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.”

Find more stories about: Facebook, search, social media, Social Networking, 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

This is awesome – the walls in most of the office are setup as whiteboards – so employees can write wherever they need to. I actually really like this idea – even just for a sign-in wall for the entryway!

Here is the 2,000th Yandex employee

Here’s the plan if this search engine thing doesn’t work out – form a rock band!

There’s a gym in the Yandex office – my Russian isn’t that great but I believe the guy is saying, “Let’s see Larry or Sergey do this!”

Find more stories about: Russia, search, 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.

Find more stories about: iPad, iphone, mobile, Quintura, search

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.

Find more stories about: Google, Scroogle, 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.

Yakov Sadchikov is the President & CEO of visual search engine Quintura.

Find more stories about: Bing, online advertising, search, Yakov Sadchikov, Yandex

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.

Find more stories about: Bing, cashback, Dell, money, search

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.

My only concern is that they might consider rebranding to the “mashable real-time search engine” as nearly every page is overwhelmed with Mashable posts. If they are using Twitter as a backbone for search results then I guess it makes sense as Mashable gets a ton of retweets and shares partly due to their default list status. (side note, I would say the same thing if it was any other blog as well)

I’d caution Faroo and all other real-time search engines to be careful to be viewed as only showing news from one source or one category. We’ve seen this with other search engines and it seems that their staying power is typically reduced when not showing a good level of diversity — not just tech news and certainly not just news from one source. This is one of the pain points as using a service like Twitter which will always feature the most active users.

For example, where is the news about the plane that was hijacked in Mexico? You only see it if you switch to timeline view and reduce the time to 1 hour – I’d suggest that the default results start with the most current results, not the most popular.

Find more stories about: Faroo, Germany 2.0, realtime, search, startups

Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google – could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

Find more stories about: Bitstrips, Google, search

It seems search engines are all the rage these days with a variety of launches over the past couple of months. Today Valley-based Surf Canyon and Ukraine-based Search Cloudlet have combined their technologies to create a new search engine.

Both companies previously offered browser plugins. We first reviewed Surf Canyon late last year and CEO Mark Cramer explained how the service works. Cramer explained how the application works — basically you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo as you always do. You select a search result and go to that page. If that page isn’t what you were looking for, when you come back to the search result, Surf Canyon looks at results 11-1000 and then recommends other results similar to the one you clicked on. It ignores results you skipped over because it recognizes you weren’t interested in those results.

We reviewed Search Cloudlet also late last year and the service provides a way to refine a search query by clicking on words in tag clouds.

The new search engine uses the technology from both companies to help searchers refine their queries to find exactly what they are looking for. Another similar service is offered by Russian-based Quintura.

Update: AltSearchEngines and Webware have additional coverage.

Find more stories about: search, Surf Canyon

Last week was all about Bing and Wave – both products the respective companies believe will change something about what we do online. Master search engine journalist Danny Sullivan has an indepth review of Bing which is worth reading (along with his partners comparison review).

In the ”coming soon” video, Microsoft classifies Bing as a “decision engine”. The video makes it seem like a search engine.

Whether you classify Bing as a decision engine or a search engine, whether you compare Bing to Google or any other engine, I have one question for Microsoft….

WHY NOT USE LIVE.COM?

Something tells me that Microsoft hired an expensive agency which eventually (after large payments) came up with the name Bing. I’ve sat through hundreds of these type of presentations over my career and have found it funny how many times the agency misses what’s right in front of them. Now maybe the Bing name was developed in-house. Frankly it really doesn’t matter where Bing came from (note, when I hear bing, I think of the bing-bong chime on the subway when the doors close).

Live is nearly a perfect name. All of the social media techies are in love with “real-time” and Google and other engines have talked about wanting to add more real-time activities into their results. Microsoft could have worked towards branding Live as THE real-time results/decision/search engine. Real-time = Live. Everything inside of Bing could have been included along with the real-time results.

Will Bing be the next Google or the next Cuil? Who knows at this point but what I do know is that had they used the Live name for the brand, they would have been further down the better path.

Perhaps in future ads and videos we will learn what the Bing name actually means and why it was chosen for this new brand.

Find more stories about: Bing, Microsoft, search, search engine strategies, windows live

Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to WordPress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

Find more stories about: CenterNetworks, drupal, Google, search, wordpress

Earlier this year Ask.com signed a deal with NASCAR racing to be the “official search partner” for the racing network. It sure seems like these days the “official” notation just means whoever will pay the most. Danny Sullivan has a good recap of the NASCAR search deal.

This weekend I noticed that Ask.com is now partnering with TNA wrestling.  You can see a screenshot of the promo below. Basically the announcer mentioned a trivia question and said you could go to Ask.com and after entering the full question, you will be provided with the correct answer. The concept has some potential although I think it will work better for NASCAR than TNA.

With the NASCAR deal, Ask.com controls the search on the nascar.com website. The official TNA website has a search engine in the middle of the page however it takes you to a site called SwagBucks with a search that is powered by Google and Ask. Even more interesting, the search results don’t seem to match the query very well. For example, a search for one of their current roster of wrestlers, Scott Steiner, brings me to a generic results page with not one result from the TNA website.

