MediaPost.com (www.mediapost.com) announced on December 9 that the search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) has moved to expand its local search offerings by allowing merchants to easily add detailed information about their businesses to the Yahoo local search results pages. The new initiative allows business owners to submit basic facts such as their hours, addresses, Web sites, phone numbers, category, operating information, and the nature of the services or products sold, at no charge, to be included on a page detailing their business. Entrepreneurs can also pay $9.95 a month for premium listings, which can include a tagline, business description, links to coupons, photos, and performance reviews.
The New Jersey-based Accoona Corporation, an industry pioneer in artificial intelligence search technology, announced on November 6 the launch of the new search engine Accoona.com (www.accoona.com), which provides the largest proprietary online database of information on companies worldwide and features a breakthrough Artificial Intelligence Software that greatly improves relevance by returning search results based on the meaning of words, rather than the traditional key word matching methodology. The former U.S. President Bill Clinton was present at the opening ceremony in New York City's Tavern, bestowing his best wishes to the search engine. In a speech on how technology can serve the greater good, Clinton joked about the good old days. Clinton also said that he hopes that the new search engine will make a lot of money and be very successful, and that Accoona will get a big runup in the stock price. The company, on the other hand, said it a made a donation of an undisclosed sum to the William J. Clinton Foundation.
Blingo (www.blingo.com), a brand new Internet search engine, announced on December 8 that it is offering users something extra along with their search results. Every time users search on Blingo, they also have a chance to win a prize. Each search is also a chance to instantly win prizes like a Canon digital camera, a one-year subscription to Netflix, an Amazon.com gift certificate, or a music CD. There's no user registration, no spam, no pop-up ads and no catch to win.
di-ve.com (www.di-ve.com) announced on December 6 the top 10 keywords on Search Malta (www.searchmalta.com), the search engine for web sites related to Malta and the Maltese, which provides the largest online searchable directory of Maltese web sites. The most popular words entered in the Search Malta search box from November 29 to December 6, which are also a good indication of the most popular types of searches carried out by Search Malta users, are: computers; maltacom; real estate; computer; property; chat; mobile phones; mepa; cinema; music.
SearchEngineWatch (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com) announced on December 6 that a new Chinese-owned business search engine, headed by the former Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer, will launch on December 6. The Accoona search engine (www.accoona.com) reportedly will list more than 30 million companies and include results found both from a web crawl and added proprietary information.
The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced on December 3 that it has opened a research and development center at its Tokyo offices. The center's role in Google's global R&D network is yet to be defined and will be shaped by the people who are hired to work there, said Howard Gobioff, the center's engineering director and principal engineer. Gobioff is one of two engineers currently working at the center, and said their first job is to recruit additional members. Three people have already been found although none have started work yet. The new center makes Japan the fourth country in which Google has an R&D presence. The others are the US, Switzerland and India.
America Online (www.aol.com) unveiled on December 1 a new version of Singingfish (www.singingfish.com), a search engine for finding video and audio clips on the Web. Changes to Singingfish include search by file type – mp3, Windows Media, etc., personalization features for saving searches, and filters for blocking adult content. The index includes roughly 14 million audio and video streams and is updated with thousands more daily, according to the company.
ineedhits (www.ineedhits.com), a world leader in providing search engine optimization and submission services to small and medium-sized businesses, which has built a solid customer base of over 500 000 customers, announced on November 30 a strategic partnership with Jayde Online, Inc., a publisher of email newsletters and developer of niche and general search engines. The alliance incorporates the paid inclusion program provided by Jayde's web search engine ExactSeek.com (www.exactseek.com) into ineedhits.com's service offerings.
Sortprice.com (www.sortprice.com), an advanced product search engine designed to facilitate the on-line shopping experience by providing free product listings for merchants and an easy to navigate and user-friendly interface for shoppers, announced on November 30 that it has reached 1000 merchants with over 10 million product listings ranging from small retailers to industry giants including companies such as Target, Buy.com and Office Depot.
Healthnostics, Inc. (www.healthnostics.com), a medical and bioscience information analytics and patient care improvement company, announced on November 30 the development of a new Internet search engine designed to semantically search a collection of news documents locally archived or resident on a remote database. The engine uses the latest unsupervised learning technology to cluster news documents in a semantically cohesive fashion. Clustering documents in this manner provides for subject matter content mining of news article collections to an unprecedented level.
