Jedi Star

Search engine Ask is making a desperate move to get back into the Major league of Search Engines.

Ask recently dropped its iconic butler and came up with a bunch of applications this year and now with this latest Facelift its trying to get back some of the traffic from Google.

The new and improved Ask will concentrate on its ability as search engine of choice for those asking questions.

The trend which is followed by most of the Google competitors are following is to be as different as possible from Google.

Ask would be using its own Technologies such as DADS, DAFS and AnswerFarm to reach new pinnacles in semantic search, Web extraction, and ranking. The site’s download speed also have increased by 30%. The user interface is also very simple and the search results are properly divided in content types like: breaking news, blogs, images, videos and music.

Ask gets its major traffic from people searching for specific answers to questions. It accounts up to 15% of its traffic, which in case of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search accounts to only 5% of traffic.

However Ask is trying to be as different as possible from Google but the new look seems to look like a clone of Google.

The interesting reply to this from Cesar Mascaraque, European managing director of Ask is “All cars have four wheels. No-one wants a car with one wheel”

But no matter how hard all the search engines try it really hard to cut into Google’s market share.

Google seems like the everyday need for anyone who has started to use the net in the past few years.

In UK though Ask has a healthy traffic which amounts up to one in five of all people using a search engine.

Posted under Latest News

Microsoft has planned to buy back its shares from investors by spending $40 bn.

Can this be a gimmick to risen its share value which fell by approximately 30% this year? Probably time will answer this question.

Similar to the big giant, Hewlett- Packard and Nike too have declared a buy back.

HP has plans to buy back $8 bn whereas Nike $5 bn.

Microsoft stated that they by the buy back plan portrays their confidence in the long term growth and commitment to return capital to the share holders.

It is expected that the plan may help revive its declined share value probably due to failure $47.5bn bid to buy Yahoo.

Inspite of the ongoing financial crisis market analysts expect that Microsoft might buy back its shares at attractive rates. At the end of June 2008 Microsoft had $23.7 bn and in its history of 33 years, have never been debt.

This buy back is expected to run till 2013.

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Yahoo gives and opportunity to others to help re-design its front page.

Yahoo seems to be trying to attempt a change its front page in order to give better information and application support to regular users. Currently the company estimates around 300 million visitors a month and by making these modifications expects to increase this figure by a substantial figure. Yahoo also claims the its website or homepage is the most heavily trafficked website. The last big change that Yahoo did was in May 2006.

Yahoo plans to introduce the human editors to compile its new stories which would be supported by a content optimization engine.

So its the time when we customize our Yahoo homepage.

Posted under Computers, General, Latest News