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At the University at Buffalo researchers have recently finalized a new search technology that is to find “hidden” information on regular web sites.

This time we are not talking about information that is not available to search engine spiders. Rather, this is a project attempting to interpret the information found in an new and more productive way.

puzzleThe technology is called Unintended Information Revelation or UIR. The press release on this research has been given the title In War on Terrorism, New Search Engine Seeks Hidden Vulnerabilities.

Read full aricle here.

MSN went live with following API’ today

• MSN search API
• MSN Messenger
• MSN Virtual Earth
• MSN Search Toolbar API
• MSN Start.com API

Detilas here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/

Vnunet reports : 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.

Read more…

After google going beta with its Froogle Mobile on google lab. Its yahoo’s turn to do the matching game and launch yahoo mobile shopping search.

“On the heels of the release of Yahoo! Shopping APIs, we at Yahoo! Shopping have developed our own application based on those very web services. It’s a great example of the innovation that can happen when building on our open APIs.

Simply enter http://shop.yahoo.com into your WAP 2.0-enabled browser, search for a product, and start comparing. Check your phone’s user manual to see if it’s WAP 2.0-enabled.”

User does not have to enter a different address for mobile shopping search for WAP phones. If http://shop.yahoo.com in your web browser it goes to http://shopping.yahoo.com doing a redirect depeing upon the device that is being used, unlike google where you have to enter a different address http://wml.froogle.com/

Yahoo has a post on its blog about this mobile shopping search.

Googles blog has this post today.

“A Washington state judge ruled today that Dr. Kai-Fu Lee can immediately begin working for Google. (There’s a profile of Dr. Lee in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.) We’re thrilled, and he’s excited to get right to work on several big things, including recruiting, building our Chinese R&D center, and related government relations.

You may remember that in July, right after we hired Dr. Lee to build and head our new China R&D center, Microsoft sued both of us. They argued that Dr. Lee was going to do work at Google that was competitive with what he had been doing at Microsoft – which they said would violate the one-year non-compete agreement that Microsoft requires employees to sign. (They sued even before knowing what Dr. Lee was going to be doing here. Hmmm…) At first, the judge in the case decided temporarily to limit what work Dr. Lee could do at Google until he learned more about the dispute….” Read it here on Googles Official blog.

No don’t rub your eyes you are reading it right, it is faxing for inclusion in so called “the main Internet search engine and web portal.”

It says “Get noticed by throusands of daily visitors. We will place a link to your web site for free under your headline, just complete this form and fax to us. If your company don’t have a web site we can get a new site designed and hosted in one day. Call 800-700-6228 now, or send an e-mail to ads@commerce.com . This main portal has a fast search engine, news, stock quotes, conversion tables for currency, temperature, measurements and more. We have collectors and hobbyist pages, specialized directories for music makers or movie makers, construction trades much more where resources can be found and listed.”

See it to believe it.

You can print the form and send it to them by fax so that they can include your site in their elusive search engine and directory.

After sending emails to adsense users affected by Katrina offering help to manage their accounts, google has created Katrina web and people search.

Google Hurricane Katrina Search is a new service from Google that allows you to do two things — search for people who may be missing and search only against sites deemed to be relevant to Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, a full list of what Katrina “relevant” sites are included is not provided. However, a FAQ page explains more on how the service works, including how to get personal information out of the service, if it should appear (it will still remain on the source documents on the web non run by Google, however). Yahoo has also strated a similar service.

Google offers to help adsense account holders with managing their account in the wake of Katrina disaster. Some adsense account holders near the affected areas has received following email from google.

Hello,

I really appreciate thought behind this email from google. It has added icing to the already sweet google. Cheers Google!!

After flexing their muscles about claims of number of pages indexed by between yahoo and google, some evidance are begging to emerge that points out that google has increased the number of pages indeed.

Numbe of pages google display on its homepage “©2005 Google – Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages” is wrong and would be updated by google soon.

Danny Sullivan has published on searcheginewatch blog a way to sort of calculate numbe of pages indexed in google.

The way to calculate pages suggested by Danny is simple. After reading this blog I thought of trying it myself. Its a 2 step process.

• Search for a word that does not returns any pages in google. “CountAllThePagesInGoogle”.
• Then use google searches negative operator to search for all the pages that did not contain that term -”CountAllThePagesInGoogle”

This results in count of 9,570,000,000 pages.

I then tried the same approach with a word that is there in google search and results in pages.

• I used the and it resulted in 9,150,000,000 pages.
• I used -the and it resulted in 1,330,000,000 pages.

This adds up to 10,480,000,000 pages. So this technique seems to work… sort of. We have to wait till googles goes public with the number of pages it holds in its index.

This test does not work on yahoo and askjeeves it does seem to work in msn though and results in 5,322,521,243 pages which is close to msn’s claims.

In SEO world how much is too much? This article tries to prove that such a thing does exist. Although its gives example to prove the point, it might differ from people to people and their experience of it. Read full article here.