ReadWriteWeb

Iterend, a new blog search and discovery engine, is entering a highly competitive market. It competes with Technorati, Google's Blog Search, Sphere, Icerocket, and many other smaller players. Iterend is trying to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a stronger focus on tracking memes, clustering results, and using tag clouds for navigation. While we mostly like Iterend's design and feature set, the search engine itself is not very useful yet, as the crawler is extremely slow and the index often only reflects stories that are more than 20 hours old.

What do you do when you need to research something on the web? You just google it, right? Using a web search engine like Google is usually fine for casual searches, but when you need to delve deep into a subject, it just won't do. What you really need is a research engine that explores the unindexed reaches of the Deep Web. For that, there's now Infovell, "the world's research engine."

Two months ago, Google released a widget for iGoogle that allowed users to search for keywords in election related speeches on YouTube. Today, Google expanded the scope of this search to a larger selection of political videos and the widget graduated to become a full-blown Google Labs product named GAUDI. Interestingly, the tagline in Google Labs describes the product as a search for "what people are saying inside YouTube videos," even though its focus so far is very narrow. Over time, we expect Google to expand this service to cover a larger selection of videos or even all of YouTube.

Google just announced an interesting update to its Google News Archive, which, starting today, will not only feature the electronic text of a lot more historical newspapers, but also a scanned copy of the actual paper. While having access to the text itself is already great for researchers, having access to an article in the context of the whole paper is even more useful. For now, however, only a select group of newspapers are available in this form and a lot of the historical material is still stuck behind pay walls.

Google has long been offering iPhone-optimized sites for most of its services, as well as a dedicated search application for the iPhone. Yahoo, however, had mostly been lagging behind with respect to dedicated iPhone offerings. Now, Yahoo has unveiled a dedicated iPhone version of its search service, which, among other things, integrates results from SearchMonkey modules and also does a good job at displaying Flickr photos or movie showtimes in the results.

Blog search engine Technorati made a fresh round of promises this morning, assuring users that the service will be less awful soon once a new anti-spam program is put in place. The company says it sees nearly 10 million unique visitors each month but we cringe a bit every time we visit the site. It doesn't have to be that way.

Blogsearch in general is rife with spam and Technorati is at a real disadvantage compared to other blogsearch engines, but that's not the company's only problem. What would you like to see Technorati do in order to be relevant again? Below is our wish list.

As you may know, we are very fond of custom search engines here at ReadWriteWeb. We find them incredibly useful and we hope you do, too. In the past, we've shared many of our CSEs with you and we've showed you how to build CSEs of your own. So of course when we came across this new site called Hittery, we were really excited. A whole personal dashboard filled with CSEs you can customize? What could be better than that?

Lijit, which provides search services to bloggers and blog networks, announced today that it has closed a $7.1 Million series C round led by Foundry Group. Lijit had raised a small Series A round in January of 2007 and a larger $3.3 million Series B in July 2007. With this new round, Lijit is planning to use this new influx of money to finance the launch of its search-powered ad network.

It's the weekend, so time for our review the past week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we showed you how to create a custom search engine using social bookmarks, found out why online video is set for a boost at the Olympics, analyzed a new mainstream RSS Reader, and checked in with Windows Live. On the trends side we answered Mozilla's call for visions of the future of the Web, also looked into the future of blogging, checked out what big brands are doing with social media for the Olympics, and analyzed the gender of the Semantic Web (yes you read that correctly).

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the only space left was (re)search - what users do after the basic search.

None of the search start-ups since then has made me change my mind. None of the cool new user interface features or ways of expressing your search intentions matter one iota, if the core search proposition is not better from day one. Well, enter the latest contender: Blekko.

An alternative search engine launched last night. It's called Cuil and, if you're a reader of tech blogs and/or the New York Times, you've no doubt been hammered with the news all day. We checked Cuil out and had a mixed user experience, as did most of the commenters in the post. So it's a pretty average search engine, although like many before it Cuil claims to be a Google competitor. But why did it get so much PR upon launch? The results showed that Cuil is no different to the hundreds of alternative search engines we track every day.

Last night, the new search engine Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google's announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil's main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil's team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google's search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.

Google today announced that it is now indexing the amazing amount of 1 trillion unique URLs. Google's first index in 1998 only had 26 million pages and by 2000 that number had jumped to 1 billion. Today, the Google index is growing by several billion pages per day alone. Not too long ago, Google used to have a counter on the front page of its search engine, displaying the number of sites in the index, but they dropped this information from the site around 2005.

According to a comment made at Microsoft's Analyst Day today, Microsoft and Facebook are preparing a search and advertising deal that would lead to the integration of Microsoft's Live Search and search advertising into Facebook. Microsoft already provides ads on Facebook as part of a 'strategic alliance' and Microsoft holds a $240 million equity stake in the company. No information about the financial specifics of the deal were mentioned so far and it is not clear if this deal would be exclusive.

Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June today and two things were striking about the data.

Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation. Update: Check out the great discussion on this in the comments below - we may have been convinced that this isn't such a bad thing after all.

In the introduction to his book, Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, wrote that life is about entertainment. He might seem the last person you'd imagine as focused on entertainment, until you realize that Linux started as a hobby.

Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google gained yet another percentage point on its biggest competitors last month and now accounts for more than 69.17% of U.S. searches. In the U.K. and Australia, Google's market share has climbed above 87%. This increase comes at a time when, according to Hitwise, more and more Internet users are also relying on search to navigate to key industry categories.

Information overload is a topic that keeps coming up, especially among users of social media services. As you add more friends and more services, the amount of content produced can become overwhelming to keep up with which leads to quality items being lost amongst the "noise." Noise-reducing apps like AideRSS or Moopz (both of which we love) highlight the best content, but their one drawback is that they determine relevance based on what the community thinks - and that may or may not be what you find interesting or important. With the new social search service from Delver, however, you can leverage your social graph to find just the information you're looking for from the people you admire and/or trust and that makes finding content a much more personal experience.

When Yahoo announced Search Monkey, its developer platform for search, it also announced the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge, which was going to reward the best search extensions based on SearchMonkey. Today, Yahoo announced the winners: StumbleUpon, BooRah, computer scientist Greg Schechter, and David Hickley from GEDview.com. The grand prize of $10,000 went to Marco Vitanza, for his Blogspot Infobar.