Latest Yahoo Search News!

YAHOO RELEASES!

Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple -- foster innovation in the search landscape

What is BOSS?
BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an AP

• Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
• Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
• BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
• Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon
• Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

Yahoo is already working on expanding the API functionality and providing more access to Yahoo! Search Technology.


Me.dium: Social Networking
Me.dium is a social browsing software company offering a browser extension that allows people to surf with friends for the first time. By revealing this new Social Exploration Environment TM (SEE), Me.dium graphically connects users with their friends and others enabling users to interact online, similarly to how one interacts with people in the real world.

Hakia: Semantics Search Engine
Hakia is a general purpose "semantic" search engine, dedicated to quality search experience
hakia is focused on bringing quality results via its semantic search technology. Today's search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods. Popular results are not always quality results, and the searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information.

Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype
The difference between standard search engines and Cluuz is in the fact that Cluuz does some work for you. A standard search engine shows links in a list. Cluuz instead peers into the searched web pages, extracts important terms and images, clusters them and gives them in chart format (semantic graph) and in a tag cloud where you can click on any entity to further focus your search:



source : www.ysearchblog.com

Latest Google on Flash indexing!

Google gets on Flash indexing : crawling and indexing

Google has improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

Google has recently come up with Indexing flash sites.

• Google has the ability to index textual content in SWF files. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
• All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
• Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Google uses the algorithm's effectiveness which was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.
• If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

LIMITATIONS OF Google for FLASH INDEXING:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. Google do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

3. Google would be able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

4) Google can't index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Non-textual content, such as images can't be indexed by Google


Now that Google has launched Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets




source: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

NEW RELEASES by GOOGLE:

NEW RELEASES by GOOGLE:
Google (GOOG), which has quietly released a new software app called Google Media Server.

Google Trends for Websites: Check any sites with google trends now
www.google.co.in/trends

Google Site Search
www.google.com/sitesearch

Google - Yahoo! Deals

Google - Yahoo! Deals

Yahoo on Wednesday sent a letter to its shareholders justifying its deal with Google, saying it will enhance the company's profitability and provide more shareholder value than the offer put forth by Microsoft to invest in Yahoo's search business.

The deal with Google will generate US$250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow for Yahoo in the first year, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang wrote in the joint letter.

LATEST GOOGLE - YAHOO! MONTHLY REPORT:

Together, Google, with a 61.8% share and Yahoo, with 20.6%, own 82.4% of the U.S. search market, according to comScore's latest monthly report.

Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo in February for $44.6 billion. When Yahoo held out for more than the software giant was willing to pay, Microsoft withdrew an increased bid of $47.5 billion in early May and proposed buying Yahoo's search business for $9 billion a month later.

Shares of the world's largest software maker are down 22 percent this year, sales of Windows software are slowing, and an attempt to buy Yahoo! Inc. flopped. And Google Inc. is widening its lead over Microsoft in Internet searches, leaving Ballmer with a case of ``chronic Google envy,'' according to Jane Snorek, an analyst at Minneapolis-based First American Funds.



source:
www.bloomberg.com
www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/

Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft

Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft

Common REP Directives
The following are all the major REP features currently implemented by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. Each of these directives can be specified to be applicable for all crawlers or for specific crawlers by targeting them to specific user-agents, which is how any crawler identifies itself. Each of us also supports Reverse DNS based authentication of our crawler, and you can use this validate the identity of any crawlers claiming a particular user-agent.

1. Robot.txt Directives

DIRECTIVE	IMPACT	USE CASE(s)
Disallow	Tells a crawler not to crawl your site or parts of your site -- your site's robots.txt still needs to be crawled to find this directive, but the disallowed pages will not be crawled.	'No crawl' pages from a site. This directive in the default syntax prevents specific path(s) of a site from crawling.
Allow	Tells a crawler the specific pages on your site you want indexed so you can use this in combination with Disallow. If both Disallow and Allow clauses apply to a URL, the most specific rule - the longest rule - applies.	This is useful in particular in conjunction with Disallow clauses, where a large section of a site is disallowed, except a small section within it.
$ Wildcard Support	Tells a crawler to match everything from the end of a URL -- large number of directories without specifying specific pages.	'No Crawl' files with specific patterns, for eg., files with certain filetypes that always have a certain extension, say pdf; etc.
Sitemap Location	Tells a crawler where it can find your sitemaps.	Point to other locations where feeds exist to point the crawlers to the site's content.

2. HTML META Directives

These directives can either be placed in the HTML of a page or in the HTTP header for non-HTML content like PDF, video, etc. using an X-Robots-Tag. The X-Robots-Tag mechanism allows these directives to be available for all types of documents -- HTML or otherwise. If both forms of the tag, HTML META and X-Robots-Tag in the header are present, the most restrictive one applies.

DIRECTIVE	IMPACT	USE CASE(s)
NOINDEX META Tag	Tells a crawler not to index a given page.	Don't index the page. This allows pages that are crawled to be kept out of the index.
NOFOLLOW META Tag	Tells a crawler not to follow a link to other content on a given page.	Prevent publicly writeable areas from being abused by spammers looking for link credit. By NOFOLLOW, you let the robot know that you are discounting all outgoing links from this page.
NOSNIPPET META Tag	Tells a crawler not to display snippets in the search results for a given page.	Present no abstract for the page on search results.
NOARCHIVE META Tag	Tells a search engine not to show a "cached" link for a given page.	Do not make a copy of the page available to users from the search engine cache.
NOODP META Tag	Tells a crawler not to use a title and snippet from the Open Directory Project for a given page.	Do not use the ODP (Open Directory Project) title and abstract for this page in Search.

source : ysearchblog

Yahoo! Google Deal! News

YAHOO - GOOGLE DEAL

Today, we announced a non-exclusive advertising agreement that will provide Yahoo! with access to our AdSense for search and AdSense for content advertising programs on their U.S. and Canadian web properties. In addition, we will work to enable interoperability between our respective instant messaging services allowing users better, broader communication online.

It is important to say what this agreement is not:

* This is not a merger. Rather, we are merely providing access to our advertising technology to Yahoo! through our AdSense program.

* This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses.

* This does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar arrangements with others. This arrangement is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo! could enter into similar arrangements with other companies.

* This does not increase Google's share of search traffic. Yahoo! will continue to run its own search engine and advertising programs, and the agreement will not increase Google's share of search traffic.

* This does not let Google raise prices for advertisers. Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that.



source: googleblog.blogspot.com

Google: GMAIL Labs: New Features Added!

GOOGLE GMAIL LABS Features:

• Gmail has a new look on the iPhone browser
• More friends are more fun. Gmail welcomes your AIM® friends.
• Colored labels
• Group chat
• New emoticons
• Free IMAP
• View as slideshow
• Increased attachment limit-- 20 MB!
• It's a Gmail party and everyone is invited!
• Get mail from other accounts
• Embarrassment-reducing new message notifications
• Forward all
• Chat even when your friends are offline
• Get Gmail on your mobile phone
• Voicemail
• Reply by chat
• A picture's worth a thousand words
• Vacation auto-responder
• Contact groups
• View as HTML
• Shortcuts on the right
• Virus scanning is here!
• Export contacts
• Auto-save
• Get to Gmail from any web page
• Customized 'From:' addresses
• Free POP access and automatic forwarding
• An application for Macs
• Import Contacts
• Signature options

register for a gmail account to get the features free: mail.google.com

source: google