Nokodo Search Engine Technologies (http://nokodo.com) announced on December 27 that it will officially open the Nokodo.com search engine on January 1, 2005. To launch the opening to the public, Nokodo.com joins three New Year’s celebrations in Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich, Germany. In each of the three cities, promoters will distribute free Nokodo.com T-shirts, pens, lighters, and other special items. In addition, there will be a special live music performance in Frankfurt.
The search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) announced on December 22 its plans to offer China's 27 million broadband subscribers the company's first service to combine mail and instant messaging. Yahoo Mail Messenger service will allow users to access instant messaging for free through their mailbox service with only one or two clicks, compared with the seven or eight previously needed, the company said. Users also can send instant messages without having to download four or five megabytes of software, the company said.
7Search (www.7Search.com), a leading pay-per-click search engine providing sponsored CPC results for over one billion searches every month, announced on December 21 a partnership with KartOO Technologies (www.KartOO.com) in the new search engine Memoory.com (www.Memoory.com). KartOO's advanced metasearch engine software presents organic and sponsored results in a unique interface. Individual sites are represented by customized folder icons, with their size in proportion to how relevant they are to the search query. The nodes are connected together by dynamic semantic links.
BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk) announced on December 21 that the Scottish speech technology firm CEC Systems (www.marketingsense.co.uk) is looking to attract web surfers with a search engine that reads out results. Called Speegle (www.speegle.co.uk), it has the look and feel of a normal search engine, with the added feature of being able to read out the results. People visiting Speegle can select one of three voices to read the results of a query or summarize news stories from sources such as the BBC and Reuters.
Seekport (www.seekport.co.uk) announced on December 20 that it has introduced a version of its search engine for the UK market, which will filter content to exclude spam, pornography, auctions and "aggressive shopping sites" from the results. The new search engine is optimized to meet the needs of users in the UK. Proven technology and a British indexing team ensure high-quality searching with much less spam and far fewer hits from the US.
SideStep, Inc. (www.sidestep.com), a travel search engine and winner of the Forbes "Best of the Web" award, announced on December 20 a marketing partnership with Hyatt Corporation (www.hyatt.com), a leading hotelier, which manages, franchises or operates 124 hotels and resorts in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Through this partnership, SideStep will drive consumers directly to Hyatt's Web site www.Hyatt.com to book their travel. Currently, there are 214 Hyatt hotels and resorts around the world.
The search engine Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) announced on December 20 the launch of a beta version of its own video search engine, one day after Yahoo released Yahoo! Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com). The service, dubbed Blinkx TV (www.blinkx.tv), makes news, sports, and entertainment easily searchable in transcript form by capturing and indexing video and audio streams directly from TV and radio broadcasters.
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on December 17 a new Shopping List feature on its Froogle shopping search engine (www.google.com/shoppinglist). The new feature allows users to save information about products found on Froogle (www.froogle.com). A new Wish List feature allows users to share lists with family and friends. Shopping Lists are private, but Wish Lists are visible to anyone who searches for one’s email address on Froogle. Froogle also announced it has launched Froogle DE in Germany at http://froogle.google.de. Merchants who wish to be included in Froogle DE are now invited to submit feeds for their German stores. Froogle has also gone wireless. One must be subscribed to a wireless web service provider specifically tailored for mobile phones in order to use this service.
The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on December 17 a beta version of a new search service for videos. Called Yahoo! Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com), the search engine crawls the Web for different types of media files, including Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple Computer's QuickTime, and RealNetworks' Real Media. The engine also will soon include XML-based RSS feeds, podcasts, and other media formats, according to Yahoo executives.
The search engine Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) announced on December 16 the launch of a beta desktop search application (http://sp.ask.com/docs/desktop/), capping off a very busy year in the desktop search space. The Ask Jeeves Desktop program is a standalone application. The download runs about 750kb. File formats searched include Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), Microsoft Outlook (Outlook Express is not available in this beta release), basic text files, images, music in the MP3 format, and video files. This release only searches titles and metadata from Adobe PDF files.
