AllThingsD » search engine

Google Gives Search a Refresh

Amir Efrati — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:00:12 +0000

Google Inc. is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today’s technology and maintain its dominant market share.

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

The changes to search are among the biggest in the company’s history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google’s current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.

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Six Major Hotel Companies Launch a Hotel Search Engine Called Room Key

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:15:04 +0000

Here’s something novel: A new hotel search engine founded by companies that own hotels. The joint venture, called Room Key, is an effort to gain independence from some of the large online aggregators, like Priceline and Expedia or even Google. Room Key was founded by Choice Hotels, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott and Wyndham Hotel, and acquired its technology from hotelicopter in an asset deal last year.

eBay Adds Former Microsoft Employee Ken Moss to Its Executive Team

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 01:54:36 +0000

EBay has appointed Ken Moss to the position of VP of technology and science for the Marketplaces services team.

Moss will report to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges and be responsible for managing and developing the back-end buyer and seller experience on eBay’s marketplace, where items are auctioned off or sold new for full price.

Most recently, Moss co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology.

While CrowdEye’s Web site has been taken down, it’s expected that its co-founder (and Moss’s wife) Becca Moss will continue working on the technology, which was once being described as a Twitter search engine.

Prior to CrowdEye, Moss spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he started and led the Bing search technical team. He also worked on MyMSN, MSN Money and other parts of MSN.

Over the past year, eBay has been redesigning its site to simplify the user experience and to offer both items sold at auction or for full price. In the past few months, it has hired a number of new executives to fill several roles to complete the turnaround.

Moss will presumably assist with those goals in a more behind-the-scenes technology role.

Jack Ma Takes His Own Advice for Yahoo: Alibaba Splits Taobao Into Three Parts

Kara Swisher — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:42:17 +0000

In an interview I did with him at the recent ninth D: All Things Digital conference, Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma suggested that Yahoo would be better off splitting itself up into smaller pieces.

Today, he did that for one of the key units of the Chinese Internet giant, cleaving its Taobao e-commerce unit into three new companies.

Said Alibaba:

Alibaba Group is reorganizing Taobao into three separate companies to capture the Chinese consumer e-commerce opportunities. Effective June 16, 2011, the three companies, which remain wholly-owned subsidiaries of Alibaba Group, will begin operations as: Taobao Marketplace (www.taobao.com), China’s leading consume-to-consumer (C2C) platform; Taobao Mall (www.tmall.com), China’s leading business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping site; and eTao (www.etao.com), a product search engine designed to make it easier for consumers to find goods and services offered by all e-retailers.

We believe this move will benefit our customers, as each of the three companies will be able to focus on its own unique consumer experience. The board of Alibaba Group is fully behind this decision, as the move will create more value to shareholders by fostering innovation and capturing more opportunities in China’s fast-growing e-commerce sector.

Interestingly, the move means no massive IPO for Taobao, which some investors have been hoping for.

Here is Alibaba CEO Jack Ma’s email to employees on the change:

Ma Letter on Taobao Reorg –

Yandex to Debut After Pricing Above Range

Lynn Cowan — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:26:23 +0000

Shares of Russian search engine Yandex NV will begin trading Tuesday after its initial public offering was priced Monday night at $25 a share, above its expected range.

The company sold 52.2 million Class A shares, raising a total of $1.3 billion. Yandex had originally set its expected price range at $20 to $22. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol YNDX.

Yandex, the largest Russian Internet company by revenue, is also its most popular search engine, generating 65% of all search traffic in a country that isn’t dominated by Google Inc.

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Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics

Amir Efrati — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:41 +0000

Google Inc. has penalized Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

The incident, according to Overstock, stemmed in part from its practice of encouraging students and faculty to post links on college and university websites associated with an Overstock discount program.

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App Way to Gripe (or Praise) About Service

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:54:14 +0000

Call it a flair for the dramatic or a love of telling and hearing juicy stories. Whatever the reason, people have a tendency to talk more about their bad customer-service experiences than the good ones.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested Tello (Tello.com), a new customer-service website and mobile app that encourages users to chime in on their customer-service experiences, good or bad. Businesses, or specific employees at those businesses, can be rated with a thumbs up or thumbs down and a detailed comment.

Tello was released in the Apple App Store this week, but I got special permission to test it early. It’s currently available for use at Tello.com, on other devices via mobile browsers at m.tello.com or as a native app on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Tello’s founder and CEO, Joe Beninato, said an Android app is due out this spring.

