search Archive

Earlier this week, we took a look into the offices of Russian search engine giant Yandex. Today Yandex has announced a new partnership with Facebook in which Yandex will integrate information from the social network on the Yandex website. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the partnership announcement, “Yandex makes its services more attractive for the users of social networks, including those with a Facebook account. So, the portal’s front page hosts a Facebook widget and the company’s own instant messaging service Ya.Online informs its users of new notifications on the networking website. In addition, Yandex will now add the data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created pages’ indexing. Specifically, Facebook will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its Pages and profiles created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.”

If you click the Facebook widget (seen below), it does request access to basically your entire Facebook account. This is different than the Like badges seen on many blogs and websites.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook, noted regarding the new partnership, “We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex.”

By now most of us have seen inside the Google offices via photos like the ones HongKiat put together of Google’s locations around the world. Stephen from Office Snapshots has some photos from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, California. We’ve covered Russian search engine Yandex several times and I know you were left wondering what their offices look like and how they differ from the offices of U.S. search engines.

Here’s a look (translated)  into the Yandex office at nighttime. EnglishRussia notes, “The office works round-the-clock seven days a week. There is no provision for time of coming and leaving of employees – you can work at night if you want, but must do your work well…The only thing they don’t have – sofas. It is made specially that employees go home at least to sleep.” They have smoking rooms as well – something I am guessing Google does not offer as part of their compensation package.

Here are a few of the photos I liked – check out the full gallery for a full office photo tour.

They grow plants inside the office – those lights help the plants grow

Continue reading “A Look Inside the Offices of Russian Search Engine Yandex” »

It’s amazing how much awesome technology is available for little kids today. When I was a little kid, I had a Fisher-Price cash register and thought that was awesome. That was until Transformers came around – even today any kid would take Optimus or Starscream over an iPad. Startup advisor Louis Gray and others have posted videos of their young kids interacting with his iPhone and even at their young age, the kids seem to know which buttons to press for the desired action!

Russia-based semantic search engine Quintura has released a version of their Kids search engine for the iPad and iPhone. I’ve included a sample screenshot from the app below. The search app uses Quintura’s cloud technology to refine the results for a search query. From the overview, “The cloud features most popular concepts that we pick up from the texts from most relevant web pages. This helps you define the best direction for further searching and refine your query.”

Quintura uses a manual selection process for the search results to make sure the available sites are kid-friendly.

The Quintura Kids for iPhone/iPad app is available for an intro price of $1.99.

Privacy-friendly Google search scraper Scroogle has posted a message today that their service no longer works due to the new Google search interface. The Scroogle service had been running since 2002.

From Scroogle, “We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we’ve been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago.”

Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, posted the message and notes, “Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it. ”

Brandt concludes with his thoughts on Google and Microsoft, “Microsoft made a decision for corporate protectionism, and even today many people will never forgive them for their past arrogance. Let’s hope Google doesn’t do the same thing. It’s not as if Google needs the money — but then, neither did Microsoft.”

I am not a fan of the new Google interface – maybe over time I will accept the changes but overall they just didn’t seem needed. Some say they were made to copy Bing but no one I’ve spoken with uses Bing unless they come through a paid ad or are using the cashback engine.

Chris Williams at The Register has more thoughts on the topic of privacy related to Google search.

Yandex has started powering search contextual ads on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Here is a screenshot and link to search result page on Bing.com for a search query “Туры” (Tours) that displays Yandex.Direct advertisements both above the Bing.com’s search results and alongside them (to the right).

Yandex has announced a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing on its blog. The Yandex.Direct ads has been tested on Bing since September 2009.  The blog post said that “in so far, a share of Bing in Russia is not that big, but [Yandex] is very glad that one of the world’s largest companies has decided to monetize in RuNet with a help of Yandex’s contextual technologies”.

Bing holds 0.8% search market share in Russia, behind Yandex with 58.3%, Google with 23.0%, Mail.ru with 10.2%, and Rambler with 3.8%, according to LiveInternet.ru. Yandex held 54.5% of searches in Russia, Google – 34.5%, Mail.ru – 7.4%, Rambler – 1.9%, Bing – 0.4%, said comScore last August.

Since the Russian contextual advertising market is vauled at $400 million per year, Yandex powering search ads on Bing will translate in several million in additional annual revenues for both Yandex and Microsoft.

Continue reading “Yandex to Power Search Ads on Bing” »

We’ve written before about the big deals you can sometimes find using the Bing cashback search. Tonight I found (via Fatwallet) that you can grab 15% on some purchases at Dell by starting at Bing.

Click here to view the search results for Dell on Bing. At the top of the results, you will see a sponsored result for Dell that displays the “Bing Cashback” link. Click that link and the Bing Cashback page will be displayed and then you can select if you want to browse products on the Business side or the Home side.

Here are the terms and conditions that were provided to me tonight:

• Shop at Dell Today and Earn 15% Bing CashBack
• Offer applies to purchases on Dell Home & Home Office and Small & Medium Business on this visit only.
• Purchases from Dell Outlet, Dell Public or Large Enterprise stores are NOT eligible for this offer.
• Dell reserves the right to end or change this offer at any time.
• View all Bing.com CashBack terms and conditions.

Fatwallet users are reporting that the cashback works on any product (e.g. laptop, monitor, mp3, tv, etc.) but as always, check the current terms and conditions before making any purchase to verify that the Bing Cashback applies to the specific item(s) you are interested in.

I haven’t used Bing Cashback yet, but if the 15% is around on Sunday, I may finally purchase a Wii.

I first met the founders of Germany-based search engine Faroo at Techcrunch40 in 2007. I enjoyed our chat and learning about their product which at the time was a P2P search engine.

This week they have launched a new search which they refer to as the, “Real-Time Social Discovery and Search”. Faroo notes that the new offering is a, “crowd-sourced approach to search, offering the discovery of new and relevant Web documents within minutes of their being published”

The new Faroo real-time search looks pretty interesting especially as you can’t attend a tech event without someone mentioning the concept of real-time search. Search results can be ordered by popularity or timeline. I can’t quite tell how they are getting their index as my startup post this morning shows a time of one-hour ago and a post on my startup’s blog this afternoon isn’t in their search results. I assume they are only indexing top and/or popular sources.

Some of the other features include:

• Tag search – refine your search based on a tag
• Preview – mouse over a result and see a visual preview before clicking to the destination
• Multi-language support – search results can include non-English language results
• RSS support – Users can subscribe to search results via RSS which can be useful for Google Reader and Friendfeed

You can also jump to search results on Wikipedia, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube.

Continue reading “Faroo Launches Real-Time Search Engine” »