Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Changes How It Logs Search Analytics Data As Of December 14, 2015Dec 21, 2015 by Barry Schwartz Google documents a change to how it logs data for the Search Analytics […]
Traffic violation-avoidance app maker PhantomALERT has sued Waze/Google for copyright violations and related claims. The company contends that Waze stole its points of interest (POI) database after partnership negotiations broke down between the two companies. Google is named in the suit only as the legal owner of and successor to Waze. No specific Google wrongdoing […]
Freebase announces they will close up shop after migrating their data and APIs to Wikidata. How will this impact the Google Knowledge Graph?
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Foursquare will soon be charging a small number of partners to use its Venue Database. Recently Microsoft and Foursquare agreed to a $15 million investment/licensing deal that brings Foursquare content to Bing search results and Windows Mobile. According to the WSJ article: The New York startup is […]
Foursquare’s superuser program, now 40,000 people strong, is getting an overhaul. The company says it’ll soon launch an automated test that will make it easier for users to become superusers — they’re the ones with special privileges to edit business listings and venues in Foursquare’s database of 55 million places. (Non-superusers can only suggest changes […]
Big news for genealogists, historians and even for people just curious about their own families: the 1940 U.S. Census is now available on the web. Unfortunately, at this point at least, it takes a bit of skill and determination to navigate through the data, though there are many efforts underway to make this incredibly valuable […]
Continuing its move from being a traditional search engine to an “answer engine,” Ask today has announced that its “AnswerFarm” database has tripled in size, from 100 million Q&A pairs to 300 million. Ask says they’ve also improved the quality of the Q&A database content: “Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer […]
Powerset, the semantic search engine that Microsoft purchased in July, has been collaborating with Microsoft’s Live Search team on several projects designed to be released within 30 days. Microsoft is currently testing them on a small, randomly selected audience. The projects include:
According to the South Florida Business Journal, Florida will be working with Google “to create new search engine features for those looking for government services online.” Google will be indexing Florida state databases that are currently not discoverable via the Internet. Other states with similar programs include California, Arizona, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia. Google also […]
Northeastern sues Google over patent from The Boston Globe reports that Northeastern University and a company founded by a Northeastern professor, Kenneth P. Baclawski, is suing Google for patent infringement. The issue at hand in this case is that Northeastern has patented a method of storing database queries back in 1997. It wasn’t until about […]
Gary Price reports that Portfolio.com released a database of top executives profiles, and part of that list includes many of the top executives from our beloved search engines. Here are quick links to some of those profiles of interest:
A few weeks ago Steven Aldrich, a VP of strategy for small business software (and now marketing) company Intuit, delivered a speech in which he presented an amazing statistic. According to Aldrich, roughly 6 million businesses are started annually in the U.S. but another approximately 5.6 million go under. Think about it. From the point […]