Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Cnet's Stephanie Olsen notes that several portals are considering following Google into the taskbar world…effectively increasing pressure on MSFT to get its Longhorn act together. This is a significant threat to the mindspace that Windows occupies: If Windows becomes a layer that is built upon by others…where is the margin…

While I was down in the Valley Weds. I heard word that Yahoo's aggregator was up and running. But then I couldn't find it when I got home. Seems they put up a brief beta in MyYahoo, then brought it back down again. Internet.com has a story on it…"Insiders at…

Comes, as usual, from Search Engine Watch. My posts will be brief for the next day, as I am taking Friday off, but this is worth a read if you care about why local search seems to be a big deal……

Via Reuters, Forbes reports on another Chinese search company planning to go public, this one called Baidu – the name "comes from a Song dynasty poem about a man searching for his lover." The company claims to be profitable, and to serve 30 million searches a day ("one seventh that…

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I've argued in the past, it's not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components…

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly…

Two Yahoo items this morning: First, the Journal (sub req'd) reports that Yahoo is set to drop Google (this is not a surprise, but rather the other shoe of the Overture/Inktomi purchases dropping). Second, CEO Semel promises many more innovations (and profits) from Yahoo search in the next year at…

Neat: Winer has created a feature that allows folks to see who subscribes to their blogs via RSS. I've always wanted to know who cares enough about Searchblog to check it regularly via RSS. In fact, I think such a connection is one of the cooler things about blogs and…

This is not confirmed by any parties, but Bloomberg claims to have an inside source. If this means the bakeoff is final, then the IPO is 90-120 days away, maybe sooner depending on the SEC. Exciting times for all concerned, and possibly and end to all this speculation. WR Hambrecht…

Shopping.com doubled its holiday traffic this past season, DM News reports today. Execs from the site are quick to claim that online shopping (or, as I like to call it, the shopping search vertical) has hit critical mass. It's hard to argue. From the piece: The San Francisco company doubled…