Travelgrove (www.travelgrove.com) announced on November 17 their new breed of travel meta-search called "ultimatesearch", which allows customers to search for airline tickets from multiple vendors at once. The user sits back and waits a few seconds until Travelgrove's travel search engine spits out the best travel deals sorted by price. While this is just a beta test for airline tickets, Travelgrove has already announced to do this for all major travel products, car rentals, hotels, vacations and cruises.
Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), which provides software solutions for extracting meaningful intelligence from multilingual text, announced on November 17 that the software giant Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) has chosen the Rosette Linguistics Platform to support Web searches in its new MSN search engine (http://beta.search.msn.com). The companies have entered into a multi-year agreement in which Microsoft has the option to utilize all of Basis Technology's linguistics software, including components for language identification, morphological analysis, and entity extraction.
icrossing (www.icrossing.com), a leading search engine marketing agency, announced on November 16 that it has been selected to provide eDiets.com, Inc. (www.eDiets.com), a leading online diet, fitness and healthy living destination, with its best-in-class Natural Search Optimization services. The e-Health category leader, which operates the Web sites www.eDiets.com and www.eFitness.com, has partnered with icrossing for its combination of proven Natural Search Optimization expertise, technological tools including proprietary analytics software ic live(TM), and flexible, customized strategic planning that, together, ensure eDiets.com will achieve its desired result relative to subscription sales and realize a maximized return-on-investment.
East Coast Internet (www.east-coastinternet.com), a leading Internet marketing and consulting company providing search engine marketing services, announced on November 16 that Lymphacare (www.lymphacare.com) has selected the company to perform search engine optimization and related SEO services.
On November 16 BizRate.com Inc. (http://BizRate.com) unveiled Shopzilla (http://shopzilla.com), a Los Angeles-based shopping search engine, aggregating and organizing more than 25 million products from over 45 000 stores. In conjunction with this launch, the company has changed its corporate name to Shopzilla, Inc. to better position it as a broad-based shopping site. By combining the largest index of products and stores with the most powerful shopping search technology and a memorable name, Shopzilla is well positioned to become the site consumers use to start their online shopping. Shopzilla, Inc. also operates the BizRate consumer feedback network and powers shopping search for many of the web's largest consumer sites, including AOL, Lycos, Time Warner's RoadRunner, and many others.
San Mateo, California-based Mobissimo, Inc. (www.mobissimo.com), a next-generation multi-national online travel search engine searching 80 consolidators, budget carriers, major airlines and international sites to deliver information from hundreds of airline, hotel and car rental providers, announced on November 16 its official launch ending a tremendously successful public beta in which 850 000 users performed more than 1.7 million travel searches. Mobissimo's travel search engine is built on a flexible platform that allows the company to add new travel Web sites very quickly and easily, unlike other meta travel search engines.
Feedster, Inc. (www.Feedster.com), a rapidly growing search engine for online content and weblogs published using RSS, a newly popular XML standard, announced on November 15 its ability to segment search results by source type. The first example of the resulting specialty search engines is found at http://blogs.Feedster.com.
Mesa Dynamics, LLC (www.mesadynamics.com), a privately held software development company specializing in innovative technologies for text and image data mining, digital asset repurposing and image processing, announced on November 15 the release of Beholder 2.0, a significant upgrade to its Internet image searching utility for the Macintosh. Beholder searches for images on the web, automatically querying Internet search engines and presenting thumbnail results in a navigable contact sheet with URL and other link details. Designed for quick image inspection and discovery, Beholder also supports targeted Internet searches via the scanning of specific web pages and folders for images.
Mrbizfind.com (www.mrbizfind.com), a Jumpat.com-powered search engine and provider of Web Store solutions, announced on November 15 the launch of its Affiliate Program to provide interested Internet based companies the opportunity to earn handsome commission each time one of their visitors comes to Mrbizfind portal and orders a paid service.
America Online (www.aol.com) announced on November 12 that it has partnered with and taken a minority investment in the travel search player Kayak Software (www.kayak.com). The two will build an AOL-owned travel search site, which will launch in early 2005, and which will be powered by Kayak's technology. Financial details of the transaction weren't disclosed.
