We made some changes over the last several days, relating mostly to GlocalSearch, but also impacting GblogSearch.

Previously, GlocalSearch commingled address resolution results with local search results, providing things like “New York, NY 10038″ alongside “New York Pretzel” and “New York Cafe.” There’s now a method for indicating whether you want those address resolution results included. You can set this yourself or expose it to users with t

Today is the 5th Birthday of Yandex Direct, the leading contexual advertising system in Russia (think Adwords). The service was born on 31st July 2001 and powers both the Yandex search engine as well as several other leading Runet sites. …

The C Channel is building a multi-interest website that brings together 3 distinct sites - Travel, Shopping and Weddings. Each one features articles, destination profiles, vendor profiles and a whole load of new tools to attract a global audience. This includes the still young Travel Forum, and the Wedding Agenda, a promising tool that will be completely free and is due out in late 2006.
The C Channel network has also recently introduced The C Directories, 5 user-friendly directories of websites, blogs, online retailers and other sites categorized under thousands of differnet subjects

Baidu, China’s largest search engine and Hewlitt Packard have announced that all HP Pavilion and HP Presario series computers that are sold in China will come with Baidu already loaded. HP users will be able to use Baidu’s search engine …

Andy had reported on a new device developed by Callum Peden.

G-vision is a prototype of a device that will allow the user to compare a digital image of where they are with a Google database that, along with some GPS trickery should be able to tell them exactly where they are along with lots of other information available in the Google index that relates to that area.

Google Vision is a conceptual product developed by Callum Peden, for the worlds favorite search engine. The product provides the user with a truly unique information hub by combining GPS, OLED technology and advanced image recognition in the form of a retractable screen device.
As well as this, advanced image recognition will mean Google Vision can target well known landmarks. Then using the increased coverage of wireless internet, provide the user with information on their surroundings wherever they may be.

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry announced the results of the mobile content and commerce market research. It shows that the mobile content market grew to 722mil yen, which is 39% growth from the previous year.

The mobile content including …

Betsynote: Not to be outdone, Beau realized his officemate Ajay would be having a birthday…but here’s how Ajay tells it….

I’m Ajay, a graduate student from the Masters of Information Systems Management program at Carnegie Mellon; I’m a program manager intern working on Core search feature development

A very interesting post from Niall Kennedy about International Search, via OjoBuscador.
This data is very interesting, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. Gives great insight into the breakdown of interntional search. Take a look at the …

We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Toolbar is not only out of beta but also packed with new features to help you find precisely what you’re looking for, surf with powerful protection and personalize your experience on the Web. Since the toolbar is an add-in to the browser, these features are ubiquitously accessible from any web page

Despite the soaring prices in gas, Americans are still hitting the roads to travel in record numbers. You can make your drive, whether it is for work or for play, a little easier by getting live traffic updates with Google.
Launched today as an update to Google Maps for mobile, you can now access comprehensive information about traffic conditions in more than 30 major metropolitian areas, as well as partial information in many other areas.
To utilize the service, you will need to download Google Maps for mobile through your mobile web browser

Accoona has launched its search engine into the European zone - in fact western Europe. The search engine - which is on a .eu at www.accoona.eu searches by language - rather than country. Currently, the EU version runs …

Did you miss us? We haven’t spent quite as much time answering questions on the GWT group lately because the GWT engineering team has been heads-down the last few weeks, busily working on your most-requested features and squashing your most-reported bugs. In addition to the items already marked “Fix in Progress” on the issues list, the new version of GWT (coming in early August) will include LocalizationEasily localize strings and formatted mess

Interested in the most popular blogs in Italy ? Qix offers a list of the top 200 blogs providing an insight as to what Italians are following, and trends in Italian blogging. Politics (Beppe Grillo) , Blogging (WordPress), Search Engines …

Google announced its 2nd Quarter earnings today after the close of the market, exceeding analyst expectations. Google said it earned $721 million, or $2.33 per share for the period ending June 30th. This figures are up from $328 million, or $1.19 per share a year ago.
Sales surged to $2.46 billion, up 77%, as Google placed more contextually targeted ads alongside its search results

Given the recent activity on the message board, here’s an update on some of the key validation problems that affected people earlier in the week. There were two distinct, but somewhat related issues at hand, both of which have been resolved.

First, people received errors because “GSearchControl” was undefined

I just stumbled upon Google’s official Google video blog, and guess what they’ve just added! If you find a cool video that you want to share with someone, you can do that, but if you see a special moment within the video you can link directly to that moment and the video will start there. Here’s what it says on the Google video blog:

Now you can email links to specific points inside a video! All you have to do is add the time you’d like to share to the end of a video’s URL. We support hours (h), minutes (m), and seconds (s).

