Clint Boulton

I profiled semantic search startup Yebol today on eWEEK.com. This startup promises to index every term imaginable from a semantic search standpoint come November. It will also index new semantic terms on the fly. Wow! We can’t see that yet, but that will be impressive if it proves true. Google hasn’t formally done much with […]

Another search startup plans to challenge Google by offering semantic search results, results that have been disambiguated to be more relevant, for every term imaginable. Launched as a beta in July, Yebol clusters and categorizes search terms and Websites, pages and contents rather than offering the standard list of Web search results that Google, Yahoo […]

One day after Google unveiled a privacy policy for Google Books at the behest of the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Google’s privacy policy was insufficient. Google rebuffed the EFF’s requests for a policy more than a month ago. One imagines, then, the EFF would turn a critical eye toward the policy […]

Update: Pluck, the social media software maker acquired by Demand Media in 2008, has created a programmable environment to let customers customize the social media experience for users. Pluck 4 is a social media application server that comprises a full presentation, scripting and data management framework, Will Ballard, executive vice president of technology and engineering […]

Where privacy advocates failed to achieve, the Federal Trade Commission succeeded. Google Sept. 3 bowed to public pressure from the FTC, creating a formal privacy policy for its Google Books service before its Google Book Search settlement with authors and publishers is even approved. Google Book Search is the search engine giant’s mammoth undertaking to […]

Microsoft’s Bing continues to impress with its innovation ramp rate. I’ve already appreciated the work Bing has done surfacing Twitter tweets in real-time and then putting Bing search results and Twitter content side by side with BingTweets. The Bing team yesterday alerted us to Bing & Ping, a potential new Bing feature that lets users […]

Google has taken a beating this week for the money developers aren’t making from the Android Market. Google responded tonight with some improvements that should stimulate the interest of all Android developers. Beginning with Android 1.6 (the Donut release, yum), the Android Market will let developers promote their applications and games with screenshots, promotional icons […]

I am a professional YouTube user in the sense that I frequent Google’s video-sharing Website to look at demonstrations from many of the high-tech companies I cover for eWEEK.com and this blog. From Google Apps product demos to new tools from collaboration startups like WizeHive, I find myself whisked to watch something on YouTube daily, […]

Amazon dramatically opposed Google’s Book Search settlement in a 49-page legal brief filed Sept. 1 with the U.S. District Court in New York presiding over the deal. The controversial deal, which is being studied by the Justice Department, calls for Google to scan millions of books online and charge users to read them, sharing the […]

So what if Android application developers are a broke lot? They’ve got another vehicle on which to launch their non-money-making applications. It’s the HTC Hero from Sprint, the second U.S. phone carrier after T-Mobile to offer a smartphone based on Google’s Android mobile operating system. T-Mobile offers the G1 and the myTouch 3G, which rolled […]

Google’s Chrome team gave this birthday shout-out to its now 1-year-old Web browser today, Sept. 2. Check out the cool Chrome cake. Eating something with those colors can’t be good for anyone. Harry McCracken over at Technologizer offers a balanced discussion of Google Chrome’s position in the market and its progress after completing its first […]

It seems there is something to advertising on social network sites after all. One out of every five display ads Web users viewed in June 2009 came from social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook, where more than 400 million users congregate to share information about themselves and play games online, according to new […]