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October 5, 2006

Search Headlines & Links: October 5, 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...

  • Yahoo Gives Update On Site Explorer
    Site Explorer Authentication - Some Improvements and Notes from the Yahoo Search Blog gives an update, tips and some bug fixes for those making use of the service, especially focused on issues with authentication....
  • Google To Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft For Info To Help In It Book Scanning Lawsuit
    Just in from Bloomberg, Google to Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft on Book Scanning covers how Google hopes that gaining information from rival book scanning programs will help it defend itself in copyright lawsuits over its own scanning program. From the story: Google, which doesn't disclose how many books it has scanned, also wants to know the title, authors and copyright status of books already offered through competitors' book projects, according to the documents. The right to subpoena has been granted, but information is to be kept confidential and used only in the litigation....
  • Light Posting On Friday, Oct 6, 2006
    Barry Schwartz is off for Sukkot tomorrow, Friday, October 6 -- and I'm away at the Frankfurt Book Fair. So the SEW Blog might have light posting!...
  • LiveDeal Partnership Moves: Vast, SimplyHired
    Within the past two days LiveDeal has announced two significant relationships: one with jobs metasearch engine SimplyHired and another, today, with general classifieds aggregator/search engine Vast....
  • Google Blog Search Adds Ping Support
    The Google Blog announced that Google Blog Search now supports the acceptance of pings. So when you add a new blog entry and you support RSS/XML/Atom you can send Google Blog Search a ping at their Blog Search Pinging Service. How do you do this? Well, you can read more at About Google Blog Search Pinging Service and view the Pinging API yourself. I tested it out on a different blog and got a 404, but it is very possible I pinged the wrong URL, I will test it again shortly. Postscript From Danny: Movable Type users want to put...
  • Google Won Keyword Trademark Lawsuit: Rescuecom v. Google
    MercuryNews.com reported last week that Google won a major sponsored keyword trademark case against Rescuecom. Judge Norman Mordue of U.S. District Court, northern district of New York, went "against all four precedent rulings" on this case, said Eric Goldman. Specifically, the court said, "Defendant's internal use of plaintiff's trademark trigger sponsored links is not a use of a trademark...because there is no allegation that defendant places plaintiff's trademarks on any goods, containers, displays, or advertisements, or that its internal use is visible to the public." Eric Goldman explained that the court used the 1-800 Contacts precedent in this case to...
  • Search Competition; Why Can't Others Catch Up To Google?
    BusinessWeek.com has a good article on search competition, explaining how Google's continued growth amongst all the competition is practically unaffected. In short, the article goes over new features, refinements, and user interfaces and explains that it is mostly about the trust the searchers have for the Google brand to provide the best results. Take a look at Danny's recent rant, he goes into this more and also check out Danny's post on Daggle.com named Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think. Want a view from a Google employee on the article, read Matt Cutts take...
  • Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend
    This is a rant. It's a rant from over 10 years of watching people trot out natural language search as the "killer" solution to the current state of search, something that's happening once again with Powerset. That's a search engine you can't even use at the moment, but the hype will no doubt continue. To counteract that, my thoughts on and some history about natural language search....
  • USA Today Asks Teoma Who?
    The other day, Ask.com was featured in a USA Today article named What's Teoma, you ask? You could ask Jeeves, but he's become ... Teoma. Yes, a weird title for a USA Today post, in where USA Today goes into the past of Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, Rutgers, IBM and Apostolos Gerasoulis. The article is a fun read but it needs some clarifications that are either wrong or can be interpreted the wrong way. The article says, "Lanzone turned off Ask's technology and began to power Ask.com with Teoma." Lanzone, being Jim, the new CEO of Ask.com. The time they...
  • Google Groups Beta 2006 Gets Mixed Reviews
    Google announced a new Google Groups Beta with a new design, added features and some shared features from other Google properties. In short, Google Groups has a new design, added Google Page like features, more customization abilities, file upload and sharing capabilities, member profile pages, Gmail-like "message cards for discussions" and more. Nathan Weinberg calls this a "step backwards" for Google Groups. As Nathan notes, Philipp Lenssen says there is too much confusion and inconsistency felt in the new design. Garett Rogers calls this upgrade an "better overall experience" for the Google Groups user. Finally, News.com reports that it is...
  • Google Code Search Live, Offers Code Searching For Programmers
    Google Code Search is now live, a new service from Google designed to allow computer programmers and others seek out computer code from across the web....

Headlines & News From Elsewhere

Posted by Danny Sullivan at October 5, 2006 8:50 PM