2003

The Kontakter is reporting that Microsoft is planning to get into the profitable market of paid search-results themselves. At the moment, they are cooperating with Overture and looking at their own MSN-searchengine, that is supposed to be ready at the beginning of next year, it seems they are planning on […]...

Web.de will start using Googles AdSense in the future. They are hoping of doubling the revenues in this sector. Web.de Pressrelease...

Heise.de is reporting that Google might be forced to report to the FTC due to a American law. Seeing how this would be expensive and quite an effort, Google might go through with their IPO sooner than expected....

According to heise.de, the Scout24-group was taken over by T-Online today for 180 Million EUR in cash. Gesundheitsscout24 and Morgen&Morgen are not part of the deal. This means that AutoScout24, ImmobilienScout24, JobScout24, FinanceScout24, FriendScout24 as well as other brands will now be part of T-Online. Pressrelease Scout24 Pressrelease T-Online...

Looksmart has announced that they will be closing down their London office on 01.15.2004. Their reasoning is that after they ended their partnership with MSN, they could not be profitable in Europe anymore. They will keep their offices on the USA, Japan and Australia. Source: http://llama.looksmart.co.uk/email/faq.html Discussion on Webmasterword...

Google has updated both PR and Backlinks once again. It seems that they are nearly through with the update as the PageRank can also be seen in the toolbar....

The ODP-Blog is reporting that the ODP now has more than 4 million pages. Congratulations....

AOL has announced that with the new version of their AOL-software, they will delete spyware and similar miscreants. They do not only plan on deleting programs that spy on the users actions but they also plan on preventing the datastream from users to reach the spyware-providers....

At searchguild.com/googleblog/ you can find a parody to a fictitious blog by Larry Page and Sergey Brin....

At http://shop.suche.web.de/, you can find a product-searchengine powered by Web.de. The results will show the product name, picture, description, the price as well as vendor-informations....

Is Googles new spam-filter working by Bayens, as many other spam-mailfilters already are? More on it here....

Fortune.com has an interesting article on Google by Fred Vogelstein....

heise.de is reporting that a code of conduct for searchengines is in the making, which is to provide for a strict division between content and advertisements....

According to a study by Nielsen//Netratings, EBay had more than 22 Million European visitors from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland. This puts E Bay far ahead of Amazon who had 11,6 Million visitors. Third place surprisingly goes to the price-comparison site Kelkoo with about […]...

news.com is reporting that Overture is blocking all ads for medicine. This is to prevent the illegal sale of medicine....

You can use Singingfish to search the internet for audio- and video-files as well as pictures. AOL still wants to integrate the Google-searchfunction, according to AOL-vicepresident Jim Riesenbach....

Google put the new backlink and PageRank values on a datacenter in VA....

On the heels of Google, MSN is planning a news-overview. It seems the MSN-Newsbot is planned for England, Italy, France and Spain....

According to News.com, tools are being developed which are supposed to filter out text-ads, similar to bannerblockers (Webwasher or the like)....

heise.de is reporting that Lycos Europe plans to massively cut costs by concentrating on their core-business. This also means that they will cut about 100 jobs....

On ecin.de there is an interesting article in 3 parts by Torsten Schwarz on the subject of E-Mail-marketing....

Besides the already well-known Google Toolbar, Googlelabs introduced the Google Deskbar yesterday. With it, you get a search-field in the Windows taskbar that can be used without having a browser open. For the searchquery, a browser-like window will open on the lower right part of the desktop which then shows […]...

The FTC has obtained an interim order against a US firm that spammed the Windows-news-service with ads for their ad-blocker, which is supposed to stop spam like that....

Beginning last Tuesday, AskJeeves has now integrated the price-comparison-service of pricegrabber.com....

The ODP forum has a posting on which mistakes to make if you wish to get banned from ODP....

An interesting article on auctionbytes.com is reporting that EBay seems to offer their top20 affiliates in the USA the possibility to use auctiontexts to spam through a eBay-API. That this procedure is also being practiced in Germany has been noted for a while now, what’s new is that now it […]...

The New York Times is reporting that there are talks between Microsoft and Google about a possible acquisition of Google through Microsoft. Both companies declined to comment. Update (11.3.): Telepolis took a closer look at this subject...

Yahoo!-Germany seems to have moved from Espotting to Overture. Overture is providing the sponsored-links within the Yahoo!-search....

Lycos Europe managed to lower their losses in the first 9 month to 28,6 million Euros (previous year: 55,4 million Euros). Their profits came in at 61,8 million Euros (previous year: 89,3 million Euros)....

A simple Email with your searchquery to google@capeclear.com is enough to get the results back in another Email. Since they are using the Google-API, this service can only be used a total of 1000 times a day. The returned results are also often noticeably different from the current SERPs on […]...

The market researchers at Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study on the impact of spam on the regular usage of E-Mail. Due to the large amounts of spam, 25% of E-Mail users are already using it less. Private users have a larger problem with spam, which can […]...

At the moment, you can marvel at an extremely brazen case of a sham-pagerank on ebay.de. The site for sale did not get the PageRank by itself but by being classified as a yahoo.com synonym by Google (Google cache-version). For all of you who always wanted a PR10 site: 1. […]...

heise.de is reporting that EBay is having problems with the switch from daylight-savings- to standard-time. Due to this, auctions that had already finished were made available again....

Saturday night, the backlinks as well as the PageRank will get evaluated anew. It seems that the results are already shown on www.google.[de|com]....

