Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google and Yahoo!

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia now set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com, which he hopes would become a rival to Google and Yahoo! Mr. Wales has already started working on search engine, which exploits the same user based technology.

Mr. Wales stated “The Times” that he is planning to develop a commercial version of Search engine through Wikia Inc, which has a launch date in the first quarter of next year.

Google is up with U.S. Patent Search

Google is very happy on release of new beta version of Google Patent Search; this makes it easy to search the full text of U.S. patent mass and look for patents that impress you. You could further explore your self at www.google.com/patents or http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search to search by criteria, including patent number, filing date and inventor. You can also view images of original patents online.

This natural extension of Google’s mission is just to make this public domain government information accessible to all users using Google search technology. It has been started with over 7 million patents granted by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and it also look forward to expand its coverage over time.

An inexpensive travel search engine – A release by Yahoo!

Summer is on and vacation is what all plan now. Yahoo announces Farechase.Com, a travel search engine that searches across airline sites and online travel agency websites to offer users a complete portal of cost, flight availability and accommodation.

FareChase aid people plan better trips with access to the most pertinent immediate information eliminating the need for multiple online searches thus reducing the expense and time used up.

Source: Ysearchblog.com 13/04/2006

Party with the new hotel price search engine

This is indeed a season to party with a reason; the popular search engine search party now has launched a new bets product.

The efficacy of the product is that it helps customers compare the rates of the various hotels. This new functionality is really new as no other travel site has encompassed this feature.

Vacationers can now travel in rapture, as they get to know and compare the various room rates, toll and booking fees, cancellation policies etc. the good news here is that you can acquire information for more than 40,000 hotels and other sources of accommodations.

Source: www.hospitality.net.org 5/4/2006

The lingo based search engine soon to hit the markets

A new customized language based search engine is yet to be instigated by the arexera information technologies. The search engine is christened as “seek port” and is planned to be released in India, European Union and the west Asian markets.

The lingoes incorporated in the search engine include three Arabic scripts and various other Indian languages. The Spanish version is under production but will be released soon in this year.

The seek port would initially function only as a search engine but it is expected to do more in the near future.

Source: www.business-standard.com 5/4/2006

Skype, Google, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital invest in start up wifi firm FON en.fon.com

A spain based WiFi company has collected 18 million euros in investment from Skype, Google , Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Currently the company is based in madrid, the man behind this successful project is Martin Varsavasky,

Martin Varsavsky – the founder of the Spanish portal ya.com and the Spanish telco Jazztel – describes it as ‘a global community of people who share WiFi connections’. In order to become a ‘Fonero’, as the company dubs it, you have to
install Fon’s software in your (compatible) router, place it near a window and then share bandwidth with other users around the world. Essentially, the aim of Fon is to create a free WiFi roaming environment for those who contribute WiFi signals via a local ISP.

visit Fon website here: en.fon.com

Volkswagen and google-earth combines to provide a virtual road navigation system

CNN reports of a possible three dumentional map navigation system being built with the collabaration nvidia corp, google earth and Volkswagen

“The two companies are working with the graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.to build an in-car navigation map system and a three-dimensional display so passengers can recognize where they are in relation to the surrounding topography.
Volkswagen, working through its Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, in Silicon Valley, is working on other advancements, including automatic personalized information updates for the navigation systems.”

Human rights Group in china wants google to remove censorship of their search results delivered to chinese people

Human rights group of china wants google not to censor search results, they
are very disappointed by google’s recent move to provide censored results,

As Vnunet
reports this move by google can be because of greed to enter search market of
china, As many bloggers complain google has started deviating from its words
“Don’t be evil” , Yahoo’s hand over of search results to chinese goverment
led to the arrest of a chinese journalist, Microsoft censored a chinese guy’s
blog, now google is providing censored results in china,

macworld reports
“To illustrate how Google has censored information using the Google.cn
search engine, HRIC conducted a comparison of four Google sites: Google.com
in English, Google.com in Chinese, Google.cn, and Google.com.tw, the company’s
Taiwanese Web site. The group conducted searches on all four sites for a range
of phrases in Chinese and English.

HRIC’s comparison found that many Web sites were not found using Google.cn
to search for Chinese phrases such as “human rights in China” and
“death penalty,” as well as the author and title of a recently published
book on former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. That book, Zhou Enlai’s Later
Years by Gao Wenqian, is banned in China.”

Google kills bmw.de, Hunting Search engine spammers in other languages,

As matt cutts puts here
google is now targeting search engine spam in other languages too, Google has
banned ( update – possibly re included because of cleaning up of spam ) bmw.de
( official BMW site for germany ) from their search index, they did this because
the seo company for bmw used the infamous javascript mouseover redirect to show
one version of the page to the user and other version to the search engine,

One SEO company and their clients were totally banned from the search engine because
of this tactic, Now google has started catching this problem in other languages, BBC
has a nice right up on this, they had a word with the bmw spokesmen this is
why they said,

A BMW spokesman admitted the company used the doorway pages, a
practice known as search engine optimization and banned by Google.

But the spokesman insisted the company’s intentions were honorable.”We
did not provide different content in the search results to the final website,”
Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website.”However, if Google says all
doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration.”

Our thoughts,

First of creating doorway pages are not part of search engine optimization,
we can call it search engine spamming definitely not search engine optimization,
next it is weird that BMW need to use such tactics simple and decent optimization
will get their site good results they don’t have to spam atall, They have to
blame their web designers for not designing a site compatible with search engines,
It is important that every company involved in web design should take search
engines in their mind when they do the design, I hope all SEO spammers will
learn a lessen from this,

Google denies possible acquisition of Napster – An ultimate online music sharing website,

Google has recently denied that it is looking for possible acquisition of Napster, There hasn’t been any official proof of google’s denial,

Googlemusic.com is owned by google for more than 3 years, Already they provide paid videos through their video service, Now we can see google is looking for capturing the music industry,

timesonline article says

“It has long been thought that Google would eventually offer online music. The company, which currently earns the majority of its revenues through internet advertising, is under pressure to show it can leverage its powerful brand in other markets. It already offers video services where customers pay for content.
Google sources have also told Times Online that the company is concentrating heavily on developing digital rights management systems to protect content providers’ copyright. Such work would be a necessary precursor to Google developing its own online music service. “

Read more here, business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2017867,00.html