Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), a provider of custom enterprise, industry, and Web search engines, announced on September 30 that it has released a new version of its business search engine and that the new version, called the Northern Light Business Research Engine, is available at www.nlresearch.com.
While Microsoft and Google cross swords over consumer-oriented Internet search, IBM is getting ready to launch its paid corporate search onslaught. IBM Software (www.ibm.com/software) is soon expected to announce general availability of its DB2 Information Integrator, which will search not only HTML data prevalent on the Web but also all the structured and unstructured data that is the lifeblood of corporate IT. That would include the whole spectrum of Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files and calendar entries that fuel business activity.
According to the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk), facing stiff competition from other search engines like Google and Amazon, Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) has now introduced a MyJeeves feature (http://myjeeves.ask.com) that lets users save search results, make notes about them and manage them like more familiar browser bookmarks. Ask Jeeves is also expected to launch personal smart search software that returns results from a user's home PC as well as the web, which will be available on both the UK and US Ask sites. The software will be returning a small number of pre-selected results instead of a long list of websites for certain types of queries.
Online search engine upstart Vivisimo Inc. (www.vivisimo.com) announced on September 30 the launch of its new search engine called Clusty.com (www.clusty.com) after four years of fine tuning. The search engine's name refers to the clustering technology that Vivisimo has refined to sort search results into different categories related to the initial search request. Other search engines, most notably Ask Jeeves Inc.'s Teoma.com, offer similar clustering approaches, but Vivisimo's approach has been hailed as the most sophisticated and user-friendly.
Michigan-based Oneupweb (www.oneupweb.com), a leading search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) firm, published on September 30 its second study of leading companies' search engine optimization usage. The study, available free at Oneupweb.com under the Articles section, reveals that only a dozen use SEO well, and more than a third aren't using SEO at all, and discusses the risks those retailers face in ignoring search engine optimization benefits, among them lost sales, lost market share, brand equity erosion, increased marketing costs and reduced profit margins.
On September 27 on its blog (www.google.com/googleblog/2004/09/china-google-news-and-source-inclusion.html) Google responded officially to the accusations that it was censoring its Google News product in China so as to prevent controversial topics, such as democracy and certain religions, from popping up inconveniently.
Search engine giant Google (www.google.com), which started selling stock on Wall Street in August, finally had a regulatory quiet period lifted on September 28, which enabled Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston, the firms that led Google's stock offering, to issue their first research on the company. As the two major investment banks issued optimistic reports on the Mountain View search engine on September 28, its stock reached $126.86, up 49 percent over its offering price of $85.
DailyRecord.co.uk (www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news) announced on September 29 the results of a recent survey among Britons run by trade journal Marketing, according to which the search engine giant Google is the most loved brand. The list of the 50 most loved brands is headed by Google and followed by mobile phone firm Nokia, supermarket Tesco, Persil and Coca-Cola. Computer maker Dell is at the ninth position.
The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (www.sempo.org), a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide, announced on September 29 the appointment of three new members to its Advisory Board that will provide different perspectives of the online industry and non-profits to help with the organization's strategies and goals.
Rocketinfo Inc. (www.rocketinfo.com), a leading international supplier of real-time news and business information software to corporations, governments and professional service firms, announced on September 28 that it has added the ability to create custom RSS feeds on RocketNews (www.rocketnews.com), the company's award winning current news search engine.
