Search – Page 8 – Digital-Lifestyles

Yahoo’s My Web Upgrades Personal Search Tools

The battle between Google and Yahoo continues to heat up, with Yahoo ramping up the feature set of its ‘My Web’ suite of personal search tools.

My Web is a personal search engine that lets users save, recall and share resources with others using a selection of Yahoo tools, such as email and IM (instant messaging).

“Yahoo Search is focused on providing innovative, useful technologies that enable people to find, use, share, and expand knowledge,” boomed Salim Mitha, director, Yahoo Search, UK & Ireland.

“My Web is the next step in our vision of integrating search, personal search and community by providing users an easy way to have their own personal web search experience that incorporates the best of the Web and what matters most to them.”

Yahoo claim that their service is “better than bookmarks”, with users able to save an exact copy of a page along with the link, so that saved content will always be there when users return to the page.

Users can store thousands of pages, with tools allowing users to organise and search the content and access it from any computer.

Shared pages can be published using RSS (Rich Site Summary) with users given the option of creating public links pages.

My Web users will soon be able to share data with the Yahoo 360 social network, which allows users to share pictures, music and other data.

Yahoo’s search history tool bears more than a passing similarity to the one released by Google last week and reflects the fierce competition between the two companies.

Yahoo are hoping that these new features will send people flocking to their portal services and thus generate lots and lots of lovely advertising revenue.

UPDATE: Thanks to Steve Rioux for getting in touch, telling us of a very similar service he started almost a year ago called “Smart Note”. You can find it at Klogger.com

Yahoo My Web

Google Introduces Local Search To UK

Web search goliaths Google have delivered a large size nine up the rear end of their fierce rivals Yahoo by being the first to launch a local search service in Britain.

Like its popular US counterpart, Google’s local search service will offer maps and driving directions, and is their first such offering in Europe.

Now in public beta, the service is offered in partnership with the UK commercial telephone directory company Yell, who provide the business phone numbers and addresses.

Users can find local services by simply typing in their query into two boxes, labelled, “what” and “where”.

For example, typing in ‘cameras’ and ‘W1’ will produce a list of camera shops in the London W1 area, complete with addresses, phone numbers, a map flagging up the locations and a clickable link for more info.

“It’s the first time we’re bringing local search to a country outside North America,” said Kate Burns, ad sales and operations manager for Google in Britain, declining to give details about launches elsewhere in Europe.

The cooperation with a telephone directories company is unique to Britain, Burns said.

Frustrated Frenchmen and befuddled Belgians were left to mull over their fate with this enigmatic statement: “We take our European audience very seriously, (but) we’ve got nothing to announce this time.”

Local search is the big hot potato for Web search providers, who are salivating at the prospect of a nice new advertising niche opening up.

Global search advertising revenue is already sending cash tills into overdrive, with US investment bank Piper Jaffray estimating spending to rise to US$7.9 billion (£4.1BN/€6bn) in 2005 from US$5.5 billion (£4.1bn/€4.2bn) in 2004 – with most of the growth coming from international expansion and higher volume.

Google has also unveiled its Google SMS (Short Message Service) in the UK. This service enables users to send queries as text messages from a mobile phone and get information local business, driving directions and dictionary definitions. There’s also a facility to compare online product prices with high street ones.

Phone users will be charged with normal SMS text tariffs for the service.

Google local
Google SMS.

Google Unveils Mobile Local Search

Google is making its local-search service available to mobile-toting users, offering maps and driving directions optimised for the wee screen.

The nifty service – currently being publicly tested – lets nomadic users find local restaurants, stores and other businesses using their Web-enabled mobiles/PDAs equipped with suitable XHTML (Extensible HTML)-enabled browsers.

Using the service is simplicity itself, with a simple interface offering two boxes to enter “what” and “where” search terms, a search button and a link to get driving directions.

If you’re gasping for a Budweiser beer in Brooklyn, simply type ‘bar’ in the first box and the area’s zip code in the second and you’ll be presented with a helpful list of ten hostelries, with a ‘next’ button offering more locations.

Each search result offers the name, address and phone number of the bar and the distance from your location (sadly the service is currently only available for US and Canadian services).

