In the UK alone, more than 20 per cent of subscribers are expected to have access to mobile internet at broadband speeds by the end of 2007, which should prompt a dramatic increase in the use of search engines via mobile phones. The initiative will come as a surprise to Google and Yahoo!, which have lost no time in striking deals with mobile operators and handset makers. But the mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service.

Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Creative Commons license…

As the video-sharing phenomenon spreads worldwide, one of the few local sites to tackle the YouTube behemoth has emerged in the heart of Old Europe. With 9,000 new videos pouring in each day and daily page views surpassing the 16 million mark, Paris-based site Daily Motion looks poised to grab a piece of Europe’s fastest-growing online audience.

Techcrunch reports that Google may have narrowed down the online spreadsheet arena. Apparently a Hebrew blog is reporting that Google has hired the founders of iRows, an online, AJAX-powered spreadsheet program, and as part of the deal, iRows will be closed down.

Bloggers are reporting that Skype is now available as part of Google’s “Google pack” download. Others are reporting that Google’s own IM/Chat/VoIP client Gtalk is missing. Gtalk is not missing. [Continue Reading >>]

Ed Oswald of Betanews writes that Yahoo is planning to integrate a AJAX-powered version of Yahoo! chat into the web-based Yahoo mail application. The new client is expected to debut in early 2007, and will be a direct competitor to Google’s Gmail / Talk integration.

Yahoo must be a step ahead of Google on this one.

Yahoo Food. Of course Google lets you make your own search engine, so you could create your very own Google food to fit your tastes.

UPDATE: Google food does exist. Via Blog outer court.

With all the hype people are giving Google over Writely, Google spreadsheets, google calendar etc, people are forgetting about the other people who where there first. For example, Oddpost was there before Gmail with a really cool AJAX user interface in some ways nicer than Gmail, before getting bought by Yahoo!

I just want to draw attention to 37 signals and their great products. Go check them out. They’re not all free, but they’re really cool.

I just ran accross some more competition for Google’s online word processing and Spreadsheet applications. Zoho is a complete office suite offering free online word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation applications. Zoho also offers some other interesting productivity tools and utilities.

Apparently Microsoft wants to set search.msn.com as the default search site in their new version of Internet Explorer. Although this appears fairly logical to me, Google is up in arms about it, taking the case to the Justice Department. Microsoft’s new browser will have a search box that defaults to their search engine (MSN). This seems a bit hypocritical on Google’s part, since the popular open-source browser Firefox ships this Google as the default search engine in it’s built-in search box.

An article in the New York Times has some more information:

The new browser [Internet Explorer 7] includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft’s MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors.

The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990’s.

Read the rest of this article in the New York Times.

Google bought Writely several weeks ago, in an attempt to challenge Microsoft’s domination of the Word processing market. Ajaxwrite a new Javascript powered online word processor brought to us by Ajaxlaunch, is now offering some pretty stiff competition. AjaxWrite is platform independant, the only requirement is a Firefox browser, and you can access, create and save Word documents from any computer. AjaxWrite doesn’t offer all the options that MS Word offers, but admittedly, Word has so many obscure functions, that instead of enhancing your productivity, it can hamper it. I personally hate the “personalized” menus. I’m way faster if I can always count on a menu option being in the exact same place. For that matter, I prefer keyboard commands. For me they are a lot faster. Anyways, to get back to the subject at hand, I tried out AjaxWrite and it worked pretty good for me. It had all the basic functionality that I need in a word processor, and I saved the document to my HHD without a hitch. Will I use it everyday? Probably not right now (OpenOffice is working fine for me), but if I’m ever on a box that doesn’t have a word processor, I can always fire up FireFox, and create my Word document. I give it a full thumbs up.

According to this article in Wired News, there is a new search engine on the way. Krugle will not be just any search engine, it will be specifically designed for programmers who need to find open source code.

From Wired News:

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

From Krugle:

Unlike conventional search engines, Krugle is designed to locate code. Krugle supports code search by crawling, parsing and indexing code found in all open source repositories, as well as code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and web pages. And Krugle makes navigating code repositories easy. For example, you can quickly navigate downward (from “Apache” to “Tomcat”), or start with a single source file and then view it’s relationship to another file, to see how it’s used. This ability to interactively browse and explore code in a meaningful context provides a more informed view and reduces the time required to make good code decisions.

Google is standing firm and won’t reveal data from searches and web crawls to the US government even though the government has stated that Microsoft and Yahoo already gave in an turned over the documents that they wanted.

Google called the Bush administration’s request for data on Web searches as “so uninformed as to be nonsensical” in papers filed in San Jose federal court Friday, arguing that turning over the information would expose its trade secrets and violate the privacy of its users.

Read more at the Mecury News.

In independant testing done at Webmasterbrain.com, the search engine experiment has concluded the Google is the best search engine. According to their blind study, where search engine results from the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) were fed randomly to the test subjects. The subjects simply decided which search results were the best, without knowing where they came from.

The study is far from over, but with more than 5000 participants so far, the results are far from inconclusive. Google currently leads the pack with the most relevant search results at 41%, Yahoo and MSN trail with 33% and 27% respectively. See the results page here. If you havn’t yet participated, go take the blind test.