AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Google
We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index [...]

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BusinessWeek
Moving past the Yahoo saga, the software giant is buying semantic search engine Powerset as a way of closing the gap with Google
Still smarting from a failed attempt to buy Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) is trying another tactic to gain on Google (GOOG) in Web search.
Microsoft is buying Powerset, developer of what it hopes is [...]

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TechCrunch
People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider
Blinkx, the video search firm that recently retooled as a Web TV play, is adding yet another line of business. The company is licensing what it calls its Advanced Media Platform to publishers to manage video search, insert advertising, and target users with relevant video. The first customers for the service, derived from [...]

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Mashable
WordPress.com, the popular hosted blogging platform, has announced that it has officially partnered with the search and recommendation engine Sphere to bring related content to readers of WordPress-powered sites.
As of this weekend, you will find links to more posts on related topics at the bottom of all English language blogs that are hosted at WordPress.com. [...]

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Tech Crunch
Two Google scientists presented a paper(pdf embedded below) at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last week that outlines their vision for the future of image search.
Notably, the new image search technology doesn’t just index text associated with an image in determining what’s in it. Google is now talking about using computers to [...]

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eSchool News
The internet-content filters most commonly used by schools block needed, legitimate content more often than not, according to a study by a university librarian. Her report was presented at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) conference in Pittsburgh last week.
Better communication between technology staff and classroom teachers is the key to ensuring that [...]

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Search Engine Land
Video Search engine Blinkx has announced five ad deals in recent weeks, along with other new initiatives. Blinkx reminds me of the old New Riders of The Purple Sage song, “Keep on Keepin’ on”. Despite mounting competition from both bigger rivals like Yahoo, Google and AOL and new start-ups, Blinkx just “keeps keepin’ [...]

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Red Herring
AOL, continuing its campaign to transform from internet service provider ugly duckling to advertising network swan, has acquired contextual search firm Sphere, the companies announced Tuesday.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Shares of Time Warner, the parent of AOL, edged up $.02, or .1 percent, to $14.19 in early afternoon trading.
Three-year-old Sphere was backed by [...]

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Integration With Online Video Search And Discovery is Critical to Advertisers - Digital Media Wire
From Future of Television Forum West “The killer video app,” according to Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang, “will be an intelligent piece of software that creates a mode-sensitive, personalized [electronics program guide],” so that people can find content they’re interested in amid [...]

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