Search Engine News Weblog Archive March 2005

Below find older entries to the Pandia search engine news weblog.

For the latest search engine news, go to the Pandia Search World page or the Pandia Search Central home page.

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Google buys Urchin

(March 29 2005) Google is to acquire Urchin, the California based web analytics software company. This is yet another example of Google's strategy of expanding its activities into new, but search engine related, types of activities.

Urchin sells software used by webmasters to track activities on their web server. Urchin will, for instance give you statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and hits and show you how visitors navigate through your site.

Urchin will also analyze visits made by people finding your site through search engines and give you an overview over their queries. This is all very useful information for webmasters trying to fine tune their sites in order to maximize the number of visitors, sales and ad click-throughs.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," says Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google.

"This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

And indeed, the main reason for Google taking over Urchin is the overlap between the Google Adwords pay-per-click text ad program and Urchin's ability to measure the success of a given web page. By using Urchin advertisers may more easily find out why some pages and some ads are nor performing as well as expected.

If Google decides to make Urchin part of a larger Adwords package, that could also be a useful way of keeping Adwords customers.

There are other possibilities as well. Urchin delivers data on search engine traffic, and these could easily be combined with ranking statistics from the Google database.

Google has so far been very reluctant to let ranking and optimization tools use the Google database to develop search engine results overviews. Google has no reason to stop a Google owned Urchin from doing the same.

Press release: Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin

Pandia adds Search Engine Detective

(March 28 2005) Pandia has added a new service to its search engine intelligence toolbox: The Pandia Search Engine Detective.

We have combined our list of search engine oriented blogs and sites with our search engine news search engine in order to give you a gateway to everything search engine.

The gateway should be of use for anyone who needs to keep track of the latest developments in the search engine industry, new search tools and services as well as the latest SE gossip.

Visit the Pandia Search Engine Detective.

Ixquick metasearch engine gets some new features

(March 24 2005) Metasearch engine Ixquick adds an international phone directory, shopping search and other useful features.

Read more about the new version of the Ixquick metasearch engine.

IAC/InterActiveCorp buys Ask Jeeves

(March 21 2005) Ask Jeeves remains the little sibling in the search engine family. It is far too strong to give up the race, but has never been able to compete with big brothers and sisters like Yahoo!, Google and MSN.

That may change, now that IAC/InterActiveCorp is to acquire the company. According to a press release IAC will "issue 1.2668 shares of common stock for each share of Ask Jeeves common stock in a tax-free transaction valued at $1.85 billion net of cash acquired".

Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of IAC, says that "Ask Jeeves was founded almost ten years ago based on the idea that simple text search results alone are not sufficient or satisfying - but, rather, that consumers want answers to questions - and questions posed in natural language and answered with spot-on accuracy were especially desired and appealing. ... we believe that in the future it has the potential to become one of the great brands on the Internet and beyond, and by beyond we mean in wireless, in the search for anything on any device."

He may be right. And with IAC's resources and marketing competences Ask Jeeves may get the clout that makes it possible for it to compete with Google.

IAC will clearly focus on text ads as a source for revenue, and go for an even closer integration of Ask Jeeves search technology and IAC's local search services (City Search).

IAC will also be promoting the Ask Jeeves search box on every IAC site, exposing 44 million unique users per month to the Ask Jeeves brand. It won't hurt.

Yahoo! buys Flickr

(March 21 2005) The search engines continue to add new services to their portfolio.

The trend in the late nineties was to provide portal content -- news, games, horoscopes, you name it. Now the search engine companies add file sharing utilities and desktop search tools, gradually blurring the dividing line between your computer and their servers.

Yahoo! is going to buy Flickr, a site for online photo sharing.

With Flickr you can publish your own photos on the web and blog the photos you take with a camera phone.

Yahoo! already has its own photo site, called Yahoo! Photos, and this one will probably absorb features from Flickr.

That being said, according to the Flickr blog Yahoo! Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future.

We can't help wondering, though, if Yahoo! is doing this to control a major competitor.

There is one interesting comment on the Yahoo! Blog, that may prove otherwise. The anonymous blogger and Yahoo! employee writes that his (or her) heart jumped with excitement when he saw the news:

"As a longtime Yahoo, the possibility absolutely thrilled me. Again, we would show the Web that Yahoo! had got its groove back. I watched and waited hopefully."

Hence the acquisition of Flickr may be caused by the groove-factor, proving once and for all that Yahoo! has not become a boring old conglomerate run by economists and lawyers, and that it can compete with Google and Apple as regard cool creativity. You need more than an exclamation mark in your trade mark to convince the urban tribes that you can produce the search engine equivalent of an iPod.

See also Jeremy Zawodny's blog.

Answer search engine Brainboost relaunched

(March 19 2005) The answer search engine Brainboost has been around for a couple of years, but was recently revamped and relaunched. Here is why you should take a look.

Brainboost is not a regular search engine. You can enter your search queries in natural language and the results will not be rendered only as links to web sites that might contain a relevant answer.

Instead Brainboost presents you with a series of answers to the question you entered. The answers form complete sentences stating facts that are relevant to your question.

Read more.

Google sued over news search issue

(March 19 2005) Google has been sued by the French press agency Agence France Presse (AFP). The issue is that Google includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site – without permission.

AFP is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million. They also want to stop Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines and story leads.

News search engines do indeed operate in murky copyright waters. Linking to a web site or news story is no problem. Many news search services have been aggregating news stories by “borrowing” headlines, photos and even entire paragraphs for a while. This lawsuit will be watched carefully by them all.

