Articles about Search

AM Software has released UltraSearch 1.7, a major update of its super-speedy MFT search tool.

As with many similar tools, the program doesn’t waste resources maintaining an index on your hard drive. Instead it accesses the NTFS Master File Table directly, which allows UltraSearch to retrieve its results at very high speed, typically just a second or two.

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Today, Google updated its enterprise search product, upping the number of supported languages to 60, better improving Big Data capabilities, increasing scalability and providing document previews with search results.

"Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites", Matthew Eichner, general manager of Google enterprise search, says. "GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience".

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If you went to Google.com today, you probably noticed the logo was replaced with a fun little birthday cake animation celebrating 14 years of incorporation. Google was incorporated on Sept. 4th 1998, but chose today to celebrate the birthday. What does it matter when they celebrate, after all, Google has had a great year.

In April, Google released a concept video about Project Glass, fancy glasses with computers in them. In May, the search giant closed the purchase of Motorola Mobility. During the annual developer conference in June, Google made a lot of announcements, among them: Android 4.1, Nexus 7 tablet, Nexus Q and creepy but useful Google Now. The fun: skydiving, bicycles and rappelling down the side of a building. Big surprise: event participants could purchase a developer version of Google Glasses.

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Trustbusters and other regulators still have their eyes on Google, which in response has maintained high lobbying presence in Washington. Is that effort paying off?

This week is surprisingly chock full of happenings -- good or bad, you be the judge -- for Google in the areas of lobbying and antitrust. Governments changed their positions on antitrust, rivals combined efforts and Google shifted strategy. All-in-all, it must be busy at the Washington, DC offices.

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Microsoft's "Bing It On" marketing campaign is brilliantly conceived, but don't believe the results. The search comparisons leave out the most important piece of information: Location. Another: relationship. In my blind testing Google and Microsoft searches using Bing It On, the comparison is blind at worst, near-sighted at best.

Bing It On is something like the Coke-Pepsi taste tests from the 1970s. People try both without knowing which is which and say which they like better. Here they blind test Bing and Google, with results presented side-by-side, left and right. But because the tests are anonymous, identity and location are missing elements, or they are for me. Also, both services now offer social graph search, which also is missing when tabulating the comparison. But wait! What about news or image searches, which I often do? Blogs and other sources? It's this richness the comparison lacks, so the taste is bland not sweet. As such, I find the comparison to be fundamentally flawed.

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If you had to name your favorite three search engines, which would they be? It is almost certain that Google would make the list, and that some Internet users may have trouble naming more than one or two as they rely solely on a single search engine for all of their searches.

Bing may be on that list, although it is less likely that people from outside the United States will name the search engine, as its localized results are not really on pair with its English results. Tech savvy users may name DuckDuckGo or Ixquick, two niche search engines that promise better privacy and unfiltered results that do not put users into a filter bubble. Regional search engines, Chinese Baidu for instance, may also be added to the list by people from those regions.

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Utilizing a network of proxy servers in more than 75 countries across the globe, Rhode Island-based company GeoEdge lets SEO and SEM managers, publishers and advertisers check how their sites and advertisements appear and perform in countries other than their own. The company gives its customers the ability to analyze Web pages from multiple locations simultaneously and track the efficacy of different advertisements, giving them the data they need to create business intelligence about their advertisements.

GeoEdge Analytics captures any ad displayed on any website, everywhere in the world. With it, publishers can enforce compliance rules in other countries, and ad networks and buyers can analyze and identify international media opportunities.

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While click fraud and identity theft are probably the most common forms of larceny on the Internet, I just heard of a company that sets a whole new standard of bad, lying to advertisers about, well, everything.

Click fraud is when a website either clicks on its own ads to increase revenue, gets someone else to click on them with no intention of buying or works with botnets to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third-party ad network to work. What I am writing about here is something completely different.

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It had to happen eventually. Representatives of the media and entertainment industries have been complaining for years about Google linking to sites that offer copyrighted content, accusing the Internet giant of not doing nearly enough to prevent access to infringing material. The company’s stock response has always been that it only indexes the web, and the results that appear when someone types a query into Google simply reflects the sites that people go to, and other sites link to. It’s a fair argument, although one somewhat undermined by last year’s algorithm update that targeted content farms, and showed the company’s willingness to tweak what sites appear where in its index.

