ReadWriteWeb

Here's another semantic search tool for Web application developers: Picky, a "a semantic text search engine for categorized data, such as varchar fields from a database." It's written in Ruby and you can grab the source here.

The developer, Florian Hanke, emphasizes that Picky is not a replacement for for full text search engines like Sphinx and Lucene. It's just for searching small, structured data very quickly.

This morning, alternative search engine service blekko announced a partnership with hot iPad social magazine Flipboard to power its content searches. Under the new deal, users looking for new content to subscribe to within Flipboard can discover and browse for items by keyword. The content will come from RSS feeds, the Web feed format used to publish regularly updated news in a structured format. But unlike with traditional RSS readers, like Google Reader, for example, the feeds will not be displayed in the typical inbox-like view often associated with feed-reading services. Instead, the feeds will be displayed in Flipboard's magazine-like format for a more visually attractive experience.

RSS dead? Hardly.

This morning at the BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, Florida, RIM President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was joined by RIM's industry partners to talk about and demonstrate the company's products and solutions in action. One of those partners was a surprise guest: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who announced Microsoft's new partnership with RIM on its BlackBerry smartphones.

Microsoft's Bing search engine will become the default search and maps provider on all new devices, said Ballmer. But it will be more than that, too. Bing will also be deeply integrated into the BlackBerry operating system, BB OS 7.

Google is allowing some users to search the web by voice on their desktop browsers, a spokesperson from the company confirmed to us today in an email. Selected users are shown a little grey microphone at the end of the search box. The experiment was first mentioned by San Francisco's Matt Schlicht, social product lead at live streaming video service Ustream, and was written up by the blog Mashable. (Turns out Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable posted on this even earlier, this morning.)

Voice search may or may not come to the desktop browser version of Google beyond this experiment, but it would good for Google's long term interests if it did. Would it be good for users? Do you want to use voice input for search when you have access to a full keyboard, as opposed to a little Android phone? I suspect for many people the size of a keyboard is a less limiting factor than comfort using it for input. Voice search on the desktop could change the nature of peoples' search queries and provide a lot more speech data for Google to analyze and learn from.

A new add-on to Firefox combines resources location and category search to the toolbar while protecting your browsing activity.

AwesomeBar HD is a spin-off from the Home Dash project designed by Mozilla developer Edward Lee to improve browsing and content discovery without the use of a toolbar. AwesomeBar is the opposite of Home Dash: instead of getting rid of the toolbar, it makes the address bar much more intuitive.

When Google announced a tweak to its search algorithm in February, the company presented the change as a move to help improve search results. The official announcement said it wanted to make sure search unearthed "high quality sites," and while it never specified what the "low quality sites" might be, many interpreted Google's move as an attack on content farms.

Considering that the company arguably most synonymous with content farms, Demand Media, had just filed an IPO the month prior, industry onlookers were eager to see the impact of the new algorithm.

The company issued a statement yesterday, downplaying the effect of the change on its pageviews and search ranking. But the stock market this morning seemed less than convinced as the company's shares took a hit.

Bing has launched an iPad app today, with a design for its search portal that it truly customized to the iPad experience. It's a stark contrast to the Google app which offers a similar thing: access to search, news, and maps.

Since its redesign last September, Twitter has said time and again that the site is not just for those who Tweet, but for those who consume. To that end, the company has worked to make it easier and easier for new users to find information related to their interests, with features like the "who to follow" page. Today, Twitter announced another feature to help onboard new users - search that makes it easier to find and follow Twitter accounts based on interest.

The improved search comes alongside another new feature - the advanced search page - which takes the various operators that have always been available to Twitter users and makes them easily accessible in a Web form.

Google Mobile Search added a new feature today that lets users search for stock ticker symbols and see their results in a beautiful, structured interface that scrolls horizontally to display different kinds of results. It would be awesome to see this kind of mobile search interface rolled out beyond search for stocks. It wouldn't be the first time a technical innovation jumped from Google Finance to the rest of Google.

If you're on an iPhone or an up to date Android phone, go to Google.com in your browser and try search queries like GOOG, AAPL, NYT or YHOO. You'll see the whole screen fill up with a chart that lets you view stock price changes over varying timeframes. Swipe right (who ever thought to swipe on a Google mobile search results page?) and you'll see News Search results for the company you searched for. Swipe again and you'll see charts for the 3 leading markets, once more and you'll see a nice chart that lets you compare all the companies you've searched for recently. It's beautiful!

Google announced this morning that it is taking the inclusion of social recommendations in its search results a step further with the introduction of the long-awaited Google +1. The new feature puts a "+1" icon next to each search result, allowing users to recommend certain results and websites directly from Google, rather than on Twitter or Facebook.

Google calls the feature "digital shorthand for 'this is pretty cool'," but we have to wonder - who are you telling and why?