Microsoft remains stubbornly fixated on becoming competitive in search. The latest salvo in the war against Google and Yahoo is a rebranding of Live Search as Bing. The company has invested heavily in the new and improved search engine, and hoping the new name will help draw attention. Does Microsft has a real reason to brag? There’s an advance review  Ars Technica that may give us an inkling:

On the actual Bing homepage, you get your typical Live Search background image and links to Microsoft Web properties. The biggest change here is that the different categories for searching that are typically at the top of the search bar have been removed (Images, Video, News, Maps; and in a More drop down menu: Health, Local, Products, and xRank). However, the categories Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps, and Travel are under an Explore section on the left-hand side. This left-hand side bar becomes very important when using Bing because it also plays a critical role in (most) search result pages.

The most interesting part of the revamp, by far, is how Bing guesses what sections are relevant to your query. What I find very find annoying is that the Web, Images, Videos, Shopping, Maps, and More links are still at the top of the search results page, meaning there is a lot of potential for overlap, depending on the query. (Ars Technica)

So does it matter? For Microsoft itself, it might. Every new Windows based system sold will default to bing as its primary search engine. That’s also been true of Live Search for some time now, so it’s not a new advantage. Having said that, some aspects of Bing will push Google and a newly mission focused Yahoo to make some changes to keep their repective lead. I have no doubt, however, that the market shares will remain mostly the same as they are today. The search engine wars have long been over. The next wave of technology that that remakes the pecking order will be something entirely different.

Lack  of critical mass, lack of interest, and the world economy going into a prolonged funk has relegated the Wikia search engine to the ash heap.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he is pulling the plug on the experiment, Wikia Search.

In a blog post Tuesday, Wales said the search engine “has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped.”

You Are the Algorithm

The idea was to let anyone help decide which Web sites appeared for different search queries — a far cry from the approach of search companies like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) .

Most search engines use constantly evolving algorithms to keep up with the proliferation of Web sites and the spammers looking to game results for a better spot on the list.

However, the plan had its skeptics from the start. (Linux Insider)

The promise of human powered, collaboratively driven search results sounds like a great idea, but building critical mass to compete with extreme automation with ever improving algorithms is a nearly impossible task. Finding the necessary cash / time combination to make this kind of enterprise work is nearly impossible in hard times. The other high profile  start up attempting to make search more relevant under human power,  Mahalo, is also rumored to be running low on cash.

If you want to beat Google and the large collection of also rans lake Yahoo and Ask, you have to do something radically different. The first big search engine, Yahoo, began with sites indexed by humans and lost its top position to an automated competitor that could index sites better. I think we’ll most likely see something coming from the open source community that will shake up search as we know it today.

Yahoo is in the throes of a management shakeup having acquired a new CEO. One of the oddities is that the current CFO seems to have discovered his demise via an 8K SEC filing? –

Yahoo! has told the world that chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen is leaving the company. The struggling web portal announced the news this morning with an SEC filing.

The announcement comes less than a day after Jorgensen told an investor conference that Yahoo! had not ruled out the possibility of striking some sort of internet-search pact with Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.

“We want to do it for the right reasons and the right economics,” he said, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this week, reports indicated that new CEO Carol Bartz was preparing to reorganize the company’s management structure. And this morning, Bartz announced the reorg with a blog post this morning - though she did not mention Jorgensen’s departure.

But there is an even odder bit in my view –

Details were few, but she did announce the creation of a new Customer Advocacy group. “After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you. Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.

“We’re also leaning on this team to make sure we’re all hearing the voice of our customers (consumers and advertisers).”

Now in most cases that translates to ‘customer damage control’. I would find it a very un-novel way to reach out to the customer base and see where improvements need to be made. Generally that kind of fact finding is done by the CEO themselves their first year in tenure. Carol better hit the online video conferencing circuit NOW.

Linky.

