Results matching “european news search engine”

Search engine giant Google reports that it is launching technology that will let users search for news content on blog posts. The optimized Google Blog Search will find and arrange the 900,000 blog entries that are added each day. Previously the service only let users to type keywords into the search engine.

The World Association of Newspapers today (15 September) asked competition authorities in Europe and North America to block an advertising agreement between Google and Yahoo on anti-competitive grounds, saying the deal would have a negative impact on the advertising revenues that the search giants provide to newspaper and other websites, and on the cost of paid search advertising.

WAN, which represents 77 national newspaper associations and 18,000 newspapers world-wide, called on the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, the European Commission's Competition Directorate, and the Competition Bureau of Canada to examine the impact of the agreement and to block the deal.

"WAN believes that the competition that currently exists between Google and Yahoo is absolutely essential to ensuring that our member titles receive competitive returns for online advertising on their sites, and for obtaining competitive prices when they purchase paid search advertising," said Gavin O'Reilly, President of the Paris-based WAN, in letters to the directors of the three agencies.

"In our view, the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo would seriously weaken that competition, resulting in less revenues and higher prices for our members. WAN is also concerned that this deal would give Google unwarranted market power over important segments of online advertising."

The World Association of Newspapers and other publishers organisations today (19 March) welcomed Google CEO Eric Schmidt's statement supporting the aim of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) to give publishers more control over the use of their content.

Speaking to a reporter in Sydney earlier this week, Mr Schmidt said that the only barriers to Google's implementation of ACAP were technical, and he denied that Google was reluctant to embrace the system because of commercial self-interest. "It is not that we don't want them (publishers) to be able to control their information," he said.

ACAP is a new publishing standard that allows website terms and conditions to be placed in machine-readable format so that publishers can have a say in how news aggregators and search engine companies use their content. Publishers world-wide have begun implementing it on their websites, and WAN last week again called on Google to embrace it. More on the protocol, a joint initiative of the European Publishers Council, the World Association of Newspapers and the International Publishers Association, can be found at www.the-acap.org.

Mr Schmidt said that ACAP, as currently specified, is incompatible with Google's proprietary search engine technology but that "we have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work."

Gavin O'Reilly, President of WAN and Chairman of ACAP, said: "We are pleased that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that they would be willing to implement ACAP if it were not for some technical incompatibility issues.  As Mr. Schmidt knows, we have worked very closely with Google at a technical level throughout the past year in the ACAP project phase.

"Naturally, we are disappointed that we have yet to overcome their remaining technical barriers to 'live' implementation, but we have always stressed that we will do whatever is necessary to make ACAP work technically and seamlessly for all search engines. Our aspirations for ACAP have always been led by business needs and not by any preconceived technical solution," he said.

Mr O'Reilly said Mr. Schmidt's statement, reported in IT Wire, "is hugely reassuring. We really look forward to continuing to work with Google to do the necessary work to match our business requirements with their technical specifications and thus make it possible for Google to immediately adopt the ACAP protocol for the benefit of digital publishing worldwide."

Source: WAN Press Release

Ifra launched a search engine to search for news about the newspaper industry last week.

The site returns results in three categories, including 'Ifra and partner sites', results from a select list of news sources, and results from the whole Web.

Searches can be done in English and German.

"We search stories about the news publishing industry, so people working in newspapers, irrespective of the platform they work on, can find information there," said Reiner Mittelbach, CEO of Ifra.

"The beauty of it is you can search the worldwide web, but only [relevant] pages that we have selected, because if you want to search for convergence you want to find news about convergence in newspapers, not biology or mathematics."

The site also brings forward membership pages published by Ifra and its partners that aren't usually crawled by search engine spiders.

Source: Editor & Publisher - European Journalism Centre - journalism.co.uk

Yahoo launched OneConnect, a new feature that will allow for easier access to messaging, e-mail and online social networks. The tool, which aggregates text messages with e-mails and instant messages from a variety of providers, is set to place Yahoo at the head of mobile internet technology.

Yahoo also announced at yesterday’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that OneSearch will be the primary search tool for T-Mobile’s European users from Mar. this year.

The new function combines news, weather, financial updates, photos and web links while displaying search results in a more streamlined fashion than on PCs.

