Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008
in search, Yahoo and semantic web.
Even if you have a great idea for a new search engine, it’s far from easy to get it off the ground. For one thing, the best engineering talent resides at big-name companies. Even more significantly, according to some estimates, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to buy and maintain the servers needed to index the Web in its entirety. However, Yahoo recently released a resource that may offer hope to search innovators and entrepreneurs. Called Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), it allows programmers to make use of Yahoo’s index of the Web–billions of pages that are continually updated–thereby removing perhaps the biggest barrier to search innovation. By opening its index to thousands of independent programmers and entrepreneurs, Yahoo hopes that BOSS will kick-start projects that it lacks the time, money, and resources to invent itself. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research and a consulting professor at Stanford University, says this might include better ways of searching videos or images, tools that use social networks to rank search results, or a semantic search engine that tries to understand the contents of Web pages, rather than just a collection of keywords and links.
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Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008
in search, Google and Yahoo.
Adobe announced recently that Google and Yahoo are adding search capabilities that will enable users to look inside the content of files encoded in Adobe’s Flash file format — SWF.The content inside SWF files has heretofore been ignored by the search engine giants, but Adobe has worked with both companies to make sure that their search engine technology can now look inside existing and future SWF content, including text, hyperlinks, audio and video content.
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Google, MySpace , and Yahoo recently said they have agreed to form a non-profit group that would govern the development of a standard application programming interface that developers could use in building software for supporting online social networks. The three Internet companies expected the OpenSocial Foundation to launch in 90 days, and asked for others in the industry to rally behind the OpenSocial API, which was developed by Google to foster development across emerging social-network development platforms.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in search, Google and Yahoo.
comScore, Inc. a leader in measuring the digital world, recently released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. January 2008 saw Americans conduct more than 10 billion core searches, representing a significant jump in activity versus December.In January, Google Sites marginally extended its share of core searches to 58.5 percent. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.5 percent).
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Published by rwatstein February 9th, 2008
in search, Google and Yahoo.
The year closed with Google holding 58.4 percent share of searches, slightly lower than the previous month, according to December 2007 U.S. search engine rankings data released by comScore. Yahoo (22.9 percent) and Microsoft (9.8 percent) had a combined share of searches of 32.7 percent, still not approaching Google if the proposed deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through. Yahoo gained half a percentage point in share and Microsoft stayed the same from November to December. In the same period, Google’s share of searches receded 0.02 percent.
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Published by rwatstein January 26th, 2008
in Yahoo.
In a bid to offer users a more secure, portable, digital identity as they move across the Internet and access web applications, Internet company, Yahoo! Inc., has announced its support for the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework. The support will make it easier for Yahoo!’s 248 million active, registered users worldwide to “consolidate their Internet identity” and remove the need to create separate IDs and logins when they visit various other websites, blogs or profile pages.
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Published by rwatstein January 26th, 2008
in social sites, search, Yahoo and del.icio.us.
TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is experimenting with integrating del.icio.us bookmark data into regular search results. After the regular search listing Yahoo! will add a line saying something like “X people bookmarked this page under [these categories]”.Yahoo! bought this very popular online bookmark service in 2005.
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Published by rwatstein December 29th, 2007
in search, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.
Looks like Google is out to dominate the search engine battle this year. It has consistently topped search engine rankings from various web analytics reports for the past couple of months, and in what seems to be the final ranking for this year, it once again shown the search engine industry its supremacy in terms of search usage. Based on the latest comScore report, Google again lead the pack with 58.6% (up by 0.2%) of all the core searches for November. Following Google is Yahoo with 22.4% (down by 0.4%) and Microsoft which is steady at 9.8%. Ask Network and Time Warner’s AOL got 4.6% and 4.5% respectively. Time Warner is the biggest gainer of all the search engines with a 0.3% increased in search ranking as compare to October.
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Published by rwatstein December 29th, 2007
in internet and Yahoo.
Yahoo Inc. has announced that three world-renowned scientists from Yahoo! Research have been recognized for their achievements in fields key to developing the next-generation of Internet experiences, including computer science, artificial intelligence, data mining, and algorithm engineering.