The mysterious disappearance of GoogleX

(March 19 2005) Google’s user interface experiment GoogleX shone brightly but only for a short while.

It was a variant of Google’s well-known search interface but with images instead of text links for the different choices (image search, Froogle, Google labs and so on). A javascript rollover effect enlarged the images when the mouse passed over them, an effect not unlike the dock in Apple’s OSX.

GoogleX appeared on March 16 and then disappeared the very next day.

Read the whole story.

Google Desktop Search is out of beta

(March 9 2005) The Google Desktop Search Tool lets you search for files and emails on your own computer (see our desktop search page for reviews of this and other desktop search tools).

Google has now removed the beta -- i.e. test period -- status from the name of the software, indicating that they now feel confident that the tool is working the way it should. Indeed, it does.

The 1.0 release also adds new functions.

You can now search the full text of PDF files and the meta-information stored with music, image and video files. Moreover, the tool now supports the Firefox and Netscape browsers, Thunderbird and Netscape email clients and new Chinese and Korean language interfaces.

"Google Desktop Search brings the power of Google search to information on the computer hard drive," says Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of Product Management at Google.

"It's like having a photographic memory of everything you've seen with your computer, right at your fingertips. We're proud to take Google Desktop Search out of beta, and we will continue to extend the utility of desktop search for users worldwide."

Google now also delivers application programming interfaces (APIs) for the desktop search tool. This means that software developers can make new plug-ins based on the desktop search product, in practice expanding its functionality.

German search services collaborate to exclude child pornography, right wing extremism, and glorification of violence

(March 8 2005) Recently it was announced that the largest German search services have joined forces in association with the organization FSM. FSM tries to make companies that offer web services keep an eye on what kind of material they make available to their users.

Competing search services like Google.de, AOL Deutchland, Lycos Europe (including HotBot and the news search service Paperball, among others), MSN Deutchland, Yahoo Deutchland, T-info, and T-online have all chosen to work together in cooperation with FSM.

Guest writer Lars Våge, InternetBrus, has the whole story.

Gmail gets even better

(March 6 2005) Even though it is still in Beta and you have to be invited to sign up for an account, Gmail is amazingly popular. You can even say it has cult status. Now this blazing star gets even better.

Google's free photo organizer Picasa is now integrated with Gmail. You can log in to Gmail directly from Picasa and send easily photos from your Gmail account. Picasa will reduce the size of the image file to prevent it from clogging the mailboxes of your friends.

At Pandia, we are Mac users and have been annoyed that Gmail was not available using many of our browsers. Now, a feature called Basic HTML view lets us access our Gmail account using almost any web browser.

If you want to try this out and sign in to Gmail using a browser that isn't fully supported, you'll automatically be directed to a basic HTML view. The list of fully supported browsers is growing.

Search Google for weather forecasts

(March 5 2005) The Google blog reports that Google has a new search feature. You can now type "weather," followed by your location in the search form to see weather conditions and a four-day forecast for your area. Zip codes work too.

The forecast is illustrated with cute little weather icons. This feature will only work for U.S. locations, though. You can also send your query as SMS to 46645 (GOOGL).

Read about this feature in Google’s help pages.

Lycos to use Ask Jeeves' search technology

(March 4 2005) Some of us remember the time Lycos had its own search engine. Much have happened since then.

Lycos used to be one of the Norwegian company Fast's loyal customers. Since Yahoo! took over Fast's AlltheWeb search engine, Lycos has been powered by Yahoo's search technology.

Now Lycos has announced that it will replace Yahoo! with the Ask Jeeves/Teoma search engine.

This only proves that the search engine duopoly -- where Google and Yahoo! split the search engine world between them -- is over. MSN has its own search engine. Ask Jeeves is moving up, and there are new companies, like Gigablast, trying to become the next Google.

For searchers choice, competition and innovation is a good thing. We wish them all success!

Lycos to Use Ask Jeeves Search Technology (Reuters)

The new Yahoo! Search Developers Network

(March 4 2005) Yahoo has launched a new web site for programmers and web developers that wants to make use of the Yahoo! search engines in their products.

In Yahoo's own words: [Yahoo's Search Web Services] are a way for application developers to access content and services to build new applications. For example, you can combine our data and services with those you create in a desktop application or those offered by other web sites."

The Yahoo! Search Developers Network (YSDN) contains documentation, mailing lists, a weblog, a Wiki (a discussion forum), and more.

Yahoo opens up its search toolbox to developers (News.com)
Yahoo! Search Web Services Launch! (Zawodny's blog)
FAQ

Overture gets a new name

(March 3 2005) Yahoo! has decided to rename Overture, its famous pay per click text ad company. The new name will be Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions, and the switch will take place this spring.

"Our mission is to be essential to marketers of all types around the world," says Yahoo senior vice president Ted Meisel according to TechNewsWorld.

"Unifying all of our search marketing and related products under one banner and one common approach reflects our commitment to integrate and simplify online advertising, allowing businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the Yahoo Search marketing solutions that best fit their marketing goals."

All right, but we are still not convinced that this is such a good move. The first argument against such a change is, of course, that Overture has become a well known brand. The company has already switched names one time before (from GoTo to Overture).

Secondly Yahoo!/Overture is selling Overture pay-per-click text ads to other portals and search destinations. They might feel a little bit uneasy about announcing that they are delivering data from one of their main competitors, the portal company Yahoo!

That being said, the move might strengthen the Yahoo! brand.

Go to search engine news for February 2005

Please note: The links on archived search engine news pages will not be updated!