At a first glance, the website looks pretty much as it did when it first launched – with the straightforward input field. But inside that simple exterior an incredible amount has happened. Our development organization has been buzzing with activity all summer. In fact, it’s clear from the metrics that the intensity is steadily rising, with things being added at an ever-increasing rate. Wolfram|AlphaWolfram|Alpha was always planned to be a very long-term project, and paced accordingly. We pushed very hard to get it launched before the summer so that we could spend the “quiet time” of our first summer steadily enhancing it, before more people start using it more intently in the fall… Read on at blog.wolframalpha.com
It’s official: Yahoo is dumping its own search technology in favor of Microsoft’s BingBing. Although searches conducted on Yahoo will still have the company’s branding and interface, for at least the next decade, the results will be based on Bing’s algorithms. However, this isn’t the first time in Yahoo’s 15 year history that it has ceded its search business to a competitor. From 2000 to 2004, Yahoo search results were powered by a relatively new up-and-comer: GoogleGoogle. That deal allowed Google to grab enormous marketshare in terms of search volume, even if the search results themselves were showing up on Yahoo’s site. When Yahoo dumped Google in favor of its own search technology in 2004, they estimated that they’d instantly have grabbed back better than 50 percent of the search market… Read on at Mashable.com
A few months from now, Yahoo’s search engine will be “powered by BingBing.” After months of back and forth between Microsoft and Yahoo, the two companies finally announced a deal today that will bring Microsoft’s search engine to Yahoo’s properties, while Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Barring any roadblocks from industry and government regulators, this deal will grant Microsoft an exclusive license to Yahoo’s core search technologies for 10 years. Yahoo expects that this deal will increase the company’s cash flow by about $275 million… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com
As we first reported yesterday, Microsoft and Yahoo are on the verge of announcing a complicated search and search marketing alliance that will combine the no. 2 and no. 3 players in search into something that may have a chance of competing with GoogleGoogle (although combined they will still have less than half of Google’s 65% or so search market share). The deal will be announced shortly after signing, and could come as early as today (Wednesday). If the deal is completed it will close the 18-month long negotiation that began with a $45 billion merger offer on February 1, 2009. The details of the deal will determine the bump in Yahoo’s share price, something investors really desperately desire… Read on at TechCrunch.com
Mobile startup Aloqa launched earlier this week at the MobileBeat conference, revealing their innovative interface for location-aware search. Their new application proactively seeks out nearby businesses, services, events, and even FacebookFacebook friends and presents them to you in a colorful yet streamlined interface. The app essentially lists everything that’s nearby – with no need for you to perform map-based searches or launch a browser. Instead, all you have to do is look at your phone… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com
FriendFeedFriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so FacebookFacebook search must be coming soon. Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including GoogleGoogle and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general. What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com
It’s no secret that GoogleGoogle – and other search engines – uses a variety of factors to customize search results: your search history, your location, and so forth. If you misspell a word, search engines often guess what you intended to type and show auto-corrected results. But on Google’s search results pages, it’s becoming a secret when these changes are happening. Google Blogoscoped writes about Google ignoring some search terms altogether (as if it knows better than you what you meant to search for). The example… Read on at Searchengineland.com
Sure, Yahoo might be second in search (which is still, in and of itself, pretty good), but the company is far from a has-been — I know a ton of startups that would kill for the eyeballs that it snags in many of its market categories, and some established companies (GoogleGoogle, AOL, Microsoft, to name a few) that would … Read on at Gigaom
At a first glance, the website looks pretty much as it did when it first launched – with the straightforward input field. But inside that simple exterior an incredible amount has happened. Our development organization has been buzzing with activity all summer. In fact, it’s clear from the metrics that the intensity is steadily rising, with things being added at an ever-increasing rate. Wolfram|AlphaWolfram|Alpha
was always planned to be a very long-term project, and paced accordingly. We pushed very hard to get it launched before the summer so that we could spend the “quiet time” of our first summer steadily enhancing it, before more people start using it more intently in the fall…
