hakia, the semantic search engine, just came out with its Syndication Web Services for web publishers or businesses looking to provide semantic search on their sites. Syndication Web Services provide the semantic technology which powers hakia. It delivers an XML feed with options to customize the feed.

The Syndication Web Services technology offers 30,000 free searches per day which is also free of advertising. This offer is only available to early adopters until they fill up their partners’ quota. These are some of the interesting features of Syndication Web Services:
Web Search -Provides search results from the entire web
Vertical Search – Provides search results from a particular vertical such as, health, or from a particular database.
News Search – Provides news articles for the given query.
Categorizer – Helps to identify categorical items from a given text ( can be a text block or URL)
Summarizer – Displays a summary of a given text block/URL. Will be of most use to content management systems.
Characterizer -Helps to identify and expand various keywords, phrases or tags; perfect for SEM professionals and publishers.
TMR (Text Meaning Representation) – Displays ‘text meaning representation’ of a given text block, most useful for core technology development.

According to Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia, this new hakia implementation is meant to be useful to a wide variety of applications, right from advertising to even document management. The best results will be seen by webmasters with complex projects, as they will benefit from the unique improvements made possible by the semantic search technology.

Now we come to Russell, a small time advertiser who like thousands of others had used Google’s AdWords to advertise one of his sites, WorldLabel.com. All was going fine until one day Russell noticed that seemingly spammy campaigns had been set up in his account.The site being advertised was “lastminute.com” which claimed to offer a loan of $1500 instantly, and the keywords for this campaign were variations of “loans” ,“fast cash” and so on. A little research showed that Russell had received a “phishing” email that had looked like an official email from Google asking him to login to his account to change some settings. In this case, Russell was saved by AdWords’s abuse filter and has since then changed his password. But for those of you hearing those alarm bells ringing, the best thing to do when you recieve such email is to ignore it. If you just can’t ignore, then never click on it, open a new window and type in the actual URL (in this case the AdWords home page) manually.

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Yes, June 17, 2008 was the big day. The folks at Mozilla haven’t left a single stone unturned in their effort to get the word across that they were hoping to set an all new kind of World Record, for the most number of downloads for a software in one day; and they were hoping to achieve that with the spanking new version of their incredibly popular browser, Mozilla Firefox 3. So,with more than half the time having elapsed already, here’s the scoop on all that’s gone on in this 24 hours.

Things certainly didn’t start out as planned. For more than two hours, the official download site, Getfirefox.com, was flooded with download requests from thousands of enthusiastic visitors from all around the world. Predictably, it couldn’t handle this sudden influx, and crashed. Frantic efforts by the Operations team at Mozilla to up the capacity started showing results, and the site was up and running again. All was not smooth though. Downloads were really slow, and on the first attempt, the download process completely froze at 46%. Thankfully, it did do the job on the subsequent attempt.

Fortunately, there have been no further hiccups as of now and Firefox 3 has already eclipsed the record set by Firefox 2, with 8 million downloads. A spokesperson at the Guinness World Records revealed that the entire review process, including the time taken for their team to assess all the evidence might take between 4-6 weeks. He also mentioned that the would-be world record setters could opt for the FastReview feature, which would provide results in about 3 days. So,we’ll have to wait and keep our ears and eyes open.

As of now, the United States is in the forefront, accounting for 2 million downloads. The total number stands at the 8,00,000+ mark at last update. As for me, I’ve done my part; Mozilla 3 has taken the pride of place in my desktop. What are you waiting for?

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Your profile is the starting point of your existence on Facebook; Anyone who would like to know you better opens this window; Obviously that makes it a great place to sell your products. Your profile is the landing page for a visitor; its the first thing that he/she will encounter, so its crucial to optimize it to sell your stuff!
Fortunately, the profile page is one of the very few areas where Facebook gives you some degree of control. Be it the design of the page, or the amount of information you can reveal/hide, customization is possible. Take advantage of Facebook’s components such as Work Info, Personal Info, Photos, etc to express your passion for any brand, product or even a cause and tell/sell your story to the entire world!

Most people underestimate the power of social networking; specifically its power to generate an immense number of page views. When you are trying to market something online, page views are all that matter. Make your profile tell a story; the more attractive your story sounds, the more people are going to want to know about you and what you have to say. Develop pages, launched sometime last year with the sole purpose of allowing businesses of varying kinds to effortlessly establish their brand presence on Facebook, is the last step in providing you a complete Facebook presence.
It seems like the Associated Press wants to establish set of rules for the online use of their content, and they have reported that they will be holding a meeting with bloggers, specifically, with Robert Cox, who is the president of the Media Bloggers Association. According to AP, this is the beginning of an effort to create standards regarding the online use of its stories by bloggers which would protect its content without discouraging legitimate quoting by bloggers.

Quite understandable, as bloggers grab for free the news that other newspapers and sources pay to get hold of. But what AP seems to be overlooking is the fact that most bloggers will credit the original source by providing a link back to it, and in the process, giving more credibility and power to AP as a permanent online news reference. Guess the people at AP are a little slow on the uptake! Stay tuned for updates!

