Computer Business Review Online (www.cbronline.com) announced on October 28 that the search engine giant Google Inc (www.google.com) has paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Keyhole Corp (www.keyhole.com), a Mountain View, California-based digital mapping company and a supplier of online satellite maps that allow users to zoom down to street level to specific locations. Keyhole's system is built on a multi-terabyte database with trillions of bits of mapping data collected from satellites and airplanes. The purchase allows Google to match rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, which offer online mapping services of their own using detailed drawings that allows users to zoom down to street-level scale.
HomeBuilder.com (http://homebuilder.com), a division of Homestore, Inc. (www.homestore.com), the exclusive new home content provider to AOL, MSN, Yahoo and United Online, and the official new homes website of the National Association of Home Builders (www.nahb.org), announced on October 27 significant changes to its website, designed to make searching for a new home easier and more effective for online home shoppers. The site redesign centers on a dramatic enhancement of the search functionality of HomeBuilder.com's proprietary new home community database of more than 100 000 available homesites. Consumers can now locate new homes by precise geographies, re-rank their search results based on their own criteria and map all search results.
Keralanext.com (www.keralanext.com) announced on October 27 that the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has launched a Swahili language service to be accessed through the .ke domain name. The hyperlink http://google.co.ke has become the 103rd country-specific domain name to be acquired by Google Inc.
AnooX (www.anoox.com), the search engine that promises to revolutionize the search industry by delivering far more accurate search results and much higher value to advertisers than Yahoo or Google, announced on October 26 that it has passed the 13 million website crawled marker. dmoz.org, which is a key source of search information to the search engine giants Google and Yahoo, has at its current operational level about 5 million websites crawled. Hence AnooX at its current crawled level has crawled more websites than Google and Yahoo and is still crawling, expecting to be at 25 million websites crawled by the time it goes live. That means that AnooX database of information for generating search results will be very deep and complete compared to existing search engines.
ComputerWeekly.com (www.computerweekly.com) announced on October 26 that the software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) has offered the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) to help promote Windows XP. And while senior Microsoft executives pit the company against Google in a looming Internet search war, the company last week started offering a Google search tool for download from the Microsoft.com website. Google's Deskbar (http://deskbar.google.com) is included in Microsoft's Partner Pack for Windows (www.microsoft.com/windows/partnerpack), a collection of Microsoft and third-party products released last week that Microsoft describes on its website as "the ultimate application package" for a Windows XP PC. The Deskbar adds a search box to the Windows taskbar, allowing users to search the web with Google without having to start a web browser.
Dallas, Texas-based KaZaZZ! (www.kazazz.com), a search engine that features web, news, shopping, mp3 and picture search, as well as personalized search suggests for consumers based on their specific areas of interest, announced on October 26 that “Eminem” was the top searched term on the KaZaZZ! Personalized Search Engine for the week ending on October 23. KaZaZZ! releases its top 10 searches at the beginning of each week via a press release.
Windows & Net Magazine (www.winnetmag.com) announced on October 25 that the search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and the document and imaging experts at Adobe (www.adobe.com) are teaming up to provide integrated online search and services to their customers. Under the terms of the deal, Adobe will begin distributing a specially customized version of Yahoo's free Internet Explorer search toolbar with Adobe Reader, while Yahoo will provide functionality in that toolbar that will allow customers to save Web pages in Adobe's PDF format.
Comtex News Network, Inc. (www.comtex.com), a leading provider of economically useful electronic real-time news and content, announced on October 25 that its Finance News Customwire has been selected as a new source of content by Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), an innovative provider of corporate search and content integration solutions, which has built and installed over 200 customer enterprise search applications for leading organizations. Comtex now provides Northern Light's Business Research Engine with more than 70 news feeds, contributing more than 8000 stories per day to their database product. Powered by the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, the Business Research Engine is a paid service for enterprise customers, free of advertising.
The search engine giant Yahoo Inc (www.yahoo.com) announced on October 25 that Chennai, India-based iSoftTech (www.isofttech.com), which has a dedicated team of 25 high-skilled software professionals working for its client Stata Labs (www.statalabs.com), has decided to transfer the entire team to Yahoo Inc following the latter's acquisition of Stata Labs.
Ad Maiora (www.admaiora.com), one of the European leading agencies in web marketing and online advertising services, announced on October 25 the launch of GlobalKey, a brand new exclusive search engine marketing service. GlobalKey incorporates several analysis and control activities, including detailed reports about quality and quantity of the traffic generated by search engines, as well as of the overall website performance.
