Jul 4th, 2008 - It would appear that Ask.com, the search site which used to be known as Ask Jeeves, has purchased Dictionary.com Dropping the 'Jeeves' branding after 10 years, the search engine retained the same 'ask a straightforward question' approach to Internet searching. With the acquisition of... (Read More)

30 Days Ago - Once upon a time, Usenet newsgroups were the Twitter, Facebook and forums of the online world. All the early Internet community makers were there, and important announcements such as the arrival of Mosaic by Marc Andreesen broke there first. Then the inevitable happened, and Usenet slowly... (Read More)

Feb 23rd, 2009 - The usual image of a stalker is some creepy bloke obsessed by some TV star, following them around and making unwanted advances. When it comes to the online realm, however, it would appear that we might have to redraw that stereotype. New research has revealed that while 50 percent of the Brits... (Read More)

Jan 15th, 2009 - According to Vik Singh of the Yahoo! BOSS team, the combination of Twitter and BOSS is a real time news search facility that can mash Yahoo news with Twitter topics. What you end up with is the most timely delivery of news you can get, certainly much more so than the likes of even Google News for... (Read More)

Jan 13th, 2009 - According to reports the new Yahoo! CEO will be Carol Bartz, the 60 year old former Autodesk chairman. She will replace Jerry Yang, the Yahoo! co-founder who was pretty much forced into resignation late last year following his handling of the Microsoft takeover offer. Bartz has a good reputation... (Read More)

Jul 27th, 2008 - According to reports it looks like Facebook and Microsoft have agreed a deal which will see Microsoft Live Search integrated into the Facebook service. Along with the related advertising of course. This should come as no great surprise to anyone who watches the technology market for trends, as... (Read More)

Oct 31st, 2007 - The last few days have been interesting ones for those of us who have nothing better to do than follow online gossip and trends. Especially so when you consider that the big gossip in the world of search has been how some rather well known sites have seen their PageRank shot down in flames by an... (Read More)

29 Days Ago - Forget the Windows 7 launch, the real big news from Microsoft this week is that it has reached a deal with Twitter to include real-time tweet data in Bing searches. If that wasn't excitement enough for the Twitterati, just a few hours after Microsoft made its announcement Google joined in and... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2009 - When a complaining consumer starts topping the Google search rankings for your company, perhaps it is time to start taking them seriously? Who says that blogging is a waste of time? Not me, but then I've been blogging for a while now, admittedly in a professional capacity as a technology... (Read More)

Feb 23rd, 2009 - It is about time, but Twitter has now announced that it is rolling out a real time search function for users. Unfortunately the 'Search and Trends' feature is currently only available for a "limited set of accounts" according to Twitter founder Biz Stone who adds that most people "will not see this... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2008 - According to the official Google Webmaster Central Blog it would appear that much better Adobe Flash indexing is heading for Google. In fact, if the Googlebot engineers posting to that blog are to be believed, the ability to index textual content in SWF format files, including Flash, has already... (Read More)

Aug 6th, 2008 - If you have ever been vaguely interested in search beyond the simple 'where can I find x' type question, and perhaps more from an 'who is asking about y' or 'where is z the most popular' instead, then listen up. Google has announced the launch of Insights for Search which aims to answer just... (Read More)

Apr 8th, 2008 - News is breaking that the European Commission could push for laws to restrict the personal search data held by search companies to no longer than six months, after which it must be discarded. The EC Article 29 data Protection Working Party seems to be heading for a confrontation with search engine... (Read More)

Aug 31st, 2007 - Microsoft has been keen to get me to take a look at a new experimental site launched to showcase the potential of its Silverlight technology. Tafiti, which apparently means 'do research' in Swahili, is the site in question. An exploration of two trends: search specialization and the Web 2.0 rich... (Read More)

Apr 8th, 2007 - Ever since I interviewed Bradley Horowitz, Head of Technology at Yahoo!, 18 months or so ago I have been keeping a keen eye on pretty much everything the company does in the search realm. Not least because Bradley is a man with a real vision for the future of social search, and with his enthusiasm... (Read More)

Nov 19th, 2006 - Webmasters are becoming increasingly aware of the power of the sitemap as an SEO tool, enabling search spiders to crawl more pages in less time with the end result of getting more or your links indexed faster. Because sitemaps require only those pages that have changes to be visited, valuable... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2008 - When I researched an article on multimedia search last year for EContent Magazine, (The resulting article was republished on Streamingmedia.com last December.) I learned in the course of my research that it's hard to search for non-text elements because they lack the contextual language of text.... (Read More)

Oct 7th, 2009 - In wide ranging interview with Peter Kafka of the Digital Memo Blog, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brinn did their best to give people the impression that Google was run by a couple of arrogant SoBs. Whether it was purchasing Android or suggesting that Google could never be evil... (Read More)

Sep 8th, 2009 - A week ago today, the unthinkable happened. That's right, Gmail went down...for *two* hours. You would have thought, judging from the amount of chatter on Twitter that we were experiencing an epic attack, a horrible natural disaster, perhaps the end of life as we know it; but it was none of that.... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Yesterday was the major league baseball trade deadline and lots of teams made big deals and took huge gambles for short-term gain, while possibly risking the future in the form of younger, cheaper, but unproven talent. Microsoft and Yahoo! also made a trade of sorts when they signed an historic... (Read More)

