Google has announced the debut of Google Flu Trends, a tool designed to identify flu-outbreak patterns through an analysis of search data. An early version of the technology deployed during the 2007-2008 flu season accurately estimated flu levels across nine regions in the U.S. as much as two weeks ...

Search and databases often have troubled relationships. Web-based search utilities have become essential business tools. The database is the lifeblood of many a business' record-keeping system. Both are vital -- just don't try to put the two together or integrate spreadsheets and other documents wit...

Ask.com rolled out a new version of itself Monday. The revamped search engine includes a new user interface with three new technologies -- DADs, DAFS and AnswerFarm -- that offer users the ability to search the Web using commonly spoken language. The enhancements to Ask.com will help the site retain...

PRODUCT REVIEW

ubExact Gives Search a Little More Personality

Google and Yahoo are so well established in my daily Internet search routine that I wasn't expecting to find anything new with a beta engine from a start-up search company. But ubExact had more than one pleasant surprise in how it lets users search. ubExact launched its beta on Sept. 2 after spendin...

Online discovery service StumbleUpon has changed the way its users can access the service. The company announced a new partner program Tuesday and also unveiled a new Web-based toolbar that no longer requires users to register or download the specific StumbleUpon Toolbar, a task that may have turned...

Google is amping up its corporate search tool by more than tripling its capacity compared to previous models. The newly launched Google Search Appliance boasts the ability to index up to 10 million documents with a single, bright yellow server. The development -- Google's fifth offering in the Sear...

Cuil, the new search engine created by a team that included a couple of former Google execs, launched this week. However, just a few hours after it went live, it seemed as though Cuil's dive into the search engine pool was more like a belly flop, judging by a sizable number of reports and reviews. C...

EXPERT ADVICE

10 Reasons to Elbow Into New Web Directories

New directories are a valuable tool for Web sites that need that extra boost in search engine ranking or in their number of visitors. They make for a great way to increase Web exposure and expand your Web site's advertising. Since many of the top Web directories are quite expensive and take time to ...

STARTUP TO WATCH

Cuil Trots Out Dark Horse Search Contender

A startup search engine launched Monday, Cuil, hopes to prove that its search technology is cooler than that of the reigning king of search, Google. Cuil's creators -- former Google search architect Anna Patterson; her husband Tom Costello, a former researcher and developer at Stanford University an...

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

HealthMap Crawls the Web to Track Disease Outbreaks

A new health-mapping system crawls the Web's disparate news sources and aggregates the information it finds there into a unified view of the world's health. HealthMap, which was launched by a team of researchers from Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, provides a comprehensive vie...

Adobe, Google and Yahoo have joined forces to add dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications to search results. The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe's Flash Player technology to improve their engines' abilities to index the Flash file format and scan information co...

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced Monday the rollout of the latest firmware update for its PlayStation Portable handheld gaming console. The system software update version 4.00 brings Google search to the XrossMediaBar interface, the result of a new partnership between the hardware heavy...

It's heartening to see that Mark Zuckerberg is following my advice and seeking a sit-down with Google to hammer out their differences over this Friend Connect thing. It would be heartening as well to see Facebook coming to the defense of my private data as forcefully as it has been -- if only it act...

OPINION

Avoiding Death by Merger

I used to run a post-merger clean-up team for IBM years ago, and have since spent a great deal of time thinking about and dealing with major mergers that clients have undertaken. In a market like this, consolidation and acquisition are inevitable, and knowing how to play in what will likely be the k...

Powerset, a new Internet search engine company, has launched a proof-of-concept salvo in the search engine war -- a natural language processing engine that attempts to understand the meaning behind a search phrase and the text it's searching against. Instead of returning a long list of results that ...

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