Ex-Google employees are Cuil!

It seems that now google has to be in tough competition in its main area,Search engine service. Yes, new search engine named 'cuil' which means 'an old Irish word for knowledge'. As per the team of this service, it seems now the person who had given google the basic architecture is in the bussiness. Check out the homepage for more.

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

As they said,

"Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private."

cuil.com

Basic Search Engine Optimization

Well many of my friends both personal and professional are now building up blogs and websites and one thing they complain about is their website is not indexed. Why? Here's something that may be useful to them. Its not overnight work but takes time.

Search engines are the single best source of free website traffic. But getting to the top of the rankings takes alot of time and effort. Starting off on the right foot is important to be successful. The two single most important factor of basic search engine optimization (SEO) is your TITLE and META Description tags. Now some people will argue that building backlinks and blogging are more important and I do agree with them, but I feel those are more advanced stages of SEO. Your website title tag, which defines the content displayed in a browser's address bar when displaying a Web page, is one of the most important elements in the search engine optimization process for a Web page. Well-composed Title tags should contain clear, concise, coherent, and keyword-rich content. Because space for your title tag is limited do not waste that prime real estate by including your domain name or name of your business. Your Meta Description tag determines what some search engines will show on their search results pages when listing your page. Consequently, the tags content should be descriptive, enticing and brief. Because search engines do scan this tag for keyword usage, Meta Description tags should include all of the keywords for which the Web page is being optimized. However, the main purpose of this tag is to be a description of what content is on your entire web page. By having a precise Meta Description tag can ensure that your website is being seen by the correct audience.

Perfecting the combo or Title and Meta description tags can take some time and research, but it is well worth it. Free target website traffic from search engines starts with basic Search Engine Optimization.

Google explains PageRank tweak

Google has confirmed that the recent update to its "visible PageRank" system is an effort to crackdown on sites trying to rig this closely-watched web popularity contest. Over the weekend, Google search engine guru Matt Cutts told Search Engine Journal that the company is intent on punishing web publishers that attempt to sell their PageRank currency to other sites.

A site with a high PageRank can often boost the rank of a less-popular site simply by linking to it. As a result, popular sites will often provide such links in exchange for cash. And Google doesn't like that.

TheRegister.co.uk

Google offers local language support in India

Google has introduced technologies that will allow people in India to use local languages in search queries and that will generate content in local languages. Internet growth in India is expected to come from outside of cities, where many people are more at ease using Indian languages, Roli Agarwal, a spokeswoman for Google India, said Monday.

Google has set up a version for India of Google Labs, which it styles as a "technology playground" for products that are in development and require market feedback to improve. The Indian version of Google Labs will focus on products for that market, though these may not be developed only by Google's research and development (R&D) centers in India, Agarwal said. Google has put up two technologies for testing by users on the Google Labs Web site: an Indic On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle Gadget and Google Indic Transliteration.

InfoWorld

Wikia Details Plans for Search Rival to Google

The ever expanding, and potentially lucrative, market of search engines may soon be welcoming another player into the fray. Last Friday, at OSCON in Portland, Oregon, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that his commercial startup, Wikia, had just acquired the distributed-computing web crawler Grub from LookSmart Ltd, and that he is currently putting the building blocks in place to create a community-developed search engine rivaling those of Yahoo and Google. The new search engine, thus far unnamed, will reportedly combine computer-driven algorithms with human-assisted editing, allowing for better results; for example, in the case of the word "palm," humans would be able to distinguish whether or not the word referred to the tree, the handheld computer, or the human body part, much better than any current algorithm. After indexing sites with Grub, search results from the new engine would be generated by the open source project Lucerne.

Wikia Search Labs

Phex 3.2.0.102

Phex is a open source P2P filesharing client which is based on the Gnutella network. It is a multi-plattform and spyware free. It offers advanced functionalities and integrates all common Gnutella extensions like multi-source downloads and advanced search features.

