Smaaz’s Blog

comScore Releases June U.S. Search Engine Rankings

comScore today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.  In June 2007, Google Sites maintained its spot atop the rankings with 49.5 percent of the U.S. search market.  Yahoo! Sites captured second place with 25.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (13.2 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).

• Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.
• Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million).  Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.
• Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.

Add comment July 17th, 2007

Amazon Launches New Answers Site - Askville.com

Amazon is jumping on the social networking train with the launch of Askville.  The concept of the site - Askville allows users to post any question they want and get answers from real people - is similar to Yahoo Answers and Answers.com.

Users will rate other people’s answers with “experience points” based on how helpful the answer is, aspiring experts can gain or lose points. Additionally, users gain Quest Coins for every action they complete, from voting to asking a question. Amazon describes them as virtual currency that can be used on a yet-to-be launched site called Questville. Amazon boasts in its FAQ section for Questville that “on Questville you will be able to use your Quest Coins to participate in exciting new adventures and other cool things!”

Add comment July 10th, 2007

Yahoo! Partners With eBay To Create eBay Toolbar

eBay and Yahoo! have teamed up to create a new version of the eBay Toolbar that combines features from both sites. The new Toolbar contains the following features:

• Improved Search - Use the new Toolbar to search items on eBay and Half.com, or do a quick Yahoo! search to find matches across the entire web. An advanced web search will help you find local businesses from Yahoo! Local, as well as content from Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Answers and more.
• One-click access to your favorite destinations - Jump directly to features such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com and My Yahoo! As before, Toolbar also provides buttons that make eBay.com and My eBay just a click away. Customize your toolbar to add and remove the buttons of your choice.
• Account Guard, eBay alerts, and more - The new eBay Toolbar featuring Yahoo! offers many of the great features of the old Toolbar. Account Guard helps protect you from spoof websites. Desktop alerts let you know when there’s been activity on items you’re watching, bidding on, or selling. Plus, the new toolbar has a number of bug fixes and updates that address issues from previous releases.

Add comment July 5th, 2007

Google is Giving Away FeedBurner Pro for Free

Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free:

FeedBurner Stats PRO
PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.

MyBrand
The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the “My Account” tab after you’ve signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website’s domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”.

Add comment July 4th, 2007

Developers Discuss Future of Innovation in Web Applications

Google today is hosting more than 5,000 developers at 10 locations around the world at the first-ever Google Developer Day. In keynotes and breakout sessions in Sydney, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Madrid, Paris, Hamburg, London, and Mountain View, California, Google engineers and product managers will be discussing the future of web applications with developers from around the world.Google will be articulating its strategy for working with the developer community and reinforcing its commitment to driving open standards, providing building blocks for developers inside and outside Google to create web applications quickly, and leading strategic enhancements to the web development environment as a whole.

“One of the things we find most exciting about emerging web technologies is the ability to mash up many different pieces of technology to build new applications, create businesses, or even just satisfy that niche interest or convenience,” said Jeff Huber, vice president of engineering, Google. “We want to work closely with developers so together we can define the next generation of products available to users on the web.”

Google’s developer program is focused on enabling developers to incorporate Google’s infrastructure and services as building blocks in their own products. Using Google products, developers can:

• Integrate Google services. Google builds web services that enable developers to use products like Google Mapsâ„¢ mapping service as building blocks in their own applications.
• Reach Google users. Google enables developers to embed their applications within products like iGoogleâ„¢ personalized homepage service, so they can reach millions of Google users.
• Build next generation web applications. Google looks for ways to improve the web browser as a platform, so that ultimately users’ most important applications can run in a web browser.

Underlying these themes is a firm commitment to open standards and a desire to work with the community to experiment frequently, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.

A step forward for the browser
At Developer Day events, Google will share details and demos of a new open source technology for creating offline web applications. (See related press release here.) The new browser extension, named Google Gearsâ„¢, is being made available in its early stages to the developer community so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it. The long-term hope is that Google Gears can help the industry as a whole move toward a single standard for offline capabilities.

Easier mashups
Today Google will also release Google Mashup Editorâ„¢, an experimental online code editor for building mashups using a simple markup language. Aimed at developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript, the Google Mashup Editor offers a simpler way to deploy AJAX user interface components atop existing feeds and Google web services. By substituting extended XHTML tags for entire blocks of JavaScript code and hosting the mashups on Google servers, the Google Mashup Editor speeds mashup creation and fosters more powerful, more interesting web applications.

