search engine

The SEC has charged internet entrepreneur and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with insider trading over shares of Mamma.com. The high-profile complaint—the press release is highlighted on SEC.gov at the moment—alleges that in June 2004, Cuban sold 600,000 shares of the search engine company's stock within hours of receiving confidential information that the company was about make a stock offering that would dilute existing holdings.

A strange launch at a strange time, and comes from a strange source: AT&T (NYSE: T) rolled out a beta version of VideoCrawler, an online video search and aggregation engine.

People search engine Spock is working on a service that will give users access to public records stored in public databases across the Web. The service, scheduled to launch mid-January, will have a $1.99 monthly service fee. Subscribers will gain access to links and data mined from government and municipally databases such as mortgage brokers and courthouses, as well as social network pages at MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Search engine company Local.com beat its guidance for its Q3 net loss, narrowing its shortfall to $1.7 million ($0.12 per share) from last year's $9.3 million. Revenue was $10.2 million, which was below guidance, but represented an 82 percent increase from Q307. The company's earnings come on the same day as a fairly pessimistic report by Borrell Associates was released.

Search/e-commerce firm Accoona, which withdrew its IPO late last year, has now been bought by B2B search engine Masterseek, which was founded in Denmark in 1999. Although the site once generated buzz as a search startup, most of its revenue came from e-commerce, a business running deeply in the red.

You can almost hear the relief from the Gehry-designed HQ as IAC (NSDQ: IACI) reports what chairman and CEO Barry Diller calls "the last quarter when the costs of our spin-offs will distort the operating performance." Post-spin IAC posted a 10 percent increase in revenue for Q3, to $369.3 million from $335.4 million.

Making it easier to expand search campaigns across multiple engines, Marin Software will unveil a feature today that lets media buyers duplicate a campaign built for one search engine and clone it for use in another.
Cloner, built into San Francisco-based Marin's Search Marketer software, takes tedious and time-consuming processes and removes the work of expanding campaigns from Google into Yahoo and MSN.

Just like the sea of content on the web, there is immense mix and mash of technologies that go into creating web sites. HTML, CSS, XHTML and their different versions to name a few.
Opera is planning to make available a search engine that indexes this structural information.

I've spent a lot of time recently (along with colleagues Theresa Regli and Adriaan Bloem) researching various information-access technologies and search products, and I had a bit of an "Aha moment" the other day. It occurred to me that while there are well-proven languages for querying structured data (e.g., SQL, XQuery, XPath), there is no universally agreed upon syntax for crafting ordinary keyword searches.

Boosted by increased usage during the Beijing Olympics, Chinese search engine Baidu's Q3 profits came in at $51.2 million (347.9 million yuan), or $1.47 per share, up 91 percent from last year's $24.2 million (181.7 million yuan). Revenues increased by 85 percent, to $135.4 million (919.1 million yuan), from $66.3 million (496.5 million yuan) in Q307.