Google also introduced its new mobile developments at the Barcelona conference. An exclusive group of attendees got a first-hand look at several prototype phones using Google’s Android software. While the ‘mocked- up’ phones were similar to Blackberry models, the prototypes featured technology that can be used on lower-end, mass-market models—suggesting that the technology could be implemented on most phones in today’s market, reported CNET News.com.

Nokia announced earlier at the conference that it will incorporate Google in its search application, integrating the search engine with Yahoo and Windows Live on four new handset models.

Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics, told Bloomberg.com that the Nokia, Google deal reflects the tendency for major industry leaders to join forces.
 
“The Google deal looks like if you can't beat them, better to join them,'' he said.

Nokia’s current search function will be integrated with Google Search and eventually made available in more than 100 countries and in more than 40 languages.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk, CNETnews.com and Bloomberg.com
 

“The role of the journalist is key in bringing trusted information to readers… Print media is going to be the most trusted media in the future,” said information society commissioner Viviane Reding at the recent annual Publishers' Forum in Brussels, where publishers exchanged views with the European Commission.

A new standard to protect the intellectual property of anyone wishing to make content available on the worldwide web will be unveiled at a conference in New York next month after a year-long pilot project spearheaded by leading publishing groups from around the globe.

Amid the problems affecting today’s newspapers, including falling circulation and competition from the Internet, many European editors remain optimistic about the fate of newspapers, viewing the web as a force to collaborate with, not run from.

Google News, Digg and Newsvine have a lesser known European cousin: Wikio. Originally designed in French, Wikio is available in German, Italian, Spanish and in a US version.

Clashes are rife between newspapers and online search engines. Where search engines are often at the heart of the internet for many websurfers, newspapers desire to accomplish the same. But how? Start-up news search engine Inform.com purports to answer this question.

Publishers offered an olive branch to Internet search engines such as Google Friday amid bitter legal tussles with
new technology that would make content widely available but safeguard copyrights. Book publishers and media companies have accused US-based giant Google of riding roughshod over intellectual property rights by providing free access to protected content.

In the week that the publishers of Le Soir and La Libre Belgique won their case in the Belgian Courts against Google for illegally publishing content on its news service without prior consent, the World Association of Newspapers (W.A.N.), the European Publishers Council (E.P.C.) the International Publishers Association (I.P.A.) and the European Newspapers Association (E.N.P.A), are preparing to launch a global industry pilot project that aims to avoid any future clash between search engines and newspaper, periodical, magazine and book publishers.

That feisty search engine which has caused a ruckus with several publishers has integrated itself even deeper into the fabric of society. Merriam-Webster Inc., publisher of the well-known collegiate English language dictionary, has announced that it will include "Google" and "Googling" in its 11th edition.

Is it okay to give people access to pre-approved information on the Web? Or is no access better than access to limited, censored material? That’s the scenario Google is grappling with in China, where it currently provides a censored Internet search engine, Google.cn. Now the company might be taking a stand in defense of freedom of information. Co-founder Sergey Brin: “Perhaps the principled approach makes more sense.”

Taking it's cue from the US based "collective intelligence" online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Baidu, China's most popular search engine, has started a user-generated encyclopedia of its own called Baidupedia. The site seems to be gaining popularity, made easier by the fact that Wikipedia is banned by the Communist Party. Yet the Financial Times is skeptical about the long-term success of Baidupedia because it is highly censored which is against the basic principles of Wikis.

Source: Financial Times (through the European Journalism Centre)

Arabic-language Internet users will soon have a search engine formatted for their own tongue. Firms from Saudi Arabia and Germany are partnering up to develop the program dubbed Sawafi that could prove a serious rival to the English-dominated search engines of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Yahoo has yet again been accused of helping put a Chinese Internet user in prison. The company has turned over an e-mail draft from one of its users to Chinese authorities, which is using the information to jail the man on subversion charges.

The newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries have come together to explore ways to challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.

A task force of global and European publishers organizations, led by the World Association of Newspapers, has agreed to work together to examine the options open to publishers to assert their rights to recognition and recompense, and to ultimately improve the relationships between content creators/producers and news aggregators and search engines.