Google Mappletsâ„¢: An API for embedding third-party applications in Google Maps
Developer Day sessions will also feature a new product called the Google Mapplets API. Released on May 29 at the Where 2.0 conference, Google Mapplets enable users to customize Google Maps with mini-applications from Google and third-party developers. These applications might provide news, real estate listings, weather reports, or just about anything else a developer can dream up. Since the Google Mapplets API combines the Google Maps API and the Google Gadgetsâ„¢ API, anyone familiar with those APIs can quickly build a Google Mapplet and reach millions of Google Maps users.

Google Web Toolkitâ„¢ framework reaches one million downloads, supports the Google Gears browser extension
Google will announce today that the Google Web Toolkit has surpassed one million downloads since its release in May 2006. It will also release the Google API Library for Google Web Toolkit with support for Google Gears, enabling developers to conveniently enhance their Google Web Toolkit applications with offline functionality.

Google Developer Day in your browser
For those unable to attend, the Google Developer Day website will provide live webcasts of the sessions from the Mountain View and London events. In addition, the website will offer blogs, schedules, presentations, Developer Day photos, and links to recorded videos from sessions around the world. All session videos will also be available on a Google Developer Day channel on YouTube. For more information, see: http://code.google.com/events/developerday.

1 comment June 1st, 2007

Google Launches Tool For Creating Offline Web Applications

Google today announced at Google Developer Day 2007 that it is providing developers with Google Gears, an open source technology for creating offline web applications. This new browser extension is being made available in its early stages so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it. The long-term hope is that Google Gears can help the industry as a whole move toward a single standard for offline capabilities that all developers can use.Google Gears marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable. As application developers and users alike want to do more on the web—whether it’s email or CRM or photo editing—enhancements that make the browser environment itself more powerful are increasingly important.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

Google is offering Google Gears as a free, fully open source technology in order to help every web application, not just Google applications. As a first example of what is possible, the Google Readerâ„¢ feed reader (http://reader.google.com) is available today with Gears-enabled offline capabilities.

Industry support
Google will be working closely with all members of the web community to converge upon a standard so developers have one consistent API for offline functionality.

“We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions.”

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla Corporation. “We’re pleased to see Google working with open source and open standards bodies on offline web applications.”

“Opera and Google share the common goal of making Web applications richer and more robust,” said HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software. “Developers have long desired the functionality and flexibility Google Gears can offer browsers. Because Opera has always prioritized giving our users what they want, we’re excited to work with Google to extend the reach and power of Web applications.”

Another tool in the application development toolbox
Google Gears builds on the web’s existing programming model by introducing new JavaScript APIs for sophisticated data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features. With these APIs, developers can bring offline capabilities to even their most complex web applications. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google Gears is available now at http://gears.google.com.

Add comment May 31st, 2007

IETF Approves DKIM as Proposed Internet Standard

In a combined effort to help combat e-mail forgery, phishing and other types of online fraud, technology industry leaders Yahoo!, Cisco, Sendmail and PGP Corporation today announced that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet, has approved DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a proposed standard, RFC 4871. DKIM is an e-mail authentication framework that uses cryptographic signature technology to verify the domain of the sender.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, close to 24,000 phishing scams were reported in the U.S. in February 2007 alone, with more than 100 top brands being forged. DKIM provides businesses with heightened brand protection by providing message authentication, verification and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate. It also provides additional information to ISPs and consumers to help determine whether a message’s point of origin is legitimate. DKIM is the result of collaboration among numerous organizations. Now that DKIM has been approved as a proposed Internet standard, these companies will work closely with leading ISPs, enterprises, e-commerce organizations, financial institutions and the open source community to facilitate rapid adoption of the specification and its incorporation into future products and offerings.

Add comment May 23rd, 2007

DMOZ Is Taking New Site Submissions Again

Seems, that DMOZ.org is accepting new site submissions again. After a lot of technical problems lately, DMOZ has disabled site suggestions and also most editor functions. Here is a status update from the Resource Zone Forum:

“The Site Suggestion, Update Listing, Editor Reinstatement, and Forgotten Password forms are available again. New editor applications are still disabled and we are still not able to check on the statuses of previous applications. As well, the public abuse reporting system, editor feedback, and any other feature for which the “Service Temporarily Unavailable” message is still appearing are still not available. We have no ETA for the return of the features which are still down. Please be patient and, again, we ask that you not start threads asking when those forms will be available again–we will update this announcement when we have further information.”

I hope the problems are over now!

1 comment January 15th, 2007