Google might be synonymous with the word search in most of the world, but that hasn't dissuaded others from bringing new search engines to the market, usually aiming to innovate in an area where Google has somehow let up its guard. Volunia, launched this week, promises to help searchers with three distinguishing features: High level site previews in search results A multimedia search within a site function A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most apprecia [...]

Related Topics: Features | Features: General | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Engines: Video Search Engines | Top News

Bitly currently is the leader in shortned URLs, minimizing 80 million URLs each day. Not only is Bitly shrinking URLs, but they are now "crawling & classifying" each shortened URL thanks to a a new social search platform. An index has since been created that will allow searchers to view the most distributed, viral and highest clicked links on the web. Currently these results can be seen when using the new "reputation monitoring" tool that is being released to enterprise users; a traditional search engine will not accompany this platform. Bitly makes a case for their real-time sear [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Site & Enterprise Search

I suspect someone is going to successfully build Google's "contextual discovery engine" before Google does. The newest company to make a run at what Marissa Mayer was talking about is Clever Sense with its new app "Alfred" (formerly called Seymour). Intended to be a demonstration of Clever Sense's underlying data extraction and machine learning technologies, Alfred creates a personalized "interest graph" that then serves up local recommendations for places you'll like. But you can also search in a more conventional way. Of course Clever Sense isn't the first company to create a "recommen [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines

Google announced they have launched a new URL shortener just for official Google use. The new URL is g.co. Google said this URL will only be used to link to official Google properties, explaining it is reserved "just for Google websites." Google explained that "you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service." Back in December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service at goo.gl for public use. Google said that non-Google properties can be linked to using the goog.gl URL shortener but g.co is only for Google use. TechCrunch says that single letter .co [...]

Related Topics: Google: Toolbar | Search Engines: Social Search Engines

Since early 2006 I've been writing about the "offline future of online shopping." And since that time a collection of startups has been working, mostly under the radar, to bring real-time local product inventory data to the internet. In November of 2010 Google joined that effort with local product search. Now when you do a product search Google will show you local store availability -- mostly at large retail chains. However, Google just said in a blog post that it's also going to make local product availability a feature of Place Pages: When you provide Google with local product availabil [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages | Google: Product Search | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Social Search Engines