Design honcho Larry Tesler says the portal's home-page redesign will happen gradually -- and only if it provides "a delightful experience"

Yahoo! may not have the prettiest home page, but with nearly 14 million Web surfers visiting it per day, it's doing something right. And Larry Tesler, Yahoo's (YHOO ) new vice-president for the User Experience and Design group, doesn't want to screw that up.

OneStat.com (www.onestat.com), the number one provider of on demand intelligence web analytics, today reported that MSN Search's global usage share has slightly increased and that Google's search site is still the number one search engine in the world. MSN Search's global usage share has risen from 8.6 percent to 8.9 percent. Google's global usage share has decreased 0.3 percent the last 8 months. Yahoo's global usage share remains stable. The second largest search engine on the web has a global usage share of 21.2 percent.

"Our real-time web analytics are the ultimate solution to measure traffic from search engines to a web site. Each web site owner and marketer can analyse what kind of search engines & keywords the visitors use to find a website," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

The 4 largest search engines on the web are:

1.
Google
56.9%

2.
Yahoo
21.2%

3.
MSN Search
8.9%

4.
AOL Search
3.2%

All numbers are an average of the last 2 months. OneStat.com is the number one provider of real-time website analysis software in the world. Our superior technology powers thousands of websites in different countries all over the world. With our accurate, detailed & reliable reports we will be able to answer questions about visitor behaviour, site performance and retention.

The OneStat.com solutions provide executives, marketers and webmasters with answers to critical e-business questions such as:
· Who is visiting my web site?
· How many pageviews, visits (sessions) and visitors are coming on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis?
· What content, products, and services do my visitors prefer?
· How many visitors return to the website and how often?
· What kind of search engine do they use?
· What kind of technology do your visitors use to view the web site?
· How much time do they spent on the website?

Methodology: A global usage share of xx percent for search engine Y means that xx percent of the visitors of Internet users arrived at sites that are using one of OneStat.com's services by using search engine Y. All numbers mentioned in the research are averages and all measurements are normalised to the GMT timezone. Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.

Microsoft will unveil on Monday its own system for selling Web advertising as it struggles to compete with Google and Yahoo in the expanding Web search business. The system, to be used by MSN, is meant to improve on those of Microsoft's rivals by allowing marketers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location

The move is part of Microsoft's broad response to the threat from Google, which is using its powerful advertising sales network to support an expanding range of free software products and Internet services. Last week, Microsoft announced a broad reorganization that placed MSN in the same group as its Windows operating system, indicating that it saw software delivered over the Internet - and possibly paid for through advertising - as central to its future.

But to offer such advertising-supported services, Microsoft needs to control its own system for selling targeted advertising. Until now, the ads on MSN's search service have been sold by Yahoo. Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft vice president, said the new service would have greater appeal to advertisers and ultimately would make more money for Microsoft. "We know we have to compete hard for our business," he said. "And we think we will offer advertisers better value because of the superior information we have about our audience." ...

The row between Google and a tiny British research firm contesting the use of the GMail trademark escalated tonight after the internet search giant was accused of making "inaccurate and misleading statements". The normally taciturn Google hit back, telling Times Online that it felt that the British company in the dispute was principally interested in money. Times Online today had sight of an e-mail exchange between Google and the chief executive of Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) - which is threatening legal action over the trademark for GMail.

In the e-mails, the IIR takes Google to task over official comments it made in response to his case.
Shane Smith wrote to Tu Tsao, Google's trademark lawyer in America, warning that he would try to refer the matter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public companies in the United States.

The exchange follows an official statement circulated to the media by Google in which it appeared to suggest there had been minimal contact between the two companies and that IIIR had provided no evidence to back up its claim.

IIIR had claimed that, through its Pronet subsidiary, it had launched its own branded G-Mail service - which gives subscribers use of web-based e-mails - nearly two years before Google launched its own Gmail offering. IIIR said last week that, after about 15 months of "correspondence and negotiations", it was considering legal action against Google.

After IIR made a further statement refering to the recent success of a similar claim in Germany, Google published an official comment about the case. It said: "We can confirm that Pronet has contacted Google and that we have been seeking information on their use of the Gmail trademark but have not received any evidence to establish the rights they have claimed."