If you are one of those folks who still use Yahoo Briefcase Service you might want to check for a different solution. Come March Yahoo is discontinuing the service. Lots of alternatives, just pick one….

A Yahoo! spokeswoman confirms the service will retire from this world on the last day of March. “[Briefcase] was launched nearly 10 years ago and usage has been significantly declining over the years,” she tells us. “Users outgrew the need for the service and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities, e.g. Yahoo! Mail and Flickr. Discontinuing the service allows us to focus our efforts on more broadly used products, in line with our commitment to deliver the best possible user experience.”

As that online death notice explains, users must remove their online files by March 30 or they will vanish forever. It shouldn’t take long to remove them. The Briefcase tops out at 30MB.

A fast alternative? Use Gmail and GSpace web tool. You can get 4-6Gb depending on where you served by Google. Quick easy and reasonably secure.

Linky.

Wikipedia’s adding some big iron to its infrastructure to support rich media uploads. As the eight busiest site on the net, it’s the biggest non profit and has no intention of operating as a for profit enterprise. If the wiki software could be improved to provide better search and indexing of rich media, it could be a real threat to the Google and Yahoo dominance in that space.

Video file sizes are quickly reaching the dozens and hundreds of megabytes, and the proliferation of high-megapixel cameras means even small photos can take up a few megabytes, says Brion Vibber, CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. Until early 2008, the user-generated encyclopedia’s primary media file server had just 2TB of total space, Vibber says.

“For a long time, we just did not have the capacity [to handle very large media files],” he says.

Wikipedia has since scaled up from 2TB to 24TB and now 48TB of storage for its primary medial file server, and recently raised file upload limits from 20MB to 100MB. The amount of storage actually being used is about 5TB but that will grow quickly, Vibber says. (Network World)

Best of luck to Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz.  She’s got quite a history of accomplishment, and not many with her track record would be interested in the minefield that surely awaits her at Yahoo.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), a leading global brand and one of the world’s most trafficked Internet destinations, announced today that Carol Bartz, a veteran technology executive who was most recently Executive Chairman of Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), has been named Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Prior to becoming Executive Chairman of Autodesk in 2006, Bartz, 60, led Autodesk as CEO for 14 years, transforming the company into a leader in computer-aided design software. During her tenure as CEO, revenues increased from less than $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, and the company’s share price increased nearly ten-fold.

In addition to turning around Autodesk, Bartz’s extensive executive experience includes hands-on responsibility for leading global operations, engineering, sales and marketing organizations for large technology and engineering companies including Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation and 3M. (Yahoo Press Release)

If Yahoo were in a more mature business, no one would be complaining about their lack of direction. Unfortunately for it’s past CEO’s, investors wanted a Yahoo that performs like a Google. The problem with that there is only one Google and to outdo them, you have to do something very different instead  of all the “me too” that the big fund managers have demanded of the past CEO’s.

If allowed the latitude to take Yahoo in the direction it needs to go, Ms Bartz still has to be able to steer the good ship Yahoo. Unfortately it’s a leaky ship without a rudder. To the plus side, it’s the #2 web destination in the world, has a large stable of active user communities, and lost of revenue. What it has always lacked is cohesive direction. It’s fine tofocus on  fixing leaks, but the ship also to have direction if it’s going anywhere.  Hopefully Carol Bartz will give the company direction and manage to navigate the minefiled long enough to gain the confidence of the big investors.

“For anyone who assumes weekday evenings are the worst time to enter the online scrum, it may be a surprise to learn that the peak internet rush hour, when average web speeds slow to a crawl, is in fact Sunday between 5pm and 6pm. (Slashdot)

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team on Thursday asked Congress to consider postponing the upcoming national switch to digital television, warning that more congressional action is needed to address potential problems. (Cnet)

Yahoo Inc unveiled on Wednesday a list of partners to aid its push to bring the Internet and television together, hoping their joint effort will finally connect with consumers. (Yahoo)

A the new land rush for content producers and distributors shifts from broadcast and cable to the Internet it creates new opportunity. Yahoo, the second most trafficed site in the world behind number one Google may have a chance to get back to the top slot if the can seize this opportunity. What the web is woefully lacking is a good indexing system and / or search engine for media content. Google’s video search is too tied to it’s own hosting to be useful in finding non Google hosted streams, and the web’s indexing of audio programs or podcasts is even more lacking.

