Searchmaven

New Products Cause Stir

You might not think that it's still possible for new products to cause a stir in the Search world, but you would be wrong.  Two new products are garnering a lot of attention.

Del.icio.us is a "Social Bookmarking" manager.  "It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others.", according to the web site.  Check it out here.

Zabasearch.com claims to be "the #1 people search on earth".   Many find scary the amount of information (addresses & phome numbers) the engine  displays when they type in their own names.  Zabasearch's business model appears to be based on selling background checks to its users.  Check it out here.

TVEyes Debuts Podcasting Search Engine

The podcasting buzz keeps ballooning, with one company readying a search engine for the new format. Real-time broadcast search provider TVEyes is hoping to be the first to make sense of the growing podcasting world, helping users sift through volumes of audio content. The engine, named Podscope, will convert audio content into searchable words, allowing indexing and organization. To accomplish the feat, TVEyes is leveraging its expertise in audio and television broadcast search. The company will crawl the existing inventory of podcasts for the upcoming service.

Become.com launches shopping search engine

The folks who brought you MySimon.com have launched a new shopping search engine called Become.com.  The site is starting with 3.2 billion pages of shopping related information from over 40 million websites.  Read more about it here.

WSJ Discovers Click Fraud

The Wall Street Journal focused its page one spotlight today on the simmering issue of "Click Fraud" in Search.  It defines click fraud as "clicking on a search add with ill intent".  The article quotes Google's Chief Financial Officer, George Reyes, as saying click fraud is "the biggest threat to the Internet economy.  Something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because potentially it threatens our business model".