Search senior vice president Shashi Seth announced last week that a key milestone in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has been achieved: Bing now powers 100 percent of Yahoo's organic (or natural) search results. Apparently this is the case now for both the desktop product and mobile.
"Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come," said Seth. "The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous."
Earlier this month, Yahoo! and Microsoft representatives reported that the transition was underway and that just about 25 percent of Yahoo's natural search results and about three percent of paid search results were, at that point, powered by Bing. They had set as early October the complete transition for both aspects of search, so completing the organic piece of the integration just a few weeks later is testament to the speed with which the joint team is executing.
There has been significant concern among search marketing professionals that the integration of the two platforms might not be completed in time for the all-important holiday season, so achievement of this first milestone will come as some relief to all concerned.
"We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall," said Satya Nadella, senior vice president, online services division at Microsof. "As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season."
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Facebook buys a $10 million search company
Facebook has acquired online search company Chai Labs for $10 million, in one of the social networking site's more confusing buyout deals to date.
Chai Labs is a relatively new start-up that specializes in a technology
it calls "Semantic Search," which "uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web," according to the company's website.
Unlike when it has snatched up online sharing sites or Web-based image-hosting companies, Facebook's purchase of Chai Labs does not have an immediately apparent value to users. While Facebook
does have a built-in search engine that lets users search the entire Internet (which is basically just an embedded Bing engine), the number of people who actually use Facebook as their online search engine is probably staggeringly low.
Although, we do have to admit that even searching within Facebook is a big annoying at times. When I try to search for a friend of mine and it brings up a completely unrelated "fan page," I can't help but feel a bit peeved.
Still, buying a sophisticated Web search firm for $10 million means Facebook obviously has something up its sleeve beyond just improving internal site searching. It gives credence to the notion that perhaps Facebook wants to become your predominant search engine, meaning you won't even have to step out of your social networking climate to go buy that book you've been meaning to get. That's of course just speculation at this point.
And given that Chai Labs was founded in part by a former Google executive, you know that Google is going to be discussing this acquisition, which is one of Facebook's biggest to date
TGDAILY.com
Chai Labs is a relatively new start-up that specializes in a technology
it calls "Semantic Search," which "uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web," according to the company's website.
Unlike when it has snatched up online sharing sites or Web-based image-hosting companies, Facebook's purchase of Chai Labs does not have an immediately apparent value to users. While Facebook
does have a built-in search engine that lets users search the entire Internet (which is basically just an embedded Bing engine), the number of people who actually use Facebook as their online search engine is probably staggeringly low.
Although, we do have to admit that even searching within Facebook is a big annoying at times. When I try to search for a friend of mine and it brings up a completely unrelated "fan page," I can't help but feel a bit peeved.
Still, buying a sophisticated Web search firm for $10 million means Facebook obviously has something up its sleeve beyond just improving internal site searching. It gives credence to the notion that perhaps Facebook wants to become your predominant search engine, meaning you won't even have to step out of your social networking climate to go buy that book you've been meaning to get. That's of course just speculation at this point.
And given that Chai Labs was founded in part by a former Google executive, you know that Google is going to be discussing this acquisition, which is one of Facebook's biggest to date
TGDAILY.com
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