At first glance, Tello seems to be another location-based service like Foursquare or Gowalla, which encourage people to “check in” while they’re at a specific place to find friends who are checked in there, or to earn badges and titles for checking in there more than anyone else. Broader review sites like Yelp let people comment on various aspects of a place or experience. But people using these services aren’t rating customer service specifically.

On the upside, Tello’s narrow scope means people know they’re reading solely about customer service, without hearing numerous details about other aspects of a business.

Screen for rating an employee

A rating as seen on Tello

The downside to Tello is that it can be hard to sum up an entire experience without considering other factors involved. If someone visits the new Italian restaurant down the street and its ambiance and food are outstanding, yet the wait staff is deplorable, a thumbs up or thumbs down doesn’t tell the whole story. For expert complainers, or people who like more space for expressing their opinions, Tello may seem too succinct. Its app and home page display portions of comments along with user ratings, so if you waxed on for a thousand words about a hotel’s poor Wi-Fi, bad lighting and slow room service, most people wouldn’t see those remarks at a glance.

Part of Tello’s appeal is that it offers a peek in on customer-service experiences around the country, so before I flew to California this week I took a look at Tello to see what businesses are getting good ratings out there. Only a relatively small group of beta testers were using Tello when I was testing it, limiting the number of rated businesses. But this will improve as more people use the service.

The Tello app uses GPS to recognize a user’s location and then displays a list of nearby businesses; nearby, in this case, is defined as within two-tenths of a mile. If people type in the name of a business and search, this broadens the location range search to within five miles.

On a few occasions, including a trip to my Washington, D.C., neighborhood’s independent coffee shop, a Greek restaurant and a Potbelly Sandwich Shop, I came up empty handed when I looked for reviews of these places. Mr. Beninato explained this was because some aspects of the search engine weren’t finalized at the time I was testing, and in one case, I was too far away from the business. Sure enough, after a final update, I had better luck finding businesses. A business can be manually added to Tello by selecting a plus icon and typing in details including the business’s name and address.

The Tello mobile app

As for rating individual employees, on most occasions, I didn’t think to ask the name of the person who helped me at the business so I could comment on their service. I did catch the name of a terrific waitress at the Greek restaurant because she signed the bill with a smiley face. In that case, I was able to make a specific comment about an employee, rather than a general comment about the restaurant. I gave Mara a thumbs up and commented she took time to make useful wine suggestions in the midst of a bustling evening with every table filled. The more I used Tello, the more I started to notice employees’ names.

After using Tello over a period of time, each user builds up a personalized page of ratings, which is helpful for remembering which places are worth a return visit and which ones to avoid. Any Tello rating is, by default, instantly shared on the Tello.com site as well as to users of the app; it can be posted out to Facebook and Twitter in the same step.

Tello aspires to be more than the destination where happy customers go to cheer or wronged customers go to whine. An option on the screen where ratings comments are entered lets users request a reply from a business if they had a bad experience. When someone selects this option, Tello contacts the user via email and asks how he or she wants to be contacted by the business—email or phone—so the business has a chance to fix things.

Starting this spring, Tello plans to roll out new features aimed at businesses that will allow them to claim their business on Tello by going through a verification process. They will then be automatically notified of bad experiences so they can decide how to handle a customer’s problems. And in the future, customers who rate businesses might be able to receive coupons.

Another new feature due out this spring will let businesses add lists of employees for Tello users to see, which may help them remember who served them or how to spell an employee’s name. Employees who receive good ratings could be acknowledged and rewarded by their employers, motivating them to work harder.

Though Tello is just getting started, it could be an incredibly helpful service through which satisfied customers get to tell friends about their experiences—or disappointed customers get to complain with a chance of actually being heard. Just know that Tello’s thumbs up or thumbs down ratings don’t allow for much ambiguity.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Tello at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Write to her at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Bing's Search Share Is Growing? Must Be All Those "Hiybbprqag" Searches, Eh Google?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:10:05 +0000

Some encouraging new search metrics for Bing. Experian Hitwise data for January shows Microsoft’s search engine with 12.81 percent of the market, up from 10.6 percent in December–a 21 percent gain. Add to that the 14.62 percent share claimed by the now-powered-by-Bing Yahoo and Bing’s got more than a quarter of the U.S. search market. Which is nowhere near the 67.95 percent Google controls, but represents a generous improvement over the paltry market share Microsoft used to hold in the best-forgotten Live Search days.