Jun 21st, 2009 - Speaking about consumer search last week, Steve Ballmer said he now regrets that Microsoft quote "didn't start earlier" unquote. But it seems to me that Microsoft has been all in for a long time and they just haven't been very successful at consumer search. It wasn't so much they gave in, as... (Read More)

Dec 12th, 2008 - In a wide ranging interview with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington on Wednesday at Le Web in Paris, Google's Marissa Mayer talked about all things Google, but what I found most interesting was when the conversation turned toward the future of search. Mayer said the key to the future of search lies in... (Read More)

Nov 24th, 2008 - According to a recent TechCrunch article, Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the Get a Mac ads have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name of the products, it's... (Read More)

Nov 21st, 2008 - It's been about a week now since the now infamous Motrin ad hit the air waves. It caused a social media firestorm the likes of which the internet might never have seen and that's saying something. If for some reason, you haven't heard, you can go to parenting.amuchbetterway.com and see the ad for... (Read More)

Nov 16th, 2008 - Google announced on Friday that it was adding on-demand indexing to its hosted Google Site Search product, giving customers the ability to instantly re-index a site after adding new content. This gives web site owners running Google Site Search much greater control over the indexing process... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2008 - Google quietly introduced an audio search tool called GAudi this week in Google Labs. For now, Google is using to the tool for experimentation purposes to index political content on YouTube videos, but chances are they are exploring this for more than good citizenship points and will expand it at... (Read More)

Jul 3rd, 2008 - I’ve been highly critical of many of Microsoft’s moves lately, mostly because they have felt like the awkward ramblings of a company one step behind the curve, but the other day Microsoft made, what in my view, is a smart play. They bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based semantic search company and... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2008 - Yesterday a (slightly) risqué ad for JC Penney made the rounds on the internet. It depicted two teens getting ready for a date by timing how fast they could get dressed. At the end of the ad, the boy comes over to the girl’s house and they let the stern looking Mom know they are going to “hang out”... (Read More)

Jun 3rd, 2008 - Google released a shiny new version of its hosted enterprise search product today that includes new custom indexing and a synonym dictionary. While they were at it, Google changed the name of the product to Google Site Search, which replaces the old (rather awkward) moniker Custom Search Business... (Read More)

May 21st, 2008 - Is the press release dead? Earlier this month, Esther Schindler wrote in her You’re the Boss blog that “PR is broken. Social media might, might glue some of the parts back on.” To test this supposition, I spoke to David Meerman Scott, who is the author of the bestselling book The New Rules of... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I think I must be turning into some sort of freak (fill in the kneejerk comment of your choice at the end of this blog, there are plenty to choose from). I've just read this interesting story that says Google is going to launch a microblogging search engine. It's here. You're going to be able to... (Read More)

May 18th, 2009 - First let's deal with the big negative I've seen on a number of websites including the BBC: Wolfram Alpha is American-centric. Well, yes, it kind of is. This will be because it's starting up and America is the biggest market it has to serve. Personally I find that understandable - presumably others... (Read More)

Apr 30th, 2009 - A new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has gone into public beta. I say search engine but it's not quite that; it's a new concept that takes a question asked by the user, goes and has a look online and offers a proper answer in return rather than a series of web links. The BBC's coverage is here. I... (Read More)

May 22nd, 2008 - American readers will have been delighted by last night's announcement ('last night' is relative, it was last night in the UK) that Microsoft is going to offer cash back on items bought through its partners from its search engine scheme. The idea completes a notion that began over a decade ago with... (Read More)

Jan 5th, 2009 - Under new a new law adopted in the UK, the British police are now permitted to access data stored on home computers without benefit of a search warrant. Worse yet, officers are allowed to hack into computers remotely without notifying its owner. Even though officials say these methods would only be... (Read More)

Sep 16th, 2008 - ZDnet's Deb Perelman asks if it's a good idea to ask IT job candidates to prove they've got the technical chops to do the job they're after. You bet your server farm it is. Perelman says, "...increasingly, IT professionals are asked to take some sort of test when they go for a job interview, to... (Read More)

Jul 7th, 2008 - Code search company Krugle on July 8 will begin shipping Krugle Enterprise 2.3, an update to its code repository appliance that it claims now allows more fine-tuned searching, increased storage and search capacity and the ability to search using custom data fields. Krugle positions its... (Read More)

Mar 20th, 2008 - Figures released earlier by ComScore reveal that Google's web-search market share dipped Janurary to Feburay overall; even though the US share was up slightly. Google's lions share of the search world still sits at 62.8% though; down from 63.1% in Janurary. The number of searches going through... (Read More)

Jan 29th, 2007 - Google has announced that they have put an end to Googlebombs - for the moment. Previoulsy a search for "failure" would bring up George Bush's White House page, but as you can see, they've fixed it. Specifically Google bombs are created by linking to some unused phrase that brings up irrelevant... (Read More)

Jan 25th, 2007 - Google looks like the next thing it's going to do is take over the world. Or at least, Microsoft. I'm sure you've all heard the rumors about Google creating an operating system, but is it really happening? I just found this screenshot of a supposedly-leaked upcoming version of GooOS. Kind of... (Read More)