Change log:

- GUI: Download progress bar shows different colors for different download segment types. (Downloading/Unverified/Verified)
- GUI: New security rule edit dialog, for better look and to integrate the security concept changes.
- GUI: User can select to include a freebase url in Exported file-lists (magma, rss, metalink).
- GUI: Search list is hidden by default.
- GUI: Improved network tab selection color codes.
- CORE: THEX integration to verify download data integrity.
- CORE: Redesigned large parts of the upload architecture.
- CORE: Changed security concept to only use cidr IP ranges. This change allowed a huge optimization of performance and memory. The disatvantage is that we had to drop support of IP ranges (from-to) and of 'Accept' rules.
- CORE: Faster internal query handling.
- CORE: Added metalink import.
- CORE: Reduced security list memory footprint.
- CORE: Reduced country list memory footprint [view full changelog]

Phex Home Page

Google Desktop for Linux

Google Inc. plans to launch a Linux version of Google Desktop on Wednesday, almost three years after the product's launch for the Windows operating system. The application, designed for indexing and finding data in PCs, as well as for searching the Web, also comes in a Mac OS X version, introduced in April of this year.

Like the Mac OS X version, Google Desktop for Linux is a beta, or test, product. The Windows version shed its beta tag already, meaning Google considers it a more stable and mature product. At this point, Google Desktop for Linux does not feature the Sidebar and Gadget features present in the Windows version. Gadgets are mini-applications that display things such as e-mail, weather data, photos and news on the desktop. The Sidebar is a vertical panel where the Gadgets can be organized.

PCWorld

Google logs half of all US searches

Overall, Americans are searching more than they did a year ago: queries have increased by 11% since 2006.

Google, the only search engine among the top five to gain market share, logged more than half of all search queries last month. Research firm comScore recorded 7.6 billion search queries in May, 3.9 billion of which were made from Google, giving the search engine a 50.7% market share. The figure is a 1% increase from April, when Google claimed a 49.7% market share, and an increase of more than 3% since the start of 2007.

Yahoo saw its market share drop from 26.8% to 26.4%. The firm has seen its share of the search market fall by more than two per cent since the beginning of the year. Time Warner's search services, which include former net giant AOL, dropped from 5% to 4.6% in May. All other search engines combined accounted for 3% of all queries. Of the top five search engines only Microsoft's saw its share of the market remain constant, logging 782 million queries last month and giving the company 10.3% of the US market.

vnunet

Bugs Discovered In Yahoo Messenger!

Yahoo is working on a patch for critical Yahoo Messenger vulnerabilities that could enable a remote hacker to take control of a user's system. eEye Digital Security's researchers found the bugs within the last few weeks and reported them to Yahoo on Wednesday, according to Marc Maiffret, co-founder and CTO of the security company. eEye's researchers say there actually are multiple flaws in Version 8 of Yahoo's instant messenger client software. Maiffret was careful not to give out too much information about the flaw until Yahoo can issue a patch for it.

InformationWeek

Google is now with Salesforce.com!

Google and Salesforce.com have announced an alliance to collaborate across multiple areas including technology development, marketing, distribution, communities and 'corporate philanthropy'. The move came as no surprise to industry experts. "When Google and Salesforce let it be known that they were working on something jointly, there was a lot of speculation over what it might be," said David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum.

vnunet

McAfee: Search results can be dangerous

McAfee is reporting that some web search companies are better at filtering out bad links than others: Google has improved over the past year, AOL has the safest search results on the Web right now and Yahoo is the riskiest. In McAfee’s latest study, published Monday, the company concluded that about 4% of search results were found to be risky, compared to last year’s 5%. Yahoo's poor performance is due to a spike in the number of sponsored links that McAfee deemed risky. When looking at organic links alone, Yahoo actually had the best results of any of the five search engines, returning risky links just 2.7% of the time.