Even more interesting, though, is Experian’s finding that Bing’s success rate–the number of searches that result in a visit to a Web site–is better than Google’s. Significantly better. Bing’s success rate: 81.68 percent. Google’s: 65.57 percent.

Must have been all those searches on hiybbprqag and torsorapy screwing things up for you–right, Google?

Google Tweaks Search Results To Punish "Scrapers"

Peter Kafka — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:40:38 +0000

Google is going after “scraper” sites that copy and paste other people’s content, via a change in the search engine’s algorithm. Google engineer Matt Cutts made the announcement on his personal blog today, as a follow-up to a much-discussed post on Google’s official blog about sites with “shallow or low-quality content.” Many observers thought Google’s original note was about Demand Media, but Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt says that’s not the case.

Working With AirPrint

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:11:52 +0000

How does Apple’s AirPrint work? And what new things would I have to get to make it work?

AirPrint allows certain apps on an iPhone or iPad to wirelessly print to locally networked printers. Officially, it works only on Hewlett-Packard’s new line of networked printers, which use a technology called ePrint. However, various programs have popped up for Macs and PCs that, when installed on a computer on your network, allow AirPrint to work with existing printers that are connected—physically or via a network—to those computers. One example I have tested successfully is Printopia, which works on Macs and is at http://bit.ly/dfjAsl. Others can be found by searching for “airprint for windows” or “airprint for mac” in a search engine. Note that you only need to install a small utility program on your computer, and nothing new gets installed on the iPad or iPhone, as long as you have the latest operating system for those devices.

Is there an external hard disk or other device other than online storage which will back up a usable copy of my entire computer complete with software programs and data? I am basically looking for a usable mirror image which would be available to load on another machine if the current one fails. I am not networked.

You can certainly use an external hard drive for this without having a network, but the key is the backup software. For Windows computers, one popular choice is Acronis True Image Home, though there are others. If your computer is a Mac, the easiest choice is the built-in Time Machine backup software.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com

Roll Camera! Jason Calacanis Makes a Video Push at Mahalo, and Wants You to Know About It

Peter Kafka — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Jason Calacanis has overhauled his Mahalo start-up yet again. Just ask him.

Actually, no need to: The not-at-all bashful entrepreneur has been working hard to make sure we’re all aware of what he’s calling “the Mahalo 4.0 launch/pivot.”

So there will be no shortage of places to read about this today. And if you want to hear Calacanis pitch his pivot himself, you can do that too, via a livestream of the DLD conference, where he’s presenting right now.

So here’s what you need to know:

Calacanis, who launched Mahalo in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine,” then turned it into an “answers” site, is now trying to move deeper into the “how to” category dominated by Demand Media. Which just happens to be going public today in a very hot offering that will value the company at more than $1 billion. [Correction: Demand will start trading on Wednesday, January 26]
The most important part of the move is a new emphasis on video, which Mahalo is creating itself. That’s a different strategy from Demand’s, which relies on a computer to spit out editorial assignments, then hands them out to an army of freelancers.
Calacanis and Mahalo president Jason Rapp, who came on board last spring, have hired a team of 50 editors, who are now cranking out some 900 videos a week on topics like “How to Cook a Ham.” They plan to have a staff of 100 dedicated to videos by the end of the year.
Mahalo still relies primarily on Google ads for revenue, which the company won’t disclose. But last week Calacanis said incoming dollars from Google’s YouTube have shot up 9x in the last year.
Rapp says Mahalo still doesn’t need to raise any more money beyond its initial round, which brought in $20 million from investors like Sequoia, CBS and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

If you missed Calacanis’s pitch this morning but still want to see people talking about his site, here’s a promo clip the company supplied. It features Calacanis’s employees, but not Calacanis, so it’s a lot less interesting. But you’ll get the idea.

Mahalo 4.0 from Mahalo.com on Vimeo.

For Ask.com, Foray Into Social Search Points to Mobile

Liz Gannes — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:56:29 +0000

Ask.com is in the process of reformulating itself, having dropped its algorithmic search offering and laid off 150 employees in November. The company is billing the changes, which came after a community Q&A launch in July, as a return to its “Ask Jeeves” question-answering roots.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Ask.com President Doug Leeds, who was particularly high on the company’s efforts in mobile: A new iPhone app that includes the Q&A feature has been downloaded 250,000 times since being released in November.

