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ComScore Nov. 6 said some 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet by 1.2 billion worldwide Internet users in September 2009. Microsoft Websites led the way, but 70 percent of the time spent on its sites was through Windows Live Messenger. Google came in at No. 2, with 9.3 percent of the minutes (2.5 billion hours). Yahoo was third with 6.3 percent of the minutes, or 1.7 billion hours, but dropped by 14 percent from its September 2008 share of almost 2 billion hours. Facebook nabbed the fourth spot, with 5 percent of the minutes, or 1.4 billion hours.
Google Dashboard Provides Too Much Info And Yet Not Enough
News Analysis: Google again finds itself in a no-win situation, this time with Google Dashboard. Some claim Google collects too much data in Dashboard and others say it doesn't provide enough. Dashboard summarizes the data from the Web services associated with a user's account. Dashboard, which can be found here, or under the Personal Setting section under My Account, will list how many Gmail conversations we have going, how many Google Docs we have, Google Calendar appointments, and even Web history if we've enabled it. But it does not include detail Google collects on us from its server logs, cookies and ads.
Google Commerce Search Launches for the Holidays
Google Nov. 5 launched Google Commerce Search to let online retailers power their online stores with Google's search technology. Preparing for the holiday e-commerce rush, Google will host this enterprise search product on its own servers in the cloud to assuage customers' concerns about handling holiday traffic spikes. Smaller companies such as Endeca, Vivisimo, Coveo and Microsoft's Fast enterprise search division already duke it out in the e-commerce search vertical, but now they will have to contend with the goliath in search.
Facebook Brings More Clarity to Privacy Policy, Social Ads
Facebook released detailed explanations on how users can alter their account information or jettison their profiles from the social network. Under the revised policy, users may change or delete their profile information. The deletion of data on Facebook has been a sticky issue for the company in the past, with users believing that once they deleted their accounts, their Facebook data was nuked from the Internet. Facebook said that when users remove information from their profile or delete their account, copies of that information may exist with the friends that data has been shared with, or who may have copied or stored the data.
Microsoft, Yahoo Delay Search Deal to Dot I's, Cross T's
Microsoft and Yahoo have delayed signing their blockbuster search deal to finalize the details, Yahoo said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Oct. 28. Financial analysts did not hit the panic button on the news, as the companies don't expect the deal to be consummated until 2010, pending regulatory approvals from the Justice Department. Yahoo also hosted a financial analyst day Oct. 28 for the first time since 2007 and analysts who attended concluded the company is still on recovery road: Microsoft is coming to the rescue with the pending search deal.
How Twitter Search Will Help Google, Microsoft Bing
News Analysis: Microsoft's recently launched Bing Twitter site is indexing tweets in real time. Not to be outdone, Google promises that Twitter content will be integrated into Google's search results page in a few months. Yahoo is allegedly working on real-time search with startup OneRiot. What are the implications? eWEEK solicits insight from search guru Danny Sullivan, social media expert Charlene Li and Gerry Campbell, CEO of real-time search startup Collecta. But perhaps the best answer lies in the Facebook phenomenon and the way real-time search fosters engagement at search sites.
Google Fits Wikipedia for Custom Search Skin
Google Oct. 26 wished its Custom Search application a happy birthday by issuing special Wikipedia skin to makes it easier for users to surf the leading resource Website. Wikipedia has long let users personalize their Wikipedia environment with certain configurations and the use of styles or skins. What Google has done is essentially marry the customization aspects of Custom Search with those of Wikipedia. Users may now use Custom Search to search across all Wikipedia articles for any topic, and find relevant pages linked from the Wikipedia page users are currently on.
DeepDyve Rents Research the Netflix Way
Looking to capitalize on the successful online rental model of companies such as Netflix, DeepDyve Oct. 27 began renting out its research articles to consumers and knowledge workers for 99 cents per article and via monthly subscriptions. While search engines such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fetch content for consumers, and Vivisimo, Microsoft's Fast division and Google Search Appliance help employees sniff out content from behind corporate firewalls, DeepDyve has made its database of 30 million scientific, technical and medical articles available to anyone willing to purchase copies.
Google Social Search Arrives to Surface Content from Twitter, FriendFeed, Yelp
Google launches Google Social Search from Google Labs Oct. 26. The experiment is designed to make search results more relevant by mining the rich Google profile information users provide. This includes all Gmail contacts and Gmail chat buddies, as well and people users are publicly connected to on social sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Not Facebook though. If there's Web content written by contacts relevant to the search query, Google's algorithm will sniff the content out and serve it up at the bottom of the search results page in a section called & Results from people in your social circle.&
Wowd, Kosmix Aim to Claim Corners of Google's Search Sandbox
Even as giants Google and Microsoft Bing made bold search engine moves at the Web 2.0 Summit Oct. 20 to 22, startups quietly made news of their own. Wowd joins the real-time search ranks, while deep search engine Kosmix buys search startup Cruxlux. Wowd anonymously nominates public Web pages for inclusion in Wowd search results when people visit them. It's Digg without the explicit voting. Cruxlux mines the Web for the relationships between people, places or things. Give Cruxlux any two topics, and it will sniff out the relationships between them and provide URLs to show the links.
