Chinese Internet search firm Baidu looks forward to life after Google

Image via CrunchBase

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 18, 2010; A12

BEIJING -- In 2000, a 31-year-old software engineer named Li Yanhong, a.k.a. Robin Li, left his job in Silicon Valley and returned home to China to start an Internet search engine. He raised $26.2 million in venture capital, including a modest investment by Google.

Ten years later, Li's company, Baidu, has become the dominant search engine in China, a goliath with 7,000 employees and a market value of $16.2 billion on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Google, which sold its stake in 2006 when it launched its own Chinese site, has lagged far behind, capturing less than half of the market share Baidu has here.

In a country obsessed with economic advancement, Li, a graduate of Beijing University and SUNY at Buffalo, has attained what Chinese newspapers have called pop-star status, with fans thronging Baidu conferences. And to many here, his company's success has become a point of national pride, even though its initial investors were virtually all American.

Now investors are betting that Baidu will reap the benefits if Google ends up exiting China over its dispute with the government about alleged cyberattacks on Google e-mail and source code. Since Tuesday, when Google announced that it would stop censoring its search engine even if that meant losing its Chinese business license, Baidu's stock on the Nasdaq has surged 21 percent to a new high, adding $2.8 billion to the company's market value in just three days.

Although investors are happy, China watchers are worried about the political consequences of Chinese Internet users depending too heavily on Baidu for news and information.

The company has been accused of altering search results for advertisers, by either deleting content or pushing firms' sites higher up on the search result lists in return for payments. The charge has prompted the company to launch an overhaul of its listings.

Moreover, as a Chinese company, Baidu has little choice but to comply with government demands for censorship. An industry source familiar with the firm said officials from the Ministry of Industries and Information Technology are stationed at its offices.

The company does not pretend to have a mission, as Google does: "Don't be evil."

"Baidu does face the same censorship issues, but without the corporate culture that resents censorship," said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of a blog called Danwei.org and an online media expert in Beijing.

In an item he posted last week on his blog, Baidu's chief product designer, Sun Yunfeng, said that in China, "every enterprise or every individual must dance with shackles."

"This is the reality," Sun wrote. "Do as much as you can is the real attitude to have as a business or a person." The posting was later taken down from his blog, but reprinted on other sites.

"Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete," said Rebecca MacKinnon, an Open Society fellow and co-founder of GlobalVoicesOnline.org, a network of bloggers and online activists.

MacKinnon said she has compared search results on Google's China search engine and Baidu over the past four years and that "consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn." She added, "There are a number of very sensitive terms that get no results from Baidu. On google.cn, you get sanitized results but at least you get results."

Meeting Chinese needs

Baidu owes much of its success to the vision and drive of its founder. Li, who declined to be interviewed for this article, tailored Baidu to what he believed were the needs and tastes of the Chinese. He made the search engine box longer and wider for Chinese characters. He introduced a feature that people with interests in, say, basketball could use to find other people with similar interests and exchange views.

More important, Baidu also linked to sites where people could download free music MP3s, largely pirated. That accounted for much of Baidu's traffic in its early years and about 20 percent of it as late as 2005, according to an industry source familiar with the company. Today, Baidu has captured two-thirds of the Chinese market.

Although the company said it couldn't possibly monitor the multitude of sites run by third parties, critics say it turned a blind eye to the legal issues. The People's High Court of Beijing has twice ruled in Baidu's favor in copyright infringement suits brought by record companies. Today, music downloads account for well under 10 percent of Baidu's traffic, the industry source said.

More recently, Baidu has introduced a Wiki-style service called "Baidu Zhidao" or Baidu Knows, where people can plug in questions and get replies. It has also courted beginners on the Web, a large category given that the number of Chinese Internet users -- 338 million at last count in the middle of last year -- is growing about 30 to 40 percent a year.

Success despite setbacks

In a business dominated by U.S. giants such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Baidu has played to national pride.

The name Baidu (by-DOO) means "100 degrees" but was inspired by a Song Dynasty love poem in which it means 100 times. A man is searching for his true love during the traditional Lantern Day Festival. "A hundred times I search for her in the crowd and turn around just to discover she is there where the lantern lights are dim," the man writes.

The firm has "managed to convince a lot of people that, as a Chinese company, they have a grip on the subtleties of the Chinese language," said Kaiser Kuo, an Internet consultant and musician. In one ad, Baidu featured a bumbling, inarticulate foreigner in Chinese garb meeting a clever Chinese character who talks circles around the befuddled foreigner.