(It might be premature to say mobile is the future of Ask, considering it has yet to launch apps on other mobile platforms.)

Refocusing Ask around Q&A on both the Web and mobile has already had an impact, even if it’s not fully rolled out. Leeds said 60 percent of Ask queries are in the form of a question now, up from 28 percent last year.

Questions are more monetizable than queries, he attested, because users stay on an Ask.com page rather than clicking to zoom off elsewhere on the Web. Ask has found that users who have their questions answered are 50 percent more likely to click on an ad.

Social search offers Ask.com a way to differentiate itself from the competition. Leeds said the company’s brand has long been a second-choice search engine: A huge percentage of Ask users go to Ask after Google fails to answer their query. That may not sound like something to brag about, but it’s made the company profitable, with consistent traffic as the sixth-largest U.S. site, at 90 million monthly visitors.

Ask doesn’t seem to get a lot of love within the halls of its owner, IAC, so it’s especially important for the company to grow its revenue, if not its traffic. Ask is hiring back 30 of the 150 positions it cut, for a total of 270 employees, said Leeds, who described the layoffs as a removal of satellite offices in order to consolidate operations at its Oakland, Calif., headquarters.

Leeds said that Ask has found social search works especially well on mobile, where, for instance, users can ask a question verbally using the free Ask.com iPhone app with speech recognition, put the phone back in their pocket and wait for a notification saying that a real person has answered the question.

The median answer time for questions posed to the Ask community is approaching five minutes. That’s eons in search time, but the fact that the answer is created within those five minutes matters, said Leeds.

According to a Harris Interactive survey of mobile users sponsored by Ask, 66 percent of respondents said timeliness matters more when they’re not in front of their computer, and 40 percent of smartphone users said they’re more influenced by users’ opinions given within the last 24 hours than those from a month ago.

To be clear, Ask has not completely converted to social. Only 20 percent of visits are currently exposed to community Q&A, and only after users say they want to ask a question or a search has failed to produce results. That’s because Ask doesn’t want to overtax its human question answerers, said Leeds. The majority of Ask user questions are answered through a machine process of extracting information from multiple Web pages (similar to the word definitions, flight status information and real-time weather you’ll get at the top of the search results page if you look for such things on Google or Bing).

To recruit and retain question answerers, Ask has a promotion going where it donates 10 cents per answer to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. “Altruism is the best incentive,” said Leeds. “We don’t want it to be a game; we want it to be useful.” Today, 65 percent of questions asked through community Q&A get accurately routed to an answerer.

Next for Ask is a “nearby” feature of its iPhone app that will launch early next year. The ideal question, said Leeds, would be “Why is there a crowd over there?” Or users could ask about the current state of traffic on roads, crowding in a particular restaurant or whether they should be worried about that smoke they’re smelling in the air. Of course, for this to work well, Ask will need much deeper penetration than 250,000 iPhone users.

As it tries to get social, another limitation for Ask is it doesn’t have much of an existing membership system. Unlike, say, Yahoo, where users are virtually always logged in, Ask has never had a portfolio of products, just search. The company introduced a revamped log-in system in July, but it will have to get many more users to sign in before it can make use of personalization, social connections and network effects to get questions answered. (Hmm…isn’t this what Facebook Connect does?)

Russia's Yandex Mulling IPO

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:51:36 +0000

Yandex, the Russian search engine that abandonded a planned $2 billion IPO in 2008, is mulling a second attempt at the public markets. Sources say the so-called Google of Russia is eyeing the London Stock Exchange or NASDAQ for an estimated $1.5 billion offering that would list sometime in early 2011. Which may well prove a great time for it, considering the success of Mail.Ru Group’s $5.71 billion IPO on the London Stock Exchange earlier this month.

Microsoft's Kinect Is Under Pressure to Connect

Nick Wingfield — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:00:39 +0000

Microsoft Corp. is betting a new product called Kinect will deliver a bigger audience for its Xbox 360 videogame console by letting people play games without a traditional controller.

But Kinect, when it goes on sale Thursday, will also be the most visible test in years of whether Microsoft can churn out breakout consumer products from its huge investment in research and development.

Microsoft faces increasing pressure from investors to show a payoff from those investments, which amounted to $8.7 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30–bigger than the R&D budget for any other tech company. Microsoft has poured a chunk of that money into improving existing products and services like its Bing search engine, as well as more traditional franchises like Windows and Office.