For example, Invisible Board is a 1 min 46 sec long video but I believe the coolest part is at 1 min 26 sec, so all I have to do is add #1m26s to the link I’m going to send to my friends! Just like this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6396990712930217422#1m26s

TAGora is a Research Project funded by the European Union. The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction and social networks.

The project will develop along several lines:

A systematic and …

Mobile Research with goo, a project run by goo research and Japan.internet.com, announced the results of the Mobile Search research.

1083 mobile users in Japan participated in the research, 43.4% male and 56.6% female.

Yahoo mobile is the most popular search site …

I feel like I’m always expecting packages.  In fact, I have been receiving a steady stream of packages for the last five months because my husband and I are remodeling our 1930 house we recently purchased.
At first it was fun, kind of like having a birthday everyday — but then it got challenging to keep track of everything that we had ordered.  Using the package tracking features on the various shipping companies’ websites became a tedious daily ritual. 
But, how cool is this?  I got to be part of solving my own problem through my work.  I am a Program Manager on Instant Answers and my team and I just finished developing a new Instant Answer that has since alleviated the annoyances of tracking all my packages.  Now I can go to MSN Search  to track packages from any of four providers, FedEx, DHL, UPS, and USPS.  I no longer have to navigate to four distinct sites and follow four processes to see the status of my packages

Here’s some recent changes we’ve made to Reader that we thought you’d like to know about: Reading list ordering defaults: Your reading list can be sorted in different ways (by date or “automatically”, which shows you more relevant items first). Additionally, it can have read items hidden or always visible. Until this week, the default combination was to sort automatically and show read items. Unfortunately, this meant that new items did not nece

Only a few days ago, another search engine was born in Spain. Migoa, a newborn multilingual search engine, currently in beta phase, aims to take away the hassle of broad search results, by scouting through countless results to deliver highly …

As per August 1st one can no longer keep their personal information secret in the DK-Hostmaster [The danish body responsible for handeling the .dk domain] database.

Up until August anyone could choose to hide their personal information from the who-is quesries …

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Bill Donahue’s Openfount, a library that lets you use GWT without running a web server by leveraging Amazon’s S3 service. Read more about it on Jon Udell’s blog.

 
My name is Beau Hollis.  I’m a grad student at the University of Florida, and as of today, I’m 23 years old.  I’m a Program Manager Intern for Windows Live Search.  I help define the user experience for the Windows Live Search page.  I really love my job and my team, and of course, all the great friends I have made out here

Bruce Perry just published a nice GWT tutorial over at XML.com, walking through GWT Ant build configuration, RPCs, and using GWT RemoteServiceServlets with Tomcat.

As we noted earlier, we’re hosting our first-ever Conference on Test Automation in London in September.
We’ve heard from many interested parties, and now have 13 excellent presentations lined up. Now we are soliciting people who want to attend. Because we expect lots of interest and space is limited, we’re asking everyone who’s interested to write a short note (400 words or less) on why you want to be there. There’s an easy form for requestin

A blog service provider, Hot Link announced the results of blog/SNS usage survey in Japan.

59.2% of blog owners said that the ads appear on their blog, and 67.2% said that they’ve clicked the ads on the blogs.

66.0% answered that they …

According to the Chinese IT market research firm Analysys International, Baidu still holds the lead among China’s search engines. In the first quarter of 2006 Baidu had 43.9 % of the search engine market share with Yahoo! China in …

GWT developers have been energetic in the past few weeks. A few examples: Ryan Dewsbury created GWT-powered gpokr, a cool multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold’Em implementation with real-time chat. Our favorite office time-waster is Mark Roth ’s GWT Hang Man. Another developer has also started work on a more ambitious photo-sharing site called myNetImages, built with GWT. Check out the GWT Site blog for a nice collection of links and information.
On t

Almost nine out of ten Icelanders aged from 14 to 74 are using the Internet. Most of the use it daily and 31% has used the Internet to shop online. 85% of those accessing the Internet are using high speed …

Google Israel team (CEO and seniors) meet leading Israeli SEM companies

Abondance tells us that the Agence pour l’innovation industrielle (Industrial Innovation Agency) gave an update this week on progress with regard to 6 of its projects including the European search engine project ‘Quaero’. The project has a budget of …

We launched the Google AJAX Search API as a Version 0.1 so that we could take a little bit of time to gather feedback from developers. We’ve been reading the developer forum and taking note of your feedback on the current API, as well as suggestions that would make integrating it into your applications easier and more seamless.

One feature that several people have requested is the ability to control link targets in the search results, since links were being uniformly created with target=”_blank”