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Follow the latest news, insight, analysis, blogs and product reviews of search engines and search related topics like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), the top search engines, search engine submission, enterprise search, information management, search servers and enterprise search tools.
Top Search Engines News
IDC analyst Al Hilwa said Chrome Operating system will take some hard selling by Google and its partners to get on netbooks, those hard disk-less machines from Asus, Dell, HP and others that let users access Web applications. He wonders if consumers and enterprises will accept only running Web applications and not local apps. Gartner analyst Ray Valdes wonders how serious potential hardware partners will be about Chrome OS. Will netbook makers use Chrome OS as a bargaining chip to get better deals on Windows operating system licenses from Microsoft?
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Google is pairing its automatic speech recognition technology with its YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms that power automatic voice mail transcription in Google Voice to generate captions for video on the fly. This a boon for deaf and hearing-impaired users who want to enjoy the millions of videos on the YouTube video sharing service. Google's YouTube team is also launching automatic caption timing, making it much easier for users to create captions manually.
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Twitter Nov. 19 released its geotagging API to programmers, but users won't yet be able to access location-based services from the Twitter.com Website. The feature, which allows users to selectively annotate their tweets with their exact location and provide more context to users about their surroundings, has been implemented on Twitter applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Seesmic Web. Creepy? Perhaps, but likely only to someone who wouldn't opt in to use such a service in the first place.
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Google released the Chrome Operating System, an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X, to open source for developers, but said end users will not be able to use the Web operating system until late 2010. During a demo, Google's Sundar Pichai showed how Chrome OS booted up on an Asus Eee PC netbook in 7 seconds, with 3 more seconds to log onto an application. Chrome OS had the look and feel of the Chrome Web browser, which has 40 million regular users. Chrome OS was designed with speed, simplicity and security in mind.
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BroadPoint AmTech analyst Mark McKechnie said a Google smartphone made by one vendor would be preferable to devices that pair hardware from Motorola, HTC and others with software and services from Google. The analyst said a Google phone would be a fine growth opportunity for the search engine as it seeks to extend its tendrils on the mobile Internet. Apple, by virtue of its singular choke point for hardware, applications and services, is best positioned to weather any Google phone attack. McKechnie expects 37.3 million iPhones will be sold worldwide in 2010, and said Apple could double its market share within a few years.
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The ubiquitous social networking site Facebook becomes further ingrained in the cultural consciousness as "unfriend" is selected by the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year.
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Google paced the market with 65.4 share, up from its 64.9 percent share in September, comScore claimed. Microsoft Bing nearly reached double digits with 9.9 percent, up from its 9.4 percent share in September. Google and Microsoft's collective gain came at the expense of Yahoo, which plummeted to 18 percent in October from the prior month's total of 18.8 percent. That's Yahoo's lowest share ever and its largest month-to-month share decline since August 2008.
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News Analysis: Instead of retelling the Google Android-based Droid versus Apple iPhone grudge match, I'm putting the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris in the steel cage. My ground rule for testing and comparing the phones was that I wanted to turn them on and begin using them without looking at the tip guides. Call it an intuitiveness test. The Eris runs Android 1.5, the Droid runs Android 2.0. The Android operating system was a breeze to navigate on both smartphones, allowing me to flit from one application or phone feature to the next with virtually no time spent on learning how to use the devices. And the winner is ...
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Microsoft launched a handful of new initiatives for both consumers and businesses this week. In addition to Exchange Server 2010, the new version of its messaging and collaboration platform, Microsoft also added features to Bing, including a more robust video page and search results from Wolfram Alpha, a computational engine that nominally returns a single numerical answer or chart in response to a search query. Microsoft also saw its market share for both Bing and Windows 7 creep up incrementally, as Redmond battles a variety of competitors ranging from Google to Apple for points amidst a still-tight economic climate.
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Google, authors and publishers Nov. 13 narrowed the scope of their agreement to let Google sell access to millions of out-of-print books online, limiting it to include works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia or Canada. The revised deal also addresses concerns from Amazon, the Department of Justice and others that Google would have too much control over orphan works. The Open Book Alliance, formed in August with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo to oppose the Google Book Search bid, blasted the revised settlement in a statement.
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The exoneration of a Brooklyn teenager with the help of a timely Facebook status update has sparked interest in social networking tools as evidence for law enforcement officials and litigators. This could heighten interest in Google Latitude Location History, an opt-in feature that lets users store where they've been. Yet the fact that Google is now storing location history has privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation concerned about what sort of protection Google will offer Latitude users in the case of legal compliance.
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Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology's pedigree features programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.
New Slideshow
Microsoft announced a broad range of new functionality for Bing, its search engine, on Nov. 11. In addition to incorporating results from Wolfram Alpha, a self-described computational engine that provides a definitive numerical answer to a search query, the revamped Bing offers a more robust video page, with feeds from MSN Video, Hulu and ABC, and more intensive search in categories such as local events and cities.
In a sign of the increased importance of social networking to corporations such as Microsoft and Google, Bing has also incorporated Facebook and Twitter into its search features. The following product gallery demonstrates the various tweaks that constitute Bing's unofficial Version 2.0.
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Microsoft Nov. 11 inked a deal with Wolfram Alpha to begin offering computational search. Google does not do this, but a company engineer hinted that it is heading there. Right around the time Bing unveiled its deal with Wolfram Alpha, Google added World Bank data to its search service. Users can search for such topics as electricity consumption per capita, or carbon dioxide emissions per capita for certain countries. When is Google going to start calculating equations itself, rather than just surfacing the data from other sources? Google's Ola Rosling responds...
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Google slashed the costs of hosted storage for its Picasa and Gmail applications, offering 20 gigabytes (GB) of storage for $5 per year, or twice as much for one quarter of the previous price. Will users begin entrusting more e-mail and photos to Google server farms? It's hard to say, but certainly cutting storage costs for its Picasa photo-sharing and Gmail applications is a sign the cloud computing market is maturing. Was the cost cut a competitive gesture? Google's cut came one days after Cisco Nov. 9 launched its Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail app for $3.50 per user per month with 5 GB of storage.
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Conventional wisdom has it that the combo of Microsoft's Bing search engine and Yahoo's market share will loosen Google's stranglehold on the search market. But there is something worse than a monopoly when it comes to stifling creativity and competition, and, with the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership, we're heading straight for it.
No longer a beta, Google's Chrome Web browser is an able challenger to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome offers strong new features, such as integration with Google Gears, a hybrid search address bar and solid security offerings. However, the search company's browser lacks some basic features found in IE, Firefox and Opera, and limits users who want to define settings and customize their browser. Despite its shortcomings, browser users should give Google Chrome a try.
Search giant Google in its new Chrome browser has souped up JavaScript, calling it V8. Although Google Chrome's V8 sports neither fuel injection nor dual-overhead cams, it does have full compilation even for dynamic languages and new garbage collection features, resulting in much faster Web 2.0 applications.
Google's new Chrome browser has a lot to offer in terms of new technology. Google has recognized that something needed to be done to enable browser technology to catch up to the current state of Web application development. Jeff Cogswell looks under the hood to see what makes it tick.
Review: Microsoft closes the gap between its browser and rivals
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