The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have released a new version of my favorite search browser plugin named Inquisitor. The upgrade makes the Apple Safari search plugin faster, cleaner, and multi-lingual.

By faster, Yahoo has integrated Inquisitor with BOSS, enabling a faster return on your Yahoo queries. Yahoo has cleaned up both the Inquisitor home page and the client to be simpler and more streamlined. Finally, Yahoo has expanded the language support to Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Here is a screen shot of the new client in action:

The Google Like/Don’t Like feature, where you can move up results, hide search results, or remove search results, seems to have been expanded to a group of test searchers.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Google Operating System, and Justin Hileman, with reports of users seeing this feature in the main search results. Justin does an excellent job taking us through each feature with screen shots.

I personally have never seen an implementation of this on any of my searches. But I know Google has been testing this over the course of the year.

Yahoo has acquired my favorite search browser plugin for Apple Safari, Inquisitor. Inquisitor is an extremely useful search refinement and search aid tool for the Apple browser market. Inquisitor offers autocomplete, refinements, suggestions, and also allows you to add any search engine you like, plus create your own personalized and advanced query operators, much like OpenSearch.

I spoke with Ariel Seidman, the director of product management for this product, and he answered a number of questions I had about the acquisition.

David Watanabe is the developer behind Inquisitor, and he is also the developer behind a few other popular Mac products, including Acquisition P2P, NewsFire RSS, and Xtorrent P2P. I asked Ariel if Yahoo is just buying Inquisitor or all the assets of Watanabe. Ariel told me Yahoo is only buying Inquisitor.

David Watanabe will work for Yahoo as an independent consultant for an unspecified amount of time. The reason is to enable Yahoo’s developers to learn the product and help with future upgrades. Watanabe should have more information about his role at Yahoo and what this means for current customers at his blog.

I asked Ariel Seidman why they have decided to acquire the product. He said the answer is basically threefold. First, the way inquisitor handles inline results, especially for navigational queries is very clever. Second, the search plugin allows people to easily integrate 3rd party search engines. Finally, it will expand awareness of Yahoo Search with the Safari browser market.

Seidman explained that Yahoo will be changing Inquisitor to default to Yahoo Search as the primary engine of choice. Yes, you will be able to change the default setting at any time. So if you prefer Live or Google, you can change it to those engines or add your own.

Ariel Seidman said he personally has been using the product since August 2007. He championed the idea of acquiring it at Yahoo and Vish Makhijani, the general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search, backed him. Vish is also a huge fan and user of Inquisitor and supported the idea of acquiring the tool.

Inquisitor is currently monetized through voluntary donations and embedded Amazon affiliate links. Yahoo will remove the affiliate links and stop accepting donations immediately.

Inquisitor will remain a standalone product and continue to be a separate brand from Yahoo. The inquisitorx.com domain will continue to be the location where you download the plugin and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

I asked Ariel if Yahoo would somehow incorporate any of the technology from Inquisitor into Yahoo Search. Ariel said, “it is fair to say that Inquisitor DNA” can show up in Yahoo products in the future. He did not give any specific examples of how or when, but said it was possible.

Finally, Yahoo would not disclose the acquisition price, nor did Yahoo expand on any future applications of Inquisitor outside of what I have mentioned above.

Finally, if you are an Inquisitor fan, I wrote a detailed post on tips on how to customize Inquisitor. It may be of help to some of your Safari users.

Google has rolled out a new experimental feature that allows anyone to alter search results in the way they like. You can move good results higher, hide ones you think are bad and suggest your own.

Google was spotted testing this feature with selected users back in August and September, and then Googlified spotted it going live this week for anyone to use.

As you can see from the screen capture below, this new feature enables users to vote up a search result or completely remove a search result from the index.

Clicking the up arrow will promote the search result to the top spot for that keyword search and place an orange marker on that result to classify the result as being pushed up. Using the X icon will hide the result from being displayed.

Google explains:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

Google launched Google Experimental Search in May of this year at where features such as Like/Don’t Like are made available for testing by anyone. You’ll also find these other features there:

• Alternate views for search results
• Keyword suggestions
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Left-hand search navigation
• Right-hand contextual search navigation

There is currently a lot of discussion around this discovery at Techmeme.

Microsoft Ad Push Is All About You at the Wall Street Journal has a nice overview of how Microsoft’s behavioral targeting ad software works, nothing ground breaking, but a nice overview. I’ll quote a piece of the article for you:

Here’s how it works: If someone types in “compare car prices” on Live Search, Microsoft’s computers note that the person is probably considering buying a vehicle. The computers then check with the list of Hotmail accounts to see if they have any information on the person. If they do, and an auto maker has paid Microsoft to target this type of person, the computer will automatically send a car ad when she next looks at a Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should see more ads that are of interest to them. “We know what Web sites they have visited and what key words they used,” says Mr. Dobson. “We can deduce what their interests are.” Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76%.

The rest of the article discusses the competitive landscape.

Decipho officially launched on December 14th after having been available since October. It’s an interesting search engine because it takes the concept of social search another stage further, while at the same time offering very useful personalisation.

There are lots of things that you can do with it, but I would recommend registering and then uploading a list of your bookmarks to start you off. Unfortunately these have to be from your browser, rather than any other bookmarking services at the moment. Once you’ve done that, take a look at the search interface itself. Very straightforward, following the Google model of having little on the screen other than the search box, although Decipho is offering a couple of interesting extras – a shops/services box and research/info box with a slider bar underneath.

If you start with a straightforward search your results are pulled out and made available in 2 columns. The left hand one gives a maximum of 40 ‘regular results’ while the right is a collection of ‘my results’. The set of ‘my results’ is based on websites that feature in your uploaded listing of bookmarks (and what a useful way to find material that you’ve lost in there!), and it will also find any websites that you’ve previously ranked, and those will be added as well.

Users are able to categorise websites into the shopping/research categories previously mentioned or into personal categories that they can create for themselves. These categories also appear when a user runs a search, to another way of limiting results.

So far, so good, but there is more with this particular search engine.

Once a search has been run, users are prompted with options to expand a search with various suggested terms, although ‘expand’ really isn’t quite accurate, as a lot of the suggestions will actually narrow a search very quickly.

Searchers can also use the the slider bar to manipulate their results even more. This is the ’social meter’ which allows you to select what percentage a websites user ranking for a specific category must be equal or greater than. To be honest, I’ve read and re-read the description of how this is supposed to work, and I still don’t fully understand it, and when I tried it out it seemed to have no effect at all. Hopefully you will have better luck!

Another nice feature that I liked was the ability for website owners to claim their sites, and add their own information. This can best be seen by doing a search for decipho and clicking on the ‘owners message’ under the result.

All told, it’s an interesting approach to marrying together social and personalised search options . If you have a spare 5 minutes it’s worth trying out.