Perhaps the new Ask Jeeves character needs a DDT or a Hulkster legdrop to get his mind right about how site search results should work. 

Find more stories about: ask.com, nascar, search

Former Techcrunch editor Ouriel Ohayon is reporting via The Globes that social search Delver has been acquired by Sears. Yes, the powertools and "sponsored conversations" company Sears. The acquisition price for the Israeli-based startup was not disclosed. Ouriel notes that the price is probably not that high as the company was running out of cash.

Delver raised $4 million in a Series A round. About a month ago the company announced that they would either sell or close the company as they were unable to raise another round of funding the tune of $6-8 million.

The Globes notes, "Delver co-founder and CEO Liad Agmon will move to the US and become a VP at Sears. Delver’s employees will continue to work in Israel and the company will operate as a Sears’ development center."

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, Israel, Quick News, search, social search

In case you are seeking employment in the product management field, q&a service Mahalo is hiring. Check out the full job description on Craigslist. It’s important to know that you must be "THE BEST" to apply for this position. Some other important notes from the posting:

• you will work hard
• it’s "life-changing"
• it’s an "incredible" opportunity
• you must be ready everyday to "kill it" – yes, based on twitter messages, it does mean everyday
• you will work hard

It’s got to be tough around Mahalo these days… what’s happened lately you ask?

• they shut down their greenhouse
• in the new upcoming greenhouse, many of the tasks will be moved to Manila  or to the buck-a-post answers system
• Andy Beal claimed that Mahalo is involved in a "pagerank funneling link scheme"
• Leah D’Emilio – host of the very popular Mahalo Daily video show quit this week – the show will move to a weekly format to become profitable
• Apparently while they only want "the best" – they did hire a felon. Apparently Jason’s HR department forgot to do a quick Google check on their employee.

My questions about the felonious hire are…

• Once the Mahalo executives found out about this situation, did they share the news with the rest of the employees?
• What about the Mahalo team in Manila – have they been checked?
• I think there’s a difference between giving a person a second chance after they have served their time and keeping a person who has yet to be sentenced on the payroll
• While Jason plays down the security fears some of Mahalo’s users might have, they are now accepting money from users on Answers. While I am guessing the number of people who have deposited their own money is less than 10, I think those people are due some answers.
• Rafe at CNET asks similar questions about trust with regards to Mahalo going forward and Rafe also wonders if we should trust any Web service that has a convicted hacker on the payroll

Let’s hope next week is a better one for Mahalo!

Find more stories about: jobs, Mahalo, Quick News, search

The recent skittles twitter campaign used a feature in limited testing at twitter. It’s called integrated search, or real-time search. You could see it at work Sunday & Monday on the skittles.com homepage, or in the picture here taken from a deck by Fred Wilson and covered recently on Cnet. New search results are posted to the top of a search results page in real-time, effectively transforming search into conversation.

It has the effect of aggregating conversation within twitter, by threading posts around the search phrase or keyword. This strikes me as a potential game-changer for twitter, for several reasons.

We currently hold "conversations" on twitter with followers. We have to search to find non-followers around topics. But there are barriers to bringing them into the conversation. Results are past results, and we have to follow/be followed back before conversation becomes possible.

So conversations tend to happen between people who follow each other. If they are topical, they tend not to mention the topic. And this makes them less easy to find in search. Twitter addressed this recently. If there has been conversation between users (using @replies), it is now visible with the "show conversation" link.

But there are limitations to the usefulness of the "show conversation" implementation:

• to engage in that conversation would require that we follow and are followed back
• "conversations" are often off topic, or get off topic quickly
• the focus is on the people @replying to each other, not on keywords

"Show conversations" doesn’t really capture conversations, but captures an exchange between users who have @replied each other. Only the first tweet in the exchange has to contain the search keyword.

Twitter certainly realizes that it needs to searchable. But it also realizes that search results are limited to our use of search words and phrases. And limited by the fact that we have only 140 characters at our disposal. If twitter went after conversationality, it could do so only by aggregating the conversation around an exchange between users who follow one another — not around topics.

The following-follower model that has made twitter so incredibly viral has been a constraint on conversations. Each of us has only a small window through with to see what a small number of people are talking about. And only a limited means of capturing and sustaining conversation with people around a topic.

The theoretical description of this problem is this: tweets are only loosely coupled. They are loosely coupled between users, and loosely coupled by topic:

• Tweets are not coupled to each other unless they include an @reply or D message. The latter doesn’t count for public conversations. @replies only count if our account settings are to set generously (there are three settings).
• Tweets tend not to sustain topics because they must be so short, because we tend to initiate and then drop and change what we tweet about, and because the twitterverse serves the purpose of talking about and creating news. In news, we are more likely to pass something along than to engage in discussion.

Twitter was designed in such a way to prohibit conversations. Not intentionally, of course, but symptomatically. Conversations require a kind of coupling between statements and responses, and people in conversation, that twitter makes incredibly hard to achieve.

Find more stories about: Adrian Chan, chat, Quick News, search, social search, Twitter