Danny Sullivan asks the question of whether search engines becoming portals -- in part because they're so furiously competing with each other -- implies a potential decline in quality. Google reportedly announced its "fusion" strategy because users were requesting greater…
Ask Jeeves has acquired Excite Europe from Tiscali for 6.1 million euros (an apparent pittance). In March of last year, Ask Jeeves bought Excite.com in the U.S. Also today, Ask Jeeves and InfoSpace announced they had settled litigation associated with…
Search-engine marketing firm TrafficLeader, whose technology supports BellSouth€™s "Real Search Engines Solutions," announced a deal with the Houston Chronicle to sell search marketing to local businesses on a similar €œflat-fee, guaranteed clicks€ basis. We had predicted €œsimplified search€ would make…
No such luck. This was simply a Forbes.com headline designed to suck readers into a brief news story. Oh, and by the way, why don€™t you respond to the question, €œWhat do you think is the best search engine?€ For…
As if the landline business hadn€™t suffered enough with wireless carriers taking share for domestic usage and VoIP taking share for international calling, now comes a slew of cheap international long distance calling plans from the cellular operators. Verizon and…
Two brief items caught my interest from opposite ends of the online spectrum, but both reflect consumer sentiment. First, there were some reports about a "grassroots" resistance among Flickrphiles to registering as Yahoo! users. Wired News has a fairly extensive…
So here's a bit of compulsive behavior from me -- coming out of the baby zone to post. I read this piece tonight on Om Malik's blog and thought it was a very interesting and bold set of predictions about…
After an almost unprecendented frenzy of speculation Google Talk is live. What is it? It's an IM client that has VoIP (good transmission quality). You have to have a gmail account to participate. (This may help drive gmail adoption.) It's…
According to MediaPost: Google and Yahoo! are attempting to purchase Amsterdam-based Trader Classified Media, which publishes 578 print guides and runs 56 Web sites with classified ads in 22 countries, according to published reports in Reuters and the London Sunday…
I got an opportunity to preview Google's version 2 of its desktop client (GD2) late last week. It's very interesting and, in the few days I've been testing it out, pretty useful. It offers much improved desktop search, indexing an…
I'm trying to get a bunch of things done and only have time for bullets right now: Print growth was sluggish but there was significant Q2 online newspaper revenue growth (28.6% to $500.7 million) vs. one year ago, according to…
Specifically, DCCI is focusing on €œthe ROI data our Call Measurement Services provides to marketer and business owners,€ and how their €œCall Measurement Programs deliver real-time information about high-value customers.€ They have placed the ads next to a YPA print…
SMARTpages has relaunched with a new look and feel, preparing for the eventual merger of the site with RealPages.com under the unified YellowPages.com brand. The new site is a significant improvement over the user experience previously offered. FAST Search &…
Google took investors by surprise in announcing that it would sell additional shares expected to generate US$4 billion. GOOG consequently took a bit of a hit. And now many in blogland are buzzing with speculation about what it means and…
According to a press release this a.m. classifieds aggregator Oodle has now grown to 20 U.S. metro areas. It's still a site in search of a business model, but it's obvious value to consumers will probably bring a (perhaps newspaper)…
I think this has been around since late June, but A9/Amazon is making a formal announcement about A9 Maps. A combination of "Block View" and MapQuest, the site is so far unique in offering street-level photographs of storefronts along with…
Following the latest wave of job "meta-search" sites (Indeed.com, SimplyHired, etc.), Business.com is launching Work.com after several months in beta. Calling itself a "premium" jobs site, Work.com's twist is that employers pay only for those leads (recruits/applicants) that click through…
The €œInternet portal,€ as the Daily Camera calls it, enables users to access customized community news, dished up via RSS feeds, as well as publish their own news. €œYou'll be able to send in news from your clubs and organizations,…
In case you haven€™t noticed, another round of consolidation in the U.S. telecom space is well underway. In one sense, it means less this time around to the directory business than it did the last. When SBC buys AT&T, or…
I finally caught up with Jeremy Stoppelman, one of the founders of Yelp, a social networking + YP site. The site has had a much lower profile than competitors with very similar models, i.e., InsiderPages and JudysBook . Like those…
