Google employees are now eligible for quarterly awards of restricted Google stock worth $12 million vested over four years awarded to teams but distributed based on individual contribution. More details will be available after Google’s conference call with investors later today. The new plan is a way for Google to provide incentives for new employees with a $190 strike price….
Category Archives: Search
MSN Search relaunch
MSN Search relaunched with music and Encarta integration as well as RSS results. Bill Gates: “Input from millions of our customers – including me – was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be.”…
Technorati Tag API
Technorati opened up their tag API for anyone to query for posts associated with a tag. The query currently only returns Technorati’s own XML. Some other API changes now live: You can choose to not receive claimed weblog data for cosmos and search queries by setting the claim parameter to 0. Search query now has a limit parameter to allow for selective browsing. Cosmos query has a highlight parameter to highlight the anchor text within the excerpt….
Amazon visual yellow pages
Amazon’s A9 search engine added a business directory today with images of the business storefront alongside the address and a clickable telephone number. A search for Starbucks returns Starbucks locations within five miles of your Amazon.com default shipping address by default with thumbnail images for the business location and an overlay of a MapQuest map. You can even browse up or down the block to see surrounding storefronts. Very cool technology! In my sample searches I found Starbucks location in a mall or office park setting had an address that did not match the picture on the listing. Business owners…
Ben Goodger joins Google
Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox, just announced he started a new job at Google. He will still be “devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general” and work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly. Interesting move and it’s good to see Google giving back to the open-source community….
Managing the Technorati community
Starting Tuesday, February 1, I will start a new job as Community Manager at Technorati. I will be responsible for helping the world understand Technorati’s service offerings and providing developers with the tools they need to build and extend Technorati. I will help make your voices heard and build new features to strengthen the links we create while consuming and producing content. I am excited to be working with a team of smart and passionate people. Technorati is not the only company competing to be your live search destination and keep you informed of the latest happenings in the areas…
Technorati tags now supports Furl topics
Technorati just added support for Furl topics to its tag service. (via Bradley Allen)…
Feed aggregators and robot exlcusion
The world of feed aggregators has been compared to the HTML Internet of 1994 by Scott Rosenberg and others.. We are starting to consume and make sense of this new data, but there are currently no well-defined methods or implementations of selective consumption. If I publish content it is instantly available to feed aggregators and search companies with no restraints on its usage regardless of licensing and robot preferences. If a Major League Baseball launched a weblog for the private, non-commercial use of their audience there is nothing stopping companies from adding or supplementing the content without the consent of…
Dear Technorati: Play well with others
This week’s announcements from Technorati have been mixed with endorsements and a message that Technorati may work better with one weblog platform than another. The Technorati tags help file contains an inline advertisement for TypePad. I could understand the use of Flickr and del.icio.us as the current most prominent uses of tags by the online community, but endorsing a weblog hosting company in your help file stinks of paid placement. Adding rel=”tag” to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the…
Technorati launches Technorati Tags
Technorati launched Technorati Tags, a new, decentralized method of categorizing posts that also integrates with popular online communities del.icio.us and Flickr. Browse tags The front page displays a sampling of current popular tags sorted by UTF value. A tag’s popularity is expressed through font size: the more popular tags appear larger. Tag page Each tag has a page aggregating photos from Flickr, weblog posts indexed by Technorati, and del.icio.us links. Each page contains ten photographs, twenty posts, and fifteen links. http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + tag of your choice (no spaces) . Join the game of tag How can you be sure your…