Kinect will be especially visible: an entirely new $150 device sold at retail outlets and aimed squarely at the consumer market, a field in which Microsoft has been more sluggish to respond to trends than Apple Inc. and other competitors.

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Windows Phone 7: There's an App for Some of That

John Paczkowski — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:15:36 +0000

How many Windows Phone 7 apps will be available when the first devices running the OS ship? Microsoft refuses to say (“Thousands that people are developing right now” seems to be the closest it’s gotten to a hard number), but I’m told it will be plenty.

Or, as one exec told me, “enough.”

Obviously, that’s tough to quantify. That said, the list of apps announced today is a good start, even if it does seem pretty short. On the mobile A/V front, there are Netflix (NFLX), IMDB, Slacker, I Heart Radio and MusixMatch. T-Mobile users will get T-Mobile TV, while AT&T (T) users will get U-verse. For the moment, WP7′s big social media app will be Twitter, though I imagine there’s a Facebook app on the way. For e-commerce, there’s eBay (EBAY), Fandango and Travelocity. And finally, there’s a growing list of games (60+ at last count) that includes Monopoly, Need for Speed Undercover, Tetris, The Sims 3, Star Wars, Bejeweled, Assassin’s Creed, Fast & Furious 7, Guitar Hero 5 and Halo Waypoint.

Add to that Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine and an Office Hub that provides mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as SharePoint integration, and you’ve got the beginnings of a decent ecosystem. Remember, when Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store first launched it had about 500 third-party applications. Today it boasts more than 250,000.

Which is not to say that the development of the WP7 app ecosystem will be as quick or tremendous. Clearly, there’s much ramping-up yet to be done. But there will be enough marquee apps available at launch that the device certainly won’t seem lacking, as some other mobile operating systems did when they debuted. Netflix, Twitter, eBay, a groaning board of games and a mobile office productivity suite is enough to get anyone started, particularly if they’ve only just decided to trade up from a feature phone to a smartphone.

FURTHER COVERAGE:

“Delightful” Windows Phone 7 Coming November 8

Windows Phone 7: It’s Now or Never

Bing Hearts Android

Kara Swisher — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:48:50 +0000

You got your Android in my Bing–no, you got your Bing in my Android.

If you can’t beat them, well, you know….

That’s now the official policy of Microsoft (MSFT), it seems, as its Bing search engine offers an app for Google (GOOG) Android for Verizon (VZ) customers.

The “Bing for Mobile Android” app will include a daily image, maps, driving directions and traffic information, as well as instant answers for movies, stocks quotes, flight status and local business listings.

Bing has had huge success with its Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and, thus, is–as expected–moving onto the next big smartphone platform.

Next up, presumably, more Android carriers and, of course, a Bing app for the Windows Phone 7, which will be Microsoft’s newest effort to keep up in the mobile market.

Here is a screenshot of the app, and you can read a blog post from Bing on the subject here, with more screenshots:

China Mobile, Xinhua to Form Search Engine JV

Owen Fletcher — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:43:48 +0000

China Mobile Communications Corp. and China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency on Thursday signed a framework agreement to launch a media and search-engine joint venture, Xinhua reported.

Rainie Lei, a spokeswoman for China Mobile Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed unit of state-owned China Mobile Communications, confirmed the parent company had signed the agreement with Xinhua but declined to give details.

The cooperation, which is focused on building a search engine, has entered a phase of substantive operation, Xinhua said, without giving details.

A new search engine would compete with market leader Baidu Inc. (BIDU) and second-place Google Inc. (GOOG) in China, which had 420 million Internet users at the end of June, more than the entire U.S. population.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In WWDC Postscript, Apple Announces Safari 5 Launch

John Paczkowski — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:34:28 +0000

Among the Apple rumors that failed to materialize during CEO Steve Jobs’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address this morning was Safari 5, the next iteration of the company’s Web browser. But shortly after 3 pm PT, an Apple news release announcing the launch appeared on the PR Newswire site, only to vanish after about 10 minutes and reappear about an hour later.

Among the browser’s enhancements: Safari Reader, which presents multipage articles in a single scrollable page; support for more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies; a new search engine option–Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing–and an improved Nitro JavaScript engine that Apple (AAPL) claims runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Google’s (GOOG) Chrome 5.0, and more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.

