Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
I learned about Startpage in an article on Reuters. Here’s a nugget:
Startpage — also known as Ixquick outside the United States and Britain — had already offered private searching, but users would leave the company’s protection when they clicked on a search result and entered a third-party website.
The new service offers use of a Startpage proxy that means the user is invisible to all websites, though pages load more slowly since Startpage must first retrieve the contents and then redisplay them.
“My wake-up call came last year,” says Katherine Albrecht, who runs U.S. media relations and marketing for Startpage and who says she noticed Google Inc had installed a program monitoring users who typed in terms indicating they had influenza — and was sharing the information with the U.S. Center for Disease Control.
So I decided to play around with it for a while.
No Comments »Microsoft is teaming Bing! up with Wolfram Alpha, according to the BBC.
Wolfram Alpha aims to answer questions directly, rather than display a list of links like a search engine.
The “computational knowledge engine” is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
It will be used to bolster Bing’s results in areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics.
The partnership will initially be rolled out in the US.
Bing has been gradually grabbing market share from other search engines since its launch in May.
Figures from Experian Hitwise suggest its market share in the US rose from 8.96% in September to 9.57% in October.
The same story points out that Google is over 70% of market share in the US.
I don’t think this is going to help Microsoft conquer Google. Jeffrey reported on Wolfram Alpha when it hit the news a few months ago and I played with it a bit, then I went back to Google. I suspect I’m not atypical.
No Comments »An interesting juxtaposition of opinions this weekend, showing how two persons can look at the same stats and draw almost-opposite conclusions:
At the New York Times (link here), Miguel Helft claims that Bing! really doesn’t have far to go to catch Google, now that Microsoft has inked a deal for Bing! to be the engine for Yahoo searches, if Bing! and Yahool stats are viewed as a single entity. A nugget:
ComScore found that for the combined Yahoo-Microsoft, “searcher penetration,” or the percentage of the online population in the United States that uses one of those search engines, is 73 percent. Google’s searcher penetration is higher, but not by that much: at 84 percent.
Meanwhile, Reuters (link here), using the same report as the Times, reports that Google users are exceptionally loyal:
Yet Google searchers conduct an average of 54.5 searches a month — about double the number of searches that Yahoo! and Microsoft users conduct combined. They search on average 26.9 times a month, comScore reported.
ComScore also found that Google searchers have the most loyalty, making nearly 70 percent of their searches on Google sites. People who use Yahoo! and Microsoft sites combined search there about 33 percent of the time and also use Google heavily.
(More about comScore–that’s how they spell it–here.)
No Comments »And, after the hoop-la dies down, things will just settle back down. Story here.
Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.
Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.
My guess, based on entirely on complete and total ignorance: They’re taking market share from Cuil.
Two assessments of Microsoft’s Bing search engine hit the news this morning.
The Guardian reports that a small study of 25 computer users showed that Bing’s search results were not that great, but that Bing users were more likely to look at some of the advertisements. The full story is here.
Bloomberg reports that Microsoft’s share of searches has risen about two percentage points during the two weeks since unveiling Bing, from single to double digits. Story here.
Frankly, I suspect that, once the novelty wears off, Bing will go the way of Microsoft’s previous attempts to penetrate the search engine market–that is, following a trail first blazed by Bob.
It’s almost impossible to look at any news site without seeing another puff piece for Microsoft’s newest attempt to become a player in internet search, Bing, which, according to the link, is coming soon.
I unhesitatingly predict that it will be the Cuil of 2009.
Remember Cuil?
No Comments »SEO – if you are a webmaster, you know that can make or break your site. If you do not follow the formula of SEO, you could get blacklisted from search engines like Google. BMW’s site was Banned by Google in 2006 for their linking scheme to boost rank.
Other items: Woz leaves Apple, Bill Gates Pie in the Face and the first Internet Webcast is the Victoria Secret fashion show.
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