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GenieKnows is a search engine that has been in existence since 1999, slugging it out in the lower tiers of the search engine universe. One of a dying breed of independent search engines, it adopted a radical and somewhat dangerous plan 18 months ago. In an effort to give itself a unique identity that would make it stand out amidst its competition and appeal to its search-user market, GenieKnows went vertical, separating its offerings into three categories: Local, Gaming and Health. This effectively created three distinct search engines, each with its own unique functionality and characteristics. Company sources revealed the intention to introduce more such verticals in the coming months.

Mark Harper, VP of strategic relations at GenieKnows credits Founder cum CEO, Barbara Manning, with the decision to serve specific verticals instead of generic search results. This decision came two years ago, a time when smaller players were struggling to survive in a search engine market so convincingly dominated by a few extremely big players. Many were forced to close, unable to compete with those six giggly and colorful letters, Google.

Having already amassed a large base index of web pages using their own home grown algorithmic search engine and their ever-awake crawler christened GenieBot, GenieKnows decided to abandon the futile general search engine battle with Google and serve local search results, health information and target the gaming community. These were smart moves, and each of these verticals is growing at a rapid pace today, each presenting its own distinct advertising and revenue generation opportunities.

GenieKnows’s Local Search, probably the most important vertical, lists nearly 20 million local businesses in partnership with Localeze, a business content management firm. This innovative local search engine combines search results with satellite or graphic images, breaking the map into a grid system called Zone Search, helping to find the right street or address easily. Much of the content in GenieKnows’s Game Search engine consists of game reviews and tips, cheat codes, hardware, maps etc. It also displays gaming forum discussions. And the third vertical GenieKnows Health Search provides health and wellness information. Spidering most major media websites as well as medical discussion forums, it provides thorough results.

With its Local Search well established and the other two verticals expanding rapidly and having survived what could have been the harshest period in the short history of search engines, GenieKnows is extremely well-positioned to make the most of the endless possibilities offered by what could be a brighter era for alternative search engines.

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Today, the search engine environment is evolving rapidly, leaving SEO practitioners gasping for air in the race to quickly adapt to the ever-changing landscape. With Inktomi having ascended to the level of importance solely held by Google until recently, SEO practitioners now have been forced to rethink their strategies, tactics and maybe even the so called ‘ethics’ of technique.

So how does one work towards optimizing a website for two remarkably unique search engines without resorting to the spammy tactics such as portal-sites and leader pages? The answer to our question is not immediately obvious but lies in the analysis of the typical behavior of both these engines. While many similarities do exist, such as the behaviors of both their spiders, there is a significant difference in the way each chooses to treat a website.

Google and Inktomi choose radically different site elements to determine site placement. Google gives a lot of importance to strong, relevant link-popularity while Inktomi uses meta tags, text and titles as the most important factors for its rankings. When the GoogleBot spiders a new page, there are good chances of getting an internal page getting placed in its index, without having to pay for that specific page. This doesn’t seem likely with Inktomi. As we know, it’s a paid-inclusion service and web masters will have to pay an admission fee that’s based on the number of pages they want to be spidered by Inktomi’s bot, Slurp. Based on this pricing, for an average site with 50 pages, it can cost up to $1289 to have all it’s pages included in Slurp’s index. It is safe to assume that most small businesses won’t be willing to pay so much where there is the option of Google, whose GoogleBot and FreshBot have just about every effective internal link on their index without the need for web masters to submit them manually.

The best way to satisfy both these engines is to rethink title, text and tag placement as well as optimization of internal and external linking strategies. Keyword arrangement, density, addition of a text-based site-map, placing of unique titles and tags for each web page, concentrating on unique, original content are all points to ponder. And finally, don’t hesitate to pass on higher costs to your clients, as top placements will now require paid-inclusion of internal pages. Search engine advertising is unparalleled international exposure and well worthing paying for.

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France has officially banned Email! Wait a minute, this doesn’t mean that you will no longer be able to send email messages and will be forced to use Instant Messaging, SMS or a service like Twitter to communicate online. It simply means that French authorities have decided to rename “Email” as “Courriel”. The original idea was to replace the word “Email” with the french equivalent “Courrier Electronique” meaning electronic letter, but the hipper term “Courriel” made it in the end. Also, a start-up will now be referred to as “Jeune Pousse” or young plant. We’ll have to wait and see if the French start “Courriel”ing each other!

People have started noticing changes in Google Trends of late, and, finally Google announced the release of the latest version of this tool yesterday on its official blog. This version includes a new feature called ‘Relative Scaling’ which is a type of numeric metric and also incorporates the ability to export data on the trends. Relative Scaling basically will provide you with a ballpark estimate of how certain terms are ‘trending’ instead of exact data. On the new graph, you can notice a number at the top as well as one on the y-axis. These numbers don’t refer to exact figures, but rather, it’s a scale of the first term entered by you so that the average search volume is equal to 1.00 in the given time period.

The new export function comes with two options, relative scaling and fixed scaling. Fixed scaling is simply the data scaled as described above in a specific time-line. Google Trends users had previously noticed that the ability to view trends on an hourly basis had been removed from the tool.

