Old news for December 2006

Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google

Wikipedia
 2006.12.25Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!
..."Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'," Mr Wales said. "Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.
"But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves," he added. "We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that."
...Catching up with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft's MSN or even smaller operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge, Mr Wales conceded.

No images next to adsense ads

Adsense 2006.12.17From the Adsense Blog:
We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads.
Read it here.

Google will sell domain names

Google 2006.12.16Google Gets Into Domain Registration.
Google's service will charge a $10 annual fee and only handle addresses ending in four suffixes _ ".com," ".net," ".biz" and ".info."
Web sites that register their domains through Google will be automatically set up to work with several other company products, including e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging.

IBM and Yahoo Team Up In Corporate Search

IBM
 2006.12.13IBM and Yahoo are teaming up to offer a free data-search tool for businesses, a quirky move challenging Google and other corporate-search specialists in a blossoming market.
IBM already sells a business-focused search product, OmniFind, that lets organizations comb through internal documents. This free new edition of OmniFind will be limited in the number of documents it can query, but it will combine the results with Web searches powered by Yahoo.
IBM hopes the service, being announced Wednesday, bolsters its overall efforts to improve its dealings with small companies.

Microsoft: Launching Book Search (Beta)

MSN Live
 2006.12.06Microsoft is releasing Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search, in beta today.
The book search engine performs keyword searches for books that have been scanned as part of Microsoft's book scanning project, in the same way that Windows Live Search searches the Internet, said Danielle Tiedt, the general manager of Live Search Selection for Microsoft.
Initially, the Live Search Books database will be searchable from the book search engine's beta homepage, or as a category on the main Windows Live Search page -- a method referred to as vertical search. Once the tool is out of beta, Microsoft plans to incorporate all of the scanned publications into its general Internet search engine. The company hopes to do this in the next six months, according to Tiedt. 

IE6 and IE7 together - Microsoft gives a solution

Microsoft 2006.12.01IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine
Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we've taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007. We hope to continue to provide these images in the future as a service to web developers.
Read more here.