Tag Archives: Yahoo!

Search Engine Wars

Posted by Tom Schultz on November 24, 2010 None comments

Search Engine

We use search engines every day, some times whether we know it or not. Ask anyone what search engines they know and Google.com will most likely be at the top of the list along with Yahoo.com and now Bing.com.

These companies make a lot of money and employ a lot of people these days(GOOG, YHOO, MSFT). They have been the kings of their hill for a while now. They have been unchallenged and some undefeated. It might be time for things to change.

Lately a lot of little search engines have been popping up, blekko.com and duckduckgo.com in this case.  I think these search engines have the same spirit that Google had when it was first starting out. Google just wanted to be a little bit better than it’s competition and when they were rejected they set off on their own. Providing users with search results that were slightly more accurate than their competition was enough to earn them the spot they’re in today.

So the question is, “How long until they are dethroned”?

That time might not be so distant in the future.

Blekko and DuckDuckGo Merge!

http://www.skrenta.com/2010/11/blekko_partners_with_duckduckg.html

These two search engines each provide some simple to use and unique features that can help users find the information that they’re looking for.

So I’m pleased to announce blekko’s first search partnership, with fellow search startupDuckDuckGo. When DuckDuckGo users search on a term which matches one of blekko’s seven auto-fired slashtag categories, DuckDuckGo users will see results from blekko. (The seven auto-fired slashtag categories are health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipesand hotels.

So now you can use some of blekko’s “slashtags”!

As part of this partnership Blekko users will have access to DuckDuckGo’s “Zero-Click Info” on a site-by-site basis. Zero-Click Info helps users find the most relevant information on sites and search terms without having to click on search results.

And you can use DuckDuckGo’s “Zero-Click Info” solutions!

Google has been releasing features a lot lately and it’s funny because it seems like they’ve been just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. If this is true then Google is in a whole lot of trouble. Because these smaller search engine companies have much less over-head and seem to care much more about their users.

I don’t think there’s been enough competition in the search engine market and I’m very glad to see duckduckgo.com and blekko.com joining forces.

How many users on Twitter?

Posted by Tom Schultz on December 7, 2009 1 comments

Twitter has been pretty strict in making sure that the public is not aware of how many users they have and this is probably for good reason.  I really think the amount of hype that Twitter has had is not justified.  So then, the question I set out to answer is quite simple and that question is, how many twitter accounts are there?

So from that point there is another question that must be asked and that is, who would know the information I’m looking for, other than Twitter?

So first I google’d around a little and I found this article on TechCrunch which had some excellent information on the subject.  Information about how user ID numbers on Twitter do not reflect the number of users that are on Twitter.

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LeapFish

Posted by Eric Shull on November 6, 2009 None comments

I came across LeapFish this morning. It’s a new search engine that promises to aggregate everything that’s touted about the new web, web 2.0, real-time web, whatever you like to call it. While they have “an introductory video that can only be described as epic,” I think that LeapFish has a fundamental problem.

It’s not that it’s slow (it is, even when typing in the search box). The problem is that the term that comes to mind to describe it is not “search engine” but “distraction engine.” The front page is littered with News, Celebrity News, Mashable, Popular Videos, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, and Deal of the Day. Ultimately, LeapFish shows me a bunch of things I don’t care about, but will probably get distracted by anyway. I know where to find the things that I want, and at present I’m not interested in finding more things to do online just for the sake of doing things online.

The LeapFish video quotes Charles Darwin in observing that the organisms which survive are those that adapt fastest to change. I take a much more Boyd-like approach when it comes to people: he who makes the change survives. If businesses are trying to keep up, they’ve already lost. This is why no one has yet become a Google-killer: Google changes the game faster than others do; that’s how they stay on top. I remember watching Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail play catch-up with GMail’s storage and archiving capabilities. Google constantly innovates, changing the game, not playing catch-up. If LeapFish thinks it’s ahead of the curve because it adapts fast, it’s already lost to those who are creating the change it’s adapting to.