Search Engine News

At the All Things Digital conference, AOL announced that it would be joining Google’s OpenSocial. AOL recently acquired social network Bebo, which had already joined OpenSocial. First up will be the adoption of gadgets on myAOL.com. Writing on the OpenSocial blog, AOL Principal Software Engineer Eric Staats said, “We’re excited to work toward supporting Gadgets and OpenSocial across AOL’s many products, platforms and services. By working with Google and other leaders in the industry to create products based on a more open, uniform standard, AOL and AOL users will be able to safely take advantage of a wide variety of new applications within our products that have been built by developers around the world.

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Google Developers from all around have converged on the Moscone Center here in San Francisco, CA for 48 hours to discuss their latest projects, new products and web applications. Google’s largest developer event, Google I/O 2008 is under way. This year’s Keynote presentation by Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of engineering (formerly at Microsoft) along with special guests from Google Web Toolkit, Android as well as other teams, focused on building web applications to advance the web as a platform. According to Gundotra, “…developers are shaping the future of the web, putting foundations in place now that future generations of users won’t be able to imagine living without.” During the Keynote a number of new APIs were announced but the real crowd pleaser was a demonstration of Google Android’s “compass view” feature (soon to be released, according to Google) where the users’ movement changed with the perspective on their screen all in real time.

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No, this isn’t the latest update of Google Maps Guide to Grand Theft Auto IV. This is the real deal: Manhattan crime committed in New York, NY and depicted over a two month period from April 2008 to the end of May, 2008. Spotcrime.com claims it’s the most comprehensive online source of crime information. The site is probably right. They offer local maps, crime reports, crime classifications, and real-time interactive maps. Soon you’ll be able to find the exact location of the Manhasset High School lockdown as reported by News 12 Long Island, where two students were found at the Manhasset high school carrying firearms.

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Yahoo is urging its shareholders to use the white proxy card to vote for the current board, which the company has nominated to continue serving for the coming year. Additionally, Yahoo is advising shareholders to read the proxy statement that will be filed with the SEC. Here’s the statement from the Yahoo corporate blog: Related Reading: Yahoo Confirms Icahn Proxy Fight Microsoft Puts New Yahoo Deal on Table: Full Text

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When the local search feature was introduced about a year ago, companies were excited to take advantage of these tools to enhance local or regional business, but have since begun to wonder about its usefulness. However, local search engine optimization has benefitted many businesses who wish to draw consumers to their doors by emphasizing the fact that they have a local address and can provide more direct, specialized assistance.

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Google VP Udi Manber offers a high level description of what goes into Google’s relevance rank in his recent post, “Introduction to Google Search Quality”.Some excerpts: Ranking is hard … We need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason … We also need to understand the queries people pose [and their needs], which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents … And we have to do all of that in a few milliseconds.PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average. Some of these improvements are simple and obvious — for example, we fixed the way Hebrew acronym queries are handled (in Hebrew an acronym is denoted by a (“) next to the last character, so IBM will be IB”M), and some are very complicated — for example, we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January.

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The web video search company, Mefeedia, has just debuted its new news video search feature. The company, which recently launched its video search feature, explained in a blog post Wednesday that it now has more than 500 news video sources, searchable by keyword. News sources currently being tracked by Mefeedia …

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comScore, Inc. announced the at they are acquiring M:Metrics, Inc., a pioneer in mobile measurement. The acquisition, according to comScore, will will make the company the “immediate leader in measuring the emerging and strategically important mobile Internet market and adds to comScore’s leading position in measuring PC-based Internet usage.” The sale of M:Metrics includes a cash payment of $44.3 million and the issuance of approximately 50,000 options to purchase shares of comScore common stock to certain M:Metrics unvested option holders. (more…)

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After being in stealth mode for a year now, Yahoo suddenly offered the public a chance to take a “sneak peak” at its new software, Yahoo!BrowserPlus. From what we can gather, BrowserPlus is being touted as a tool for “extending the web” via a simple-to-execute web applications development processes. If released for public use and abuse, BrowserPlus would give users the ability to update and add new services on the fly without the need to restart or reload a browser page. BrowserPlus benefits both users and web application developers. Since it doesn’t require web browse reloading, users can easily add new web services without the need to run installers. While developers can check for and activate new services with a single function call, which is of course subject to user approval. BrowserPlus will handle software distribution and updates for users. (more…)

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Akamai has been around almost as long as the Internet itself, offering tracking and dynamic site solutions along with enterprise applications and streaming data. Celebrating Akamai’s 10th anniversary, the company has released its State of the Internet report which outlines security flaws and hacking, DNOS attacks, offline events which influenced the flow of the Internet and broadband penetration by different countries and regions. (more…)

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