Microsoft Bing Continues Growth in September, But So Does Google
Web analytics firm Compete claims Microsoft's Bing search engine grew from 8.7 percent in August to 8.8 percent in September, sparked by 25 billion queries. Bing users conducted an average of 5 searchers per day. However, Bing's sponsored link click average was 6.4 percent, beating even Google and Yahoo's average of 6 percent. Google paced the market per usual with a 72.6 percent share, growing 3 basis points and serving 9 billion searches for the month. Meanwhile, Bing is trying to gain share by improving its functionality, indexing Twitter tweets for real-time search. However, Google will do the same in a few months.
Google Co-founder Sergey Brin Says He Did Not Try to Buy Twitter
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Google did not try to buy Twitter in a surprise visit onstage here at the Web 2.0 Summit Oct. 22. Brin also shared his thoughts on Microsoft Bing, the search engine gunning for Google's 65 percent market share; the Microsoft-Yahoo deal; Chrome for Mac; Google Book Search; and the alleged Google Phone. Unbidden, Brin said Yahoo was doing interesting things in search and that it was a shame the company plans to & abdicate& search to Microsoft, which agreed to power Yahoo's searches with the Bing infrastructure.
Google Search Appliance Gets New Analysis Tool, Universal Log-in
Google adds the Self-Learning Scorer to its Google Search Appliance 6.0. The tool analyzes the clicks and behavior of users searching an intranet, then improves the relevance for later searches. The GSA(n) architecture also features a new log-in tool that synchronizes user credentials with any of the back-end systems in a company, reducing the number of log-ins users have to do when searching across their companies' systems. The GSA also now has native integration for SharePoint out of the box, speeding up the rate at which SharePoint collaboration content is indexed.
Google Launching Social Search Soon, Challenging Aardvark, ChaCha, Mahalo
Google's Marissa Mayer Oct. 21 unveiled Google Social Search, a pending opt-in service that will let users with Google accounts, profiles and contacts find content created by people in social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed. The news came just hours after Microsoft executives announced that Bing would be surfacing search results with Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates in real time. Google already has millions of users for its general search engine. If even a fraction of these millions begin using Google Social Search, it might not leave much room for challengers such as Aardvark, Mahalo and ChaCha.
Microsoft Launches Bing Twitter at Web 2.0 Summit, Says Facebook Data to Come
Microsoft launches Bing Twitter to enable users to find real-time Twitter content through the Bing search engine, a move designed to give the software giant an advantage over rival Google, with its 65 percent search market share that has so far been impenetrable. In separate, nonexclusive deals, Bing will get access to all public Twitter information in real time, as well as all public Facebook data posts. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online audience business, announced the deals at the Web 2.0 Summit during event co-host Tim O'Reilly's interview with Microsoft Online Services President Qi Lu, confirming earlier reports.
Microsoft Bing Director Mum on Real-Time Data Deals with Twitter, Facebook
Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz denies knowledge of the data integration deals with Twitter and Facebook his boss is expected to announce at the Web 2.0 Summit Oct. 21. BoomTown's Kara Swisher reports that Microsoft has struck deals to index real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook on Bing, and that Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, will announce those deals here at the event. Indexing real-time information from Facebook and Twitter could give Bing an advantage over Google, which has been slow to index Twitter tweets and other real-time search info.
Google May Launch Music Service to Challenge Apple iTunes
Google is set to challenge Apple, Spotify and several players in the digital music space by launching Google Audio, TechCrunch reported Oct. 21. Wired reports that it will offer enhanced music search with a streaming function. Searching for an artist or song will bring up a box with a streaming link assigned to stream from either Lala or iLike. Also, Google may be taking a page out of Apple's design-the-device-yourself handbook by releasing an actually Google Phone, goes the second big rumor to come out the Googleplex this week.
Yahoo Triples Profit, Beats Wall Street Expectations
Yahoo announces that its quarterly profit more than tripled as cost cuts and asset sales more than offset a continued decline in sales, sending its shares up 5 percent.
Microsoft, Yahoo Deal Approved by Microsoft Beneficiary
Microsoft and Yahoo's search-and-advertising agreement received a thumbs up from the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which includes Publicis Groupe, which just finalized a deal to acquire Microsoft subsidiary Razorfish for $286.8 million and 6.5 million shares of stock. The U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an antitrust evaluation of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, still on track to finalize in early 2010.
Google Editions Bookstore to Face Stiff Challenge from Amazon, Perhaps Apple
Google Editions, the online bookstore the search engine is planning for 2010, will offer 500,000 electronic books to any device with a Web browser, including PCs, laptops and smartphones. Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said Google Editions poses way too many unanswered questions, from Google's lack of experience selling media to the effectiveness of offering e-books through Web browsers. Apple could also roll into the e-book scrum. The company is reportedly preparing to launch a tablet device in 2010.