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Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has the scoop of Yahoo’s latest beta-product, Yahoo Search Assist. an iteration on type-ahead tools like Google Suggest or Yahoos own Search Suggest, Search Assist selectively suggests terms for refining a query by clustering common keywords within search-results. this should basically help in situations when users struggle to find the “right” keyword to refine their queries. in his screencast, Danny demonstrates the new feature - which is only available to a select number of users at the moment - by searching for Lego organizing systems. (more…)

Mitch Kapor’s (inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the EFF) bookmark-synchronizing utility for Firefox-based browsers, foxmarks, is about to enter the market of human-powered search engines - a space currently heating up - not only since the recent launch of Mahalo. the search engine will utilize user-generated metadata on URLs to deliver - according to TechCrunch - superior search-results compared to Google - especially for popular search-terms, which naturally suffer the most under SEO-efforts. thinking about foxmarks, three questions arise:

• there are obviously privacy issues when using user-submitted data for a public search-offering (update: the foxmarks-Blog promises to give users the ability to opt-out before they’re going to launch a public service)
• when is Yahoo! going to leverage del.icio.us in a similar way? given that del.icio.us has far more users than foxmarks (I’m guessing) this seems to be a no-brainer…
• how is foxmarks going to protect their service, which might work very well while it has not appeared on SEO’s radars, from spammers?

update: after reading that Yahoo! just integrated Flickr’s image search-results (which is superior to the image search at Google or Ask, at least according to Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk) tightly into their main Yahoo! Image Search product, a possible adaption of del.icio.us-metadata to the Yahoo!-searchengine does sound even more interesting…doesn’t it?

people - even less tech-savvy ones - are starting to create all kinds of interesting Pipes…

• automated babelfish-translation (english -> german) of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code show-notes
• P2P-Blog utlitizes a custom del.icio.us-tag to keep track of all blog-posts you have commented on
• this pipe mashes data from Yahoo! Local with flickr to find localized imagest
• Nick Bradbury’s YouTunes combines iTunes Top 10 Songs-feed with matching YoutTube-clips
• my own vanity pipe combines results from Technorati & Gooble Blog Search to keep you updated on what’s been written about you/your product/your company

wow, the whole web is singing the praises of Yahoo! Tubes Pipes, a new mashup-service announced earlier today. unfortunately, the Pipes-servers haven’t been responding for most of the evening, Yahoo’s engineers have either underestimated the impact of this announcement or the ressources a service which could be described best as universal RSS-mashup-engine might suck up. however, from what I’ve seen in the short period of availability, Pipes offers a drag&drop interface which allows users to query, combine, filter, merge etc various source-feeds into one output-feed. besides pre-defined RSS-sources (including Google Base, surprisingly), users may of course add any given RSS-feed (OPML-support seems to miss). very promising so far, lets hope the plombers fix the Pipes soon…

(screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch)

Yahoo!’s mashup OurCity retrieves location-based data from various Yahoo!-properties. photos from flickr, bookmarks from del.icio.us and events from Upcoming together with news-clips, blogs & podcasts draw an appropriate picture of the city. currently in early beta, the service is available for Delhi & Bangalore only.

(screenshot courtesy of GigaOM)

this time for real: MyBlogLog goes to Yahoo! for an estimated $10-12mio. integration with Yahoo 360 or flickr might be the next logical steps, driving mainstream-adoption of MyBlogLog.

Anothr.com is a Skype-bot pushing instant IM-notifications on new feed-items for any given RSS-feed. the chinese service currently seems to struggle under heavy load (or maybe it’s just network-troubles). great to stay up-to-date regarding Steve Job’s Keynote todays Macworld …

speaking of, the keynote is covered extensively at engadget (and anywhere else).

Carson Systems is extending their event-schedule with an advertising-related conference - The Future of Online-Advertising will premerie on 7th & 8th of june in New York City.

endless.com - Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com - though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.

two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update of their tag-pages…

earlier than probably expected by most, Linden Labs released the source-code of their SecondLife client under GPLv2 today. while this move already earned a lot of praise among the community, the biggest steps towards an open virtual world - i.e. opening up backend-services and grid-servers - is yet to be done. on the downside, it remains to be seen how this affects the already shattered stability of SecondLife in the short term.

rumours of Yahoo! aquiring MyBlogLog seem to get a second rehash…bloggers seem to remain more skeptical this time

more news from Yahoo! at Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the company’s answer to Google’s latest mobile efforts like their mobile Gmail-app. the java-based mobile client integrates various Yahoo!-services like search, maps, mail, photos (flickr) and news.

several deals got public within the past 24 hours:

• acquisition of swedisch mobile service company Kennet Works earlier this year got confirmed on GigaOM today. Kennet Works seems to work on ‘mobile real-time communities’. there’s not really any info on their product Kennet Community Connect on their website, however.

• karaoke & video-contest site Bix became a Yahoo!-property today as well. not much to say about the product, other than it’s probably a good match with online video-editor jumpcut, also acquired by Yahoo! few months ago.

• MyBlogLog, social networking site for bloggers (earlier report) has been acquired by Yahoo! today. is in early acquisition-talks with Yahoo! rumours evaluate the deal near the us$ 10mio-mark which - imho - seems not to bad for a company that young. however I agree with a commenter at TechCrunch, claiming that they would probably have made a much better price in a year from now.

update: looks like the MyBlogLog-deal was a false positive, fervently spread but nontheless wrong.

years after the big search-players agreed on nofollow-directives and robots.txt-controlled exclusions, Danny Sullivan reports that Microsoft & Yahoo have announced to join Google’s sitemap-effort, an XML-protocol allowing webmasters to optimize the crawling of dynamic web-content:

Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.

TechCrunch reports tonights addition of geotagging-features to flickr. using a slick AJAX-interface, photos can be drag&dropped on Yahoo! Maps for adding geo-information. using flickr’s photo-organizer, batches of photos are easily processed in a single step. users can browse their own and public photos by geographic data and generate maps displaying all their photos. geo-features were long awaited and put flickr at par with upcoming photo-sharing sites like zooomr, offering similar features by mashing up Google Maps since quite a time.

update: wow, according to the official FlickrBlog, 1.234.384 pictures where geotagged in the first 24h since the feature has lauched! the post also includes interesting technical details on flickr-geotagging.