Stop and search changes planned
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Both the government and the Conservatives are supporting plans to cut the red tape that hinders police stop and search powers.
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By Scott Streater, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Feb.
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A three-panel layout features search suggestions and specialty search engine results, along with new algorithmic improvements.
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Search giant wants federal and state regulators to press Microsoft to make more changes to Windows Vista's desktop search and indexing tool.
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Blog: Yahoo.com has kicked off its Search Suggest feature, a move designed to save users time by offering up suggestions they can click on.
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The federal agency in charge of airline screening yesterday changed its policy on patdowns, in part because of complaints by women passengers about searches of their chests.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will change how desktop search works in its Vista operating system by the end of the year, in response to an antitrust complaint by rival Google Inc., the company said in court documents released late Tuesday. Microsoft has agreed to make changes that would allow end users and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to select a default desktop search program in Vista that's not Windows Instant Search, according to a status report in the ongoing court review of Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The change will come in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, due out in beta form by the end of 2007. "Microsoft believes that Google's complaint is without merit," Microsoft's lawyers wrote in the status report, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Nevertheless, Microsoft worked with the Plaintiffs in a spirit of cooperation to resolve any issues the complaint may raise." Google, in a statement, said the search changes are welcome, but more needs to be done. "Microsoft's current approach to Vista desktop search clearly violates the consent decree and limits consumer choice," David Drummond, Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer, said in the statement. "These remedies are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers." Earlier this month, Google confirmed that it had complained to the DOJ about Vista's desktop search functionality. Google had complained that it was difficult to replace Vista's search with products from Google or other competitors. In the 2002 settlement, Microsoft agreed to allow competing middleware vendors to easily replace Microsoft software with their own in Windows operating systems. As part of the desktop search agreement, software vendors will be able to register their products as alternatives for the Vista search. The default search selected by the computer user or OEM will launch whenever Vista launches a search result window, and the default search will have space in Vista's start menu. Microsoft will also tell software vendors and OEMs that the desktop search index in Vista is designed to run in the background and "cede precedence over computing resources to any other software product, including third-party search products," the DOJ said in its portion of the status report. "Microsoft will emphasize that there is no technical reason why OEMs and end users cannot, if they choose to, install additional desktop search products on their systems." Microsoft will also provide technical information to allow other desktop search providers to design their products to optimize computer resources, the DOJ said. The plaintiffs in the case, including 17 states that sued Microsoft for antitrust, are "collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues" in the Google complaint, the DOJ said. Elsewhere in the status report, the DOJ said a technical committee overseeing Microsoft's compliance has hired two consulting firms to check Microsoft's procedures for identifying communications protocols that it is required to disclose to independent software vendors who want to make their products interoperable with Microsoft's. In March, Microsoft and the plaintiffs reached an agreement to address concerns over the belated discovery of protocols that plaintiffs believed needed to be disclosed. The technical committee will extend a royalty-free program for software vendors to receive the protocols, the DOJ said. The royalty-free program will continue 18 months after the date the committee decides the protocol documentation is substantially complete, and the technical committee can extend the program if it believe Microsoft isn't making progress on the documentation, the DOJ said. But Microsoft is on schedule with a plan to fix technical documentation used by other software vendors, the DOJ said. Errors in the technical documentation have prompted repeated complaints from the antitrust plaintiffs in recent months, but the DOJ said Microsoft has been able "to keep up with the flow of new technical documentation issues."
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Site will alert users to roadwork and accidents in their local area.
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Blog: Company kicks off its Search Suggest feature, designed to save users time by offering search suggestions on which they can click.
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Changes to come in Microsoft Windows Vista will allow users to select a default desktop search program that's not Windows Instant Search.
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Microsoft will make changes to its desktop search program following a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) by Google, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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The winds of change are upon us.
