Google Spider Teamwork
Google has recently revised its site indexing methods. Previously, each of Google's spiders was responsible for indexing its respective content on a website. This left the image spider (Imagebot) to crawl all images, the AdSense spider (Mediabot) to index sites to determine what ads to display, good old Googlebot to crawl the content of a page, and so on. Hypothetically, a blog about images that displayed AdSense ads would need to be visited by at least four spiders. Under the new setup, a site only needs to be visited by one spider, as the information indexed by that spider can be shared with other spiders. Although it seems that the mine-is-bigger-than-yours battle over index size has cooled down since Yahoo has given up on overtaking Google as the leader in search, this development is still beneficial for Google. More effective use of its resources can help Google generate higher-quality results by giving the engine the ability to index more pages or to perform faster updates on its index, making it more current.

Google Calls Kettle Black
The folks at Google are upset about the search feature of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7. The new browser (still in beta) has an integrated search box in the top right corner that is set to MSN search by default. Google is complaining that this setup is similar to Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, a practice that got Microsoft into some anti-trust trouble in the '90s. Google feels that users should be able to decide which search engine to use in the program setup, rather than having it default to MSN. It seems a little hypocritical of Google to complain, as the default search engine for Mozilla's Firefox browser is Google itself. However, considering Internet Explorer owns more than 75 percent of the browser market, and it is estimated that up to half of all searches are launched from a browser search box, it is easy to see why Google has cause for concern.

Ask CEO Goes to Microsoft
The search engine talent raid trend continues as Steve Berkowitz, former CEO of Ask, was hired by Microsoft in an effort to improve its search product. Microsoft has been struggling to find ways to gain ground on Google, as all of Microsoft's recent developments and products have been unsuccessful at making headway. Recent ratings have shown that Microsoft has actually lost market share. Berkowitz is expected to bring a \"blend of start-up and high growth business experiences\" and \"deep functional knowledge of the search\" to MSN. This move also signals that the changes happening at Ask have gotten the attention of the major players, validating the underdog engine and signaling that it could become a bigger player in the future.

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