Melanie’s Round Up

Google verticals languishing

Search dominates Google traffic by 79.98%, while its dedicated service sites combined gain paltry numbers. ZNet story here, considers the end game.

Naymz

The Search quotes a Harris poll that says nearly 40 percent of internet users have performed the requisite vanity search.

“I’d be willing to wager that this number will head north of 90 percent in the coming years, as search becomes as individually definitional as finding oneself in the white pages was during the rise of the telephone. Besides ourselves, nearly 20 percent of us have looked for former flames and 36 percent for old friends, and 29 percent have researched a family member.”

Now Tom Drugan, co-founder Naymz, says his company has used the quote and poll as a successful springboard to launch their start up. Naymz is creating a searchable index of profile (vanity) pages, aimed at professionals who want to pull together an online portfolio of their citations for networking.

Full text in Yahoo trademark case

The dating site LoveCity filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Yahoo and three other companies for allegedly using ‘lovecity’ as a keyword in their AdWords campaigns. Resource Shelf has the full text of the court filing.

Netscape Digg clone?

Late last week AOL-Netscape launched a beta socially-ranked news site (sort of) that many loyal diggers jumped on as a Digg clone. In a response, Digg CEO Jay Adelson questioned the scalability and editorial control of the so-called “Digg Killer,” and welcomed the competition. But a CNet suggests that despite the beta’s voting capabilities, the Netscape site retains sufficient editorial control to mean the two are different beasts.

Recruit Job search

Freshly launched, Recruit says they offer the first trilingual, international job search engine—in Chinese, Japanese and English.

Snap Interview

Garrett French has a great interview with Snap’s Tad Benson over a SEL, also pointing out Snap’s great blog.

NewMedia launches

NameMedia, launching this week, is creating a series of vertical portal search platforms on topic-specific domains (with a technology they call SiteSense). The targeted domains serve users of ‘direct search’ (perhaps better known as ‘direct navigation’)–those bypassing search engines and instead directly typing a product name into the address bar as a url (for instance ww.photography.com).