Kayak kicked off 2011 with major sales growth in the run-up to its planned IPO, according to a regulatory filing. The travel search company made $52.6 million in the first three months of 2011, representing a 43.4 percent increase over the same period in 2010 Read more »
Israeli startup Ineze thinks it can go where dozens have struggled, and create a better way of searching for products to buy online. But what can it do that they can’t? Understand what you’re actually looking for, says CEO Gil Rozenberg. Read more »
A new startup called Do@ thinks there’s still room to change the way we search — not on the desktop, but on mobile devices. The company launched today with an iPhone app and a $7-million investment from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Read more »
Russia’s biggest search engine, Yandex, plans to cash in by going public on the Nasdaq — but its bid for the big time is being hit by concerns of political interference and revelations that it has handed private user data over to the Russian security services. Read more »
With personals’ unit Match having grown revenues 25 percent in Q4, would this be a good time for IAC (NSDQ: IACI) to spin it off? At least o… Read more at paidContent »
The handset maker and software giant may have already walked down the aisle as far back as February 11, but it was only today that they fina… Read more at paidContent »
Demand Media says the latest changes to Google’s algorithm aren’t a big deal, even though they pushed its eHow unit down by as much as 65 percent, according to some estimates — but the reality is that Google is both Demand’s biggest partner and its biggest threat. Read more »
Reports from Chinese sources say that Facebook is in talks with local search giant Baidu to create a social network in China. But will Facebook be able to live with the kinds of things it will have to do in order to appease China’s totalitarian government? Read more »
In a memo to Google staff, new CEO and co-founder Larry Page says employee bonuses are effectively on the line if the company’s efforts to add more social features don’t succeed. But the Google co-founder may find that you can’t threaten people into being social. Read more »
Microsoft introduced its new dedicated Bing iPad search application Thursday, and my first impression is that it offers more useful features than Google’s iOS app in a better package. Yet while it may outclass the competition, I also doubt I’ll ever use it again. Read more »
A screenshot that has been circulating of a Facebook page with a web-search box appears to be fake, but the giant social network is almost certain to add more search-related features that take advantage of the social information it has. And yes, Google should be afraid. Read more »
Google is making it easier for users to block unwanted sites in their search results, ratcheting up the pressure on low quality content sites. The search giant is allowing users to hide or block sites from future search results right from within Google search. Read more »
A chorus of complaints about spammy results in Google searches highlights a growing problem the search company is going to have to solve — and doing so will inevitably bring it into conflict with Demand Media, currently planning a high-profile IPO for later this year. Read more »
Qwiki presents search results in a montage of images, video, animations and other visual resources, and overlays it with real-time narration, using text-to-speech technology. The result is information as a watchable experience. For me, the experience of watching the content is eerie and unsettling. Read more »
We’ve witnessed massive transformations in the ways we connect. ReSearch.ly is a new site that offers interesting–and sometimes curious and puzzling–ways of experiencing content from Twitter. ReSearch.ly’s premise is that “search is a social act which relies on trust and community.” Read more »
In Silicon Valley, history often repeats itself. Most often it’s the tale of a startup that captures the attention of millions and topples its bigger, incumbent competitors. Then it becomes hated monopoly, despised for the control it wields. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, this ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Originally announced back in September, Google Instant for mobile went live today, bringing the auto-populating search results to iPhone and Android devices. Like on the desktop, Instant displays search results as you type into the Google.com search field. Read more »
More and more, open source search looks to be a viable alternative for organizing unstructured data in the enterprise. The open source community believes it has advantages in scalability, flexibility and speed over enterprise-specific behemoths like Autonomy and Microsoft. But more importantly the functionality, cost structure ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A talk by Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston about how search-related keyword ads didn’t really work for his company is another worthwhile reminder that search advertising doesn’t work for every situation, and that there are good reasons why Google needs to be afraid of Facebook. Read more »
Along with Google’s recent rollout of Google Instant comes the expectation for quicker, more dynamic results on a search page. From the point of view of a user, such demands are obvious. But search marketers — those who want to promote their sites by increasing visibility ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the battle for collaboration domination, Google has struck another blow with its suite of new features for the Google Search Appliance that let users search their Google cloud services as well as traditional data stores. Read more »
Google represents 97 percent of mobile searches on the iPhone, according to Chitika Research, with 49.08 percent of searches coming through the Safari tool bar, 42.24 percent coming from its home page and other minor sources and 8.68 percent from its dedicated Google app. Read more »
It’s not all war and competition between tech giants Google and Apple. Sometimes the companies can come together, and the winner each time that happens is invariably the consumer. Today Google brings Google Goggles to the iPhone. Try saying that five times fast. Read more »
Microsoft’s search engine has taken over from Yahoo as the second most-popular search in the U.S., according to new figures from Nielsen. The latest survey by the traffic-ranking firm shows that Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live/Bing search had almost a 14-percent share of overall search volume in August. Read more »
Topsy says it now has the most comprehensive index of Twitter content available online, having recently indexed its 5 billionth tweet and its 2.5 billionth link from the network. The company has launched a new architecture that it says can handle up to 100 billion updates. Read more »
I can’t be the only person on Earth who, when I need information, heads to Good Ol’ Google and is sometimes frustrated by the results I get. Of course, there are other research tools I can use, too — social networks being one of them. Read more »
Cuil, a widely panned search engine that debuted in 2008, has launched an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia that produces articles on topics by generating them from pages found in its index. But the only thing Cpedia manages to do is make Wikipedia look really, really good. Read more »
In its latest acquisition — and its first in the UK — Google has bought a small visual-search startup called Plink, maker of a mobile app that recognizes works of art. The acquisition appears to be an attempt to add horsepower to its Google Goggles project. Read more »
Facebook’s U.S. search queries grew 48 percent in March, bringing the company to 2.7 percent market share, making it larger than AOL and almost as big as Ask. Read more »
Google’s mobile services are at least partially blocked for users in mainland China, according to the page that Google set up recently to track which of its services are available to users in that country. Read more »
Facebook redesigned at the beginning of February, moving its search box from the right side to the top middle of its home page, and it seems to have paid off, with the company’s U.S. search queries growing 10 percent in February, according to comScore. Read more »
At the moment I’ve got 1,303 items in the trash bin in my OS X Dock — not that much compared to the usual pile that accumulates there when my normal maintenance has me only cleaning it out once every couple of months. Usually, it’s not […] Read more »
I’m not sure Shashi Seth knew what he was getting into, but he must have had an inkling. Yahoo’s new SVP of search products (as of three weeks ago) invited the press over to Sunnyvale today to try to “reset” perceptions about Yahoo and search. Read more »
Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. […] Read more »
Mobile apps that take users directly to e-commerce and other types of sites are a growing threat to traditional search engines, according to BroadPoint. While the growth of mobile apps has been heralded as a healthy trend, is it good for the Googles of the world? Read more »
