Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond have released a beta of SearchTogether,which is a free Internet plug in that allows groups of people to collaborate on Web Searches. Meredith Ringel Morris, a researcher spearheading the project conveys that SearchTogether is just a portion of a larger project about collaborative search.

As updated in one of the blogs, Microsoft’s SearchTogether is a breakthrough and different from traditional search, which is executed solo. SearchTogether gives opportunity for people at different locations to execute searches as a team.It basically enables people to divide responsibilities and pooling results in a shared Web space on the browser.

Existing search Engines enable users to find Web content on an individual basis.Search interfaces have not yet been able to support collaborative search. Collaborating on search generally means that while one person is at a keyboard,the other makes suggestions.It could also be possible that while two people,each viewing a Web browser, they would be using instant messaging or a phone.The product is expected to become very popular among schools,colleges and universities, where students would have to work on multiple projects.

Google has launched a search feature that provided an opportunity for net users to re-rank, delete and add comments on search results.SearchWiki, is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic,providing people tools that make search even more useful.

Suppose a user does the same search, frequently.Later,the user can remove a site from the results that isn’t of interest.Users are also given the option to add comments to a site, which pops up every time that site is in the results.Users can further personalize search results by typing in the URL of a site they want to add to their search results for a particular search,or even move a site to the top of the search results.To enable SearchWiki,the user need to be signed in to a Google account and English must be the chosen language.

Additional feature is that users can keep track of all the changes that has been made with the option “see all my SearchWiki notes”.One can also remove any changes that have been made to the search results and can revert back to the usual search results.

Source:Pubcon definition-Wikipedia

Microsoft has updated its online services and has transformed its live site to a social network.The changes include photo sharing,email,instant messaging capabilities as well as including contents from around 50 companies.The Web Services include Flickr,LinkedIn Corp,Twitter,Wordpress.org etc., through profiles and a news feed.The Web 2.0 industry observers have received several positive reviews regarding these updates.

Live.com users can now access several online services like mail, calendar, photos, online storage,etc.,including downloaded services like a mail client, instant messaging,Movie Maker,Photo Gallery,the Toolbar and other services. Eventually,this has become one huge social network.Check out http://www.windowslive.com/ for more.

Video and Voice Chat has been added to Google,creating a major update for Gmail.In order to make this functionality work, we need to install a small browser plugin,available at the location http://mail.google.com/videochat .This update can function on all browsers and will work on PC’s with Windows XP or Vista, including Macs with OS X 10.4 or later.

We need to intially enable this new functionality from the ‘Options’ menu which is at the bottom of a Gmail chat window.Then we need to select the contact you want to speak with and click on ‘Video & more’ located in the lower-left part of the chat window.From here on,you can then start a voice or video chat.

Point to note that Google’s Gmail desktop chat program has not yet incorporated any video functionality yet, although voice chat is available for Google Talk long time ago.However Google has become a major competitor for skype for which video chat has been one of the major functionalities.

Microsoft Corporation Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said that his company has no plans to make another bid to buyout yahoo.

“We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on .We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at 33 dollars a share, said Ballmer as published in a blog.

On the contrary,Yahoo Chief Executive, Jerry Yang said that Yahoo would welcome Microsoft if it was ever willing to offer another bid with the former.Yahoo made these remarks after Google stayed out of the ad deal with Yahoo after the Justice Department notified the two companies of an antitrust suit.

After Microsoft opted for a bid for Yahoo in February, Google and Yahoo began several conversations to see if Google could help Yahoo to remain independent. Thus came the advertising agreement which the two companies signed in June. This deal was supposed to deliver Yahoo $250 million to $450 million in additional operating cash flow in the first year.

However,Google chose to abandon this controversial deal after the Justice Department notified the companies that it would file an antitrust suit to block it.
Google’s Chief Executive Eric Shmidt said in an interview which was posted in a blog,”We canceled the deal with about one hour to go before a lawsuit was going to be filed against our deal. We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won.”

On the contrary,Yahoo said it would have preferred to defend the deal in court. “Yahoo strongly believes we would have prevailed in court if the Department of Justice had filed a lawsuit, but unlike Google, we were prepared to defend our agreement,”said Tracy Schmaler, a Yahoo spokeswoman in a blog.Yahoo’s Chief Executive Jerry Yang said that he was upset that Google had chosen to walk away.

Google Chrome version 0.3.154.9 is released.This release fixes several issues,especially with regard to plugins which people have put forward in the top issues.Check the following site http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes for details on the changes that have been made since 0.2.149.30.

Following issues have been fixed:
1.Scrolling with laptop touchpads works fine now.
2.Improved performance for plugins (like Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and Windows Media).Several issues like video not loading, stopping after a second, and slowing down were fixed.
3.When you close a tab that was showing PDF using Adobe Reader 9,a ‘chrome has crashed’ message appears.This has been fixed.
4.Data from secure sites are not stored.We can still search the history for the site contents.
5.Performance Improvement for people who use web proxies.