Google does of course remove pages when it receives copyright removal notices to do so. In fact, in an effort to demonstrate just how actively, Google recently expanded its Transparency Report to show how many URLs it removes, from where, and at whose request. The figures are staggering. In the last month alone, Google removed over 4.3 million URLs from its index.

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London-based startup Ginjex launched its "real-time availability engine" in Beta on Wednesday, providing small and independent businesses a place to list their availability live so customers can get the services they need exactly when they need them.

Bringing goods from website to consumer has become a mind-bending race to see who can get there the fastest. Zappos set a standard for speed with its common next-day delivery upgrades, and Amazon Prime offers subscribers next- and second day shipments on all purchases for just a couple of dollars, where just a few years ago, such rapid delivery used to tack on a significant extra cost.

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If you use Google search (and who doesn’t), you may have noticed that sponsored results (pay-per-click, or PPC, ads) have been taking over more and more of the search engine results page.

Here at WordStream, we’ve noticed that too! So we decided to do some research into what impact all of these new, bigger, more prominent and engaging ad formats are having on the average Google searcher. The results are astonishing: Clicks on paid search listings beat out organic clicks by nearly a 2:1 margin for keywords with high commercial intent in the US.

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If Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing, Newsroom) wrote the story of Yahoo and he got to Marissa Mayer’s surprise entrance as Yahoo’s latest CEO, here’s how he would probably play it: the brilliant, tough, beautiful, charismatic engineer defies her Google glass ceiling and, through sheer vision and clever example, saves the pioneering Internet company. That’s how Sorkin would play it because he likes an underdog, loves smart, well-spoken people and revels in beautiful if slightly flawed characters and happy endings. But in this case Aaron Sorkin would be playing it wrong.

To be clear, were I in the position of Yahoo’s board I would probably have hired Marissa Mayer, too. On paper she’s nearly perfect (only CEO experience is missing) and the drama of her going from not even being on the list of candidates discussed to getting the big job is wonderful theater that will play well on Wall Street for weeks, maybe months. For once the Yahoo board seems to have been on the ball.

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A week has passed since I started up my Google I/O-issue Galaxy Nexus and updated to Android 4.1 (aka Jelly Bean). Since then, my daughter and I faced off Google's Voice Assistant against Siri (on her iPhone 4S). The results aren't surprising. Google's depth as a search provider proves its wherewithal against Apple, which calls Siri a personal assistant. But Jelly Bean's feature, used alongside Google Now, is every bit more and every bit what a digital assistant should be. Siri sucks even more, by comparison.

I will be absolutely clear: Together, Voice Assistant and Google Now represent a watershed development, living up to what Apple promises with Siri. Google has successfully presented its depth of search in a truly meaningful manner -- one that can change how people interact with mobile devices. If execution improves over time, particularly as Google Now learns personal habits, these innovations could be as important to the search giant as the development of its algorithm.

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Worthless. That's the description that best describes Microsoft's ambitious aQuantive acquisition, announced in May 2007. Today, after the market closed, the software giant announced a "non-tax-deductible income statement charge" of $6.2 billion booked last year. Fiscal 2012 closed June 30, so the timing has a deliberateness.

Microsoft probably should have told everyone before the quarter's close. Doing so today, during a big holiday week (Fourth of the July), mitigates the negative news. Lots of people are on vacation.

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I'm here in San Francisco, undeterred by cancelled and delayed flights, and it's madness. At 7 am PDT, when the doors were supposed to open, the line wrapped around and down the block and around the next one. Man, you should have come. I/O closes an exciting month of developer events -- Apple's WWDC, Microsoft's TechEd, Windows Phone and surprise Surface announcement. But the last word goes to Google, which is expected today to debut the Nexus tablet, expand cloud services and delight with lots more. I'm too rushed to go through them all.

The keynote commences at 9:30 am PDT -- that's 12:30 pm Eastern Time, and all updates here will be in chronological order reversed -- meaning newest first. You'll want to refresh often.

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