Posted 10/08/08 at 06:33:37 PM by Pulkit Chandna
Now that the possibility of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo has been wiped out, Microsoft is steadily trying to improve its standing amongst search engines through strategic acquisitions and deals. To this end, its Live search service has now been integrated into Facebook. Users can now search the web using Live search from the familiar search bar on the top right corner of the popular social networking website.
The search results are displayed within Facebook and are accompanied by advertisements on the right side - as is the norm with search ads. This particular move is being viewed as a giant stride – at least potentially - for Live search, although Facebook will still has to convince users to use the search feature.
Posted 09/12/08 at 08:29:15 AM by Pulkit Chandna
Infantile search engine Cuil came out a cropper during its launch when it crumbled under the weight of its lofty promises – blame it on the copywriter’s strong imagination. But any startup needs some time, sans any distraction, before it can stake a claim for a place in the big league.
However, Cuil’s management will find it difficult to stay focused on its development roadmap for the time being. The startup has lost the services of its VP Product, Louis Monier, who has quit. Monier was an employee worth his weight in gold for Cuil due to his vast experience in the field of online search. It has been confirmed that there were “philosophical differences” between Monier and the Cuil bosses. A huge blow for Cuil as retaining top talent is one of the biggest challenges for any startup.
Posted 09/11/08 at 04:28:58 PM by Florence Ion
Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, about her “search is 90-95% solved” story in the LA times.
Mayer said in the original article that “Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%”. Mayer also alluded that Google still has some mountains to climb before its search has fully adapted to the internet and its growing trends, such as embedded video, maps, and electronic books. Arrington agrees that internet search is still “in its infancy.”
Mayer ended the conversation with saying that the ideal search engine is the user’s “best friend”; it should tailor answers to you based on preference and existing knowledge, and ask, “What do you want?” Hopefully, this is an indication of what’s to come to the Google search engine.
Posted 09/02/08 at 09:56:21 PM by Mark Edward Soper
The search engine startup Cuil (pronouced "Cool") we first told you about in July isn't very "cool" in the way its indexing robot works with websites. TechCrunch reports that Cuil's Twiceler website crawler is bringing many websites to their knees.
What is Twiceler doing? Last year, posters on The Admin Zone forum on Twiceler pointed out that the crawler was creating many connections in a short amount of time, resulting in an de facto denial of service "attack" on sites being crawled. While Twiceler doesn't work the same way now, it's still behaving badly.
For example, the JazzyChad blog reported recently that Twiceler was indexing invalid addresses that would become 404 (file not found) errors when Cuil users tried to follow them. Joe Kirp's Popular Science and Technology blog reports that:
The Twiceler bot is probably the most stupid crawler I've ever seen, it just downloads everything it can find and it seems that it just won't ever stop. If there's a page using dynamic input in a URL (a calendar for example) it will download the same page 100,000 and more times, simply by following all kinds of dynamic links it can find without using any kind of intelligent limitation.
By downloading thousands of pages per hour on each website it can cause an incredible traffic on a server, and dynamic scripts (written in Perl, Python or PHP for example) start causing an immense CPU load that may even take your entire server down (as reported by several webmasters). Twiceler is really harmful and can cost both money and downtime. A well written crawler such as Googlebot or Slurp (Yahoo) would never affect a website in such a malicious way.
How can you stop Twiceler from bringing your website to a crashing halt? To find out how, and to sound off on your Twiceler problems, follow the jump.
Posted 08/30/08 at 04:48:28 PM by Justin Kerr
Microsoft’s quest for online dominance it would seem, will take more than just cash to realize. The aborted Yahoo deal was but a small part of a multifaceted approach towards capturing long term search engine market share, the most lucrative of which involves e-commerce. For those who can’t remember back that far, on May 31st 2008 Microsoft announced plans to offer consumers cash back for transactions with select e-retailers which were found using the Live search engine. The comScore US market share results show a slight increase after the first month which represents a boost of about 0.7%. But July’s results saw the search engine give back 0.3% to its competitors. Even though the promotion has only been running for about two months, tech critics seem to think the idea is already running out of steam and express doubt that it will have any meaningful long term gains. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will continue the program as it may see any gain in market share to be a success. This seems even more likely when you consider how slowly search engine market share moves these days. To put it in perspective, during the same two month period Google’s market share rose only 0.1% to 61.8% and Yahoo dropped, but only by 0.1% to 20.5%. According to eMarketer Inc., U.S. online retail sales are projected to grow to about $335 billion by the year 2012. Even today, 68 percent of all online transactions began through a search engine.
Do you think Microsoft can make a comeback with cash back? Click the jump and let us know.