Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category.
5th May 2008, 02:22 am
Microsoft announced that it was ready to increase the offer for Yahoo, from $31 to $33 per share, adding $5 billion to the value of the takeover. Yahoo was seeking for further $5 billion to complete the deal, but Microsoft decided this increase would not be reflected by Yahoo’s values, so they decided to withdraw the proposal for Yahoo.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he is happy to see the back of Microsoft, and looks forward to the continuation of Yahoo’s plans of development.
Source: pcpro.co.uk
7th April 2008, 04:23 am
Microsoft informed Yahoo! that they should decide if they sell to MS, within 3 weeks. If this does not happen, Microsoft will try to buy directly from the share holders, at a lower price. This kind of offer is very likely to cause massive resignations at Yahoo, and of course Microsoft would not want to lose high qualified employees that gave Yahoo so much value.
The current offer that Yahoo should accept / reject within 3 weeks is $44.6 billion.
4th April 2008, 04:12 am
Yahoo! has released a new application, which enables the user to search the web using voice commands. The web giant says that voice searches should take no more than 5 seconds, or 10-20 seconds on slower networks.
Yahoo! claims that oneSearch will allow general queries, not just simple ones, based on a basic vocabulary. This is very good news, because people will easily find restaurants, movies, concerts, flights, and so on. Yahoo has already finished deals with mobile operators that sum 600 million users that access the web using a phone, they hope to reach 750 million users.
Source: pcpro.co.uk
31st March 2008, 02:33 am
Boris Epstein, founder of Sillicon Valley based BINC (a company specialized in head-hunting technical workers) says Yahoo! is in big trouble, because a lot of people leave the company.
Many employees of Yahoo! do not want to work for the merge between Yahoo! and Microsoft, considering that, while Yahoo! is good, Microsoft is evil. Other reasons are the lack of support for open-source from Microsoft and the “not so interesting” technologies of MS.
Other people say bureaucracy has made innovations impossible at Yahoo. The fact that in January Yahoo! announced that it will fire 1000 employees makes people not be sure about their job at Yahoo, so that prefer to search for another job.
More on this topic can be read here.
25th March 2008, 03:16 pm
Reuters announces that a leading brokerage claims that the Microsoft giant will raise the offer for Yahoo (current offer is $31 per share).
Analyst Mark Mahaney believes that Microsoft is trying to find alternatives, if the deal for Yahoo is not reached. One of the possibilities would be to offer a share of Microsoft to Time Warner, in exchange for the Time Warner online content, considered of high-value.
Citigroup continues to say that the most probable thing to happen is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.
24th March 2008, 03:50 am
Google announced the release of a new tool for webmasters: Google AJAX Language API. With only Javascript, it can detect and translate blocks of text within web pages. It uses the Web 2.0 technology, and the supported languages are: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The API supports 29 translation pairs.
For an easy integration, Google offers some examples of using the Language Translation API. Though automated translations are not as good as human translations, it became very often that websites offer their visitors the possibility of reading the content in the other languages. Google said that the new API will be improved in the future, so stay tuned 