Baidu has its critics. Many of them think that the company's ardor for money prompted it to accept payments in return for deleting negative reports. When the Sanlu Group was found to have sold dairy products containing kidney-damaging melamine, critics alleged that Baidu had agreed to filter out relevant pages from its search results, citing a document purporting to describe an agreement between Sanlu and Baidu. Baidu denied the accusations, but the incident damaged the company's reputation and for a time drove traffic to other sites, according to one competitor.

There have been other controversies as well. In November 2008, China Central Television said Baidu's paid search service, which let Web sites pay to be listed higher among search results, highlighted links to unlicensed companies that offered medical products or services. CCTV said the sites sold treatments -- many of them fake, useless or unlicensed -- for cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and other ailments. CCTV also said that consumers were more likely to purchase such products because it wasn't clear that the product placement had been purchased.

Despite such setbacks, Baidu continues to make gains. It earned $72.2 million in the third quarter last year. Big advertisers include Nike, Intel and other Fortune 500 companies.

It's a reminder that Baidu's mission isn't political or philanthropic: It's a business.

"For ordinary people, the critical information is not keyhole reports of Zhongnanhai," said Baidu's chief product designer Sun, in his blog post last week, referring to the compound where China's top leaders live, "but the most routine information in economy, culture and technology fields."

As with the rest of his posting, this observation was also deleted from his blog, but it was reprinted elsewhere.

China's Google dilemma: Soften on censorship or anger millions of Internet users

Image via CrunchBase

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 14, 2010; A14

BEIJING -- Google's threat to shut down its Chinese Web site and offices over cyberattacks and censorship puts the government here in the awkward position of having to choose between relaxing restrictions and raising the ire of the roughly 80 million Chinese people who use the search engine.

Few political and Internet analysts appear to doubt that China will stick to its tough stance and reject Google's proposal to stop censoring search results on its Chinese sites. But Google's audience of Chinese "netizens," a few of whom placed flowers outside the company's Beijing offices Wednesday, is large enough to make such a reaction risky.

"This would adversely affect a lot of people, not just the technorati elite that is Western-oriented anyway," said Kaiser Kuo, an independent technology consultant. "The government could face a serious backlash this time."

On Wednesday, the Google story was the top trending topic on a Twitter-like microblog on the Chinese site Sina.com, with about 60,000 people weighing in before the conversation was taken down. Most commenters expressed dismay at the prospect of losing Google's China-based service; some lashed out at the government, while others begged Google to stay. A substantial minority wished the company good riddance.

"This will make the extent of Chinese censorship a lot clearer, even to ordinary Chinese people who are not aware of it," said Jeremy Goldkorn, a China Internet specialist who posts on Sina's blog site and runs a Web site called Danwei, which has been blocked since July.

"Many people think Google should negotiate with the Chinese government," said Zhou Shuguang, a blogger who has done investigative reporting across the country. He added, though, that its withdrawal would lead more Chinese to discover that China lacks freedom on the Internet. "There are no benefits to people at all if Google continues to make concessions with Chinese authorities," he said.

The government has backed down once in the face of outcries on the Internet. Last year, it attempted to require the makers of personal computers sold here to install Green Dam, a filtering software. But it reversed itself after widespread online protests that the software slowed down and damaged computers.

Still, businesspeople in Beijing were pessimistic Wednesday about the prospect of a crack in what is known as the Great Firewall of China. "China can't lose face over this, and it's not going to let anybody run an open search engine," said an industry source close to Google.

The government has shut down or blocked thousands of Web sites. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all blocked. Just this week, the General Administration of Press and Publication boasted of taking down 136,000 non-registered Web sites and more than 1.5 million pieces of "bad information." It also said it had shut down 15,000 pornographic Web sites.

For now, the government has said only that it will seek more information from Google. Virtually the only official comment came in the form of a signed opinion article on the People's Daily Web site, lacking the weight of an officially vetted unsigned editorial. The article likened Google to a "spoiled child" and said that even if it stormed out of China, it would be back because of the importance of the Chinese market.

Other pro-government online comments said that Google, which lags far behind the Chinese-based search engine Baidu, was simply dressing up a business decision in moral clothing. Baidu has about two-thirds of the market. Some independent analysts have estimated a 30 percent market share for Google, but well-placed industry sources put the number closer to 20 percent.

