Microsoft acquires video search startup VideoSurf for $70M

Microsoft has acquired video search startup VideoSurf for an undisclosed amount, reports Israeli business news site Globes.

A handful of publications have indicated that Microsoft paid an estimated $70 million for the company, according to a report from TechCrunch Europe.

VideoSurf specializes in video search technology that scans several video related sites for results, such as DailyMotion, YouTube, Metacafe, Hulu and others. The site’s results focus on specific episodes of web shows, notable individuals and … Continue Reading

Google considers financing a deal for Yahoo buyout

Google is the latest company to be connected to a potential buyout of troubled Yahoo Inc. The search giant has talked to at least two equity firms about helping it acquire a chunk of Yahoo, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which sites an unnamed source close to the matter.

The talks are said to still be in the early stages, and no serious offers have been made, but the play would … Continue Reading

Union Square invests in search engine Duck Duck Go

Alternative search engine Duck Duck Go closed its first round of funding led by Union Square Ventures, the company’s founder Gabriel Weinberg announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Duck Duck Go, which has a tiny percentage of the search engine market share in comparison to Google, doesn’t primarily base its results on algorithms. It also differs from other big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by not tracking its visitors the way … Continue Reading

Demo: TasteJive lets wine recommendations be one of the cool kids

TasteJive wants to make wine just a little bit easier to swallow. Today the company launched its wine recommendation engine to take the jargon out and make wine more contemporary.

Wine can be intimidating and often pushes people away just for the fear of looking stupid. (I know, it’s hard to believe anyone would feel insecure with a bunch of people slurping, swishing and spitting around them, but hey, this is the wine-snob norm.) TasteJive … Continue Reading

Watch out for botnet-driven Google Dorks, the next automated cyber attacks

Botnets have been taking down web sites for years by overwhelming sites with too much traffic. But now the swarms of compromised computers are being unleashed for the first time on an old kind of vulnerability: Google Dorks.

Google Dorks have been around for a while, as the name for an attack where hackers scan web sites, using commonly used links within company networks, to see if there are any unsecure links that can be … Continue Reading

Reputation.com to spend $41M on “math” to control your online profile

Consumers will be able to charge advertisers to access their personal data.

The company making it possible is Reputation.com, an online privacy company that just picked up a $41 million round led by August Capital.

However, the details of the product, still under development, are unclear.

Michael Fertik says it’s designed to put consumers in control of their own data.  “It’s like a vault where they can put data and get paid for it themselves,” … Continue Reading

Google’s Instant Pages drastically improves webpage loading speeds

Google demonstrated the speed improvements of its new Instant Pages feature at today’s Inside Search live event, which focused on additions to its Instant Search product.

Instant Pages uses web rendering to load webpages from search results 3 to 5 times faster for the average person, according to Google’s Amit Singhal, who reaffirmed the company’s commitment to a faster search experience during the demo.

Singhal explained that the average webpage takes about 5 seconds to … Continue Reading

Google, Bing, and Yahoo partner for web tag standards

When the top three Internet search providers work together on a project, the web pays attention. On Thursday, Google, Bing, and Yahoo introduced schema.org, a resource for website owners and developers that want to add markup to their pages.

Search engines rely on schemas, or HTML tags, to improve results and make them more accurate. When webmasters set out to optimize their sites for SEO, they can use these markups to help push their sites … Continue Reading

App search engine Quixey lets developers manage apps across app stores

Quixey, a new startup that’s developing a search engine dedicated to apps, announced today that it will also make life easier for developers by giving them an easy way to manage their apps across multiple stores.

Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow … Continue Reading

Microsoft's Bing sees Twitter backlash for Japan quake campaign

Here’s a great example of how a seemingly noble social media donation campaign can go awry: Microsoft tweeted two hours ago on the Bing search engine’s Twitter account that it would donate up to $100,000 to help victims of Japan’s earthquake — but only if Twitter users retweeted its original post to broadcast it to their followers, at $1 per retweet.

While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this … Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Bing overtakes Yahoo globally (again)

Chalk up yet another victory for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It has overtaken Yahoo in search traffic for the month of January 2010, according to web analytics company StatCounter.

The company says this is the first time Bing has ever surpassed Yahoo, but that’s only according to StatCounter data. In September 2010, the research company Nielsen found that Bing ousted Yahoo as the second place search engine worldwide.

It’s not unusual for web analytics companies … Continue Reading

Demand Media: Content farm? What content farm?

Demand Media had its first earnings call as a public company this afternoon, and chief executive Richard Rosenblatt took the opportunity to fire back at critics who have accused the company of being nothing more than a content farm churning out articles targeted at search engines.

Rosenblatt had to endure a lot of criticism in silence due to the quiet period before Demand Media’s IPO and its first earnings report. Now, however, he said it’s … Continue Reading

Microsoft's Bing wrests search share from Google

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, now has 27 percent of the search engine market and is quickly gaining on Google, according to Hitwise. Bing’s share rose by 6 percent in the month of January alone.

The bigger news, and perhaps the underlying reason for the rise: Microsoft’s Bing might be the better search engine. Hitwise says that Google’s “success rate” is just 65 percent, compared with an 82 percent score for Bing. The success rate is … Continue Reading

Search engine Ask.com has no value within IAC, says Barry Diller — and maybe he doesn't, either

Search engine Ask.com, an early competitor of Google’s that has since faded slightly into obscurity, doesn’t have any value in the framework of its parent company InterActiveCorp, according to IAC CEO Barry Diller. He made the comments today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Ask.com might possess some value if it were spun off into a standalone company outside of IAC, but it hasn’t gained any significant ground in the search engine market since it … Continue Reading

AOL and Google renew search deal as Bing creeps up

Every time AOL is expected to fade into obscurity, something crazy happens to make it relevant again. Today it’s the five-year extension of AOL’s contract with Google to provide search functions and a portion of ad revenue.

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a … Continue Reading

Microsoft cuts off cash flow to deal hounds, shutters Bing cashback

Every time AOL is expected to fade into obscurity, something crazy happens to make it relevant again. Today it’s the five-year extension of AOL’s contract with Google to provide search functions and a portion of ad revenue.

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a … Continue Reading

Bing to start roll-out of new search features

Every time AOL is expected to fade into obscurity, something crazy happens to make it relevant again. Today it’s the five-year extension of AOL’s contract with Google to provide search functions and a portion of ad revenue.

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a … Continue Reading

Cashing in on non-English search engines

Every time AOL is expected to fade into obscurity, something crazy happens to make it relevant again. Today it’s the five-year extension of AOL’s contract with Google to provide search functions and a portion of ad revenue.

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a … Continue Reading