In response, Mr Smith wrote to Ms Tsao: "This emphatic statement means that a one-off event of contacting Google has occurred, and that my firm has made totally unsubstantiated claims.

"As you must be aware this is grossly misleading. It misrepresents the degree of telephone, fax, e-mail and letter contact that has in fact taken place over the last 16 months, between our companies directly, between our US attorneys and Google, and between our UK lawyers, myself and Google in conference."

Googling someone -- a prospective job candidate, a teenage crush, your son's soccer coach -- is a commonplace ritual of modern life. But the search engine company evidently doesn't appreciate a taste of its own medicine. Google has blackballed online technology news service Cnet News.com for googling Eric Schmidt, CEO of the Mountain View company, and including some personal information about him in a story last month. Google told a Cnet editor that it will not speak with Cnet reporters until August 2006, according to Jai Singh, editor in chief of Cnet News.com in San Francisco.


"We published a story that recounted how we found information on the (Google) CEO in a public forum using their service," Singh said. "They had issue with the fact that they felt it was private information and our point is it was public information obtained through public channels using Google search." Google declined to comment.

Reporter Elinor Mills' Cnet article made the point that Google, the search engine used by more than half of U.S. Internet users, has much potential for privacy invasion, particularly through data it collects that is not available to the public, such as logs of Google searches. She illustrated the story with information that could readily be obtained by anyone with access to Google and the Internet: Schmidt's net worth, home neighborhood, attendance at Burning Man and enthusiasm for amateur piloting.

"From what I understand, most of (Google's objection to the article) had to do with the anecdotal lead we used to illustrate the point that information could be obtained rather easily using Google search," Singh said. Mark Glaser, a columnist with Online Journalism Review, run by the USC Annenberg School, said Google was overreacting.

"Google helps people search for this kind of information. For them to be upset that someone would publicize it is a little bit strange. It could end up backfiring on them because it gives more attention to the (privacy) problem," he said. An entire company shunning an entire media outlet is unusual, although isolated bans are not.
Athletes and movie stars are known for refusing to talk to reporters who have angered them. During the height of the steroids scandal in March, Barry Bonds once refused to speak to the media while The Chronicle's Giants beat reporter was present.

Companies sometimes pull advertisements to retaliate for media coverage they consider unfair. In April, General Motors pulled all its ads in the Los Angeles Times over what it called "factual errors and misrepresentations," a ban that the Wall Street Journal reported could have cost the newspaper about $10 million annually. GM resumed advertising in the Los Angeles Times this month.
Media critic Ben Bagdikian said Google and other everyday digital technologies indeed raise privacy concerns, but he predicted that the ban against Cnet will not last.

"No one can force one party to speak to another party," he wrote in an e-mail. "My guess is that for business reasons, and to respond to unkind words directed at Google, it will be hard for Google not to reply, at which point the whole messy fight will make both parties look so ridiculous in public that the general public will get bored and both parties will suffer in their businesses."

Google Inc. is being sued over accusations that it overcharged advertisers who use the Web search giant's paid search advertising program, which accounts for the vast majority of Google's revenue.

The proposed class-action suit, filed on August 3 in State Superior Court in Santa Clara, California, accuses Google of charging in excess of advertisers' "daily budgets," under which Google allows an advertiser to limit how much it spends each day.

Lawyers for the proposed suit were not available to comment. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and was filed on behalf of CLRB Hanson Industries LLC in Minnesota and other advertisers. Google said the allegations had no basis.
"The claims are without merit and we will defend against it vigorously," said Google spokesman Steve Langdon.

The suit claims Google "engaged in conduct which injured members of the general public, including the plaintiffs" and said it was "impossible ... to determine the exact amount of the injury without a detailed review of Google's books and records." It also accuses Google, based in Mountain View, California, of disputing complaints from advertisers regarding the company's pricing practices and for not reimbursing what the suit called "unlawful" charges.

Google, the biggest player in the global Internet advertising market, gets the vast majority of its revenue from Web search advertising. Shares of Google closed down $1.10 to $291.25 on Nasdaq. The stock is 7.2 percent below its record close of $313.94 on July 21.

