A startup called SRCH2 launched on Tuesday with the promise of delivering instant search faster and more accurately than than any other enterprise search product. Read more »
Google’s published a blog post last week about “bad apples” in the ad industry. The meaning of the post is now clear: it was intended to rein in shady software, but also to send a message to other advertisers to clean up their act. Read more at paidContent »
Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Foursquare is making a major push toward local search and discovery, recognizing that getting people to check into locations isn’t enough to grow the business — it’s all about local commerce. Read more »
A New York court issued a major ruling that limits the amount of content an internet scraping service can take without paying for it. Here’s a plain English explanation. Read more at paidContent »
Pinterest has acquired Livestar, the social recommendation app that gave users ideas on the best content around them, adding the company’s engineering team to Pinterest’s talent. Read more »
Google is continuing its effort to punish sites that manipulate outside links in order to increase their search visibility. The move means websites should be careful that their SEO strategies doesn’t lead to a penalty. Read more at paidContent »
Google Flu Trends significantly overestimated the number of Americans afflicted with flu-like symptoms during the season’s peak a couple months ago, but assuring accuracy is a big part of the puzzle any time we’re talking about web data. Read more »
Archify isn’t the first service to promise a personal search engine but, with smart touches such as Gmail integration and the recording of social streams, it has a decent chance of being the one that succeeds. Read more »
With 90 percent of cruises still being booked offline, there’s huge room for disruption in the online cruise industry. So Cruisewise wants to let you book your cruise vacations online, aggregating 95 percent of the most popular cruise lines in the U.S. and Canada at once. Read more »
Siri, and possibly Apple’s overall search functionality, is likely to get smarter: Apple has hired William Stasior away from Amazon. Stasior led Amazon’s A9 search unit and was Amazon’s director of search and navigation. With the move, Apple can rely less on others for search. Read more »
Would Google chairman Eric Schmidt like his company’s search engine to replace Microsoft Bing as the default search in Yahoo.com? Do you really have to ask? If so, the answer is yes, according to reports out of Japan. Read more »
To help patients and caregivers access easy-to-understand, cutting-edge medical research, HealthTap is adding the full library of peer-reviewed medical research from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed. The goal is further educate patients as well as help disseminate new information through the physician community. Read more »
In an effort to starve would-be competitors of classified ad data, Craigslist is reportedly demanding that search engines stop indexing its listings. The site has moved aggressively in recent weeks to combat what it considers the misuse of its listings. Read more »
France’s Supreme Court has set aside a critical piracy ruling won by Google in 2011, leaving the door open to the search giant being forced to censor some of its autocomplete listings to prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Read more »
Blekko, the human-curated search engine, on Thursday unveiled a new content curation site, ROCKzi, which lets people consume and socialize around the news they care about in a PInterest-like environment. Read more »
For the last year, the FTC has been investigating whether Google is operating fairly in its search results. Internet law expert Marvin Ammori argues that if the FTC is serious about protecting consumers, it should take an industry-wide look at search engine transparency and labeling. Read more »
The folks over at iFood.tv are no longer just proffering up cooking videos and recipes. IFood.tv’s founders have launched a nutrition search engine and database called NutritionRank with the rather ambitious goal of making it the web’s top repository of dietary health information. Read more »
Livestar, a new iPhone app, makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional reviews. The app from former Microsoft exec Fritz Lanman serves as a sort of search engine, Q&A platform and review aggregator. Read more »
Social is the new SEO. But, as publishers turn to social insights to optimize content and fuel revenue, they run into a big problem. The data that they’re looking at is inaccurate. Parse.ly’s CEO, Sachin Kamdar, explains why publishers need to take social-as-a-strategy seriously. Read more »
Facebook better hurry up with that search engine it’s reportedly building. A new survey of the mobile market shows that search ads are outstripping display ads by a wide margin in every region of the world. Read more at paidContent »
According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. Read more »
Moscow-based search engine Yandex is hoping to steal a march on international rivals with a new music subscription app for the iPhone — but it’s gambling that users will be ready to stump up cash for the service in a country where paid-for digital music is […] Read more »
A flurry of reports suggest Facebook is interested in buying Israeli image recognition startup Face.com. But reports from Moscow suggest the rumor mill could be turning because Russian search engine Yandex wants to sell its stake in the firm to Mark Zuckerberg. Read more »
You could search for business contacts on LinkedIn or high school classmates on Facebook, but San Francisco-based Ark thinks you should be able to search for all kinds of people in one consolidated place. Read more »
Google is trying to encourage searchers to spend more time on its pages while also hoping they’ll continue to think of the search company as their first destination when looking for information. A new feature called Knowledge Graph is a step in that direction. Read more »
Just as the New York Times can decide “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings. Read more at paidContent »
Russia’s most popular search engine, Yandex, has lost a significant chunk of its market share over the past year — but announcing a 50 percent increase in profits for the first quarter of this year, CEO Arkady Volozh says there’s still lots of room to keep growing. Read more »
Google-co-founder Sergey Brin recently said he believes the future of the “open Internet” is at risk. Then why is the company trying to build its own closed network? Because the open vs. closed debate is more complicated than it first appears when it comes to Google. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social media are a great source of information on consumer sentiment, but the next wave of analytics in social media will be influence. It’s easy to ridicule your friends and co-workers who are actually concerned with their Klout scores, but this stuff matters. Read more »
Search engine Yandex is looking to extend its dominance in Russia through a deal to access Twitter’s firehose — allowing users to search millions of incoming tweets in real time. Read more »
A team of developers led by Facebook’s Blake Ross has launched a browser plugin called “Don’t be evil” they claim presents Google’s search more fairly — but is this a war Facebook can win, or just a chance to make cheap PR points against Google? Read more »
With its new “Search plus Your World” personalized results, Google may argue it is enhancing its service, but it’s also coming dangerously close to reneging on the promise it made to users in 2004: to provide unbiased links to those who are searching for information. Read more »
Google is promoting its new “personalized search” features as an enhancement for users, but Twitter and others say the integration of Google+ results uses the company’s dominance in search to promote its own service, an argument that could turn up the antitrust heat in Washington. Read more »
Does the world really need another search engine? Trefis says yes at least for do-it-yourself and even professional investors. For them, Trefis is launching a new search option that will return only pertinent, rich data about the companies they follow. Read more »
Which stories dominated the green GigaOM clicks in 2011? This year was filled with smart thermostats, a dream of Apple getting into solar, the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of cloud computing, Google’s green data centers and Tesla’s Model S. Read more »
LinkedIn has announced that the technology behind IndexTank, the search engine startup it acquired back in October, has been released as open source software. It was pretty clear that IndexTank was bought largely for its talent, so it’s good news that its technology will live on. Read more »
Want to help stimulate the economy? You may not need to go any further than your web browser’s search box. Each online search engine adds about 50 cents to the worldwide economy, according to a new research report from consultancy giant McKinsey & Company. Read more »
Microsoft can’t give up on search. Though it’s been losing money forever, Microsoft needs search to defend its core platforms, compete with Google and solidify its ad business while opening emerging revenue ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When it comes to offering recommendations and personalized services to users sifting through mountains of digital content, online video could learn a few lessons from the music world. We’ve yet to see an offering for online movies and TV that mimics, say, Pandora’s highly personalized service. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
