search engine

Is TikTok the new search engine?

Video sharing platform TikTok is fast becoming the go-to search engine for many of its users. The social media video-sharing app was created to…

Google reveals South Africa’s top election-related searches

Google has published data that shows what searches related to elections people in South Africa are making leading up to the 2021 municipal elections….

Google adding label to rapidly changing search results

Google is adding a label to users’ search results that tells them when the results are changing rapidly due to ongoing events. The update…

Google Pixel is a physical search bar, according to ad

Google doesn’t do subtle any more. Sure, Google Tricks weren’t exactly marks of elegance, nor are the coy names for its Google Pixel smartphones’…

Baidu planning world domination

Robin Li, chief of China’s largest search engine Baidu hopes to have expanded his company across the world in less than five years. He…

Microsoft tracks search behaviour using cursor movements

Researchers at Microsoft have been investigating the correlation between eye movement, or “gaze tracking”, and mouse cursor movement on search engine results pages. The…

China’s Baidu launches English blog as part of global push

Backing up its intention to expand globally, Chinese search engine giant Baidu has launched an English-language blog on the country’s online culture, a company…

Google Chrome first impressions: Fast, clean & not evil

Downloaded it a few minutes ago and gave it a test run. Noticed a few minor rendering glitches here and there on some sites,…

The mobile web: Why the future really is on the small screen

According to a report on Reuters last year, world wide mobile phone subscriptions reached 3.3-billion users or half the world’s population. Compare this to…

Google not against ACAP, says CEO Eric Schmidt

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has now issued a press release that “welcomes Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s statement supporting the aim of the…

World's publishers face off against Google: It's getting ugly

I had a feeling this would be the end result. At first there was co-operation and pleasantries exchanged between the media publishers and Google,…

SA sites caught up in Google PageRank 'carnage'

About a month ago, Google’s latest pagerank updates saw a number of major international news sites, A-list bloggers and local sites have their rankings…

Jimmy Wales responds to Facebook & search speculation…

Wired’s Epicenter blogger Terrence Russell woke up Jimmy Wales at 2am in the morning in Bangkok to ask him a few questions on the…

Mashable weighs in on latest Jimmy Wales comments

Noticed that Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins of Mashable, ranked the 7th biggest blog in the world by Technorati picked up on my Jimmy Wales post,…

New Google head for South Africa

South Africa has a new Google boss. Stafford Masie, the former head of Novell South Africa and a relative unknown outside IT circles, has…

Google slammed, Google praised at newspaper conference

Eamonn Byrne from the World Association of newspapers asked the panel at the last session of this congress: Is partnering with a search engine…

One-on-one with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

UPDATED: Here are some excerpts of an interview I did with Jimmy on Thursday afternoon. I posed questions from myself and relayed some questions…

Linklove: what big media can learn from bloggers

The fundamental art of linking is something online media could learn from the blogosphere….

Without linking there wouldn’t be an internet. It’s the web of links that leads a user from website-to-website that essentially creates the thing we know as the world wide web. Many commercial online media publishers hate linking from their websites to the “outside”, especially when there’s a competitor involved. It’s a protective, “walled garden” mentality, prevalent in many traditional media businesses, which doesn’t translate particularly well on the wild world wide web. It’s pretty silly, because linking is the whole point of the web.

This where the blogosphere could teach online publishers a thing or two…. read on

Decline of the homepage

Website consumption patterns are changing. Remember when the main way to surf a website was via its homepage? Well, that was the old days. The rise of super-fast, super-efficient search engines mean that users are increasingly accessing websites via deep links that bypass their homepages directly to a website’s articles. It’s essentially a backdoor into your website. Search engines aren’t the only ones to blame. Bloggers generally link directly to the articles they are writing about, ignoring homepages. RSS feeds, which allow users to subscribe directly to article feeds, are also responsible for the decline of the homepage. So what does this mean? Paradoxically it is both a problem and an opportunity for publishers.

Online ‘permanence’

Imagine a world where you could actively sell advertising on archived content. Well, it’s here. Content on a website should never die. Never, ever. To delete content on a website is a waste. Online articles and their links should be permanent. In the world of the dead tree, articles have limited lifespans. You read your paper, then it’s used to wrap fish and chips, is thrown in the rubbish bin, or lives a lonely life of obscurity in some dusty library archive….

We Media

Journalism on the internet is becoming a “conversation” rather than a “sermon”. Mainstream media should take note. What’s going on with the internet these…

Court judgement pasted on Google.be homepage

Here’s something I bet you’ve never seen before. See this rather long court judgement from a Belgian court pasted on Google’s normally-minimalist and clean…

Capitec activates Apple Pay

High stakes behind closed doors, Meghan and Prince Harry docuseries trailer

Is there load shedding on Christmas and New Year’s day?

Ashanti prince to open P3-USAS in Washington D.C.

Seedstars launches programme for women-led startups

Pitfalls to avoid for progression in a tech career

Disney Plus now available on PlayStation 5 consoles

Three features you’ll like on the Huawei Y 61

God of War Ragnarök shatters sales records

Astra electric could be Opel’s breakthrough car

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