Canadian search engine Mamma.com (www.Mamma.com), announced on September 7 its plans to buy back up to 600 000 of its outstanding shares over the next year. The Montreal-based company, which has 10.5 million shares outstanding, said the normal course issuer bid will take place over a 12-month period starting on September 8.
SignPostX.com (www.SignPostX.com), a new travel search engine portal powered by Jumpat.com, has been launched. SignPostX.com will help meet the needs of the growing tourist industry both for the travel consumer and the travel industry advertiser by using a very different format from many of the other travel search engines.
AskOneSelf.com (www.AskOneSelf.com), a new search engine powered by Jumpat.com, has been launched especially for people interested in fairies, poets, scientists, alternative healing, green business, spiritual teachers, Reiki, Waldorf education, the spiritual teachings of Buddha, Lao-tzu, Einstein, Taj Mahal, the American Red Cross, the American Heart Association and many more.
Search giant Yahoo announced on September 8 that it would soon begin testing a search engine called FareChase that allows travel shoppers to compare prices. The site (www.farechase.com), helps users find and buy flights on various airlines, offers hotel room and car rental bookings, provides a comparison of fares and prices but sends users to provider's website, such as an airline's site or online travel agency, to book travel.
UK-based Thomson Directories (www.thomsondirectories.com) has developed a pay-as-you-go direct marketing package to drive new customers to business websites. WebFinder (www.webfinder.com), whose pay-as-you-go package works in a way so that customers only pay when someone clicks through to the site, is a search engine marketing service that promotes sites on some of the UK's top search sites including Wanadoo, Ask Jeeves, Tiscali and Streetmap.
Photopheed.com (www.Photopheed.com), a new search engine, which uses automatic preview function to summarize search results instantly, unveiled on September 7 their new digital photography-only meta-search engine designed to cut through all of the Internet and return only relevant digital photography-related search results.
Somacon (www.somacon.com) announced on September 7 the launch of a Yahoo! Store product feed submission service to Froogle, Google's product search engine. Somacon's Data Feed Service (http://froogle.somacon.com) completely automates the submission process and Yahoo! Store owners must simply sign up for an account and complete some online forms.
Websourced, Inc., a global leader in search engine marketing (www.websourced.com), which works with clients to increase their web presence and rank on leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, announced on September 2 that its conference on effective search engine marketing, SEM Live (www.SEMLive.com), will take place on October 26 at the RBC Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. Educational sessions will include a panel discussion on pay-per-click advertising with speakers invited from Google and Yahoo's Overture Services.
Search engine giant Google is hiring workers for the recently opened research and development center in Bangalore, India, its latest fully functional engineering facility outside its Mountain View headquarters in California. Google is expected to hire about 100 software engineers, top programmers and visionary computer scientists.
Beyondseek.com (www.beyondseek.com), a Jumpat.com-powered business-opportunity focused search engine and directory, which helps home-business owners and network marketers with easy-to-use communication tools and advertising resources, announced on September 3 that it now offers its members a valuable new service – live online help.