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When it does battle on the Web, Google rarely loses. Last year’s closure of Google Answers, however, marked a rare setback for the search giant. An even bigger shock is that Yahoo! succeeded where Google failed. Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can’t be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!’s internal stats. The site has compiled 400 million answers, all searchable in its archives. According to the Web tracking company Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is the second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia. The blockbuster success The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool.
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Published by rwatstein December 9th, 2007
in search and Yahoo.
The year is quickly winding down, which in the world of search means that it’s time to review the year’s overall trends. Yahoo became the first search engine of the year to release their report on the Top Trends in Search, as told through the billions of searches in 2007 at Yahoo! throughout the world. Looking through the hot search trends of the year is always interesting, and often very revealing of our culture, as well as some of the year’s major events. Typical findings include various celebrities who have passed away through the year, political situations and scandals, technological advancements and breakthroughs, sports bloppers, and more.
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Published by rwatstein December 9th, 2007
in Yahoo and censorship.
For a company that ostensibly believes in the Internet’s liberating power, Yahoo has a gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression. The company helped Beijing’s state police uncover the Internet identities of two Chinese journalists, who were handed 10 years in prison for disseminating pro-democracy writings. Testifying before Congress last year about one case, Yahoo’s legal counsel said the company was unaware of the nature of the investigation. Did he miss the language about providing “state secrets to foreign entities” — a red flag for a political prosecution?
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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007
in search, Google and Yahoo.
Among core search engines in October 2007, Google Sites remained the top search property with more than 6.1 billion core searches conducted, representing a 58.5 percent share of the search market. October was a strong month for overall search activity, as each of the five core search engines achieved at least 5 percent growth in the number of searches conducted. In October, Google Sites increased its lead atop the core search ranking with 58.5 percent of U.S. searches, gaining 1.5 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.9 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.7 percent), Ask Network (4.7 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).
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Published by rwatstein November 12th, 2007
in social sites, social networking and Yahoo.
Yahoo! has launched another social networking service that few people are likely to use. Recently, the behind-the-times web portal unveiled something called Y! Kickstart, a service aimed at youngsters struggling to make a go of it in the real world.
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Published by rwatstein October 27th, 2007
in search, Google and Yahoo.
Google maintained its position as top search property in September, garnering 54% of all searches conducted during the month, according to Nielsen Online, a service of Nielsen Co. Yahoo came in a distant second with a 19.5% share. Microsoft Corp.’s MSN/Windows Live Search came in third with a 12% share.
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Published by rwatstein October 7th, 2007
in search and Yahoo.
Yahoo! has unveiled a number of enhancements to its search engine. New features include Search Assist, which offers a drop down menu below the search box with suggestions for search terms related to the user’s subject of interest. Yahoo! has also integrated video, audio and photos into its search results, allowing users to access related multimedia content in search results without moving to a different page. The company said the new features aim to make web searching easier. While 99 percent of adults use search engines to find information online, only 15 percent find what they’re looking for on the first try, according to research by Harris Interactive for Yahoo!.
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Published by rwatstein October 7th, 2007
in search and Yahoo.
Yahoo’s beating Google by a considerable amount - according to comScore, it received 10.2 million more visitors in the month of August alone. Yahoo’s even doing well compared to the Japanese competition; Maru Sato, comScore Japan’s managing director, told bigmouthmedia, “Since our first official ranking in June, we have seen Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft sites remain unchanged as the top three properties in Japan.”
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Published by rwatstein September 22nd, 2007
in social sites, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace.
Yahoo Inc. has started testing a social-networking service called Mash, in a challenge to Facebook Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace. Mash users can add photos and information about themselves to their pages and accept contributions from others, Will Aldrich, who runs Mash, said in a recent blog entry on Yahoo’s Web site. For now, an invitation from a friend is needed to join the system
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in search, Google, Yahoo and Wikia.
Back in December last year, it emerged that Wales was considering starting a new search engine to take on the bigwigs. Called Wikiasari, it would be funded by Internet Advertising. Now a report in the Times has confirmed that this year will see the launch of the new product, although it will be called Wikia Search.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in Yahoo and acquisitions/mergers.
Yahoo is buying news aggregator BuzzTracker (Kara Swisher reports for $5 million). Yahoo sees the acquisition improving and expanding its news coverage in a number of ways. BuzzTracker founder Alan Warms becomes GM of Yahoo News.
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