Dan Brody, who set up Google's China office and now runs the Koolanoo Group, a Beijing-based Internet media investment firm, estimates that Google has annual revenue of $300 million to $400 million in China -- an amount that he said pales next to the revenue it earns elsewhere.

Moreover, he said, if Google loses even a small percentage of its users in Europe or the United States because it is seen as compromising too much with China, it could lose more than it earns in the country. "From a business and moral perspective, user trust in the West is so important to them," he said.

The company has clashed with the Chinese government since it set up google.cn in 2005. Google agreed to remove information that China's leadership might find too sensitive but differed with officials over what should fall into that category.

Last summer, state-run media denounced the firm for providing access to "pornography." Another industry source close to Google said that in addition to well-publicized incidents, Chinese officials were demanding weekly that items be removed. When cyberattacks were discovered, he said, "it was the last straw." The industry sources spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If Google closes down its Chinese site, or if the Chinese government closes it down, Chinese users could still try to use the U.S.-based site. But the U.S. site works more slowly, and access to many pages is blocked.

Where would that leave the Chinese market?

The closing of Google's China site would boost Baidu and Sina and hurt Google, industry analysts said.

Despite expensive campaigns in universities and schools, Google has had trouble catching up to its domestic competitors. Analysts say Chinese Internet users prefer the crowded, busy sites of Baidu and Sina to the no-nonsense sparseness of Google's home page. Unlike Google, Baidu and Sina also feature bulletin boards and music-downloading services. And surveys have shown that most Chinese people have trouble spelling Google or don't know its Chinese name, Guge, which means "valley song."

Google China has also suffered from high turnover and was recently forced to replace some of its locally hired, Mandarin-speaking staff with managers from its California headquarters. The head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, who was recruited from Microsoft, quit in September.

Ironically, however, the possible departure of Google is no guarantee of harmony on the Chinese Internet. This week, Baidu's site was attacked by hackers who said they were from Iran.

"This is a lose-lose solution for both Google and China," said Hu Yong of Beijing University's School of Journalism and Communication.

"For Google, China is a huge market with very big business potential," Hu said. "For Chinese netizens, it's a bad result as well. A search engine is very important for the free transportation of information online. And we need competition," he added, or "the number of information sources will decrease."

Staff researchers Zhang Jie and Wang Juan contributed to this report.

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Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

Image by michperu via Flickr

By STEFANIE OLSEN

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

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Yahoo to Add Real-Time Search Results - WSJ.com

Image via CrunchBase

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Yahoo Inc. said it is testing a new search feature that will show people results based on relevant information being shared by Internet users in real-time.

People familiar with the matter said Yahoo is testing real-time search results through a partnership with Web search start-up OneRiot Inc., along with other companies. The OneRiot test is scheduled to go live this week.

In a statement, Yahoo said the real-time shortcuts will only appear on certain search queries and that the company is still weighing whether to integrate the results across its user base.

The OneRiot deal is independent from Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search features to Microsoft Corp., according to a person familiar with the matter.

Unlike traditional Web search results, which are ranked by methods like analyzing what sort of Web pages link to a particular Web page, OneRiot's results are based on the links that people are sharing through services like Twitter and Digg and other data. Searching OneRiot for "Michelle Obama," for instance, may bring up a link to reports about her recent Halloween costume instead of a link to a biography.

Yahoo's move underscores how the largest search properties are focusing on timelier search results.

In October, Microsoft and Google Inc. announced deals with Twitter designed to help them add similar capabilities to their search services.

Still, the search engines are faced with the challenge of figuring out when real-time content is relevant or just clutter. In addition, the business model for real-time search is murky.

In an interview last week, Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams said Twitter is trying to tackle some of those problems. The San Francisco company is devoting more engineering resources to its own Twitter search engine and is focusing on how to show people the most relevant tweet, Mr. Williams said, not just the latest one that matches the terms they searched.

FUMSI Articles on Finding, Using Managing and Sharing Information

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Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

Getting the Full 360 on Silobreaker

by Gary Price

Searching for news is a task both information professionals and the users we train are doing all of the time using one of many news search databases.

One powerful news search database I like a lot gets very little attention, and I think that needs to change.
The resource I’m talking about is Silobreaker. It’s been online for several years and aggregates content from more than 10,000 news sites, blogs, and multimedia sources.

Best of all, access to this London- and Stockholm-based news search tool is free. While not perfect (what is?), it’s a search tool you will want to know about.

