Daily SearchCast, July 28, 2005

Today’s edition of The Daily SearchCast is
now available (MP3 file). In it, I did a rundown
of the past day’s search news accompanied by guest host Daron Babin. Today’s topics included developments in RSS & feed search, vertical search, employee relations, search
partnerships and gadgets & tips & stuff. Below are the stories that were discussed that have more information:

RSS & Feed Search News

• AOL Offers Personalized Home Page, RSS Feeds covers how AOL now offers a customized home page to
  anyone, letting you add feeds of your choosing. It follows in a week when Google’s personalized home page got
  the ability to add feeds, as did Yahoo’s 360 service. Currently, AOL’s only works if autodiscovery on sites
  hosting feeds is enabled.
• Technorati Founder and CEO Chats with BusinessWeek covers Technorati
  founder David Sifry discussing how he expect to survive the entry of the major search engines into blog search, though it’s NOT literally built into every single publishing
  platform.

Vertical Search

• Cairo.com Beats ShopLocal.com in WSJ Test of Local Shopping Engines covers how Walt Mossberg of the Wall
  Street Journal looked at two services that let you find things on sale in local bricks-and-mortar stores and loved Cairo.
• AOL Unveils New Mobile Search Services covers AOL making it possible to search the web and have pages
  reshaped for your cell phone, plus access to shopping and yellow pages results.

Employee Relations

• Ruling Soon In Dispute Over Microsoft Exec With “Playbook” At Google covers court arguments in the
  between Google and Microsoft over Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the former Microsoft exec now at heading Google China. He’s got the “playbook” for fighting Google, Microsoft says. He wasn’t
  involved in search, says Google — and Gates threatened he’d be made an example of. Ruling may come today.
• Yahoo Hiring From IBM looks at a NY Times article about Yahoo pulling from IBM talent, including the
  person who led the Clever project that later because part of the foundation for Teoma. And how Google has pulled from Bell Labs.
• And More On Search Hiring! carries on with the “Where have all the engineers gone? Off to Google, Yahoo
  and MSN” theme, a BusinessWeek look at the brain drain happening as Google and Yahoo suck up tech talent. 230 engineers hired by Google in the second quarter of this year!

Partnerships

• Yahoo Partners With ITV & Rounding Up TV Search Partners In The UK has one of the UK’s major TV channels
  getting search and ads from Yahoo.
• Official: Google & Univision Partner covers the partnership rumored and seen between Google and
  Spanish-language broadcaster Univision.

Gadgets & Tips & Stuff

• Battelle On The Birth Of Google gives us an excerpt from John Battelle’s forthcoming The Search book on how
  Larry and Sergey didn’t have love at first site but found togetherness via links.
  
• Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox Leaves Beta, Version
  1.0 Now Available covers Yahoo’s Toolbar for Firefox getting the official sign-off by Yahoo. You can resize the search box, save to My Web, add things to My Yahoo and, of
  course, search via Yahoo.
• New Google Backlink Tool on a new tool that lets you see PageRank score, last cache date and listings in the
  Google Directory and ODP of sites that link to you.