Can you build a better search engine than Google? Lots of companies want to. But search already works pretty well — pretty well, that is, if you’re sitting at your computer. If you’re on the go with just a phone, it’s not quite so easy to get the information you need.

That’s because effective searching often involves orienteering — finding information step-by-step, and using local context at each step as a guide. Orienteering-style search on a mobile phone, however, is next to impossible. Startup ChaCha is looking to change that with textChaCha, a human-managed search available via text messaging from your mobile phone.

Continue »

A look back at some of the Web 2.0 stories we covered this year:

January. Yahoo bought MyBlogLog. Daylife, a webified newspaper with Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, launched. And browser preview startup Browster bid us good-bye.

February. Yahoo! launched its RSS mashup service Pipes. Facebook rolled out gifts, allowing members to give each other puppies and toilet paper, among other things, in digital form.

March. Clearspring raised $5.5 million for its widget platform. Internet OS Xcerion came out of stealth. Hewlett-Packard bought Tabblo, a photo organizing and printing site with social features.

April. Google released a competitor to social bookmarking discovery service provider StumbleUpon. Microsoft launched Silverlight beta, its answer to the Adobe Flash platform.

May. eBay paid $75 million to buy StumbleUpon. Facebook launched its developer platform. Google released Gears, its open source toolset for taking web apps offline. And MySpace bought photo-hosting site PhotoBucket.

Continue »

There’s more than one way to find a good airfare online, as the Kayak-SideStep merger shows. But what’s the best way? Is there one site that you can rely on to find the best fare for all your travel needs? Or do you need to visit them all to ensure you don’t miss anything?

I set out to compare fare-finding services and booking engines, including Kayak, SideStep, Mobissimo, Farecast, Priceline, Expedia and Hotwire. To do so, I chose three itineraries: a business trip to San Francisco, a trip from the U.S. to South America, and a one-way trip from India to the UK.

The winner? Mobissimo. Continue »

Travel review site Kango, which brings together traveler opinions from across the web, then analyzes them using natural language analysis and travel-specific term matching to help you find the perfect hotels and activities for your next vacation, said it entered “almost beta” today.

Kango’s “almost beta” state covers romantic and family-friendly lodging and activities in Hawaii and California. For example, you can search for a family-friendly resort in Wailea, Maui and specify your budget criteria. Kango ranks results in order of family-friendliness and displays ratings from web sites like Yahoo! Travel, Travelocity and TripAdvisor.

Earlier this year, Kango received a Series A round of funding of $4 million from Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel.

Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake. For it to be generally useful, it will of course have to cover more geography and support terms beyond “before kids” (romantic) and “after” (family-friendly).

Kids’ plush toy social network Webkinz.com has started running advertising, a move that, if recent articles in New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider are to be believed, has greatly upset parents. In fact, whatever controversy exists seems to have been manufactured by a nonprofit group with an idealistic agenda.

In October, some Webkinz bloggers noticed that the site was running an advertisement for “Bee Movie.” Conversation ensued, much of it over how to score a bee costume by clicking on the ad.

Continue »