Matthew Hicks

SAN FRANCISCO—Yahoo Inc. wants to join the advertising market for XML syndication feeds, a top company executive said here on Wednesday, raising the prospect for a greater adoption of sponsored links within news feeds. During a question-and-answer session at the Web 2.0 conference, Yahoo chief operating officer Dan Rosensweig said the company plans to offer […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Google Inc. on Thursday gave a preview of its next steps to improve Web search, and clustering technology played a leading role. During a panel discussion of research lab leaders at the Web 2.0 conference here, one of Googles top researchers previewed the search companys work in clustering both entities and words as a […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Bill Gross, the man behind Overture Services and the Idealab incubator, wants to reinvent Web search. During the Web 2.0 conference here on Tuesday, Gross unveiled search-engine Snap, which has combined terabytes of click-stream data and advertising conversions rates to remodel search-result relevancy. Gross said that Snap, available in a public beta, is focused […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The co-founders of early search engine and portal Excite.com are bringing a new concept to the Web: the wiki as an application development platform. JotSpot Inc., the brainchild of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, was unveiled here on Wednesday during the Web 2.0 conference and began offering invitation-only access to a beta of its […]

The public preview of MSNs upcoming search engine is back, this time with a Web index about five times fatter and reworked relevancy algorithms. Microsoft Corp.s Internet division launched the second preview on Monday for the United States and plans to expand it to a total of 29 markets in 12 languages by Thursday, an […]

The co-founder of Blogger, one of the original Weblogging services that is now owned by Google Inc., is leaving the company by the end of the week. Evan Williams, who started Pyra Labs in 1999 and later launched the Blogger service, wrote on Monday in his personal blog that he has resigned from his program […]

Yahoo unveiled its local search service on Monday following a two-month beta test. Yahoo Inc. has started promoting Yahoo Local from its home page and includes a local option in its search query box. It also will tout the service over the next few months with an online and offline advertising and marketing campaign. The […]

As the major players in Web search duke it out, a growing number of startups are embracing a different way of retrieving and sorting search results. Called clustering, the technology dynamically groups search results into categories as a way of solving one of the perennial problems of Web search: figuring out what the searcher is […]

Microsoft Corp. has won a favorable jury verdict in a 2-year-old patent-infringement case regarding technology used in its Office productivity suite. After a two-week trial, a jury in U.S. District Court in Providence, R.I., ruled Wednesday that Microsofts Smart Tags technology does not infringe on a patent held by Norwegian inventor Alte Hedloy of Arendi […]

Microsoft Corp. is quickening its march into search by setting up an advisory group of industry insiders to preview its search-engine plans and research. Microsofts Internet division has invited dozens of Webloggers, researchers and others to its Redmond, Wash., campus next week for an event called “Search Champs.” They are scheduled to hear about and […]