Search Engine | featured news

Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month's Searchology event, Google Squared is now live.

Yahoo! is shutting its unloved social networking site, Yahoo! 360, next month.The closure follows the shuttering of services Y! 360 aimed at college graduates and Mash, two other networking efforts opened in 2007 and then quietly closed. Yahoo!

Google promised to deliver something spectacular on the second day of the Google I/O conference, and they did not disappoint. Google has just announced Google Wave, a new in-browser communication and collaboration tool that is already being hailed by some as the next evolution of email. Yes, Google Wave is potentially that disruptive.

Today, Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing. It will become available over the next few days, and be fully launched by June 3. On the surface, Bing has a distinct gloss. The home page features a rotation of stunning photography, for instance, which can be clicked on to produce related image search results. But the most significant changes are under the covers.

Microsoft is likely to show a new version of its Internet search engine publicly for the first time next week, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

We may be coming upon a new era for the Internet search. And, despite its dominance, Google is not the only player.

Google said it was responding to the phenomenal popularity of free music downloads in China, one of the few markets where the company lags, by forming an alliance with the music industry.

The Internet giant's search engine could make Web site design and navigation obsolete.

More on NewspapersTerry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Ms. Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales "blitz" intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper's Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year.