Whenever we think that things are cooling down for a while, not one, but both search engine giants jump up to remind us the war is not over yet.
Just yesterday Yahoo! announced that:
we have grown our index and just reached a significant milestone at Yahoo! Search – our index now provides access to over 20 billion items. While we typically don’t disclose size (since we’ve always said that size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine), for those who are curious this update includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files.
Wow! That was more than double that Google index claims. Well, Google didn’t stay behind for more than just one day. As such, they (finally)
announced that starting today you’ll be able to get Google News results in two feed flavors, Atom and RSS. You can use either format in your favorite feed reader
Think that this is all? Well if rumors were spreading around that Google has plans with Instant Messaging, even since last autumn, Google took it seriously. They’re rumored to be announcing the purchase of Meetroduction, a combined IM/social networking offering that tries to combine instant messaging with the ability to find someone who’s physically near you.
This isn’t a separate instant messaging product, but one that plugs into existing IM offerings which might make a lot of sense for Google, since it wouldn’t need to build up a new userbase, Techdirt says and this seems like the sort of thing that could easily be merged with Google’s Dodgeball offering to create something that goes beyond mobile devices to instant messaging as well. Smart move indeed, I have to admin I’m looking forward into it.
Remaining in this field, of Yahoo vs. Google battle and rumors in the same time the latest buzz shaking around the blogsphere is that Skype is looking for buyers, and with this in mind, approached Yahoo! but they balked at the asking price. Price supposedly asked: $1 billion. Hmmm!! Another one to think about…
Technorati tags: Google, Yahoo, Meetro, Skype, Google News RSS