Here’s the release as I received it.

Apple Releases Safari 5

SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today released Safari® 5, the latest version of the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4,* and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac® and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

“Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices.”

Safari Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email.

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.* Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Safari 5 adds more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

The new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions. For enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

Pricing & Availability

Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS® X and Windows as a free download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 5 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard® 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 5 can be found at www.apple.com/safari. The Safari Developer Program is free to join at developer.apple.com/programs/safari.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted by Apple in May 2010 on an iMac® 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X 10.6.3, with 4GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider 0.9.1 JavaScript Performance test.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh. Apple continues to lead the industry with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system, and iLife, iWork and professional applications. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store, has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

UPDATE: Safari 5 is now live and available for download.

Bing! Microsoft Search Comes to the iPhone.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:18:16 +0000

As All Things Digital previously reported, the new iPhone will incorporate Microsoft’s Bing search engine. And as predicted, Bing will not be the default search engine, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs announced today: The pole position still goes to Google (GOOG), frenemy or not.

And if you want to use Yahoo (YHOO) search, even though it’s going to be merged with Microsoft (MSFT) anyway? You can (still) do that, too.

Steve Jobs: We're Not Getting Into Search, and We're Not Booting Google From the iPhone

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:57:29 +0000

Will Apple’s rivalry with Google (GOOG) lead to the search company disappearing from iPhones and iPads?

Nope, says CEO Steve Jobs, though asked if he’ll feature a rival search offering–say, from Microsoft (MSFT)–he demurs.

One search engine Apple (AAPL) won’t be featuring, Jobs says, is its own. That’s because the company is not getting into search, despite speculation that it would: “It’s not something we know about. its not something we care deeply about,” he said at the D8 conference.

But what about Apple’s acquisition of Siri, which some people have described as a search company? “I don’t know if I would describe Siri as a search company,” Jobs says. “They’re not in the search area…they’re in the AI area.”

More Coverage on the Steve Jobs D8 Speaker Page »

EU Slams Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Over Data Retention

John Paczkowski — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:28:56 +0000

The privacy practices of the world’s three largest search engines are under fire in Europe again. European Union officials sent letters to Google (PDF), Microsoft (PDF), and Yahoo (PDF) yesterday claiming their data protection policies (PDF) flout EU data retention rules.

Under those rules, search engines must anonymize user data after six months. And while most search engines have reduced their data retention periods, none have truly complied with EU regulations. Google (GOOG) keeps user data for nine months. Microsoft (MSFT) keeps it for six, but holds on to software cookies and whatnot for a year beyond that. And Yahoo (YHOO) eliminates user data after 90 days, but only partially.

“On behalf of the data protection authorities in the EU united in WP29, I call on you to improve the protection of the online privacy of users of your search engine services,” the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said in its letters.

“Besides limiting the retention period of personal data,” the letters continue, “measures include a reduction of the possibility to identify users in the search logs and the creation of an external audit process to reassure users that you are delivering on your privacy promises, i.e. by involving an independent and external auditing entity.”

Regulators had a particularly stern rebuke for Google, whose privacy practices have come under intense scrutiny this month after the company admitted its Street View cars had been–heh heh–“inadvertently” collecting and storing payload data from unsecured private Wi-Fi networks for three years.

“Considering Google’s dominant position in almost every EU member state, with a market share of up to 95 percent in some national search engine markets, the company has a significant role in European citizens’ daily lives,” the regulators wrote. “The company’s apparent lack of focus in data retention is concerning.”

Google Tries On Another Apple Business for Size

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:56:51 +0000

Remember when Google was an advertising company and Apple sold hardware and content? When it didn’t seem insane to have Eric Schmidt sitting on Steve Jobs’s board of directors?

Cut to now: Google (GOOG) sells digital movies, is about to sell digital books and would like to sell digital TV shows. It is also trying, for now, to sell Google-branded phones directly to consumers. The one thing it’s not selling that Apple does is music, though there are persistent rumblings that the Googleplex is interested in playing there, too.

Apple (AAPL), meanwhile, is adding advertising (along with movies and books and phones, etc.) to its offerings. Next up perhaps: Search.

You can add nuance to this if you want. Google’s e-bookstore is designed to be compatible with Apple’s iPad, for instance. And its search engine is still the default on Apple’s mobile devices. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs counts on Google’s YouTube as an ally in his fight against Adobe (ADBE) and its Flash standard.

