Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine has announced that it is joining forces with Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. One article reports, “Now the pages tagged with Schema.org tags will be picked up not only by Yandex search engine, but also its other services, such as Yandex’s Business Directory, Yandex.Dictionaries, Yandex.Images and Yandex.Video. Yandex shows the data from these services also in its search results.” Read more

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An unlikely web entrepreneur, rapper M.C. Hammer announced a new web service called WireDoo, “a search engine that adds relationship information to search results. For example, if someone searches for the word ‘car’ on WireDoo, they will see results for topics related to a car, including insurance, pricing and consumer safety ratings. Searching a stock symbol will show related investors and mutual funds. Mr. Hammer said WireDoo, which is currently still being built and not available to the public, is not trying to compete with established search giants like Google, but hopes to offer a ‘deeper type of search’ that can show relationships to queries.” Read more

Bing’s new product Adaptive Search strives to capitalize on semantic search technology. The article states, “Predictive, adaptive, semantic search. It’s that holy grail wherein a search engine will know that, if you input the word barbecue, you really mean recipes instead of the history of grills. While search has gotten exponentially more intelligent over the years, there are still areas in which it fails and semantics is just such an area. The team at Bing, however, thinks that it has the answer in a new product called Adaptive Search.” Read more

Vertical Search Works has launched a new semantic search engine called VSW Search. The article reports, “VSW Search™ is a search bar that publishers can deploy free of charge on their websites. With VSW Search™, site visitors conducting a search are driven to a publisher-branded results page, rather than being immediately directed away from the publisher’s site via a search toolbar. The top two search results direct site visitors to content housed within the host publisher site, allowing Web publishers to retain visitors while generating additional page views and advertising revenue.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Russia’s most popular search engine, Yandex, is seeing its shares slide in its second day of trading… Yandex, which attracted 38.3 million unique users in March and secured 64 percent of all Russian search traffic, priced its initial public offering at $25 per share. Almost immediately, the company’s shares soared, and continued to rise throughout the day. At the close of trading yesterday, Yandex shares settled at $37.75 after reaching a high of more than $42.” Read more

Search engine Bing has updated its shopping feature to include natural language processing. As the official Bing blog puts it, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could just type what you’re thinking into the search box? Say, ‘Air Jordans under $100’ or ‘Hudson jeans under $200’ and let Bing do the work. With improvements to natural language search arriving in Bing, now you can.

The post continues, “With help from Microsoft Research, we’ve improved how we handle price queries to deliver results that automatically reflect your budget.   This is especially handy when you’re on the go, and don’t have time to browse around and click the right refinements.” Read more

Last week we reported on Google’s new Recipe View. The new search feature on Google allows users to search for recipes by ingredient, calorie count, and preparation time. Currently Recipe View is available in the US and Japan, and it should be rolling out to more countries soon.

One of the great features of Recipe View is that it allows users to find recipes based on ingredients or even events. Trying to figure out what to serve at your St. Patrick’s Day party? Google’s Recipe View has the answers. Or if you know you want to make a dessert with bananas but have no idea what to do, Recipe View can provide a great list of options. Read more

Search engines will find interesting competition in TrueKnowledge.com, an ‘answer engine’ that provides users with direct answers to direct questions. The semantically powered engine already has answers to trillions of questions in its knowledge stores and is continually adding to its knowledge base. Read more

Comparison engine FindtheBest, the startup launched by DoubleClick co-founder Kevin O’Connor (see our story here), has found itself the recipient of some VC funding. The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sFund is parting with an undisclosed sum out of its new $250 million initiative, designated for investment in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services, to the site that hopes to be the go-to center of objective comparisons, from e-readers  to smart phones  to, yup, VCs, too.   

So, what’s social about an objective comparison engine? There’s what’s there now – and what may be there in the future, courtesy of leveraging protocols such as Facebook’s Open Graph. “Social can be a pretty amorphous word,” O’Connor says. The comparison engine works on the human-curated principle, with FindtheBest staffers getting the data about the objects of comparison and then organizations themselves being able to come in and add or update the information, O’Connor says. “We want people to add great objective information,” maybe when a ski lodge has added three new runs to its trails, for instance,” he says. Its internal checks and balances come in for the more subjective – and social – aspects, to keep out those looking to game the system. For instance, contributors have to be registered to share their experiences of products and services, and those that come across as really slanted are axed by the curators before going through. “And we do allow the crowd to move those reviews up or down, so over time, if even something [questionable] gets through, it gets pushed through to the bottom,” he says.

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