The Wall Street Journal writes that Google is planning on holding their IPO next year. Estimates on Google’s worth go from 15 to 25 billion US-Dollars....

According to heise.de, the district government in Dusseldorf wants searchengines to become repsonsible for the content that they return. Their argument is that searchengines are service-providers and could therefore possibly be legally responsible for their SERPs. The district government is planning on especially getting into contact with Google on this....

A French court decided that Google searchqueries that are also brandnames may not point to competitors’ links, that put these brandnames into their advertisements....

VeriSign wants to sell Network Solutions Business to a Private Equity company....

Searchenginewatch.com got the chance to exchange some words with Sergey Brin at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose....

OJR has an interesting interview with Krishna Bharat, the developer of Google-News....

You can now also get the news as an RSS-Feed at https://www.sistrix.com/feed/ for your offline-newsreader or for syndication....

James Baughn is introducing a new searchengine-concept on humorix.org. Here, sites that pay money to other searchengines for rankings are excluded, or shown far to the back of the SERPs. Another signal that is considered is the quality of the HTML-code the page has....

Beginning in November, Yahoo! is planning on including ticket-data from Eventim into their music-portal Launch....

Karstadt.de is offering a price-comparison service for 15 European low-cost-carriers....

The FTD has an article on how the Musicindustry will make five times the profits with ringtones this year, than it does with the sale of music online. While they will likely make a profit of 350 million Euro from ringtones, the profits for musicdownloads should only be around 70 […]...

heise.de is reporting that more than 200 attendees have come together to discuss what can be done against email-spam....

It seems that the QHosts-worm was not the only one to take advantage of the Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerability. The owner of elict.org seems to be doing something similar. Until recently, the URL http://www.elict.org/awards.html showed up regularly in the logfiles as referrer, which encouraged you to take a look who […]...

Searchenginewatch has an interesting article on the origin of the names of all the important searchengines....

Yahoo! has more than doubled their profits in the third quarter, thanks to a strong growth of the advertisement devision. At the same time, they raised their yearly estimates. A large part of the advertisements should come from the PPC-entrys to the Yahoo! searchengine....

Amazon and Microsoft announced that from now on, they will integrate the Amazon Webservices into Microsoft Office. Amazon’s XML-interface will be able to show fitting articles from the Amazon stock right in Office documents. Microsoft Press-release...

Just as Google shows interesting searchqueries and trends with it’s Zeitgeist, AskJeeves will now do the same with JeevesIQ....

AOL renewed its contract with Google. Details about the contract were not made public. This contract goes against the trend for large portals to develop their own search technologies. Google’s large popularity was one of the reasons why AOL decided to renew their partnership. This means that the AOL-sites will […]...

Searchenginewatch is reporting that MSN ended their partnership with Looksmart. MSN made up about 65% of Looksmarts profits. This should be another step by MSN on the way of getting ready to set up their own searchengine. Update (3:25pm): heise.de also has an article....

According to heise.de, Verisign has taken down the controversial SiteFinder. Verisign redirected any access to non registered .com and .net domains to their SiteFinder. It seems that an ultimatum from the ICANN was the source of this takedown, which gave Verisign until 6pm pacific to shut down SiteFinder. Verisign is […]...

In a spam-mail, PPCExperience.com is trying to sell a list with all pages in Googles’ Directory. Since the Google-Directory is using ODP-data, you can download these, free of charge, at this URL: http://rdf.dmoz.org/...

Suchmaschine.de is trying to install a dialer with every query. Seems as though someone is trying to make some money with suchmaschine.de, once again....

Google has bought Kaltix Corp. Both parties are not divulging any financial insights into the deal. Kaltix develops personalized searchtechnologies....

You can get the Google-Toolbar for Mozilla at http://googlebar.mozdev.org/about.html. This free toolbar is unable to show the PageRank, since it is unable to calculate the necessary checksum. [Toolbar Screenshots]...

TweakXP is reporting that a program has modified the hosts-file for many internet users, so that queries to the important searchengines like Google and Altavista are being redirected to the IP 64.191.59.85, which means that the queries will not reach the intended sites anymore. There are speculations on Usenet about […]...

After setting up their Google-Spain offices, Google now also has a News– as well as an Adwords-team there....

The Wirtschaftswoche is reporting, that Google is planning on not only setting up selling agencies but also research-offices in Europe and India. The reasoning behind this being the USA’s restrictive Visa policies. The work-permits for many important developers are not being extended. To keep these people from leaving the company, […]...

The Wall Street Journal has an article on how Amazon is developing their own searchtechnology. This new division, which goes by the name A9, has been fitted with 30 programmers and is located in Silicon Valley. Amazon plans on both using this technology themselves as well as licensing it out […]...

Google is going to open an office in Spain, according to an article on finanzen.net. This will be the fifth European branch besides Germany, Ireland, France and Italy....

Version 2 of the Google Toolbar, which has been available in English for a while already, is now available in its German translation. New are the Popup-Blocker that is already known from the English version as well as the ability to restrict searches by country. [Download here]...

Yahoo! has relaunched their shopping-platform. For the categories Electronics, Baby-products as well as CD’s, they are now comparing prices from different online-shops. Yahoo might not get close to the results of the large price-comparison sites, but I am sure they are working on their database....

In the current c’t on page 88, Heise is reporting on the increasing Googlespam. In this article, heise states that they have banished the Biveroo-Moloch from the Google-Index....

www-kr seems to be a new Google-datacenter. It can be found in Dublin, Ireland and has the IP 66.102.11.100....