In an investor call Monday morning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Yahoo and Tumblr’s audiences really don’t overlap. She said that’s fine: Yahoo users will be exposed to more Tumblr content, and Tumblr gets a new ad strategy and possible Flickr integration while remaining a separate site. Read more »
New notification features for Google Now and richer voice recognition in searches on mobile devices and desktops keeps Google the search to beat. Read more »
There’s no question the kind of data collection Google has to do in the background to power its Google Now service can be a little intrusive — perhaps too intrusive for some. But it also makes the results extremely useful. Read more »
The European Commission has formally revealed the concessions Google is offering to make in order to settle an antitrust investigation over its search practices. Interested parties have a month to comment. Read more »
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 »
Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. To change this, they must structure their repositories of content so it can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs. Read more »
LucidWorks CTO Grant Ingersoll made his case at Structure:Data on Thursday for why companies tackling big problems related to large sets of data should give search another look. Read more »
As Punchfork gets ready to shut down its API post Pinterest acquisition, Yummly hopes to step into its shoes, proving recipe content to food sites and apps. Yummly’s semantic search technology, however, has a lot to offer. Read more »
Google is the undisputed champ of search, but it’s much better with “head” searches than it is with “long-tail” searches — and that’s a problem. Narendra Reddy, of Wignite, says Google can address that by purchasing the expert network Quora. Read more »
Twitter has made a few changes in how users interact with tweets on mobile through the search and discover and connect tabs, improving the interface slightly as the company works to make Twitter search more useful and interesting. Read more »
Facebook’s new social-graph search may look like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers, but the information it is able to reveal highlights how much we make public without even realizing it. Read more »
Facebook debuted Graph Search in Menlo Park on Tuesday, rolling out its own personalized version of search that incorporates the photos and data uploaded by all its users on the site. Read more »
Online learning site lynda.com on Monday announced that it had hired Frits Habermann as its new CTO. The former PopCap and Adobe executive will oversee the expansion of the company’s cloud infrastructure and build out new mobile and international platforms. Read more »
Big data tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop are transforming how data is stored and exploited at scale. But without similarly capable search technologies, enterprise adopters face challenges when it comes to gaining insights from that data. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Developers are frustrated by changes caused by the update to App Store with iOS 6. That release, which incorporated changes from Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, was supposed to help users find apps they’d like, and surface higher-quality apps. In many cases, it’s simply causing confusion. Read more »
Priceline announced Thursday that it has acquired Kayak at $40 a share, putting the travel search site at a $1.8 billion valuation. Kayak recently went public in July 2012 after delaying its IPO since 2010, waiting for the markets to improve. Read more »
Google is releasing an updated search app for iOS devices that allows users to ask their questions by voice and get quick responses, many of them spoken back to users. It doesn’t replicate everything Siri does but it also provides more answers. Read more »
In the investor call following Yahoo’s third quarter earnings report, new CEO Marissa Mayer laid out her vision for the company going forward. “The best days lie ahead,” she said. “We intend to do great things and we intend to win.” Read more at paidContent »
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 »
A federal court has found that scanning books for search — which Google was doing for a university project called the Hathi Trust — is clearly covered by the “fair use” principle in copyright law, which could help Google in its own lawsuit with the Authors Guild. Read more »
According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, Google is expected to lead the US display ad market in 2012, after losing the top spot to Facebook last year. The search giant also dominates in mobile and search advertising. Read more »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network is already handling a billion search queries per day, and that it is interested in launching a social search engine powered by the activity of its users — something that could turn out to be Google’s worst nightmare. Read more »
Yandex, the Russian search engine, has taken its cloud storage product out of its invite-only beta. Like Box or Dropbox, Yandex.Disk offers users access to their files from any device, including their Apple and Android phones. Users will get 10 GB of storage for free. Read more »
Walmart is now relying on its own search engine called Polaris to help guide shoppers to the right products. The search engine was created out of @WalmartLabs and incorporates semantic technology acquired through Walmart’s purchase of Kosmix. Read more »
Google’s use of its homepage to advertise its own products and display pop-up birthday reminders for its Google+ network on its homepage may seem like just an annoyance, but each step the company takes toward promoting its own offerings raises more red flags for antitrust regulators. Read more »
In yet another move to simplify the process of patent search, Google is now tackling the particularly tough problem of prior with a new feature. But all this innovation begs the question of whether Google, not the USPTO, should become the de facto patent search engine. Read more »
Google is making changes to its search algorithms that will penalize websites hit with copyright-removal claims, but the company is saying very little about what criteria it will use to determine who gets hit and who doesn’t — can we trust it to make the right decision? 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 »
It has been fairly obvious for a few years that the search-driven, URL-centric web would converge with the web of social objects. It’s something that drives Google’s paranoia and something Facebook dreams about. However, the company most likely to capture the opportunity is Twitter, Read more »
The latest criticism of Google as an unfair monopoly, which comes from the CEO of a comparison shopping site called Nextag, is riddled with flawed logic — but the search giant has also invited this kind of charge with some of its recent behavior. Read more »
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 »
Time was, only strong man competition entrants would exert themselves to tear up phone directories for expectant crowds.
Now publishers themselves are this month twisting their books and businesses in to new shapes, to find relevance amid ongoing digital disruption… Read more at paidContent »
In this busy new world of multiple social networks and recommendations tools, the discovery process itself is being disrupted by innovation and by the changing ways in which consumers now interact online. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Almost three years after they agreed a search alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo are finally making it happen in Europe. 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 »
Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. Read more in the full report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
In the first quarter of 2012 all eyes were on the screen, both big and small. Apple’s new Retina display pushed video streaming, and broadcast-TV streaming service Aereo’s launch was quickly followed with litigation. These events and more are discussed in a new quarterly report. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google take notice: Amazon Web Services is now pushing a “fully managed search service” for web or mobile app developers. CloudSearch promises to ease the provisioning headaches of web developers who need to build search into their commerce or other sites. Read more »
Should the industry take “Project Glass” seriously? Does Google have a truly disruptive user interface technology in its labs? Project Glass aligns with critical UI factors, and it plays to Google’s strengths in user interface and its data, mapping and communications expertise, so don’t dismiss it ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
