A somewhat simplistic study points to better click through rates on Yahoo than on Google.

Quoted: Yahoo Inc.'s search engine gets a higher percentage of users to click on the results of a query than market leader Google Inc.

Google is paying "Business Referral Representatives" to collect business meta-data which they can map to Google Maps. The referral payments can be quite high if you submit good and verifiable content. College students - here's a great way to earn some cash!

Quoted: Google wants to digitize local search information, and Tony Wright tells you how you can help.

Quoted: Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, is an expert ace at building machines that answer tough questions. An authority in programming languages and artificial intelligence, he has written an oft-cited book on AI (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, and was the head of computational sciences at NASA. In 2001, Norvig came to Google to be the director of search quality. Four years later, he became Google's director of research, overseeing about 100 researchers who investigate topics that range from networking to machine translation. Technology Review spoke with Norvig to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come.

Tips on using the very powerful GMail Search capabilities.

Quoted: It's no surprise that the killer feature in Google's email offering, Gmail, is its search capability. Google's king of the web because it makes information on its billions of pages findable; likewise, Gmail makes the megabytes of messages that get pumped into your inbox every day manageable...

Quoted: "People think of Google as pure algorithms," said Matt Cutts, search quality engineer at Google, speaking at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle on Monday. "We've recently begun trying to communicate the fact that we're not averse to using some manual intervention."

Recap of Steve Ballmer's dialog with Mossberg at the D5 conference today. Mentions a bit about surface computing.

This is very detailed accounting of where the Google Book Search effort is at with regards to their library scanning endeavors. There are many helpful links and a good overview of all the major issues.

Quoted: Like Harvard and the NYPL, Oxford continues to explore how best to use its digital copies. When asked to describe how his library currently uses and/or plans to use digital copies received from Google, Popham replied, “At the moment, we are simply planning to archive and preserve our copy of the data generated by our joint project with Google.” Popham went on to say that Oxford will link from its catalog record to the images hosted at Google [http://books.google.com]. Finally, Popham explained, “The scale and scope of this project is such that we are only just beginning to consider some of the possibilities that this work may enable.”

A fascinating New Yorker article about the Google's attempts to pull together a "universal library." Major publishers ar finding themselves in the awkward position of being for and against this since it will help them sell books but leaves control of the full copyrighted script in Google's hands.

Quoted: The New Yorker

Did you guys know that Blue Dot was acquired by Ask in 2008? Yes, it's a message from the future...

Quoted: Google bought Magnolia and Simpy in 2007 (both were immediately merged with Google Bookmarks), and Ask acquired Bluedot in 2008. Now all the big three had efficient bookmarking services that could deliver input to search algorithms.