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Can People Outdo Machines in Search?

It seemed like it was settled long ago, when Yahoo! gave up on its original directory approach to categorizing the Web in favor of spidering technology. Not so. Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis yesterday unveiled Mahalo, a search engine powered by people. Mahalo employees come up with a list of the best sites for the most popular searches, supplementing those with rankings from Google. So far, Mahalo only has 50,000 pages, but venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who is backing the company, believes those pages beat Google's for relevance. More ...

Google's Feedburner Grab Would Impact Personalized Search, Analytics

Google's rumored acquisition of Feedburner for $100 million seems small compared to the recent spate of billion-dollar ad network deals. But insiders say it was only a matter of time before the Web's predominant RSS supplier would be snatched up by one of the "big three." More ...

Trends of Online Mapping Portals

Last week there were several announcements made that show the direction of the online mapping portals. Satellite images and slippy maps are no longer differentiators for attracting users, everyone has them and as I noted last week there are now companies that have cropped up to service companies that want their own maps. Some of these new differentiators are immersive experiences, owning the stack, and data! More ...

Video Ads on Google Search?

Google typically buries important advertising news under its whiz-bang consumer announcements. Yet at the end of the day, it is in the business of selling advertising. Its new "universal search" approach will combine several elements on search results pages, including photos and videos. What this will open up is a way for Google to move beyond text ads on those pages to include graphical formats and even video, The New York Times reports. More ...

GoogleVersal Search--The End of Outsourced SEO?

The coming rollout of Google's universal search model sparks a debate about the future of the search engine optimization and search marketing industry. More ...

Google unveils Universal Search

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but over the course of the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal. A new navigational interface has also been unveiled for Google and is covered more in the companion piece to this article, Google's New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide. More ...

Out of Chaos, Order. Or So Google Says.

Over the years, Google has carefully cultivated the image of a zany company in which innovation and new products — lots of new products — emerge from a bit of chaos. Now Google is trying to put some order into that chaos  — or at least appear to do so. More ...

Google’s Foray Into 411

On Friday, Google announced a new “experimental service” called Goog-411, which is a free phone-based service for getting phone numbers by calling 1-800-466-4411. A lot of people seem really excited about it. More ...