IAC/InterActiveCorp (www.iac.com), which owns the travel site Expedia, the service search site CitySearch and the dating site Match.com, announced on March 21 that it has acquired the search engine Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) for $1.85 billion. The deal sees IAC issuing 1.2668 shares for every one share of common stock that Ask Jeeves has. At least 60% of these shares will then be bought back by IAC.
The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on March 22 the acquisition of Flickr Inc. (www.flickr.com), a Canadian photo-sharing company that lets people share digital images with select groups, upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, publish photos in their blogs, share digital photo albums with anyone else who uses the service and alert other users whenever they upload a new photo or album. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on March 18 the launch of Google Code (http://code.google.com), which will be a repository for source code, APIs, and C++- and Python-specific tools to assist developers working on Google-related projects. The initial tool releases include perftools and sparsehashtable, for developers working in C++, and goopy/functional, for Python developers. Tools will be distributed through the SourceForge.net open-source programming site (www.sourceforge.net). Google’s latest effort has resurrected old programming tools to tap into new services such as Gmail (http://gmail.google.com) and Google Maps (http://maps.google.com).
The search engine giant Ask Jeeves Inc. (www.ask.com) announced on March 16 the launch of its toolbar for the open-source Firefox browser. The toolbar, which provides easy access to Ask Jeeves search directly from the browser, as well as a variety of other features, including tools to make local searches faster, is available for free download through the Ask Jeeves at http://sp.ask.com/docs/toolbar/moz/index.html. In addition, the application allows users to add any page they are viewing to their MyJeeves service, which lets them save, organize and share web pages.
Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com) announced on March 14 the launch of Gov.Clusty.com (http://gov.clusty.com), a service built to search and cluster results from a variety of government info sources such as FirstGov, political news from Reuters, the Associated Press and CNN, and several think tanks including RAND, The Brookings Institution and The Cato Institute. In addition, the engine can search a single document, such as the 2006 Federal Budget or the 9-11 Commission report.
Become.com (www.become.com), a search engine for product reviews and relevant buying information, which indexes over 2.2 billion pages of shopping related information from over 20 million websites, announced on March 14 Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), its revolutionary, patent-pending technology for ranking web pages. AIR provides highly targeted search results by understanding the context of pages on the Web. AIR represents a fundamentally new approach to ranking Web pages that integrates advanced concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics. AIR identifies exceptional Web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. Unlike Become.com's AIR, Google's PageRank estimates the popularity of a given Web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context.
Rocketinfo Inc. (www.rocketinfo.com), a real-time business news search engine and current news database, announced on March 14 that it has been accepted for listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, which is the world's third largest stock exchange behind the NYSE and NASDAQ markets. Rocketinfo's shares were listed in response to demand from the European investment community and to enable the company to showcase its news and business information solutions and technologies in Europe. Rocketinfo shares commenced trading on the Frankfurt Exchange on March 11 under the symbol RPT.
The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on March 9 that it has launched its Small Business Resource Center, a new effort aimed at helping entrepreneurs run and market their online businesses while also helping big advertisers target the small business market. Available at http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources, the service and content offering includes about 1000 articles from sources like Inc. Magazine (www.inc.com/magazine/) and Entrepreneur.com (www.entrepreneur.com) on topics ranging from marketing and legal to finance and human resources.
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on March 8 the formal launch of Google Desktop Search (http://desktop.google.com), a free downloadable application that enables users to search for information on their own computers. Previously in beta, today's 1.0 release adds search over the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored with music, image and video files. Additional enhancements include support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers, Thunderbird and Netscape e-mail clients and new Chinese and Korean language interfaces. Google Desktop Search allows access to the full text of Web page history and can also search AOL instant messages.
The search engine giant Lycos (www.lycos.com) announced on February 24 the launch of Lycos Dating Search (http://datingsearch.lycos.com), a search engine that allows users to browse results from multiple online dating companies, all in one place. Lycos Dating Search includes a Favorite Profiles feature and a Saved Search feature, allowing users to keep track of their top choices and store search criteria across multiple dating sites. The service also offers search features and keyword search functionality giving users the option of searching by criteria such as favorite books, musicians, movies, hobbies and sports.
