Microsoft has released a better Live search engine today, as shown in the image above, with the sexy and simple interface. It is known as a move that attempts to bring the closer gap between the market share of Google and Live.com. According to Microsoft’s press release, this revamped search engine trying to make its existing users fascinating about the search experience that Microsoft did not offered in the first hand; and trying to make these group of users make more search queries on it. However, the main focus of the overhauled Live.com seems to be focused on vertical search, with the substantial research and improvement done on the areas such as entertainment, shopping, local and health. One of the great things that this search engine offered was the increase of the size of its search index by four times, to more than 20 billion in total.

Apparently, Live.com still far lagged behind Google and Yahoo!, but it seems that they’re going to become a “narrow focus search club” in order to get more advantage over the fierce competition in the U.S. market.

A vertical flight search engine dohop has launched its Turkish version today. This site is organized in a fully localized service, with Turkish language and the pricing information is in Turkish Lira. The availability of Turkish version represented the gander ambition of dohop when comes to the European market. It was initially founded as a great search engine that would leverage the technology for fast and efficiency and a commitment to the European. As you can it on their site, now there are more than 10 European languages of vertical search available on dohop’s site. Czech, Danish, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish (Castillano), Catalán, and Swedish languages are there for the users from different European countries.

Meanwhile, Dohop Ltd. is also announcing a partnership with TAV Airports, the largest and the only fully integrated airport operating and aviation services group in Turkey. The group manages three major airports in Turkey: Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport International Terminal (IST), Ankara’s Esenboga Airport (ESB), and Izmir’s Adnan Menderes Airport (ADB).

The London-based live event vertical search engine TickEx has launched its U.S. site yesterday. TickEx, labeled as “Google For Tickets” by a music magazine MusicWeek, was founded with the financial support of some private investors. It allows buyers and sellers to list, search for, bid on and pay for products on their official sites or through resellers such as eBay or StubHub. Moreover, users can use its search engine to browse and compare tickets they find through artist, city, venue, date, seat location and price searches. In fact, there is another factor that drives the company in launching this U.S. site. Most recently, viagogo, also a London-based online ticket company, has expanded into the U.S. market and signed the first-ever secondary ticket deal in the U.S. with NFL’s Cleveland Browns. However, the business model of viagogo seems to be vary with TickEx. TickEx is focused on vertical search but viagogo is an online ticket marketplace. The vertical search features that offered by TickEx enable users to search tickets on StubHub, a startup co-founded by the CEO of viagogo.

TickEx was founded in year 2006, launched its U.K. site, still in beta in June this year. Now its U.S. office is located in Costa Mesa, California.

Google has quietly launched its China version of blog search engine. Not surprise, I said that they’re going to launch this China blog search since the Hong Kong and Taiwan version has already been on the Web earlier this month. Currently this Google China blog search is still in beta status, while capable in searching the blog entries from Hi Baidu, QQ QZone, Bokee, not barely from Blogger or WordPress. Apparently, the China people are more favor in using the Chinese blog providers, when Google China launched this blog search engine, they need to proved that they’re well sorting out the search results especially from the blogging platform offered by their number one competitor in China, i.e. Baidu.

Meanwhile, the engineers in Google China are well prepared in developing this kind of application. There are even article (in Mandarin) stated that the Russian Google Answers was one of the Web projects of Google China. I’m wondering you notice the similar layout of this Russian’s Google Answers and the Tianya Wenda.

See also my another post entitled, “Google Launches Google Answers in China? An Update.”

Baidu, the leading search engine in China has launched the voice search, a service that restricted to Beijing residents. If you’re staying in Beijing, you can use your phone to call 11616690 and seek the voice search help from the Baidu customer service personnel. Only those who use the phone services from these providers CNC, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom are allowed to access to the services. This voice search currently is in beta status, from 9am to 9pm and free of charge, however an user need to pay the phone cost as stipulated by those providers stated in the above.

Baidu is aimed at making their voice search system more like a typical question and answer session, with as much interaction with end users as possible. Though this type of process is trivial and involve a lot of manual work, but I learned a valuable lesson from Baidu from this offering. No matter how big you are, you still need to keep on striving in the market, and do the things that other players do not want to do.

An old issue. Which search engine is the best in searching the Chinese sites? Google or Baidu? And now they’ve been fighting with each other through the video platform. A new video clip just uploaded is hot in China, stated that Google is the next generation of search engine in China, with the purpose to counter blast an earlier video clip that promote Baidu search engine, “I Know, You Don’t Know, I Know, You Don’t Know.”

Sorry, I can’t find any English subtitle in these two video clips. These two video clips are embedded as below.

谷歌恶搞百度, i.e. Google annoying Baidu: 17 mins.

我知道你不知道我知道你不知道, i.e. I know, You Don’t Know, I know, You Don’t Know

Google has launched its Hong Kong and Taiwan blog search engine, a move that converting their Chinese sites into a much more full-fledged search engine, and I believed their next plan is the launch of Google China blog search. When I tested their blog search engine, for some search queries, it appeared that the blog search was based on the same database that the existing English version of Google blog search is using. However, the search results are translated into the Chinese character. At this time, I’m still in doubt of their Chinese blog search capabilities when compared to Baidu blog search that launched by Baidu in December last year. Baidu blog search is creating more values to the users when come to indexing the blogs of these blog service providers, such as Hi Baidu, Hexun, Sina blog, and MSN Spaces.

Frankly, I started to watch closely on the Search Wikia, Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ newest project since last week, after Wikia purchased the Grub Web crawler engine. The Grub Web crawler tool has since then released under open source license the first time in four years.

No doubt, Wales advocated the open source is the business model of the future and he was in the middle of building a great open search engine. However, we must understand a fact that it’s a long term project, maybe last for more than five years. According to Wales, “As to the pace, I can only advise people to have a bit of patience!…… Hopefully we will have the first stab of something that sucks up by the end of the year. And then we will start to revise, reconsider, rethink, delete, add, edit, change, until we start making something better and better over time. Will it take 2 years? 5 years? I dunno. It will take however long it takes. But it will be fun.”