Yahoo is stepping out with Intel to deliver TVoIP directly to a big living room screen with an IP connected smart TV. If executed properly, the resulting technology would be usable on any IP connected device.

The two companies have attracted several significant manufacturing and content allies in the attempt to bring new smarts and interactivity to a part of the electronics world that has remained a more passive part of people’s digital lives.

Intel and Yahoo showed off Net-enabled TV prototypes in August, but the companies’ technology will be presented in more finished form at the electronics show within products by Samsung, Toshiba, and a number of new partners that have signed on since the debut.

What exactly are they trying to achieve? For Yahoo, it’s establishment of the Widget Channel, a software foundation that can house programs for browsing photos, using the Internet’s abundant socially connected services, watching YouTube videos, or digging deeper into TV shows — and through which Yahoo will be able to show advertisements. (CNN)

While I don’t expect Yahoo to succeed at this, I have high hopes that it will. If content can be found more easily online will accelerate the shift to TVoIP. The shift will enrich viewers with more options and quality as well as create more opportunities to earn a living doing creative work.

Yahoo is to deliver a nice lump of coal to about 1500 employees this Wednesday. Yet again I never understand. If you know you have to cut, why not do it in June rather than December and save half of an employee salary. Fact that half year saved can get applied to the termination write down costs. –

The massive layoffs that Yahoo!’s departing CEO Jerry Yang warned about in October will reportedly hit the search firm’s employees Wednesday morning.

A report on Dow Jones’ All Things Digital claims the planned Yahoo! worker-decimation scheme will arrive tomorrow with further cuts on the way.

Yang said during the company’s Q3 earnings call in October that Yahoo! would jettison at least 10 per cent of its workforce by the end of the year, affecting about 1,500 positions.

I wish all the employees affected good luck on their future.

Linky.

They say Lions eat regular but vultures never get injured. Personally I don’t know as I have never been on safari. But rumor has it that Microsoft has launched another safari on Yahoo. With the former CEO out of the way this could be a real possibility now. —

SOFTWARE giant Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion (£13 billion).

The proposal forms the centrepiece of a complex transaction that would see Microsoft support a new management team to take control of Yahoo. But there is no intention of Microsoft tabling another takeover bid for the web giant, after its aborted $47.5 billion offer this summer.

It is thought that Jonathan Miller, ex-chairman and chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media, have been lined up to lead the new management team. Senior directors at Microsoft and Yahoo are understood to have agreed the broad terms of a deal, but there is no guarantee that it will succeed.

What is interesting about this deal is its only for Yahoo’s search component, not the whole company. That begs the question, of what is wrong with Microsofts MSN, LiveSearch efforts? I also wonder if Microsoft believes that it must reach some critical presence level to compete with Google. A Yahoo acquisition being their only way of increasing that presence.

It might work, but I doubt it. More likely the Yahoo crowd will just go to Google.

Linky.

[Update]: Well Yahoo is denying there is any deal in the works –

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) — Yahoo! Inc. isn’t planning to sell its Internet search business to a group of investors backed by Microsoft Corp., people familiar with the situation said today, denying a report in the Sunday Times of London.

The Times said Microsoft Corp. is backing a new management team to take control of Yahoo’s search unit following its failed takeover attempt. There are no plans to sell the business, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, has been seeking ways to revive its online advertising business as the global recession stifles spending and Google Inc. wins more search users.

Which probably means that there is a deal in the works. Microsoft would not want a run up in the stock to keep costs down.