It was a bad week for search related companies. Yahoo disappointed, and with it the sentiment on search companies turned a little bearish. Soon after, there was an uproar when DoJ asking Google and others to hand over certain information. (An alternate opinion is here!)
Suddenly we were all thinking about cached life. Google plummeted nearly 8.5% of Friday, posting its worst day on stock markets thus far. Niall and I thought, it would be pretty sweet if we did a podcast recaping it all. Om and Niall PodSessions: Search around the world
Governments and search engines in other countries were busy moving forward with their own search plans despite the distractions in Silicon Valley. France and Germany announced a collaborative effort to develop the Quaero project to counter the power of Google and Yahoo! over content in those two countries.
The new search engine will receive around $2 billion from the European Union French and German governments to develop new search technologies especially focused on audio and video.
In Korea NHN’s Naver.com continues its stellar growth with over 40% of the country’s search market. Google currently has only about 2% of the Korean market. Naver adds mashups and detailed information directly on search results pages assisted by efforts from its millions of subscribers.
The company has expanded into Japan and China behind the power of its gaming network and founded a U.S. subsidiary. All these topics and more in this week’s podcast. The podcast is 21 minutes long, a 9.8 MB download.
You can listen to it by downloading it, or subscribing to our feed or on iTunes.
Quaero will receive the governmental part of its funding from the French and German governments, not the European Union.
Does search needs to be looked differently .. I am getting more and more disappointed with the relevence everytime I search !!
Om, surely you would know better than me; but I got the impression that Josh was kidding. After all, much of the stuff he did could be construed as illegal (stalking, using the internet to anonymously annoy with insect candy, searching for porn [since everybody knows Whitehouse.com is a porn site, even if it’s not]). If I were him I wouldn’t want those transcripts falling into (goes without saying, inept) government hands.
Om, great podcast as usual. Why do you say “its a little too late” as far as net neutrality is concerned? It is well known that internet companies cannot match the Bells’ lobbying power, but can the Bells actually get away with it this time? Maybe if the internet companies had had the foresight to make a lot of noise right after the Brand X decision, things would not have come so far.