Google returned risky results 3.4% of the time, compared to last year’s 5.3%. AOL on the other hand, gave risky links 2.9% of the time, an improvement over last year's 5.3%. Yahoo, formerly one of the safest engines evaluated by McAfee, jumped from 4.3% in 2006 to 5.4%. Microsoft's MSN also took a step backward, jumping from 3.9% in 2006 to 4.2% in 2007. Ask.com went from 6.1% to 3.5%.

McAfee's study looked at the first five pages of search results provided by AOL, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Ask.com for about 2,300 widely used keywords. It then compared those links to its Web safety database, which records sites that are associated with things like spam, online scams, Web attacks, and risky downloads. The most dangerous subjects to search for are words related to digital music and tech toys, as they return risky results nearly 20% of the time.

InfoWorld

Mahalo - first human-powered search engine!

Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

Mahalo means in Hawaiian Thank you.

HomePage

Facial recognition slipped into Google image search

Google has silently added face recognition abilities to its image search. It is now possible to search for images that only contain faces by appending the "&imgtype=face" query string onto the end of a search URL. There is currently no way to indicate that you only want to search for faces through the image search interface. As well, adding on "&imgtype=news" displays only images that are associated with news stories.

The technology appears to be the fruit of Google's 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that had developed techniques for facial recognition in photos. Google is apparently taking that technology to heart by experimenting with facial recognition online. Even cooler (or creepier, as the case may be), one day Google's image search may be able to find faces of specific people based on image analysis/recognition alone instead of relying on the text associated with that image to identify the person in the photo.

Ars Technica

Google announces StumbleUpon competitor

On the same day that the news breaks that eBay is acquiring StumbleUpon for $40ish million, Google announces that they are building strikingly similar functionality into their Toolbar. Google (along with AOL) were reportedly in the running to acquire StumbleUpon until very recently.

The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon. Click it and you’ll be taken to a new website that Google thinks you’ll find interesting based on your previous search queries.

This isn’t an exact duplicate of StumbleUpon functionality, which bases recommendations on your and other StumbleUpon users’ votes of sites. But the end result is the same - serendipitous discovery of new and interesting websites based on your core interests.

Techcrunch

Yahoo's mobile search now available to all

Yahoo has opened up its mobile oneSearch service to anyone with a phone who can access the Internet. The offering was previously available as part of Yahoo Go for Mobile, a mobile phone-optimized content only compatible with certain handsets. Yahoo claims 85% of mobile phones on the market can use the service. OneSearch is initially available to users in the U.S., and Yahoo plans to roll it out in additional languages and countries in the coming months.

In a bold move, Yahoo has placed a button called "Dare to Compare" on the oneSearch Web site which opens a 21-page document containing screen shots that compare the results of a Google mobile search with a Yahoo oneSearch mobile search. Rather than displaying lists of links as search results, oneSearch pulls up a range of results, including news headlines, images, business listings, and reviews. The service is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible, Yahoo said.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all begun offering search services tailored to mobile-phone users, all of which deliver advertisements in their search results. The online giants are competing against handset makers like Nokia that often include their own search mechanisms in phones as well as startups like Medio Systems that offer search services that mobile operators can self-brand.

Source: InfoWorld

Google to make search logs anonymous

Google has announced that it will start making its records about users' searches anonymous after 18 to 24 months under a new policy. The Mountain View, California-based company instigated the move on its own after talking to "leading privacy stakeholders" in Europe and the U.S. Until now, the search giant has indefinitely retained a log of every search with identifiers that can associate it with a particular computer. The new policy, to be implemented within the next year, is intended to better protect users' privacy.

Under the new policy, unless Google is legally required to retain them longer (under data retention laws), server logs will still be retained but will be "anonymized" after 18 to 24 months so that they can't be identified with individual users, according to a blog entry written by Peter Fleischer, Google's privacy counsel for Europe, and Nicole Wong, the company's deputy general counsel. Engineers are working out the technical details now. Google keeps the server logs so it can improve services and protect them from abuse and security threats, the company said. Each search record includes the query, IP addresses, and cookie details.

Source: InfoWorld