. (from TechCrunch : by Duncan Riley, 23rd October 2007)
StumbleUpon Expands Social Search Across the Web - 10/22/2007
If you are one of the 3.7 million people who have downloaded the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser, you may have noticed that whenever a Website that’s been “stumbled” comes up in a Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live search, the StumbleUpon icon and its star ratings appear right beside the link in the results page. (A page that’s been “stumbled” means that a Stumbler found it useful and gave it a Digg-like thumbs up). Now, StumbleUpon is expanding that feature to search results for AOL and Ask, as well as for Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. StumbleUpon calls these SearchReviews. In addition to the general star ratings, members w

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