| 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.
 Several European companies have encouraged the European Commission to look into Google’s search results, arguing that it gives its own sites and unfair advantage in search results. Pandia argues that they have not understood what web search business is about.
Joaquin Almunia, the EU Commissioner of Competition, has opened a wide-raging case against Google (GOOG). As the International Herald Tribune reports, the idea is to look into whether the company has given preferential treatment to its own services when ranking search results and whether it discriminates against competitors. Three new publishing companies are now included in the research, namely B.D.Z.V., V.D.Z. and the online mapping company Euro-Cities. Among the other complainants we find British price comparison site Foundem and the French legal search engine Ejustice. The publishers want to stop Google from giving preference to its own operations. Google is a commercial business, not a charity It seems to us all of this is based on a basic misunderstanding of what a search engine actually is and what a company like Google should be allowed to do. Let us take the search engine results first. A neutral search algorithm We have never seen any sign of Google giving an unfair boost to its own web properties in search results. Never. And we have followed this business since the start. In fact, Google does its best to leave the ranking to its automatic search engine algorithm, and to the extent they do go in and change things manually, it is in response to complaints of the kind the Commission is looking at right now. Google cannot afford to manipulate the search results in the way the German companies indicate, as its business model is based on the trust of both searchers and advertisers. This is why Google even rank pay per click ads according to what extent the ads give searchers the kind of information they want. Click here to read the rest of this article!
We have found some interesting news articles regarding Yahoo! this week.
Yahoo! (YHOO) is going to close down search engine old timers AltaVista and AlltheWeb. No, this does not really matter that much, as they now serve as experimental interfaces to the regular Yahoo! search results. The Yahoo! search results are, as most of you will know, powered by Bing. AltaVista and AlltheWeb have not had their own search index or algorithms for a long time. May they rest in peace. More serious is the fact that Yahoo! is getting rid of bookmarking service Delicious.com. As far as we can see, it is not going to be closed down. It will probably be sold off to someone else. Yahoo! has wasted a great opportunity with delicious, one of the best and most popular bookmarking services out there. The fact that the company has not been able to integrate it into its business strategy, says a lot about the company’s inability to develop a coherent product portfolio. Yahoo! will apparently also close down Yahoo! Bookmarks, its alternative bookmarking service, as well as Yahoo! Buzz, a digg like social web site. This is not all: Yahoo! is also changing Yahoo! Video. You can no longer upload videos and user-generated content will be removed on March 15 2010. We guess this could be noted as another death by YouTube. On top of it all Yahoo! is announcing lay-offs. All of this must come as a serious blow to Yahoo! employees, and will probably lead to Yahoo! bleeding off even more talent. At the same time both Bing and Google have been announcing several new innovations. This week Bing told the world about closer integration with Facebook, local search enhancements, improvements in Bing Maps, mobile apps and much more. Which company would you like to work in? One that abandons all your work or one that makes use of it? What kind of online service company would you like to use? One that threatens to delete your bookmarks and videos or one that improves on the tools you are already using? There is no doubt about it: Yahoo! is in serious trouble. Here are some of this week’s search engine news headlines: Voice Search gets personal
Google Mobile Blog: If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. Chrome OS to Merge with Android, Pundits Say
Google Watch: nearly one quarter of smartphone market share in the U.S., and 300,000 smartphone activations per day, we know from more than just anecdotal evidence or speculation that Android is here to stay as much as Apple’s iPhone.
Get a Glimpse of the Past with Google Earth
Google Tutor: One of the coolest and most exciting features of Google Earth is probably something you really haven't given much thought to -- historical imagery. Who wouldn't want to visit the past and check out the historical record of our world? Google market shares around the globe
State of Search: Yes we know, Google is King, Google is the one and only search power out there. Are they? Yes, they are... And this infographic gives us a nice insight into that.
Click here for a readable map.
Do Not Track Could Revolutionize Online Ad Industry
Inside Google: This monththe Federal Trade Commission -- responding to complaints that "tracking" software can violate the privacy of those using the Web -- moved to put the brakes on such monitoring. The FTC called for a "Do Not Track" mechanism that would enable consumers to opt out of being tailed around the Web. Cool! Bing Adds Natural Language Processing to Airline Ticket Info Search
Resourceshelf: Microsoft announced improvements to the natural language processing (nlp) used when querying Bing for info so you can check pricing, fare predictions, not available for every city pair, and then book a flight if what you find is to your liking. Bing keeps coming on strong : will it continue to?
Search Cowboys: Last week Microsoft announced a whole new range of features for Bing. Key topics: mobile (oh yes, the future of search is very much a mobile one), social and local (key in U.S., growing elsewhere). There are enhancements for Windows Phone 7 and for iPhone and Android applications (one of them being Autosuggest). Next announcement: Bing Vision. Again in the mobile space: it allows you to use the camera of your smart phone to search on words that are detected in the image. New hacked site notifications in search results
Google Webmaster Central Blog: We've provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page. Now we're expanding the search results notifications to help people avoid sites that may have been compromised and altered by a third party, typically for spam. Browse the web for a good cause
Google Blog: Earlier this week, we invited the Chrome user community to participate in the Chrome for a Cause project this December 15-19. Already tens of thousands of web denizens have "donated" the tabs that they opened in Google Chrome to help drive a charitable gift that Google will make on their behalf, up to $1 million. Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All
SE Land: Delicious says: No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive. 7 Useful Google Cheatsheets – Download for Free!
