Sillicon Alley Insider - Dan Frommer | August 22, 2008 9:30 AM

Former foes Google (GOOG) and Verizon (VZ) are close to linking up in a wide-reaching search deal that would make Google the default engine on Verizon Wireless phones, and eventually on Verizon’s Web portal and FiOS TV service, the WSJ reports.

One interesting part of the pact: Verizon eventually wants to put a search bar on the home screen of its phones — a smart move, we think.

Why does this matter? Some 17 million mobile subscribers use mobile search, according to comScore M:Metrics. That’s a pathetic 7% of the U.S. mobile market — which means some 93% of mobile subscribers aren’t using mobile search. Why not? In part because carriers have made it so hard to find. In most cases, if you want to search for something, you have to boot up the mobile Web, then find your way to Google — especially annoying without a QWERTY keyboard — then enter a search.

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BUSINESSWEEK - Techbeat on August 19

Short answer: No. Not even close. Not for a long time, anyway.

Posted by: Rob Hof

Short answer: No. Not even close. Not for a long time, anyway.

But it’s sure trying hard, and it would be dangerous for anyone to write off Microsoft. Its determination was on display today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior VP of search, portal, and advertising platform group, told the crowd that he sees searchers moving from merely typing keywords into Google to getting tasks done.

Not coincidentally, getting tasks done is essentially Microsoft’s main business, so that sounds a little too convenient. But in fact, searchers are already doing that to varying degrees. Nardella cited an interesting figure: About half the queries on Microsoft’s Live Search site are part of search sessions that extend over 30 minutes.

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Sillicon Alley Insider - Michael Learmonth | August 19, 2008 5:50 PM

Tough to be anyone but Google (GOOG) in search. Google gained a share point from June to July, moving from 59% to 60% of all search queries, according to Nielsen Online.

It came at the expense of MSN, which lost more than two percentage points of market share from month to month, going from 14.1% of searches to 11.9%. So if Microsoft’s “Cashback” search engine shopping gimmick actually helped boost search share in May and June, its impact seems to be dropping.

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BUSINESSWEEK - The Associated Press  August 6, 2008, 5:09PM ET

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK. The search box is everywhere online these days. It’s built into Web browsers. It’s incorporated into Web sites of all sorts. And it’s a major driver of traffic and revenue for Google Inc. and the like.

So it should come as no surprise that nearly half of Internet users conduct a search on a typical day, up from about a third in 2002, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday. Search is approaching e-mail as the most popular thing to do on the Internet; about 60 percent use e-mail on any given day.

Users with college degrees, higher incomes and broadband connections are more likely to conduct a search. So are men and younger users.

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InformationWeek - August 6, 2008 09:00 AM

An upgraded version of the Google Search Appliance can handle up to 10 million documents, more than triple the previous maximum of 3 million documents.

Thomas Claburn

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Wednesday plans to introduce a new version of the Google Search Appliance that can handle up to 10 million documents.The previous GSA, Google’s search hardware for businesses, topped out at 3 million documents.

“We’ve made some drastic changes in our server architecture which allow us to scale to 10 million documents,” said Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager for Google enterprise search.

Mangtani declined to provide specifics but said that the changes had to do with indexing documents more efficiently and with hardware-based improvements.

GSAs in standard configurations can support up to 30 million documents and can support more in custom configurations.

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Sillicon Alley Insider - Peter Kafka | July 28, 2008 7:19 AM

Inauspicious start for Cuil, yet another would-be-Google-killer: The search engine, whose selling point is that it crawls more of the Web than anyone else, launched overnight, but it’s been unable to stay up consistently. It’s been on and off throughout the morning, so don’t be shocked to see this message today:
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