Ask.comâs Ask X : Search Testing Ground
619680
Lisa Barone, super search blogger, has the beef on Ask.com&#8217;s search interface  &#038; user experience testing ground, Ask X.  Google has its SearchMash to test new Ajax and Java powered search tools, and now Ask has Ask X.  And Lisa has this to say about Ask X: The difference between Ask X and Google&#8217;s SearchMash [...]
110221
Users can search by file format, size, and duration.
517445
Tips for improving the efficiency of job searches on the Web.
719899
ObjectsSearch Offers Open Source Search Results  Aiming to provide users with unbiased website ranking, ObjectsSearch.com has launched an open source search engine based on Nutch.org's search. ObjectsSearch looks to solve problems related to search result manipulation and information overload. ObjectsSearch claims that their open source approach provides an "alternative to commercial ...
477171
There&#8217;s something of a dance going on between the new AskCity, which got huge amounts of coverage since launch a week or so ago, and IAC&#8217;s stalwart local brand Citysearch. Here&#8217;s a press release out this morning, which points to the fact that Citysearch is supplying much of the content on Ask City. It&#8217;s a little [...]
328254
Human-powered search site morphs into search for mobile users.
86125
What's new in search? Found in the forums: How Do Links And Traffic Find You; Starting My SEO Strategy; Quality Score Column; and more.
432225
Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
674304
Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
144070
The software maker is in the midst of a major revamp to its search product. Over the coming weeks, the company will make more changes, including to the engine itself. Whether the changes add up to more eyeballs is an open question.
86299
Plus: Is Microsoft search engine crawling Google? [News.com Extra]
737161
Over at Search Engine Watch Forums, a member asks about Ask.com&#8217;s Sponsored Listings and the quality of traffic coming from them. Seems that results are ranging based upon quality of the keywords chosen and campaign targeting, here are some of the responses in the mix: We get decent results from Ask. However, it takes some work. You [...]
124078
I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
460464
A new posting from Dynamically Typed - More on rich web UIs - has a few interesting links to share, as well as Harry's search for a XmlHttpRequest method.
114613
Also: Stephen Hawking looking for assistant. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
765822
(InfoWorld) - Ask.com is making another major attempt to attract more people to its search engine, as its years-long, unsuccessful struggle to boost its usage market share continues. On Tuesday, Ask.com will make a big splash with what it calls major enhancements to its search algorithms and user interface, with the hopes that these improvements will give its user base a substantial push. Despite a steady stream of upgrades and generally favorable reviews from industry experts, Ask.com routinely ranks as either last or next-to-last among the five major search engines in the U.S. This has been a source of dismay for company officials, who over the years have expressed frustration at a usage market share that they don't believe corresponds with the quality of the Ask.com search engine. For example, in April, U.S. users entered 5.1 percent of their queries on Ask.com, a virtual tie with the 5 percent attained by Time Warner Inc., which includes AOL LLC, according to comScore Networks Inc. The closes competitor, Microsoft Corp., more than doubled Ask.com's share with 10.3 percent, while the top two providers are worlds away: Yahoo Inc. with almost 27 percent and Google Inc. with almost 50 percent. In total numbers, this means that in April Ask.com handled 376 million queries to Google's 3.6 billion. More concerning is that the situation is worse today than in July 2005. Back then, Ask.com's share was 6.1 percent. Between then and now, Ask.com, Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner have lost share at Google's expense, which had a 36.5 percent share at the time. However, with the debut of Ask3D on Tuesday, Ask.com, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp., expects the tide to turn. The most visible highlight of Ask3D, which now powers the company's main search site , is a 3-panel layout. Suggestions to expand and refine queries appear on the left-hand column and results from specialty engines on the right-hand column. The traditional search results list sits in the center column. On the backend, algorithmic improvements will produce more precise results, particularly from the specialty engines column, Ask.com officials said. The idea is to complement the core list of Web sites with links to relevant news articles, video clips, images, digital songs, weather information, blog postings, local business listings, entertainment events information and the like. The specialty engines tapped for each query are decided on a case-by-case basis by Ask.com. Some queries may trigger links to digital songs and video clips, while others may generate links to news articles and blog postings in the right-hand column. The ultimate goal of Ask3D is to cut down on the frustrating trial-and-error method of searching, by delivering in a single results page what Ask.com considers to be the most relevant results and query-refinement tools. All of Ask.com's major rivals have been tweaking their search engines in order to provide a variety of relevant links in the first page of results. Most recently, Google unveiled its Universal Search project, a push to integrate results from a variety of its search engines on its main Google.com site. Search engine usage studies consistently have shown that most users never venture beyond the first page of results, and that many don't know that providers like Google and the others offer specialty engines to look for news, images, videos and the like. The enhancements in Ask3D will be familiar to those who tested AskX.com, which the company quietly put up in December to try out and preview.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
664765
Yahoo! has more questions than exclamation marks.