Plenty of Search news today.
News.com: “Microsoft plans to introduce a news aggregation service for Web logs and to develop a social networking product…Microsoft’s Yusuf Medhi said one in two search requests currently go unanswered and that there are a number of ways to improve on that. One is to learn more about the searchers, in order to give better results.”
Adds WSJ: “Microsoft said it will introduce MSN Newsbot, which gathers news from hundreds of news sites, and MSN Blogbot, which can search Web logs, or personal Web pages…Unlike rival news searches, MSN Newsbot keeps track of a visitor’s queries and suggests news articles based on past requests. MSN Blogbot is still in development, but a beta version should be available in the first half of this year.”
Michael Kanellos writes about interpreting search. “University of Southern California spinoff Language Weaver, for instance, has come up with technology that performs functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly…People can submit a Web page in French, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi or the ever-popular Somali, and a functional English version pops out in about a minute…MetaCarta has come up with software designed to enable intelligence agencies, oil exploration teams and marketing execs to search for documents in their own data files and then plot them geographically…The MetaCarta and Language Weaver efforts essentially address the central paradox of search: The more you know, the less you know. The amount of information out there and the ways people want to use it are so wide-ranging that there are plenty of technology opportunities.”
Two deals: Yahoo paid $575 million for European e-commerce provider Kelkoo and Infospace is buying Switchboard, a provider of online yellow pages listings, for USD 160 million. “Analysts said the market fever has been driven in part by the early success of paid search services pioneered by Yahoo’s Overture Services subsidiary and Google’s Adwords service. Sales from keyword searches increased to 31 percent of the total $1.75 billion in online ad revenue in the third quarter of 2003, according to online-advertising trade group the Internet Advertising Bureau.”
Newsweek has a cover story on Google.
