People Search Digest

Poor Yahoo.

As if dealing with testy shareholders, political intrigue, and departing executives wasn’t enough for the foundering company, it just got, like, totally dissed by Maxim Magazine. You know Maxim - that mag for post-adolescent, collar-popping guys everywhere. They’ve ditched Yahoo’s search engine in favor of Quintura’s semantic tag cloud search, which creates a tag cloud above the results. Users can refine the search by clicking various tags.

Remember when we talked up Quintura a few months back? The attractive new search engine had tons of potential, but was just launching its beta and still needed some supporters.

Quintura may have just replaced Yahoo as the primary search engine for Maxim.com; we’re just not totally convinced. The cloud is certainly attractive, and it can be useful, but refining the searches takes longer than pulling up Yahoo’s search results. Plus, final results through Quintura don’t seem markedly superior to Yahoo’s. From Maxim’s perspective, however, that just means searchers will spend even more time on their sites looking around, and more exposure is always a good thing.

Even for mags like Maxim.

By Erik C.

Like a psycho ex-girlfriend who won’t take the hint, Microsoft is still attempting to worm its way into Yahoo’s affections, despite having been humiliatingly dumped by the struggling search company for a relationship with the more attractive Google.

News has surfaced that Microsoft is continuing negotiations with Yahoo for a total buyout (off the record, naturally). Why Microsoft is swallowing its pride now, whereas before it probably would have crushed Yahoo like a fly remains a mystery. Our guess is that it’s because Microsoft recognizes that if it lets Yahoo get away, Google will eat them - and all other budding search companies - alive, with or without Yahoo’s help.

It’s very clear now that Microsoft is struggling in its third place position; its tactics make that obvious. But just because Yahoo is being batted around like a tennis ball doesn’t mean it’s going to end up on the winning team in the end. With their stock continuing to drop rapidly, the time is ripe for Yahoo to merge with anyone and Microsoft figures, Why not us?.

So why not Microsoft?
[Read more →]

In this modern age, any luddite would be forgiven for thinking that tracking down information online is quick, easy, and always accurate, but those of us locked into a daily struggle with search engines know that nothing about the Internet is easy and, when it comes to search engine results, hardly ever accurate.

Most people with an Internet connection have had the disheartening experience of inputting a fairly simple search term into their search engine of choice and being rewarded with a list of totally irrelevant, completely useless results. Here is illustrated the great split between the way the human mind thinks and the way the Internet, as of now, has been coded to think. Whereas the human mind makes natural connections between words and phrases using cultural inference, the Internet only makes connections between disparate words and phrases if it has been manually instructed to by the use of tags, keywords, and hyperlinks. Think about it this way: Humans are like a thesaurus - endless catalogues of meaning assigned to one word; the Internet is like the dictionary - a list of strict definitions with no room for embellishment. We connote, it denotes. We traffic in essence; it is the world’s last literalist. We get the gist; it, well, can’t. So the semantic search has come to fill the gap.
[Read more →]