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October 2, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: October 2, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we've spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog...

  • Why IAC's Pronto Will Succeed: Partnership With Ask
    There are many reasons to like Pronto among the many crawler based shopping search engines: - Comprehensiveness (read last week's press release) - Upcoming features that provide a better user experience - Monetization through an ad system not called Google AdSense - Not relying solely on the PPC engines for traffic - Online ad market is hot and will continue to grow - Ecommerce is hot and will continue to grow While these things are the building blocks of a great new shopping service, they aren't the be all, end all. Other companies can and will develop powerful crawling technology...
  • Need A Costume For Halloween? Try The CostumeZee Costume Search Engine!
    This is an entirely commercial operation, but with Halloween looming on the horizon, one that may prove useful. CostumeZee is a search engine that enables searchers to locate costumes for particular events, such as Halloween, or themes such as Pirates. Costumes for both children and adults are available, as well as appropriate accessories. The links do all seem to take searchers to American based sites however, so if you're outside the US, order early and cross your fingers....
  • Amazon's A9 Becomes, Well, Sort Of Nothing
    Amazon's A9 saw the loss of its driving force Udi Manber to Google earlier this year. Now two years after its launch, A9 itself has lost virtually all of its  many of its distinguishing features, according to an update from the company, including:...
  • Copiepresse Upset Ruling On Google Wasn't Visible Enough
    Last week, Google complied with a Belgian court order and posted the ruling against it in a copyright suit on the home page of Google Belgium and Google News Belgium, along with many other places including many search results pages. Now via Google Blogoscoped, news that the plaintiff in the case Copiepresse thinks the ruling should have gone at the top of the Google News Belgium page, rather than the bottom....
  • The Accent Is On Search
    An interesting article in Pandia about an overlooked area of search - Searching Google for words with accents. The bottom line is that it's difficult and fiddly to do it, and it depends on a number of different factors that the searcher cannot control. Let's take the example (as given) by Pandia for Mexico and México. A search will probably return sites that contain either word, but to force the engine to return hits with the accented version a search for +México will pretty much work (though there may be a few oddities caused by inbound links. However, results will...
  • Yahoo Hack Day's Success & Yahoo Mail API Coming
    It sounds like Yahoo's first open Hack Day was a big success, featuring even a performance by Beck. Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz has a nice roundup in Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes!. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington served at MC of the event, and All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize post covers the top winners, briefly. Meanwhile, Yahoo Mail introduces web APIs from Niall Kennedy covers how a new API for Yahoo Mail is coming, with commentary from others here on TechMeme....
  • Reading Other People's Gmail Via Bloglines
    Using Bloglines to snoop on people's private Gmail from Martin Belam looks at how he accidentally stumbled upon email feeds that individuals are posting to Bloglines. To be fair, it's an issue that could happen to any "private" feed that someone unknowingly shares to the public....
  • Google Buys Birthplace Garage
    Google has purchased the garage where the company developed after its initial birth at Stanford University. Actually, they've purchased the home of Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki. Before she became a Google VP, Wojcicki rented the garage attached to her home to Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine from the Associated Press has details about the sale, which was probably in the $1.2 million range. As of yet, Google doesn't know what exactly it may do with the home the article reports. It's already a tourist attraction,...

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at October 2, 2006 4:57 PM