Links for tag 'yahoo'

Microsoft will not give up, and for this Bill Gates and his crew must be commended.

Realising search is so far the best way to make money online, Microsoft is set to unveil its new search engine in California next week.

The Wall Street Journal says a key feature of the new search engine - being worked on under the code-name Kumo - is that results will be grouped into categories.

Microsoft is set to unveil its new multi-billion-dollar search engine thought to be called Bing. Bing will be released as the latest attempt by the Microsoft people to steal some market share from the ever-dominant king of search, Google.

Will this attempt prove futile like previous attempts? Or will it manage to put a dent in Google's 92% (Australian) market share?

I ask to be forgiven for my prediction that Bing will fall smack bang on its face in this attempt.

Recently, Microsoft tried to make this dent into Google by unsuccessfully attempting to buy Yahoo.

Later, it teamed with Yahoo (in Australia at least) for pay per click advertising without making the dent they hoped.

Before both of these attempts, Microsoft had some massive advantages over Google that it was unable to capitalise on because of its inferior product.

I have long been a critic of Microsoft and Yahoo in the field of 'online search'. Google monsters both in this market, yet the duo have never managed to resolve their boardroom differences to do the logical and combine forces to take the giant of search on as a more serious challenger.

Well eureka! The deal is finally done. Yahoo will use Microsoft's new search engine Bing on all its websites, and in return Microsoft will hand over the management of all premium search advertisers to Yahoo.

After all this time, it took no cash. Just an exchange of resources that will see their global market share climb to about 30%. Google has 65%.

In Australia, the Yahoo/Microsoft partnership will not even reach 8% on current estimates, as Google controls 92%. But it is a start!

A few weeks ago I reported that Yahoo and Microsoft had signed a deal to combine search engines under the newly-launched 'Bing' banner, hence provide more serious competition for ever-dominant Google.

While Bing has been hogging the search headlines with its innovative and well-budgeted marketing campaigns, Google has been developing a 'next generation' version of its own product.

Caffeine is the project Google is working on. and has today launched the test version of Google Caffeine for people to test and compare their results. Please click here to try.

Google's goal with the Caffeine engine is to improve its "indexing speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness". Not to mention "other dimensions".

Google's Sitaram Iyers and Matt Cutts wrote in their blog: "For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search.

"The new infrastructure sits 'under the hood' of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results.

"But, Web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback."

At the moment, it seems to be the silicon valley company that has the answer to all challenges, with its team a few steps ahead of all in competition.

The link again to Google Caffeine is: www2.sandbox.google.com.

An interesting list was released last week, ranking the 1000 most-visited websites on the internet (excluding Google and YouTube). Facebook topped it.

This is hardly surprising considering TIME's cover story on Facebook last week revealed that "1 in 4 people" using the internet not only have a Facebook account, but have visited it in the last 30 days.