Articles posted on May 2007

Got the crazy idea of searching the word ’search’ on 6 popular search engine for kicks. What I found out was quite interesting. Through the pointless research I found out that Live Search actually determines your country of origin by the browser language instead of your IP (like Google). Worse, the results are tuned to your supposedly country of origin whether or not you choose it. To switch to the default version, change the language setting to ‘English US’.

Anyway, here are the search engines in alphabetical order along with their top 10 results. Comments and points are given based on the results returned for the word ’search’ so it might not accurately reflect the actual state of the engines.

If you are here you probably already know what Joost is, so I’ll just skip to the point. Everyone wants an invite but certain people are taking advantage of the situation and making the rest jump through hoops. Enough of contests, lucky draws, registrations and all that bullshit.

Here are 50 links to decent people who give away their invites with minimum effort from you. All you need to do is just comment on their blog or send an email. Don’t just select the first link listed here, randomly choose one that has lesser comments which will increase your chances of getting an invite. Thank the kind chaps on your way out

Online news sites have been ablaze with rumors of Microsoft’s intention to acquire Yahoo! (henceforth referred to as Yahoo without the exclamation). It seems that Yahoo has been approached again by Microsoft to enter into acquisition talks. This follows numerous inconclusive talks in the past between the two parties. Microsoft is rather desperate this time, offering up to a (reportedly) sum of $50 billion for the deal to go forward.

Experts have been hinting otherwise, as the takeover and integration process would be a massive task.Imagine all the overlapping services that have to be streamlined. This is not made easier by the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft have been actively copying each other since forever.

The move didn’t came out as a surprise, given the latest purchase of major online advertising company DoubleClick by Google which might have slightly offset Microsoft’s world domination plan. A more plausible explanation would be a joint partnership on search and advertising in order to fight evenly with Google. Google currently leads search and advertising market followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. Microsoft’s struggle against Google has been pretty futile so a partner in crime might help out a bit.

After the dust settled, we now know that the latest episode of talks ended up inconclusive again. Too bad, I was looking forward to the result of this unholy union.

(from TechCrunch)

A couple of days ago I received a notice from Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren who broke the news - Pandora will no longer be accessible outside US. This is terrible news to me as a fan of their service.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener’s country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

well, it’s been quite awhile since I last blogged due to various commitments and lack of materials. Time passes, people change, people blog. Having gone through many versions and styles of blog, I hope that this one will stick, no promises though! So without further ado, I bring you the first post…

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