Yahoo launched a new technique for tracking advertisement impressions.

The system will count and report ad impressions only after the ad's graphic loads in the viewer's browser. Ads within blocked pop-ups, for instance, would not receive credit. Most Internet publishers currently measure their ad impressions at the other end--when they leave the server.

The new process will "measure even more accurately if an advertisement has been viewed by a consumer," Todd Teresi, Yahoo's vice president of operations, said in a statement.

The system hinges on new standards for tracking ad impressions, released last November by an Interactive Advertising Bureau task force, which Yahoo chaired.
The guidelines marked the first time any advertising medium had developed a standard tied to the point at which the ad reaches the consumer. Other mediums, such as magazines and television, measure ad impressions through the content or programming that houses the embedded ad.

According to a company press release, Yahoo is one of the first organizations to put the standards into practice. Now available in the United States, Yahoo's measurement system will make its way across its global network by early next year.
Weather.com, Univision and CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, are also in "full compliance" with the new measurement guidelines, an IAB press release said. A dozen other companies, including Walt Disney Internet Group, The New York Times Co., Microsoft's MSN and AOL Media Networks, expect to complete the auditing and certification process by the end of 2005 or early 2006 ...

Google could try to bid for America Online to pre-empt a Microsoft takeover and protect the $380 million in revenue Google gets from its biggest partner, according to an analyst.

"We believe it is entirely possible that Google could consider making a bid for AOL as well," Lauren Rich Fine, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, wrote in a Friday report on the implications of an AOL-Microsoft Network deal. "This would certainly protect Google's revenues from AOL as well as enable Google to keep 100 percent of the search advertising revenues as well as gain a significant amount of content."

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Microsoft was in talks with AOL's parent Time Warner on merging AOL with MSN and other options as a way to counter the serious competitive threat Google poses in the portal and search market.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that AOL may be considering switching its search engine from Google to MSN, which could cut Google's earnings per share by between 5 percent and 10 percent, the report said. AOL generated about 12 percent of Google's revenues in 2004, or $382 million.

Google began providing search services for AOL in 2002, replacing Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo. In 2003, Google and AOL broadened their agreement. Google pays AOL every time someone clicks on one of its sponsored links and lets advertisers bid for the AOL search result placements for specific keywords users enter.

Search giant Google next month plans a first-ever gathering of its partners, with one eye-raising caveat: no one speaking or attending the event can talk about the goings on with outsiders, according to two sources with knowledge of the three-day affair. A Google spokesman explained that Zeitgeist '05: The Google Partner Forum is a private affair for Google's partners and advertising customers, but did not provide additional details.


On a Web site, Google said the event will be "an inquiry into the spirit of our times." The spokesman said the off-the-record caveat extends to people speaking at the event. Bloggers and reporters who attend the invite-only event also can't publicize any of the goings on, according to Danny Sullivan, editor of the well-respected Search Engine Watch Web site.

The conditions for the event, to be held between Oct 25 and Oct 27, has struck some as rather odd, especially because many bloggers and prominent members of the media, including a head honcho at the New York Times, have been invited to speak.
While Zeitgeist '05 is certainly not the first event to require attendees to keep mum, it stands out nonetheless.

These events are, for the most part, designed to generate a buzz. Many corporate hosts try to ensure press coverage by coddling reporters with free entry, transportation, food, drink and products.

In a Web log posting on Friday, Search Engine Watch's Sullivan wonders just how Google will manage to keep all speeches and discussions under wraps.
Sullivan was the first to report about the upcoming event.

"This will be good to see if you can keep open discussions among 400 people, some of them bloggers, many of them press, somehow off the record," Sullivan wrote in a Web log entry posted on Friday.

A new worm modifies the infected PC so attempts to search using Google are directed to a spoofed site that looks like the real thing, but with different sponsored links to drive traffic to sites the hacker's designated, a security firm said Friday.
Panda Software's analysis of the P2Load.a worm showed that after compromising a PC, it modifies the Windows HOSTS file so all attempts to reach google.com -- and even mistyped addresses, such as "googel.com" -- are redirected to a site actually served from Germany.

"The page is an exact copy of Google and supports the 17 languages of Google," said Panda in a statement.

