March Madness has begun, Maryland and Georgetown won their first games, and Yahoo has added March Madness shortcuts and scoreboards in Yahoo Search results. More from the Yahoo Search Blog : We’ve included seed numbers, game times, and when the games are in play, real-time scores. If you prefer, you can use our existing score [...]

Google has added the ability to chat and make VOIP calls directly from a Google account holder’s Google Personalized Homepage with the Google Talk Gadget. The Google Talk Gadget can also be placed on non Google pages or blogs, or your favorite homepage destination (not sure if it would work on PageFlakes, MySpace or NetVibes).

Here’s the release. Here are my previous posts on Tellme and mobile local search. Bringing more usability to mobile search in particular — and differentiation to MSFT — is a key to this acquisition. But it remains strange because MSFT has considerable speech processing assets and conceivably could have built everything that Tellme is bringing [...]

Sometimes the best offense is a strong defense and Microsoft just made one heck of an offensive/defensive search toolbar deal with the Lenovo Group; which is the third largest PC maker in the world. Now China based Lenovo (which owns IBM PC’s) PC’s will come with the Windows Live Toolbar installed within their desktops and [...]

I was at Topix last week chatting with Chris Tolles and CEO Rick Skrenta and they told me of their acquisition of the Topix.com domain from a Canadian firm. Under pain of torture I was sworn to secrecy. That news came out in Kevin Delaney’s WSJ article (sub req’d) today, which focused on SEO issues [...]

Remember Go.com and the ease of securing a top ranking for your site within the search engine results just by gaming the old Go.com GoGuides system? Those were the golden years of SEO : Go.com, Altavista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos and Yahoo were the more popular search engines on the market and the most desired sites [...]

Eurekster, Inc., which wasone of the first community based social search engines, has secured $5.5 million in a Series B financing. The funding, from Technology Venture Partners (TVP) of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan with the participation of the private investors who provided the company’s initial Series A financing, will enable Eurekster to accelerate [...]