As with Google local search results, clicking on the link for a result takes you to a page offering more detail about the business (there’s not much there at the moment, though).

Telephone numbers are displayed as a hyperlink, and if the users’ phone supports the facility, clicking on the link will dial the listed telephone number (unlike some local search services, there is no additional charge for this).

At the top of the page, a small map shows the locations of the bars listed, with each marked with a pushpin-like icon. A set of text links below lets you zoom in and pan around the local area.

Basic driving instructions can also be obtained by inputting your start and end addresses.

Naturally, such a genuinely useful service suggests a host of revenue earning possibilities, but Georges Harik, director of product management for Google declined to discuss future plans for sponsored listings, pay-per-call advertisements or other potential enhancements to the local mobile service.

Instead, the cryptic chappie stated that Google “plans to do whatever would be useful” for users of the service.

Local search services are set to be the big hot potato of 2005, with the Kelsey Group reporting that local search ad spending hit US$162 million (£85m/€125m) in 2004.

The local advertising market is predicted to reach US$5.1 billion in the United States by 2009, with local search advertising accounting for about two-thirds of the spend.

With Google’s arch-rivals, Yahoo, already offering a mobile search service, we can look forward to a glorious bun fight as the search engine giants ramp up the feature sets to woo customers. Bring it on!

Google Mobile
Google Local
Yahoo Local

Google Launches Q&A Service

Google has started dishing out factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, thus sparing click-weary users the hassle of navigating to other sites to look up the information.

For example, if a user keen to discover more about the greatest country in the world enters the query, “what is the capital of Wales”, Google will serve up the first paragraph from a wikipedia feature on Cardiff, along with a link to the originating page.

Typing in separate requests for the populations of England, Scotland and Ireland produced the correct results at the top of the page although – disgracefully – there was nothing for Wales. Outrageous!

The Q&A also works for celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics and movies. Peter Norvig, Google’s director of search quality, states that the company will continually work to broaden the scope of topics and to improve its capability to deliver more complex answers.

Only a small percentage of queries currently produce these factual answers, but the service is still its early stages, added Norvig.

Google are a bit late to the party with this one – other search engine providers such as Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and AOL are already offering similar services.

Norvig went on to explain that Google feeds the service with information from Web sites they considers to be reliable, but it’s yet to establish formal relationships with any of the sites providing the content.

You might think that some of the sites might be a tad miffed to see Google stealing their thunder, but Norvig thinks that they’ll be so chuffed to find themselves at the top of Google’s results list that they’ll want to run naked through the streets, clenching roses between their bum cheeks.

Well, he might have said that. To himself. When he was asleep. Possibly.

Google
Google Blog

Yahoo To Support Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia

Yahoo’s search engine division has announced that it will be dishing out hardware galore, resources and “critical material aid” to support the non-profit Wikipedia online encyclopedia.

Yahoo Search’s contribution is the most significant received by Wikimedia from a corporate sponsor to date, costed at “several hundred thousand dollars,” by David Mandelbrot, Yahoo’s vice president of search content.

Wikipedia is a global charitable effort, to create and give away a freely licensed encyclopedia in every language of the world.

In just four years, the non profit Wikimedia Foundation has created the largest English language encyclopedia in history, supported by substantial encyclopedias in French, German, and Japanese with “strong efforts underway” in over 100 other languages.

Much like Google’s new Q&A service, Yahoo Search will also feature abstracts of Wikipedia content at the top of relevant search results in the form of “shortcuts,” containing factual information or links to factual information.

Yahoo’s shortcuts are intended to give users the answer they’re looking for on the search results page, saving them the bother of clicking onto other Web sites for the desired information.

Yahoo’s support comes completely free of charge and they will in no way benefit from the positive world-wide publicity or continuing access to Wikipedia content. No sir.

To the strains of “We Are The World” serenading in the background, Mandelbrot explained Yahoo’s generosity, “To operate a site that reaches as many people as Wikipedia can be costly for a non profit, and we’re contributing with resources to help with that effort.”

“Their popularity is growing very fast and, accordingly, their bandwidth and hardware needs have increased substantially.”

Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia’s president, was naturally well chuffed with the announcement; “Our growth in Web traffic continues to be staggering, doubling every few months. Yahoo’s generous donation to our cause in the form of servers, hosting and bandwidth will have a huge impact on our ability to get our message of sharing knowledge out to the world.”

In a separate statement from Wikimedia, the charity revealed that Yahoo will also be dedicating “a significant number of servers” in a Yahoo facility in Asia.

Yahoo’s profits tripled from $65.3 million (£34.9m/€50.9m) to $253.3 million (£135.4m/€198m) last year.

Wikipedia
Yahoo

Ask Jeeves Sold To Diller’s InterActive Corp?

The wires are buzzing with rumours that Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp (IAC) is set to buy the Internet search engine service Ask Jeeves for almost $2bn.

Ask Jeeves is currently the fifth-largest search-engine provider on the Internet and the company also owns the popular ask.com, Bloglines and Excite Web sites.

In the UK, Ask Jeeves is the seventh most popular search site with 1.9 per cent of total searches, dwarfed by Google who weigh in with a mighty 63 per cent of total searches.

IAC already owns assorted Web properties including CitySearch, Expedia, Hotels.com, TicketMaster, dating site Match.com and the Home Shopping Network.

CitySearch offers localised search results for businesses, bars, cinemas and restaurants.

The reported US$1.9 billion price tag is something like 35 times AskJeeves’ 2004 earnings from continuing operations of US$52.4 million, and is 27 times its 2004 pro forma earnings from continuing operations of US$71.1 million (this excludes items like depreciation and amortisation).

About US$1.2 billion of the purchase price will be in cash, the New York Times reported (although we don’t think they mean used wads of dollars stuffed in suitcases).

Today’s expected announcement shows that search sites are still attracting investors and that there’s rich pickings to be gained with Microsoft recently following Google and Yahoo into paid-for-search advertising.

We tried to check the story by visiting Ask Jeeves and typing in, “are you being bought by InterActive Corp?”

Disappointingly, the search engine failed to find the answer.

AskJeeves
InterActive Corp

Google Movie Search Born

A handy Google search feature went live this week that lets users find showtimes at nearby movie theatres using either their computer or mobile phones and other wireless devices that use short-message services.

The service is available from any Google search box or via SMS.

So a movie hungry visitor to New York could enter their zip code in this search phrase “movie: 10122” to get a listing of what’s playing and when at theatres in their area. If they’re looking for a specific film, typing in, for example, ‘Vera Drake in 10122′ will provide local listings and show times.

The new feature also provides information such as theatre locations and reviews, and enables users to search for movies by title, plot or genre, sortable by movie or cinema.

Other possible searches can help with recommendations or simply refresh fans’ memories (or settle late night arguments).

A query such as “movie: lick my love pump” would return with “This Is Spinal Tap (1984)”, or searching on “movie: great fights” would provide a list of films featuring lots of fabulous punch-ups. And before you ask, yes, it works for naughty words too.

The search results come with a star rating, calculated on an aggregate of online reviews, and links to critics’ reviews.

“We’ll expect more traffic flow overall in movie names,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products. She said increased inventory will increase bidding. “We’re basically creating a new market for AdWords.”

In addition to film studios, Google expects marketing interest from video and DVD distribution companies such as Netflix, Blockbuster Online and Amazon.com, and from marketers of celebrity wallpaper, mobile ringtones and other such money-spinning merchandise.

This latest service ups the stakes in the ongoing bunfight between Google, Yahoo – and recently MSN search – as they battle to provide the most comprehensive set of Web search tools – and get a slice of fast-growing advertising revenues.

Google

Microsoft Search Squares up to Google

After receiving a sound pummelling in previous rounds against the mighty Google, Microsoft has produced a leaner, meaner more bad-ass search engine – and this one looks like it might go the distance.

Ditching their previous reliance on the Yahoo/Inktomi search index, the all-new MSN Search service has been created from the ground up using a Microsoft-designed proprietary index (although the company are still using Yahoo-owned Overture to deliver Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising).

With a spartan, advert-free interface straight out of the Google school of design, the minimalist screen lets users search for keywords from a rich range of sources including web pages, news feeds, images, news headlines, Encarta, music downloads and files on user’s PCs.

