Google now offers shuttle service from San Francisco to Mountain View every day. The shuttle averages 155 employees a day and has wireless Internet access onboard. Sweet! Makes all the city folk want work at Google even more than before….
Category Archives: Search
FeedMesh
There is some interesting work going on at Camp Foo this weekend. A peering network for weblog or site update notifications as well as a method for pulling down new entries from a server instead of the entire feed….
Google looking for Executive Protection Specialist
Google is looking to hire persons as an Executive Protection Specialist. Trained in protective driving and knowledge of surveillance, counter-surveillance and technical surveillance countermeasures. I am sure this is common practice among Fortune 500 companies but the times are changing for Google….
Blabble natural language weblog search
Internet Retailer has an article about Blabble, a weblog search company that incorporates natural language processing when parsing weblogs. Blabble just entered its public beta stage on Monday. Take a look at a report for Bourne Supremacy for a better idea of what Blabble is offering that is different than Feedster or Technorati. The software can search the database for relevant words, phrases, and even within defined time frames to gauge how often bloggers referred to a product by hour, day, week and more. It also can search for the same idea as expressed by phrases composed of different language….
Economist on Microsoft search
The Economist takes a look at Ask MSR, Dr. Eric Brill’s attempt to deliver a direct answer to a search question. “Ask MSR is still a prototype, although Microsoft is trying to improve it and it may be launched commercially under the name AnswerBot.” Eric Brill and Radu Soricut recently authored a paper on factoid questions. We build our QA system around a noisy-channel architecture which exploits both a language model for answers and a transformation model for answer/question terms, trained on a corpus of 1 million question/answer pairs collected from the Web. Our evaluations show that our system achieves…
Feedster partners with The Washington Post for best blogs awards
Feedster has partnered with The Washington Post to help readers nominate weblogs for the Best Blogs awards. “Categories include Best Rant, Democratic Party Coverage, Republican Party Coverage, Campaign Dirt, Inside the Beltway, Outside the Beltway, International, Class Clown, Most Original and Most Likely to Last beyond Election Day.”…
Technorati receives new funding
Om Malik reports that Technorati either has or is about to close its first round of funding. $6.5 million at a company valuation of around $12 million. (via Anil Dash)…
Yahoo! Search blog
Yahoo! now has their own search blog. It is powered by Movable Type. Jeremy Zawodny has some more information as well. Jeff Weiner, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search, has the first post. Comment threads are open. They even link to the Google Blog….
Athens 2004 Web site linking policy
The official Web site of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has a hyperlink policy they would like all Web sites to adhere to. “Use the term Athens 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent.”Send a request letter to the Internet Department with a description of your site, reason for linking, the unique URL containing, the link, and your e-mail contact. How odd. Such policies never work, and might serve as a nice way to aggregate news coverage. I am sure the official site of the Olympics does not need the PageRank help….
Feedster to add RSS advertising
Feedster plans to incorporate contextual advertising from Kanoodle in its RSS search subscriptions. Feedster will also sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds. There will be one advertisement every sixth headline and users can pay $10 a year for a feed without advertisements. The ad-free feed will be licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The eWeek article mentions the dispute regarding advertising in RSS feeds. I have no issue with advertising in RSS feeds and realize that it is bound to happen just as e-mail carries advertising messages as a trade-off for the costs of production….