But make no mistake: These two companies are going to be competing directly for a long time to come. And no matter how many al fresco coffees their CEOs enjoy together, it’s going to be a fierce battle.

As Promised: Here Come the Twitter Ads

Peter Kafka — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:07:28 +0000

Twitter’s status as an ad-free service is just about over.

Starting today, the company will run ads–it prefers the term “promoted tweets”–on its Twitter.com site. Down the road, the ads will show up in the third-party software many Twitter users rely on to access the service.

As I reported in March, Twitter is rolling out the service, modeled on Google’s (GOOG) AdWords, in conjunction with a presentation COO Dick Costolo is giving at an Ad Age conference in New York today. Topic of his keynote address: “How brands can work with Twitter.”

And as I reported in February, Twitter’s ads will initially show up only in search results. That’s a tactic that both limits their reach and the possibility that they’ll upset users who are used to an ad-free stream.

But depending on which report you read, Twitter is debating whether to move the ads into users’ regular streams (Ad Age) or has already decided to do so (New York Times).

The latter makes a lot more sense to me: If Twitter only showed ads to searchers, it may have a very difficult time reaching most users.

That’s in part because Twitter’s search results are pretty lousy–if you don’t believe me, go ahead and try it yourself. And it’s in part because Twitter isn’t a search engine; it’s a media company that will make money by rounding up eyeballs and showing them marketing messages.

That’s an important distinction, and one that Twitter itself has been loath to acknowledge. But you can see the company grudgingly accepting that reality now as it moves to control more of its platform.

At the same time, Twitter needs the biggest possible audience for its ads. Which means it has to court the ecosystem of third-party developers it has encouraged over the years so that they’ll run the ads as well.

That romancing got a lot more difficult last week when the company scared the beejebus out of its developers. And it got more difficult yesterday with the launch of TweetUp, a rival ad platform backed by serious players.

So Twitter’s team has a lot of selling to do. That effort starts with advertisers in New York today, then switches to programmers in San Francisco on Wednesday. We’ll be covering both pitches, so stay tuned.

Bing Keeps Banging the Drum. Is Anyone Listening?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:30:04 +0000

We are approaching Bing’s one-year anniversary. In that time, Microsoft’s search engine has managed to claw a few share points from Yahoo (YHOO), its new partner. And none from Google (GOOG), its real target.

So perhaps it’s time to rethink ads like this:

True story. Last night I was in a room with a few bright people. Though the TV was on, no one was really paying attention. But when the commercial above came on, we watched it all the way through. Followed by this question from one of my fellow TV-watchers:

“What’s Bing?”

To be fair, it turns out that the person who asked this question is also paying $15 a month for an AOL (AOL) subscription. So we can’t argue that the question-asker is perched atop technology’s bleeding edge.

But if Bing is really going to claim 40 to 50 percent of the search market, it’s going to have to convert a lot of people who pay absolutely no attention to technology whatsoever. Like AOL subscribers.*

Then again, if you can point me to any TV ad campaign that has moved the needle for a search engine, I’d love to see it.

So would Microsoft (MSFT), I’ll bet.

*And yes, I’ve told a similar story before. Different people, though. I swear.

Beijing: "Google is Not God"

John Paczkowski — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:41:07 +0000

Google’s principled stand in China has very quickly turned into an ugly clash with the country’s government. On Wednesday, The People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, lobbed a searing editorial at the company, decrying its arrogance and accusing it of collaborating with U.S. intelligence agencies. It was accompanied by the cartoon above (is that supposed to be Eric Schmidt?). Its title: “Google is Not God.” An excerpt:

For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. Actually, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies is well-known, which aroused spats with Europe. If some information is “unfavorable”, Google must delete it under the order of relevant US agencies. The data of its search results is also “stored for inspection.”

After Google launched an attack on China’s censoring, American officials and media responded vigorously. Is it still a corporate incident or commercial action? All this makes one wonder. Thinking about the US’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war, perhaps this could be an exploratory pre-dawn battle.

A blistering attack, though Google (GOOG) clearly invited it by directing Chinese searches to an uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong, essentially using Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy against it.

There will undoubtedly be more like it in the future, especially if Google continues to tweak the Chinese government as it did today by indexing Twitter posts on its Chinese search site in open defiance of the country’s ban on the microblogging site.

[Image credit: China Daily]