SE Journal: . This week I have collected another set of useful lists that will allow you to use Google services to their full potential. See also: 7 Essential SEO Cheat Sheets
Opera 11 gets 6.7 million downloads in a day
Techradar: Opera 11 has broken the company’s first day download records, with 6.7 million people taking a look at the latest browser on its debut. The browser adds grouped tabs. Google News Adds "Follow News" Button, Easy Way To Customize Home Page
SE Land: Google News has quietly added a new button that allows you to easily bookmark frequent searches and create custom sections within your personalized Google News home page. Google's Anticipated Music Service: Taking to the Cloud?
SE Journal: The details have been vague for quite some time, and no one knows whether Google Music will be a service more akin to Google Bookstore or Picasa. Recent information, however, indicates that Google's approach may be that of a cloud-storage MP3 locker. Confirmed: Yahoo Closing Buzz, Traffic APIs -- Maybe Delicious & AltaVista
SE Land: News is traveling fast about a leaked slide from a Yahoo "all hands" meeting earlier this week that listed several products -- including Delicous and AltaVista -- to be "sunsetted." Yahoo confirms that Yahoo Buzz will be closed, as will the Traffic APIs. Delicious seems likely to go, too.
Find out what's in a word, or five, with the Google Books Ngram Viewer
Google Blog: Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we're making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year….The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. Yahoo Video To Close March 15, 2011
SE Watch: Yahoo Video is no longer allowing uploads and has announced it will be deleting all videos and shuttering this product in March 15, 2011, Yahoo announced. Google Body Browser
Google OS: Google has recently demoed an interesting WebGL application called Body Browser, which lets you explore the human body just like you can explore the world in Google Earth. Now you can try Google Body Browser before it’s added to Google Labs, assuming that you have a WebGL-enabled browser.
Here's Carol Bartz's Internal Layoff Memo to Beleaguered Yahoo Troops
BoomTown: “Today, we began notifying some Yahoos that they will lose their jobs. Most of the reductions will come from the Products org and, when completed, will affect about 4% of the company.”
Google Image Search Is Getting Hyper
SE Journal: Caffeine, the revamp of Google's data processing revamp that allowed near instantaneous updates from across the web, is finally rubbing off on image updating -- a process that has long been notoriously slow.
Bing Hits All-Time Market Share High In November, comScore Says
SE Land: After several months of slow growth, Bing reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010. Bing Incorporates FanSnap into Event Search
SE Watch: The technology enables users to compare ticket results for more than 15 million tickets to 75,000 events from 57 ticket vendors. Bing Releases Huge Set of Upgrades: Maps, Local, Mobile, Travel, Image Search
SE Land: At the Bing Search event in San Francisco today, Microsoft unveiled a dizzying array of nearly across-the-board updates and improvements for Bing online and mobile apps. Bing Expands Use Of Facebook "Likes" In Search Results
SE Land: But soon, Bing says it will show (to U.S. users only for now) which individual pages/URLs have been liked by your Facebook friends right inline as part of the regular search results -- not just in a separate box/display. Google Now Helps Your Content Rank In Any Language
SE Land: Last week Google rolled out new features throughout much of the world—with the notable exception of English language "Googles"-- called "foreign pages translated," which in theory could deliver this result. In many versions of Google from Scandinavia to Italy, this new option is now listed to accompany "the web," "pages in language" and "pages from country."
Google Still Rules as the Most Used Social Media Login
Marketing Pilgrim: In spite of the fact that Facebook logins have been popping up everywhere on the web, they're still only the second most popular login system. They're up 3% over the past three months and rapidly gaining on Google which still holds first place. AOL Abandons Yahoo Merger As Yahoo Cuts Headcount
SE Land: The would be AOL-Yahoo merger is apparently off, according to Crain's New York Business. The site is reporting that "AOL tried to either get enough backing to make a run at Yahoo, or get Yahoo interested in buying it . . . Yahoo didn't bite, and AOL didn't have its ducks lined up to be a buyer." Google launches Teach Parents Tech site
Techradar: How to deal with technophobic relatives this Christmas. 28 delicious alternatives to Delicious
P Bradley: Well, we’ve all seen the news that the single most insane idea of the year award can go to Yahoo who are apparently going to be closing Delicious. Quite why they’re not prepared to ask people to pay for access, or even to offer it to someone like the Library of Congress to take over defeats me, but clearly straightforward thinking isn’t their forte else they wouldn’t be taking this stupid step in the first place. So, if you want to choose a different bookmarking resource, what options are available to you? The good news is that there’s quite a lot. Google's Head Of Search: Google Does Not Give Brands A Bias
SE Land: Google's head of search, head engineer, and Google fellow, Amit Singhal told Fast Company in an interview that Google Instant does not have a brand bias. Google Instant, the search predictions that Google gives searchers as they type a query, is not influenced by any brand bias, Singhal said. Google allows you to roll back your Contacts list
techradar: Google has added a feature that allows you to restore your contacts to a point in the past -- just in case you regret that drunken decision to delete your girlfriend/parents/wife’s details.
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