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The significant&#160;changes that eBay announced last week&#160;have merchants abuzz as they analyze and react to the impact that the restructured fees, modification of the search and feedback functions, and other changes will have on their sales and profits.Of particular interest have been the proposed changes to fees, which involve lowering the cost of listing items and increasing the commission eBay gets when products are sold. There has also been much discussion in blogs and discussion forums of eBay&#39;s plan to forbid sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers.While merchants are split on the potential benefits and disadvantages of the changes, there seems to be a general consensus that, whether one supports them or not, the changes represent a major attempt on eBay&#39;s part to alter the way that the marketplace works.&quot;It&#39;s clear eBay is taking it really seriously that they have to improve the buyer experience, and they&#39;re laying the groundwork for getting aggressive about doing it,&quot; said Jonathan Garriss, executive director of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA), a group of large sellers that has often been highly critical of eBay.Garriss, also CEO of Gotham City Online, an apparel store on eBay that also has its own site, hopes that the proposed changes will be a first step of others that eBay will take to fix what PESA considers key problems with the marketplace, such as making the buyer experience more convenient and streamlined.To that end, Garriss is encouraged by the proposed incentives to reward merchants who provide superior customer service by giving all qualifying merchants preferred placement in search engine results and offering PowerSellers additional fee discounts based on their customer ratings.&quot;We don&#39;t want to lose sight of the health of the marketplace, and the changes eBay is making are absolutely in the right direction,&quot; Garriss said in a phone interview.While he supports the concept of lowering insertion fees and shifting them to the commission, he recognizes that, as proposed, the fee restructuring will greatly hurt some merchants, particularly, in his view, those that sell lower-priced items in high volume via auctions. Garriss hopes that eBay will take this into consideration and possibly adjust the fee changes before rolling them out in a few weeks in the U.S.Lisa Witt, an eBay PowerSeller for eight years, says the fee changes will not have much of an impact on her bottom line. A seller of fine jewelry, Witt says the listing fees will remain too high even under the new fee structure.&quot;They need to dramatically change the fee structure if they expect seller growth on the site. eBay should have a flat rate listing fee and it should be the same amount across the board for everyone, and that listing fee should be low,&quot; she wrote in an e-mail interview. &quot;A monthly fee for unlimited listings on eBay would work well too.&quot;Witt is against the plan to forbid sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers. This change may lead to buyers using the threat of negative feedback as an extortion tactic to get extras, she said. Buyers may also be disinclined to contact sellers if a disagreement arises, resorting simply to leaving negative feedback, she added. &quot;Feedback is voluntary and should be able to be left by either party as they see fit,&quot; Witt said.Meanwhile, John Lawson, another PowerSeller and owner of 3rd Power Outlet, is generally positive about the proposed changes. &quot;There&#39;ll be some bumpy roads, but they&#39;re on a path to make this marketplace more vibrant,&quot; Lawson said in a phone interview.3rd Power Outlet , which sells urban wear and accessories and makes about 80 percent of its sales via eBay, will save about 50 percent in listing fees and, factoring in the increased commission, will have net savings in eBay costs of about 30 percent, Lawson said.&quot;It&#39;ll have a nice impact on our eBay costs. It&#39;s extra money in our pockets,&quot; Lawson said. While not a major windfall, the savings will allow him to add more listings and do more auctions, he said.Forbidding sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers is a good move because, as eBay officials have argued, some sellers have used negative feedback to retaliate against buyers, he said. &quot;A seller doesn&#39;t have to leave any comment about buyers at all,&quot; Lawson said. &quot;The buyer has to be satisfied and must have the ability to leave a true comment.&quot;Still, he&#39;s not crazy about new proposed fee discounts to PowerSellers based on them attaining certain levels of DSR (Detailed Seller Rating). For example, he finds that it&#39;s off the mark for eBay to have a specific DSR category for shipping and handling, because, as a rule, no one likes to pay for this portion of the transaction. Merchants like himself, who sell to buyers overseas, are in particular disadvantage, because many buyers abroad don&#39;t have a clear understanding of shipping costs from the U.S. to international locations, he said.For others like Witt, DSR-based fee discounts are welcome. &quot;It&#39;s fine to offer incentives to sellers who strive for excellence. That was a good idea and they should expand on it. Offering rewards has always worked better than punishments,&quot; she said.These and other differing viewpoints about the plans reflect the ripple effect that eBay changes inevitably have, since there is such a wide variety of merchants on its platform. It remains to be seen whether eBay will want, and be able to refine further, its planned changes to achieve -- as much as possible -- a happy medium across its vast community of sellers.&#160;
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By Steve Lawson  GOOGLE are overhauling their search system so it returns results from news sites, blogs and video services instead of just from web pages.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft released documents on Wednesday that detail changes it will make to its desktop search and indexing feature in Windows Vista that will be included as part of the Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) update. The changes are a response toÂ charges from rival Google that Microsoft built the feature in such a way that it slowed down competitive offerings from rivals. Microsoft agreed to make the changes as part of its ongoing antitrust proceedings with U.S. and state officials, and they were detailed as part of a status report filed in the case in June. To provide more information to the general public, the company posted documents online Wednesday that detail how third parties can help modify desktop search applications to work with the changes being made in SP1. Microsoft has said it will release SP1, a roll-up of updates to the Vista OS, in the first quarter of 2008. Microsoft said it made the changes so that a customer who uses a third-party desktop search product instead of Vista's built-in feature can have "easy and direct access" to those offerings through the Windows user interface. "That means that in addition to the numerous ways a user could access a third-party search solution in Windows Vista, they can now get to their preferred search results from additional entry points in the Start Menu and Explorer Windows in Windows Vista SP1," the company said. These features were at the heart of Google's claims, which appeared in a white paper to U.S. and state antitrust officials in April. Google said the desktop search feature in Vista discouraged users from installing third-party products because Vista's search boxes and bars -- available in several places in the OS, including the Start menu and in the Windows Explorer file manager -- work only with Microsoft's search and indexing tool. The company also said it is nearly impossible to turn off Vista's indexing, which means a competitor must add a second indexer that slows down a PC. To let their products use Vista options they don't have access to now, third-party vendors can register their search applications using the new search protocol in Windows Vista SP1, which is detailed online. An article explaining the search changes can be found in Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
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Users will be able to choose whether their pages are revealed to outside search engines.
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Yesterday webmasters began noticing shifting and changing within Yahoo Search results. Usually, before such changes occur, Yahoo posts a Weather Report on the Yahoo Search Blog.  No posting on the YSearchBlog as of yet, but Barry Schwartz did notice that Yahoo Tim Mayer did comment at WebmasterWorld: There will be more changes tomorrow. Things should settle [...]