Searches run on the spoofed version of Google return results similar to the real Google, but in some cases, the sponsored links -- top-of-the-page and right-side links to e-commerce sites that have paid for the placement -- are different.
"The creator of this worm has taken advantage of the importance of a company appearing among the first few links in the search results of an Internet browser,” said Luis Corrons, director of PandaLabs, in a statement. “Its aims are none other than to increase visits to the pages linked by the creator of this malware or earn an income from companies that want to appear in the first few results in computer where the identity of Google has been spoofed…in both case, the motivation of the author of this malware is purely financial."

Because the new HOSTS file is downloaded from a Web site, not embedded in the worm's code as is the usual practice, Panda warned that P2Load.a, or similar threats, could spoof other popular sites by simply changing the content of the file downloaded.

Google has been targeted by hackers before. In March, for instance, a widespread DNS cache poisoning attack redirected traffic from Google and other popular URLs to hacker sites. In another case, phishers and spyware creators downloaded software, including bank account theft software, to PCs when their owners mistyped google.com and ended up at a malicious site hosted by servers in Russia.

Google, the internet search engine, is facing a renewed threat of legal action from a company that claims to own the intellectual property rights to its GMail e-mail service. Independent International Investment Research, a British company that specialises in research and has several leading City investment banks as clients, argues that it launched "G-MailTM web based email" in May 2002.

IIR's version of G-Mail was developed by one of its subsidiaries, Pronet, which specialises in research about the currency markets for banks and other financial institutions.The idea was that subscribers to its research could use G-Mail to disseminate it and discuss it over the web confidentially. The development came nearly two years before Google unveiled its own branded e-mail service, known at "GMailTM". Google's GMail services give subscribers their own web-based e-mail account with the benefit of vast amounts of storage space.

IIR said this morning that, after about 15 months of "correspondence and negotiations" with Google in an effort to have the "superiority" of its claim over the trade mark to G-Mail recognised, discussions are now at an end with no agreement having been reached. IIR, led by chairman and chief executive Shane Smith, accused the search engine of "failing to respect the intellectual property rights of others" and said it had no alternative but to pursue an expensive legal action that it admitted it could ill afford.

Mr Smith, who founded the company and is the leading shareholder, told Times Online that the two companies had held "detailed discussions" over the terms of a possible settlement, with both sides making offers but failing "to meet in the middle". He said he was "reluctantly" considering taking legal action against Google, which could involve his family trust selling shares in the group to fund the claim. "I feel it is up to me as the founder and the major shareholder. We're not going to sit on the sidelines while a company uses our intellectual property rights," he said. "We're confident that we have the funding available to us and we're girding our loins," he said.

An independent valuation report commissioned at the end of last year by IIR, whose clients include Bank of America and Commerzbank, estimated a "conservative" value of between ?25 million and ?34 million for a royalty claim against Google for the G-Mail trademark. IIR has already indicated that it would be prepared to settle for less than this amount, which was calculated using a royalty fee of 0.5 per cent. IIR pointed this morning to a similar trade mark disagreement between Google and a company in Germany, stating that both firms were "frustrated" with Google's behaviour.

IIR is considering joining forces with this company in its possible legal action against Google. IIR said this morning that "despite strenuous efforts, achievement of a settlement involving agreement on a fair value [for the intellectual property rights to G-Mail] is currently out of reach. Your board has not been able to reach a settlement with Google and is therefore considering taking further legal action to protect the group's intellectual property.

"This has also been the experience of the owner of a similar trade mark in Germany, who has recently sought and obtained a preliminary injunction against Google extending its use of the Gmail trade mark in that country. "The party in Germany and your board are both frustrated with the manner in which we believe that Google is failing to respect the intellectual property rights of others, and shares with your board a commitment to take whatever steps are necessary (collaboration where appropriate) to seek to protect those rights."

Google was not immediately available for comment.

Australian researchers have patented a method of exploring the web which they claim could revolutionise existing search engines.Developed by Ori Allon, a 26 year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Orion search engine is designed to complement searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

Allon explained that conventional search engines find pages in which keywords occur and that sometimes these pages are important to the topic, but at other times are not.Orion is designed to find pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the keyword. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the keyword so that the user can pick the most relevant.