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Ok so today I logged into my digg profile to see that there is a story with other 10K votes an amazing feat for any story of any nature. Although I have before slated digg in previous posts for the way the site is run, you can absolutley see the potential power of a strong story. I guess with about 10k diggs that site in question must of got a heck of alot of traffic with alot of subscribers and it generated alot of buzz as its all over the internet. Whether or not the story is true it just goes to show anyone using digg can see why it is labelled the top social site around these days

As you can see from the title I feel this story in question has broken the digg record with the most votes. There maybe another few that have like 20 – 30k votes but this is the only one that caught mine and a global attention. So if you have do let us know the URL if you think there are more that has the power of this story. Finally id just like to congratulate the submitter of the story and digg for achieving such a great feat. I say bring on the 20k with a killer story! 

P.S If you know any other storys that have achieved this feat do let us know

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Ever wondered why some some friendships are fleeting while others last your entire lifetime? According to a recent study that involved 2 million people and 8 million phone conversations over the period of an entire year, the secret behind persistent relationships is reciprocity, or, the simple act of returning your friend’s call. It found out that the more often two friends called each other, the longer the period of their relationship’s continuance.

It has been common knowledge that some people are more adept as social animals, who are much more connected than others. The study also found these highly connected people are also more socially expressed in terms of the persistence or strength of their many connections.

Applying these findings to social media, if you happen to have a large network of online friends, it doesn’t mean that you have weaker ties with all of them. As the study says, the lifespan and depth of these relationships depends on one factor – connecting repeatedly over time.

Micro-blogging or life-streaming websites such as Twitter and Plurk give us the chance to meet and communicate with a large number of varied people from all around the world. This kind of communication is less personal, but no less legitimate than a real face-to-face meeting. The strength of these services is their ability to enable you to develop persistence in your online relationships, in a ultra-casual, completely non-invasive manner, gradually helping you build a network of people.

There are various ways to leverage the new social channels such as Twitter and Plurk, but what matters in the end is that they help you develop persistence in relationships that matter to you. The bottom line is, people market people! Now isn’t that a good enough reason to get you going?

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It turns out that choosing a potential vice presidential candidate is no big deal, thanks to Google! Republican presidential hopeful John McCain jokingly remarked that the incredibly popular search engine has made his job of scouting for vice presidential hopefuls much easier.

“You know, basically its a Google!!”, he announced amidst raucous laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked to comment on how his selection process was going. He also commented that he found the reach of the Internet today to be remarkable.

Vice-presidential hopefuls go through an excruciatingly rigorous screening process to determine how much help they might offer to a presidential candidate to clinch the White House and to make sure that they have no hidden skeletons that might be damaging down the campaign route. McCain, who is a senator from Arizona, clinched the republican ticket earlier this year. He said he still had some time left to decide on Number Two.

Yahoo has finally gathered all the anti-trust information required to make a decision on giving the nod on an ad outsourcing deal with Google, but it has just begun to explore that very issue for a possible scaled-down agreement with Microsoft, according to sources. This means that any deal requiring Yahoo to turn over its search related business completely to Microsoft is not imminent.

February 1, 2008 was the date when Microsoft attacked Yahoo with an unsolicited bid for a full buyout at $31 a share. This led Yahoo to review various anti-trust ramifications connected with the issue. In mid-may, Microsoft withdrew its offer and came back three weeks ago with an announcement that it was restarting talks – this time around, the discussions were about a partial transaction and not a full outright purchase.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft will try to save time by using some of the existing anti-trust material gathered when the full takeover was on the table, but this won’t guarantee a speedier review process by the federal regulators. Representatives from both Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment on the issue.

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Every major search engine uses an automated approach for indexing the net and serving relevant content- that’s a given. But what hundreds of young upstarts are trying to do is look for innovative ways to include human input into the equation. Omgili offers an interesting and unique mix of automated approach and the human factor.

Omgili sends out an automated crawler to index the web like any other search engine would. But that’s where similarities end; Omgili goes a step further and tries to specialize its results. It scans millions of online discussion boards, forums and similar discussion-based resources from all over the world. To see the result of this in action, search for, say, a certain brand of digital camera on Google and Omgili. On top of Google’s result page, predictably, will be the manufacturer’s page for that product; But here’s the surprise, Omgili will fill your page with links to various online discussions about that particular camera, helping you find out what other real people thought about this product rather than give you the device’s specs.

This young search engine includes a number of nifty features aimed at increasing its usefulness as a search tool. Omgili Search Aid is a feature that lets a user search within the search queries performed by other users. Product Reviews is targeted exclusively at serving information from product review sites. Omgili Buzz displays the top topics at that point of time in various categories such as news, videos, movies etc… And yet another feature, Google@Omgili, empowers a user to do a simultaneous search on both search engines.

If you are interested in finding out about what other people are saying about topics that interest you, Omgili might be the tool you have been looking for. It is far from perfect, but it certainly shows the direction that the next generation of “Specialized” search engines must take.

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