Google Ending 'Answers' Service
Google Answers, the expert-driven social site launched by the company in April 2002, will stop accepting new questions this week, Google said Wednesday. The product elimination comes a month after Google executives vowed to reduce and simplify its broad product offerings.
On a company blog, Google software engineer Andrew Fikes wrote Wednesday that Google Answers was a ?great experiment,? that provided the company with information to make new products. But Fikes did not address the product?s many competitors, which may have contributed to Google?s decision to pull the plug on Answers.
[Source: http://www.forbes.com/]
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Ask.com hopes to become the Web's neighborhood search engine
Ask.com's search engine is sharpening its focus on local results in an attempt to make a bigger splash on the World Wide Web.
The long-overshadowed company is hoping to finally outshine much-larger rivals Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. with a new service meant to become a one-stop destination for information about neighborhood events, movies, restaurants and other businesses. The service, dubbed ''AskCity,'' is scheduled to debut Monday.
Providing a search channel that digs up phone numbers, addresses and businesses is not new. All the Internet's major search engines, including Ask, have been offering variations on that theme for two years or more.
[Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/]
Control-Alt-Delete your Reputation
Websites touting the ability to seek out personal information are nothing new, but today Reputation Defender announced their contention to not only seek out personal information, but also destroy it when found.
Reputation Defender is a start-up catering to students and parents, specifically advertising their ability to erase personal info from social media sites. For a low fee of around $15 a month, individuals can hire the reputation watchdogs to sniff out personal content, and then contact the host to have it removed.
Reputation Defender is marketing their service to people applying for jobs, parents, people engaged in online dating, and others concerned with personal data sharing. Corante predicts that this is becoming a very lucrative market.
The real question is whether their technology will prove effective enough to rival larger corporate reputation management companies. Buzz tracking services have been struggling for years to come up with an effective way to manage the brands of high-profile clients. Because of the enormous breadth of user-generated content, it's extremely difficult to create an adequate search-and-destroy engine that can not only measure updating content in real-time, but also run effective natural-language content analysis.
[More on:
http://searchviews.com/]