"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts giving you the relevant information without having to go the website, although you still have that option if you wish," said Allon. "By displaying results to other associated keywords directly related to your search topic, you gain additional pertinent information that you might not have originally conceived, thus offering an expert search without having an expert's knowledge." Allon cited a search on the topic of the American Revolution as an example of how the system works.
Orion is designed to bring up results with extracts containing this phrase, but it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more.
Andrew Stead, of New South Innovations, the technology transfer company within UNSW, is confident that Orion will fill a gap in the market highlighted by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

"Gates was recently quoted in Forbes magazine as saying that we need to take search way beyond how people think of it today. We believe that Orion will do that," he said. Allon claimed that some big companies have already shown interest in implementing Orion for commercial use.

Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.

It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.

It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."

"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.

When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web ...

Tier-two search engine Ask Jeeves' new sponsored listings product is drawing cautious interest from search marketers. By and large, they welcome the new paid search alternative, but worry that traffic volume on the site and its syndication network may not be high enough to warrant the complexity it will add to their search buys.

Marketers surveyed by ClickZ News all said they would try out the new auction-based listings, which Ask Jeeves unveiled Monday. Whether they continue to invest time and money into them is another matter, and will depend on how much traffic Ask Jeeves can generate, as well as how easy the ads are to manage.

The ads will appear on search results pages on the Ask Jeeves site, as well as on its syndication network. That network includes several properties owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, which completed its acquisition of Ask Jeeves last month. This should help solve some of the volume issues, according to Chris Churchill, CEO of Fathom Online and former product manager at Ask Jeeves.

"There's always been the problem of going through a lot of work and having everything convert, but having only a limited volume. This gives us much better reach and volume," Churchill said.

Another improvement the sponsored listings have over Ask Jeeves' premium listing offering is the auction-based keyword bidding model. Auction-based bidding fits into what SEMs are doing with Google and Yahoo!, so adding another marketplace to monitor with existing tools is easier than dealing with the manual processes Ask Jeeves previously used, he said.

For SEMs with existing technology and the money required to integrate it with Ask Jeeves' platform, the addition of another paid search offering is good news, according to Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect. Marckini said iProspect's iSEBA bidding agent will integrate with the new listings ...

REDMOND, Wash.—Microsoft's MSN unit is getting new search, social-networking, Web e-mail and advertising-platform products ready to roll in the coming months, according to company officials.

MSN officials demonstrated a few of these future products and technologies during a session titled "Winning in Internet Services" held during the company's annual financial analyst meeting here Thursday.

Officials demonstrated a beta version of a new mail client, as well as the adCenter platform, also in beta, that Microsoft is hoping to use to attract potential MSN and Microsoft.com advertisers.

They also put through their paces a social-networking app tentatively called "Friends of Friends," as well as an MSN Virtual Earth search enhancement called "Eagle Eye," due out this fall, that is designed to give a panoramic, very fine-grained zoom view.

Microsoft believes it finally is gaining on Google and other Internet service competitors in some key areas, according to Yusuf Mehdi, MSN senior vice president. Mehdi said Microsoft has significantly narrowed the gap between itself and Google, Yahoo and other players in this space, thanks to advances in algorithmic search, Hotmail, MSN Messenger and online advertising.
"Our ability to enter, differentiate and compete has never been stronger," Mehdi told the Wall Street analysts and media representatives who attended the analyst meeting.

Mehdi also told attendees that Microsoft is committed to investing to the extent needed in people, software innovation and capital expenditures "to take the lead in Internet services."

In fiscal 2005, which ended for Microsoft on June 30, the MSN unit shipped a first version of its algorithmic MSN Search engine, launched Windows desktop search and delivered the MSN Spaces blogging platform, which currently hosts 18.5 million blogs and supports 55 million unique users monthly.

The unit also shipped new versions of the MSN Messenger consumer instant-messaging product, as well as of Microsoft's current Hotmail Web e-mail product.

Baidu.com takes its name from a 900-year-old poem but its ambitions are ultramodern - to become the Chinese-language equivalent of Internet search giant Google Inc. Little known abroad, 5-year-old Baidu.com says it already is the world's sixth most-visited Internet site, thanks to a strong following from China's 100 million-plus Web surfers. Now the startup founded by two Chinese veterans of American tech firms is preparing to follow Google's example with an initial public offering in the United States, hoping to raise $45 million.