All the usual gizmos are on board too, with MSN Search offering word definitions, mathematic calculations, conversions, sports information and just about everything else that their competitors provide.

The new product reflects the intense competition in the increasingly important Internet-based search technology market. With Google already offering a free e-mail program, photo-editing software and a desktop search program for finding files on Windows computers, this development can be seen as Microsoft trying to protect their turf.

But will it be good enough to provide a viable alternative to the current search industry big boys, Yahoo! and Google, both of whom have more market share than Microsoft in the search business?

Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com isn’t completely convinced:

“The core search engine is good and a welcomed new “search voice” in the space. However, it does not make a massive leap beyond what’s offered by Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves — the other three major search companies that provide their own voices of what’s deemed relevant on the web.”

This week’s MSN Search launch probably won’t have much of an immediate impact on the search-engine market, but backed by an advertising budget the size of a small country’s GDP, we can expect things to heat up nicely in the coming months.

The timing of the launch, the day before Google announce their first full year trading results may also not have been coincidental.

MSN Search
Wikipedia: Pay per click
searchenginewatch.com

Video/TV Search Beta Launched By Google And Yahoo!

Google has added another product to its long list of extended beta services. Google Video is a TV video-search service that searches the closed captioning content of television programs – from major American TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others – to return still photos and a text excerpt at the point where the search phrase was spoken.

Google Video also; displays a preview page of up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each programme; lists when a particular programme will next be aired in a given area (US only); and allows for searches within a particular show.

Transcripts are available, but not video clips. This service is another milestone as it broadens the company’s strategy of expanding search to information on and off the Web, and it takes it into a market where more advanced services have been available for years.

“What Google did for the Web, Google Video aims to do for television,” said Larry Page, Google co-founder. “This preview release demonstrates how searching television can work today. Users can search the content of TV programmes for anything, see relevant thumbnails, and discover where and when to watch matching television programmes. We are working with content owners to improve this service by providing additional enhancements such as playback.”

Not to be outdone, US-based rival Yahoo! has also launched a video search link on its home page. The Yahoo! service searches and returns actual video clips for playback, but does not offer transcripts. Google and Yahoo!’s video searches are interesting launches, but they do not match those of video search services currently available on the Web. Examples include Blinkx.tv and SpeechBot from Hewlett-Packard, which uses speech-recognition in its search, and ShadowTV, which offers a paid business service. Nevertheless, when a leading search engine company enters a new market, we all know something big is going to happen.

Google Video
Yahoo!

Google Suggest – Search Innovation

Two Google stories in a day! They’re testing a new interface for their search engine that they’re calling Google Suggest.

One of the problems for many users of Google has been the huge number of results returned including ones that apparently had nothing to do with the original request. Other search engines have taken the approach of gathering what they feel are related results together to try and assist the searcher. Google Suggest is Google’s shot at it.

The interface looks the same as it does currently – simple, stripped down and functional – but as you type in your search term, a drop-down box shows a number of suggestions based on what you have entered. It also lists the number of search results would be returned, giving a further guide to searchers.

As an example of how it works we entered “digital”. This bring up the predictable “digital camera”, but helpfully for novice users, it also lists “digital camera review”, which might be more what they are looking for. There are ten suggestions lists in total, which in this case included “Digital radio” and possibly just for a little variety, “digital blasphemy“, not something we’ve come across before, but as it turns out a site selling computer rendered wallpapers that is well worth a look.

Selecting the term bring up the expected list of Google results, but with the Google Suggest feature persisting in the search box.

As ever, Google are innovating in their own way, and given their skill in improving upon innovation, we see no reasons the suggested search terms shouldn’t also list of the audio/video/photo results making searching quicker.

More importantly it’s key to remember that this is helping Google raise revenue. The more precise the search term, the better the match for displayed TextAds, the more likely the searcher is to click on them and in turn, the more income Google will make.

Before you rush to the site to test the ‘rude’ words, don’t get too excited, many don’t bring up suggestions. Although we can well see that testing of the limits of this will become a strand of postings on boingboing.net. Google Suggest beta