Microsoft to present operating system for “the cloud” (and other recent search engine news).

Microsoft Steve Ballmer visited Oslo this week and talked about the future of Microsoft in “the cloud”.

Google has clearly understood the new paradigm of moving software and file storage online, thus making the browser the main interface to the digital world, instead of the operating system. (Or rather, the browser becomes the new operating system).

Microsoft has been criticized for holding too hard on to Windows and not presenting online applications that might eventually replace Microsoft Office.

However, Microsoft is going to present a new operating system for the Web, for the time being known as “Windows Clouds”, in five weeks time.

Many doubt that this will present a shift from the PC to the cloud. Instead Microsoft will allow for light editing online, and encourage people to do other work “offline”.

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Google has relaunched Google Blog Search with a new home page containing clustered links to recent blog posts.

The new homepage is more similar to Google News, in that it puts up popular news topics in the center column. At the moment of writing, examples of such topics are “The Palin-Biden debate” and “OJ Simpson guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping”.

The headline points to one of the most popular blog posts, while alternative links are provided under the summary. There is also a link (in green, over the selected illustration) to a result page presenting a large number of relevant blog posts.

The new Blog Search home page works well, and has turned the service into more than a search engine. It may actually be used as a tool for news surveillance and trend analysis, and functions as a good supplement to Google News.

This is not a Google innovation, though. Others have done this for quite some time. Take, for instance, a look at Techmeme, a blog aggregator focusing on technology news. Technorati does something similar, as do voting based systems like Digg and Propeller. The latter go beyond the blogosphere, though.

Our friends over at Internetbrus argue that this new development could be leading up to a closer integration of Google News and Google Blog Search.

There is certainly nothing much to stop Google from integrating a selection of these headlines into the Google News home page. One reason may be that Blog Search continues to be more vulnerable to spam. Google News is, after all, based on hand picked news resources. Blogsearch does its selection automatically.

Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search (Official Google Blog)

Google has put up a search page that lets you search the January 2001 index of Google.

Google has its 10 year anniversary this year, and this nostalgic version of Google is part of the celebration.

Over at the Official Google Blog Shirin Oskooi notes that:

“Now that we’re a decade old, we figured we’re long overdue for some spring cleaning. We started digging around our basement and found all kinds of junk: old Swedish fish, pigeon poop, Klingon translation books. Amazingly enough, hidden in a corner beneath Larry’s and Sergey’s original lab coats, we found a vintage search index in mint condition.”

We are glad to say that Pandia had a strong presence in the index even at that time. But then again, we celebrate our own 10th year anniversary in December.

Note that Google only gives you its 2001 search results. The links do not lead to the 2001 version of the world wide web.

The alternative

It is possible to search older versions of the web by other means. Go over to the Internet Archive and use the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine lets you browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to quite recently. Type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available.

Using the Wayback Machine is both an exhilarating and sobering experience: Exhilarating, because it great to see so much Internet history preserved for future generations; sobering, because this means that any “mistakes” you published at the dawn of the digital age remains there forever.

Pandia argues that there is still room for a European search engine industry, even if all the major companies now are on American hands.

Yesterday we reported on how Microsoft has decided to make Norway the base for its enterprise search efforts. That can hardly be taken as a sign of the European search engine industry dying now, can it?

Total US domination

The fact remains, however, that there is now only one regular European owned web search engine left in Europe: Exalead.

The French search engine is a quality search tool (and the best one on advanced Boolean searching), but the company’s main focus is on enterprise search, and it is not well known in the US.

This means that all the big web search engines — Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live — are on American hands.

European concern

At this week’s EU Commission search engine seminar in Seville several of the invited experts was concerned about the dominating position of Google, partly because they feel the company get too much power and is not to be trusted in areas like privacy protection and search result bias, and partly because its “near-monopoly” makes it impossible for European alternatives to succeed.

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Fast Search and Transfer becomes the core in Microsoft’s new efforts to conquer the enterprise search market.

When Microsoft bought the Norwegian search engine company Fast Search and Transfer in January for US$ 1.2 million, there were those who feared that this could mean the end for the Norwegian search engine cluster.

However, instead of Microsoft totally assimilating Fast, it seems that Fast is — in some way — taking over Microsoft’s enterprise search activities, i.e. the development of search technologies for intranets and company databases.

Microsoft will add 50 new employees in the Norwegian cities Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsø. Fast already has some 300 people working on search in Norway.

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The Pandia team is going to Seville, Spain, next week, to take part in a seminar arranged by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a Joint Research Centre under the European Commission.

There is actually great interest in search in European innovation policy circles. This is partly because of its great socio-economic role.

Search is a growing forward looking industry in its own right. Moreover, it has been shaping the world around us in a profound way, which brings up questions regarding learning, innovation, social equality, privacy and more.

Given the clout the Commission has regarding competition and privacy issues, American owned search giants like Google are acutely aware of the need to communicate their views to the Europeans.

At the seminar, called “Socio-Economic Challenges of Search”, IPTS has asked various experts to debate topics like:

• New and disruptive and groundbreaking applications
• The interaction between search and the social web
• Competition in the search engine industry
• Context-aware search
• Mobile search
• Search engines and the citizen
• Search engines and journalism and media policy
• Privacy challenges
• and more

We have produced two position papers — one on Web 2.0 and one on privacy issues — which will share with you next week. We also plan to give you some highlights from the discussion.

One of our favorites among the search engines is the leading European search engine Exalead. Exalead has recently updated its image search engine with several major improvements.

By Panda Guest Writer Lars Våge, Internetbrus

Exalead’s interface has become much better and could now be the most ingenious of all of the big image search services online.

The results are now presented just as thumbnails with information on the original image resolution beneath.

If you let your cursor hover above the images, Exalead will show some very relevant links. You may, for instance, save the image with one click. Such an operation will require three or more click when using Google or one of the others.

You can go directly to the original size version of the image (as opposed to clicking two times with the other search engines). Moreover, you may go directly to the web page containing the original image without getting it framed as in Google and Yahoo!.

Another great feature is that Exalead shows you the various options for filtering if you set the cursor in the search field. You may there select filters for size, orientation, color vs. gray scale, file types and content.
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Here are some of this week’s headlines from the world of search and search engines:

• Google Searches at 63% of the Search Market for August 2008

  Google saw 63% of the 11.7 billion core searches conducted in the U.S. during the late summer month. (SE Watch Sept 19 2008)

• Google’s “Submit Your Content” Page Changes Into Content Central, One Stop Shopping For Publisher Advice

  To help centralize submission and inclusion information, Google has updated its Submit Your Content page to make it more into what I’d call Content Central (Danny Sullivan Sept 18 2008)

• Yahoo Adds a Soundtrack to the SERP

  You can play up to 25 of the new full-length tracks in Yahoo SERPs per month. (Marketing Pilgrim Sept 18 2008)

• Google Maps for mobile! Geared Up With Street View and Walking Directions!

  An entirely new as well as exciting version has been launched for Google Maps For Mobile. (PageTraffic Sept 18 2008)

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