Baidu.com is in the front ranks of an emerging group of Chinese companies that are trying to create Internet services uniquely suited to their country's ideogram-based language and the political restrictions of its communist government "Here's a homegrown company that has created what really is a very strong search product," said David Wolf, managing director of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing consulting firm. Baidu.com was founded in 2000 by Robin Li, who earned a master's degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked for U.S. search engine firm Infoseek, and Eric Xu, a Ph.D. from Texas A&M and a veteran of American biotech firms. Xu later left the company ...

Ask Jeeves is now invading territory that so far has been dominated by the makers of the Internet's two most popular search engines -- Google and Yahoo. Microsoft also hopes to grab a piece of the action with a similar advertising network revolving around its MSN.com site.

Backed by a new owner known for shaking up the status quo, Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ) is launching an upstart advertising network powered by its own search engine -- a move likely to rankle its longtime business partner, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) .

Ask Jeeves' marketing system, scheduled to debut today, follows the same model that has been generating tremendous profit growth for Google and another Internet powerhouse, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) , during the past three years.
The expansion heralds a new era for Ask Jeeves, a 9-year-old company that survived the dot-com bust to be acquired for US$2.3 billion by InterActiveCorp in a deal completed less than two weeks ago ...

AP - People scoffed nearly a decade ago when serial entrepreneur Bill Gross proposed an online search engine that ranked results based on how much advertisers were willing to pay to have their links tied to specific requests. But the concept developed into a revolutionary idea that turned Internet search engines into massive moneymaking machines. Now Gross hopes to shake things up again with Snap.com, which is providing another commercial twist on search engines while also promising to deliver more useful results than industry leaders Google Inc and Yahoo Inc. "We feel there is so much more innovation that can take place in search," Gross said. "It's hard to say that little Snap will ever beat Google, but I think we can become a viable alternative."

As Snap gears up to shift out of test phase, the search engine's parent company - Pasadena-based Perfect Market Technologies Inc. - has raised $US10 million ($A13.29 million) in a venture capital round led by Mayfield, a Menlo Park firm.
Gross and Snap CEO Tom McGovern intend to use some of that money to spread the word about a system that he believes can deliver better value for advertisers.
Google, Yahoo and other search engines make money by distributing sponsored Web links that are tied to a search query or the content displayed on a page. dvertisers pay commissions whenever the commercial links are clicked on, even if the traffic doesn't result in a sale. Gross pioneered this "pay-per-click" approach at GoTo.com, which later changed its name to Overture Services before Yahoo bought it for $US1.7 billion ($A2.26 billion) in 2003. Google introduced its own pay-per-click model, known as AdWords, in 2002 ...

Yahoo has merged all its European search products under one common business brandname, Yahoo Europe. Two years ago, Yahoo acquired the original PPC engine Overture, which had previously purchased Alta Vista and AlltheWeb, the search engine designed by the Norwegian search firm FAST.

Signalling an increased interest in paid search, Yahoo named Overture Europe's current regional vice president and managing director, Stephen Taylor, as the head of Yahoo Search Europe.

Dominique Vidal, a regional VP and managing director of Yahoo Europe said, "The creation of this new role marks an important step towards the ongoing synergy of Overture and Yahoo Search in Europe and reflects Yahoo's ongoing commitment to introducing the next generation of search technology and products for advertisers, publishers and users alike."

Yahoo has been rebranding its various international divisions over the past six months starting in North America with the introduction of Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions (why sms?) in early spring. It plans to merge its other international units, with the exception of Japan and Korea, before the end of the year.

Ask Jeeves improves its search engine

Search engine Ask Jeeves UK has introduced a new search feature to the site which it says increases relevance and guides is faster to use.

The new “Zoom” tool gives users suggestions to narrow or expand their searches.
This new feature takes advantage of, and builds on, the clustering ability of the company's Teoma search technology, which breaks the Web into topic communities.
The Zoom service examines the relationships between these communities to identify and present conceptually-related topics to the searcher.