What's the Buzz on the Internet for Sales Leads!
December 27, 2006 - The founder of Wikipedia to Launch Search Engine
The founder of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales, is planning to create and launch a new search engine that they hope will eventually rival Google. The project has been named Wikiasari. Wales has secured funding from some Silicon Valley investors and Amazon.com and is looking for a launch date sometime in the first quarter of 2007.
The search engine will be based upon human editors as opposed to mathematical algorithms such as those employed by Google. His contention is that while Google does an adequate job in many sectors, to many search queries produce poor results. According to him, no algorithm is a match for a human in judging quality sites and relevant results.
Mr. Wales will have a very steep hill to climb in our humble opinion. If one takes a look back at the history of the internet they would note that years ago, the Yahoo Directory was a very important part of the internet. This directory was hand edited and the results created by humans. For a time it proved more popular than the organic results displayed by Yahoo, which at that time were actually supplied by Google. Flash forward to today, and that directory is barely relevant. In fact the only reason webmasters still pay the annual $299.00 fee to be listed is that they believe it boosts their rankings in the algorithmic Google results.
The challenge will be even more evident in regard to scalability. Most individuals who complain, or praise, search engine results are focused on the first 10 to 30 returns. Thus hand reviewing those sites does not seem such a daunting task. However search music download in Google and you get over 300 hundred million results.
The eventuality of this may well be hand reviews for the top sites, and an algorithm for all the rest; very fertile ground for bias, favoritism and down right corrupt results.
However, this man has been extremely successful with community projects such as the encyclopedia so a word to the wise is keep an eye on it and watch for traffic that you may be able to convert into business.
December 14, 2006 - Google Staff Stock auction
Google, Inc. has plans for an unorthodox stock options policy that will allow employees to sell their vested options in an online auction starting in April.
Full story; Google Staff Stock Auction
August 15, 2006 - Dell Recalls Over 4 Million Lap Top Batteries
Dell, Inc. announced the recall of over 4 million batteries installed in lap tops it has sold between 2004 and 2006 due to a potential risk of fire. The batteries are branded under the Dell name but made by Sony. Dell has established a special web site to get more information on wether your lap top is part of the recall and how to get a replacement; https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx
Full story; Dell Battery Recall
August 9, 2006 - University of California to Help Google Scan Books
Googles controversial plan to scan the world's books into a free and searcheable data base has gained an ally in the University of California. The initial plan is the scanning of a few million of the libraries 34 million books over a year and a half. Publishers are still resisting this gigantic effort by Google and the debate goes on.
August 3, 2006 - Major Search Engines Join to Fight Click Fraud
A major initiative to combat click fraud was announced today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. This effort is being spear headed by the leading Search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN with participation from Ask, LookSmart and the non-profit Media Rating council. Click fraud has been a widely argued phenomenon with estimates ranging up to 1 billion/year in lost dollars for on-line advertisers. The first step the group will face is defining what exactly constitutes a fraudulent click.
July 11, 2006 - AOL to Unviel New Business Plan
AOl has announced it will be unveiling a new business strategy aimed at cutting costs. There has been much speculation regarding the financial picture of AOL, which took great strides to dispell at the announcement. In addition there has been a great deal of disucssion that AOL will be abandoning it's subscription based model in order to more effectively compete with Yahoo and Google.
Full story; AOL Has New Business Plan
July 10, 2006 - Microsoft to Release Web Based CRM
Today Microsoft Corporation announced it was releasing a web based CRM system in 2007. This is designed to challenge Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP AG for the growing on-line sector of "Customer Relationship Management" systems. Web based CRM systems have shown themselves to be superior to PC based conventional software because the information can be accessed from anywhere via the internet.
