People Search Digest

It’s been a tough few weeks for Yahoo!. First Microsoft withdrew their offer to purchase the ailing company for $44.6 billion after drawn out negotiations. Then billionaire bully Carl Icahn sent a very nasty, very public letter to Yahoo!, an incident that was detailed on this site last month. With its stock dropping steeply and a spurned Microsoft feeling uncharitable, it seemed quite certain that Yahoo! would be forced to play nice with their competitors to stay afloat. The Internet was aflame with speculations: Would an unhappy Microsoft play nice? Would Icahn succeed in forcing out Yahoo! founder and CEO Jerry Yang? And what was the strangely silent Google plotting in their Mountain View complex? Yesterday we got an answer. Sort of.

As most people know by now, late yesterday afternoon Google and Yahoo! announced they would be forming a non-exclusive search agreement, allowing Yahoo! to access Google’s AdSense technology on their American and Canadian webpages. In addition both companies would begin working on making their respective messaging systems compatible with each other for better communication between users. On the official GoogleBlog, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Development Omid Kordestani emphasized that this was not a merger in the traditional sense, but rather a move that would benefit both companies by streamlining the process of correlating advertising to search terms.
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Wikia Search no longer sucks.

That’s straight from Jimmy Wales, its creator, who says that, up until now, Wikia Search “pretty much sucked” and “has not been usable on a day to day basis.” Such brazen honesty is refreshing in this industry, but it’s pointless unless the service improves. Wales insists that it has, rolling out a ton of new editing features that allows users the same kind of freedom they enjoy on Wikipedia. Searchers can remove, reorder, add, rate, annotate, and comment on search results at their leisure. Everyone else can do the same too, which should make for some epic editing wars. As with Wikipedia, the Wikia Search community can collectively ban spammers from editing results.

The new interface lets users drag results around the page in real time, and hovering over a result brings up an editing menu on the right. Users can also add new search results; simply paste in the URL in the “Add to this result” box, and the new page will appear in any subsequent search results.
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Most discussions of search technology focus on open web searching — engines like Google or Yahoo and how those are being refined and improved. But behind the scenes, under the noses of most consumers, there are huge advances being made in the world of search technology. Consumers may not directly benefit, but it’s always good to be aware of new technology.

A Palo Alto-based startup is launching a product that should advance behind-the-firewall search tech considerably. Paglo has created a crawler that, rather than indexing documents, images, and media on the Internet, actually identifies IT resources within a corporate network and makes the information searchable for all users. IT departments simply have to install an open source program, provided by Paglo, that will send relevant data to Paglo’s servers. It takes mere minutes for a department to set up with Paglo, after which administrators can log in from anywhere to search their network.
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