Silobreaker is powerful due to its advanced search interface located next to the primary search box, which enables you to limit in a number of ways including by source, content type, date, etc. Even more important are the many additional resources not found on most other news search engines, providing options that can help make sense of the news. They provide not only links to news results but also useful intelligence.

Take a look on the charts and tables located on the right side of the homepage and you’ll see what I’m talking about. All of these features are also searchable via the links found directly above the main search box.

Notice the drop-down menu from the search box that appears as you enter your search terms. If the term(what Silobreaker calls an 'entity') is in the database, you’ll see it here. It can help you focus your search even before you click.

Just because a search topic doesn’t have a drop down option does not mean it isn’t searchable on Silobreaker. However, results -- like on any news search tool -- may vary. Here’s an example of a search results page for an entity not in the database.

With that understood, Silobreaker is most powerful with entities in their database. They even ask for help in identifying new entities and sources. Look for the link at the very top of any page.

At the top of the homepage, you’ll spot a hyperlink labeled '360° search'. This is the default search option. Here’s the resulting 360 search on General Motors.

Note the brief company information available at the top left of the page including a link to a Silobreaker fact sheet about GM.

This service also works for searches about people. For example, Barack Obama. Again, you’ll see brief bio info along with other information. Click the bio link and you’ll receive a full bio about the President gleaned from Silobreaker sources. Very useful. All of this is in addition to the news stories that the database provides.

The next search option at the top of the search box is called 'Network' and it graphically displays how people or topics in the database relate to other people and/or topics in the full database. This is an interactive tool. Cursor over any of the boxes and you’ll see what the relationship is via a text snippet. Here’s the 'Network' page for Global Warming.

Option number three is labeled 'Hot Spots'. Here you’ll find a map that gives an idea of where the underlying stories are about. Again using Barack Obama as the search topic, take a look at this Hot Spot map.

You'll notice lots of content about the Middle East. Obama is heading their today (6/3/2009).

The 'Trends' option gives you a graphical look at how much attention topic or person is getting in the press over a period of time. Here’s the trends page for U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

OK, that was a lot to take in. Let’s review using a 360° degree search for Gordon Brown.

Note the main search results like you would find with any news search tool. The entities located below each article are clickable.

On the right side of the page take note of the following:

• Video search results (if available)
• 'In focus' (people, places, events related to Brown (clickable)
  
• 'Content volume' for searches about Gordon Brown broken down by source type
• A 'Network' graph that identifies and shows relationships
• 'Hot Spots' that illustrate where the news is coming from (clickable)
• A 'Trends' graph that illustrates the amount of content about Prime Minister Brown versus other people in the news.
  

Finally, while Silobreaker offers many options the learning curve does not take a long time. It’s actually quite fun. You’ll be up and running in no time. Pages on the site also provide more help if needed.

Two New Real-Time Search Engines: Collecta and CrowdEye

From a Search Engine Land Blog post by Greg Sterling:

This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company.

The blog post goes on to offer an in-depth overview of both services.

Direct to Collecta

Direct to Crowd Eye

Source: Search Engine Land

Internet Resources, June 25, 2009

Blog Tips - On entering the blog, you might try first going to the bottom of the page. This is where a bunch of gadgets which 'push' news to you are located. There are also a few which let you select from a new menu of news daily, or, in some cases, just as the news appears on the net. The top two are the 'breaking news' gadgets, one looking like a map which you can manipulate to get news from almost every country in the world. The one immediately below the map presents only breaking news programmed to reflect the six topics covered by the blog. Hit any stiry of interest to see the full-text behind the moving headline. In researching contemporary events, gadgets like these make your work easier, faster, and more complete.


Today's Readings

GetDocs

CitizenTube

YouTube Video Volunteers

Wayback Machine

Web Pioneers


Wiki Resources

Internet Archive

Volunteering

Internet Resources Briefs #3

With Bing, Microsoft Finds Some Good Search Ideas (search engine)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/06/AR2009060600019.html

Get the Tech Scuttlebutt (It Might Even Be True)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/business/media/07ping.html?ref=todayspaper

Blogs Falling in An Empty Forest (blogs)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?ref=todayspaper

How to Plan A Vacation Using Social Media (networking, search)
http://mashable.com/2009/06/07/vacation-social-media/

China Squeezes PC Makers
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124440211524192081.html#mod=todays_us_page_one