This week, Microsoft announced updates and improvements to the Live Search crawler, which they say will “improve the efficiency” with which they crawl and index websites. Amongst the improvements to MSNbot are HTTP compression and something called “conditional get.” With HTTP compression, MSNbot now supports gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (Sections 14.11 …
On Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Yahoo introduced a new mobile service called “oneConnect” which is designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what they refer to as a “socially connected address book.” oneConnect will be the first mobile product with open architecture to aggregate communication tools, including email, instant messaging, and …
The latest version of the Google Toolbar replaces the custom 404 “Page Not Found” on the website you’re at with a Google version, which has many webmasters concerned that this change may direct users away from the website they’re browsing. Conveniently, Google’s 404 page contains a Google search box, and if a user decides to …
If you’ve launched a new blog at Blogger or WordPress, you might be wondering if or when Google might get around to indexing your site. Evidence lately seems to suggest that even if you don’t have many, or in some cases any, incoming links that Google will still index your blog pretty quickly. WebProNews points …
Ask.com has just unveiled the latest addition to their line-up of features – BigNews. As you can probably figure out from the name, it’s a news-related product like Google News or Yahoo News. Except, Ask.com has put their own social media spin on it, and integrates something they call “BigFactor” to give you more telling …
Two years after entering the Chinese search market, Google is readying to take another crack at the country’s top search engine – Baidu.com. Baidu has remained China’s most dominant search engine thanks in a large part to offering free, unlicensed music downloads. It’s a controversial and risky tactic that might land Baidu in hot water …
Yahoo’s open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server – Zimbra – has just released version 5.0 of their collaboration suite. If you recall, Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo in September 2007. This latest release includes some much-needed upgrades, including support for RIM’s BlackBerry devices, and improvements to their browser-based email client. With Zimbra 5.0, users will …
On Monday MySpace announced the launch of their developer platform, and beginning today developers can begin building applications for use with the popular social networking site. What is interesting about this so-called launch is that it is launching without any actual applications for users to mess around with. Instead, the idea is that all developers …
In case you somehow escaped the news, the New York Giants took home the Lombardi trophy last night as the Super Bowl XLII champs. Next to the game itself, the television ads that run during the game are the next most talked about thing. Reprise Media released the results today of their 4th annual Search …
While a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would most obviously impact consumers the most, it would also affect businesses. One of the first casualties of such a merger would likely be Yahoo’s Zimbra open-source messaging server, which they acquired in September 2007 for about $350 million. Zimbra is considered to be an open-source alternative to the …
