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| Here are the latest news headlines and articles from Pandia Search World. Go to www.pandia.com/sew/ for the online version of this news service. Yahoo! switches to Bing search results
This means that Yahoo! will close down its own search engine and start using Bing search results instead, probably as early as next week. And then they were two This is a historical moment. It means that we see the end of no less than three search engines that all have played important roles in web search history. The Yahoo! search engine was born out of the merger of three search engines: The American search engines Inktomi and AltaVista, and the Norwegian search engine Alltheweb. For parts of the 1990’s AltaVista was the Google of its day, delivering better and more alternative search results than any other search engine. For a short while Alltheweb was considered a serious contender to the search engine throne, but Fast Search and Transfer did not have the clout needed to compete with Google, so they sold the technology to Overture, which was then bought by Yahoo! The end of the Yahoo search engine also means that the big three are now the big two: Google and Bing. The only interesting competitors to these two are Ask and Hakia, but they are both lagging far behind Google and Bing/Yahoo! traffic wise. What makes Yahoo! different? Yahoo is trying desperately to explain that this does not mean that Yahoo! is no longer a search company. The argument is that although the organic search results and the paid text ads will be provided by Microsoft/Bing, the presentation of these results are Yahoo’s own. Yahoo gives the following examples: 1) Yahoo! will provide you with “rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!'s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.” In other words: Yahoo! will include additional information from other sites on the search result pages. 2) Yahoo will add “specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.” 3) Yahoo! will provide “handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren't quite what you were looking for.” This is all true, but Bing will also provide links to additional content, related searches, news and more. The only significant difference is that Bing does not have a “Search Pad” (i.e. a kind of integrated note book for saving, organizing and sharing search related notes). Yahoo! from search to content Yahoo! will save a lot of money by not having a large search engine development staff. The Yahoo!/Bing alliance will also be able to sell more text ads for a higher price, now that their combined market share makes their product more interesting. The danger for Yahoo! is that they might see their search market share shrink, as people realize that Bing delivers the same search results in what many may consider a more elegant packaging. That would mean that Yahoo’s role as a major Internet portal will depend on their other web properties, including tools like mail and messaging, and content sites like Yahoo! Health and Yahoo! Sports. Experts trace Google hackers to Chinese schoolsThe Google/China controversy has got a new chapter. The cyber attacks have been traced back to two Chinese schools. As we reported in January Google practically declared war on the Chinese government after they discovered serious cyber attacks at their own servers. It seems the hackers were after both business information and information on Chinese dissidents. Image: Chinese citizens thanked Google for standing up to Chinese censorship by laying down flowers and notes at the Google China offices. Needless to say, for the Chinese government to get access to the email accounts belonging to the democratic oppositions, would help them unravel the networks of these dissidents. It would be bad for human rights in China and it would be bad for every-one’s trust in Google. In short: It would be bad for business. Google counter attacked. The company declared that they no longer will accept any form of censorship on Google search results in China. If the Chinese do not accept this, Google will leave the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China to investigate the attack, turning the case into a battle of nations. The cynic might observe that Google didn’t become the defender of freedom of speech it should have been before its own interests were threatened. We say: better late than never. The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune report that the attacks have been traced back to a Chinese elite university, the Shanghai Jiatong University, and to the the Lanxiang Vocational School, one of them with close ties to the Chinese military. Computer security experts, including investigators from the US National Security Agency, have found that the attacks might have started much earlier than Google has reported — maybe as early as in April 2009. The hackers used a previously unknown flaw in the Internet Explorer web browser to gain access to corporate servers. The investigators suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school. The computer network of the school is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the largest search engine in China. So is this the smoking gun Google needs to prove that the Chinese government orchestrated the attacks? The gun is smoking, but this does not prove that the Chinese government pulled the trigger. Some analysts believe the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. The fact that the hackers where looking for information on Chinese human rights activists may support this theory. Others, however, speculate the schools are used for covering an intelligence operation run by another country (implicating China in the process) or criminals trying to steal intellectual property from US technology firms. They could have hijacked the IP addresses of the schools. Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up Feb 21Here are some of the search engine related articles we have found interesting this week:
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