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(March 4 2005) Some of us remember the time Lycos had its own search engine. Much
have happened since then.
Lycos used to be one of the Norwegian company Fast's loyal customers. Since Yahoo!
took over Fast's AlltheWeb search engine, Lycos has been powered by Yahoo's search technology.
Now Lycos has announced that it will replace Yahoo! with the Ask Jeeves/Teoma search
engine.
This only proves that the search engine duopoly -- where Google and Yahoo! split
the search engine world between them -- is over. MSN has its own search engine. Ask Jeeves is moving up, and there are new
companies, like Gigablast, trying to become the next Google.
For searchers choice, competition and innovation is a good thing. We wish them all
success!
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(March 4 2005) Yahoo has launched a new web site for programmers and web developers
that wants to make use of the Yahoo! search engines in their products.
In Yahoo's own words: [Yahoo's Search Web Services] are a way for application developers
to access content and services to build new applications. For example, you can combine our data and services with those you
create in a desktop application or those offered by other web sites."
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(March 3 2005) Yahoo! has decided to rename Overture, its famous pay per click text
ad company. The new name will be Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions, and the switch will take place this spring.
"Our mission is to be essential to marketers of all types around the world," says
Yahoo senior vice president Ted Meisel according to TechNewsWorld.
"Unifying all of our search marketing and related products under one banner and one
common approach reflects our commitment to integrate and simplify online advertising, allowing businesses of all sizes to
take advantage of the Yahoo Search marketing solutions that best fit their marketing goals."
All right, but we are still not convinced that this is such a good move. The first
argument against such a change is, of course, that Overture has become a well known brand. The company has already switched
names one time before (from GoTo to Overture).
Secondly Yahoo!/Overture is selling Overture pay-per-click text ads to other portals
and search destinations. They might feel a little bit uneasy about announcing that they are delivering data from one of their
main competitors, the portal company Yahoo!
That being said, the move might strengthen the Yahoo! brand.
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(February 24 2005) Google has added another operator to its search syntax. Add movie:
to a search query in order to get to webpages covering the cinema, when using the regular Google search engine.
The Google blog gives a few examples that show that you can go beyond searches for particular movie names (movie:
Matrix).
Hence you may search for movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball, movie:
awesome car chase or movie: good chick flick. (Yep, these are Google's examples, not ours!)
In the US you may also use movie: followed by a U.S. zip code or city/state
to find theaters and show times in your area.
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(February 23 2005) Yahoo's search engine for images now contains some 1.5 billion pictures, a step ahead of Google, which has a database of 1.1 billion
graphic files.
Yahoo! will also include fresh pictures from Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Movies.
As Search Engine Journal points out, this new version of Yahoo! Image will try to interpret your search queries in a better
way, guessing -- for instance -- that the query "black and white pics of tiger" means "black and white images of a tiger".
If you are using the regular Yahoo! Web search engine instead of the image search tool, you may add words like photos, images, pictures or pics
to your query to get results from the image database in addition to regular search results.
Yahoo! Images info page
