Semantic search engine hakia launched a new user interface last week. The aim is to "take search beyond 10 blue links". I have been wishing for some innovation in the way search engines presentats search results, so I'm curious to find out what hakia has done. What's new? The search results are now divided into tabs. The first tab â€" All Results â€" provides a three-column overview of the Web results,

Search! Search! Search! What the Web had to say about search this week' How to Search Images Online - Most Advanced Methods Search Engine Journal presenting image search engines )Oct 8 2008( Yahoo Upgrades Calendar, Integrates With Other Yahoo Properties Yahoo announced details of the new Yahoo! Calendar beta, which uses technology from their 2007 purchase of Zimbra.

Ask goes back to its roots, trying to give regular answers to natural language queries, while Hakia tries to become the new Ask. In a market dominated by one search engine, such attempts do matter, Pandia argues. Imagine the following: Due to the financial crisis, Yahoo! fails to stay afloat, and is sold to the highest bidder. If that is Google, Google will close down the Yahoo! search engine and replace it with its own. If it is Microsoft,

We are glad to welcome a new sponsor to Pandia: Directory Journal. Directory Journal is a human edited web catalog presenting hand picked sites under various categories. The directory includes over 6300 listings, website reviews, as well as articles covering a wide variety of topics. And it is growing. Blog There is a blog covering the search directory scene. When we asked Hasan Saleem of Directory Journal about why he blogged )favorably( about his competitors,

SnappyFingers calls itself a comprehensive question/answer explorer. What this means is they index millions of FAQs spread across the web to give you a one-stop-shop for when you turn to the Web to have your questions answered. We have interviewed the founder of SnappyFingers , Chirayu Patel to learn more about how SnappyFingers works and to get a glimpse behind the scenes of an answer search service in the making. Pandia: How do you identify FAQs?

The Social Web is changing web search and the search engine business. This change poses challenges and brings opportunities. Here are some current trends that will change the shape of search in the years to come. The Pandia team went to Seville, Spain, last week, to take part in a workshop hosted by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies )IPTS(, a Joint Research Centre under the European Commission.

Microsoft to present operating system for "the cloud" )and other recent search engine news(. Microsoft Steve Ballmer visited Oslo this week and talked about the future of Microsoft in "the cloud". Google has clearly understood the new paradigm of moving software and file storage online, thus making the browser the main interface to the digital world, instead of the operating system. )Or rather, the browser becomes the new operating system (.

Google has relaunched Google Blogsearch with a new home page containing clustered links to recent blog posts. The new homepage is more similar to Google News, in that it puts up popular news topics in the center column. At the moment of writing, examples of such topics are "The Palin-Biden debate" and "OJ Simpson guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping". The headline points to one of the most popular blog posts, while alternative links are provided under the summary.

Google has put up a search page that lets you search the January 2001 index of Google. Google has its 10 year anniversary this year, and this nostalgic version of Google is part of the celebration. Over at the Official Google Blog Shirin Oskooi notes that: "Now that we're a decade old, we figured we're long overdue for some spring cleaning. We started digging around our basement and found all kinds of junk: old Swedish fish, pigeon poop, Klingon translation books.

Pandia argues that there is still room for a European search engine industry, even if all the major companies now are on American hands. Yesterday we reported on how Microsoft has decided to make Norway the base for its enterprise search efforts. That can hardly be taken as a sign of the European search engine industry dying now, can it? Total US domination The fact remains, however, that there is now only one regular European owned web search engine left in Europe: Exalead.

Fast Search and Transfer becomes the core in Microsoft's new efforts to conquer the enterprise search market. When Microsoft bought the Norwegian search engine company Fast Search and Transfer in January for US$ 1.2 million, there were those who feared that this could mean the end for the Norwegian search engine cluster. However, instead of Microsoft totally assimilating Fast, it seems that Fast is " in some way " taking over Microsoft's enterprise search activities,

The Pandia team is going to Seville, Spain, next week, to take part in a seminar arranged by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies )IPTS(, a Joint Research Centre under the European Commission. There is actually great interest in search in European innovation policy circles. This is partly because of its great socio-economic role. Search is a growing forward looking industry in its own right. Moreover, it has been shaping the world around us in a profound way,

One of our favorites among the search engines is the leading European search engine Exalead. Exalead has recently updated its image search engine with several major improvements. By Panda Guest Writer Lars Våge, Internetbrus Exalead's interface has become much better and could now be the most ingenious of all of the big image search services online. The results are now presented just as thumbnails with information on the original image resolution beneath.

Here are some of this week's headlines from the world of search and search engines: Google Searches at 63% of the Search Market for August 2008 Google saw 63% of the 11.7 billion core searches conducted in the U.S. during the late summer month. )SE Watch Sept 19 2008( Google's "Submit Your Content" Page Changes Into Content Central, One Stop Shopping For Publisher Advice To help centralize submission and inclusion information,

If you happen to be in London in early December, maybe we could meet and discuss search engines and searching. Pandia is taking part in the December 1 to 4 Online Information Conference. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies will open the 2008 conference with a keynote address that examines "Every piece of information is a latent community.

Social search is upon us: A new brand of search engines is taking shape right now. In July we covered Scour , a new social meta search engine that encourages voting and commentary on its query results. In order to give you a glimpse behind the scenes of a social search engine in the making, we have interviewed Scour CEO Dan Yomtobian. Pandia: Why does Scour pay registered users for their comments and ratings? Dan Yomtobian: For Scour to function as a social community,

Google has decided to reduce the period it keeps personal information in its datalogs by half, from 18 to 9 months. Google will now anonymize IP adresses on their servers at an earlier stage. Google has been in conflict with the EU Commission on this issue. Since IP addresses are shifted around by Internet service providers, Google has argued that the IP address cannot be used to identify individuals. EU disagrees. Google is using the data to improve it search results,

Google gives away face recognition technology for free. But what happens if this technology becomes part of regular web search? Is there any privacy left? The image oriented part of the social web is dominated by Yahoo's Flickr. Google also has its own image tools, however: There is the Picasa software for Windows and Linux, a free photo organizer, and Picasa web albums , an online photo sharing service like Flickr. NRKBeta,

There is a new site presenting search engines and tools, with its own directory and discussion forum. Felix Liao has a relatively new site devoted to web search, desktop search, image search " well, anything web search related really. Search1.x contains a very informative blog covering search engine sites and technologies. The blog design is a bit unusual, as it orders the post in a kind of newspaper layout. It works well, though,

Google is 10 years old this weekend )the exact date is debated(. In these 10 years the search engine has developed from a search tool only known to geeks to a multinational giant. Google has become one of the most well known brands on the globe, and is " at least in the Western world " delivering close to 70 percent of all search results. That this would happen was not at all obvious in 1998, where the technological front was defined by AltaVista,