Website.com Sold for $750,000

Sedo.com, a marketplace for the buying and selling of domain names, today announced the domain name 'website.com' was sold for $750,000. This is the highest valued domain sale of 2005.

According to Sedo, the transaction process of website.com was supported by Sedo's Premium Domain Brokerage Program, which it claims generated substantial interest in the domain. In addition, Sedo facilitated each phase of the negotiation and domain transfer process.

"The $750,000 price tag of Website.com represents the highest-valued sale in the domain name market this year, and Sedo is honored to serve as the marketplace that matched its seller with an eager buyer," said Matt Bentley, CEO of Sedo.com. "By utilizing Sedo's premium domain brokerage program, website.com was able to maximize interest among domain buyers, enabling the seller to get the optimal price for a premium domain name."

Sedo's Premium Domain Brokerage services have supported many of the highest domain sales in 2005, including Chat.de for $470,000, the third highest valued sale of the year, and Uruguay.com for $175,000, the fourth highest valued sale of 2005.

ICANN Approves .Mobi sTLD

Internet-oversight group ICANN (www.icann.org) recently announced the creation of .mobi, sponsored top-level domain (sTLD), aimed at mobile phones and other mobile devices. It formalized the creation by entering into a contract with mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd (www.mtldinfo.com), the sponsoring organisaton for .mobi domains.

mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd. was formed by member companies including Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse Technologies, Telefonica Moviles, TIM, T-Mobile and Vodafone. They jointly lobbied for '.mobi' to encourage more mobile websites which are optimized for mobile phone and small display screen.

The first domain names will be available during the first half of 2006, starting with a 90 day sunrise period, allowing corporations with trademark validated names to secure a second-level .mobi domain.

Yahoo Launches HotJobs Job Engine

Yahoo HotJobs now features a job engine, a search function that queries Yahoo's HotJob database, which is also undergoing some alterations. Before, Yahoo HotJobs featured listings from organizations that have paid for their inclusion. Now, the newly improved HotJobs spiders the web for job listings, and are then added to Yahoo's job index. Yahoo has also altered the HotJobs search results in order to accommodate these new listings.

Google Search Engine Wins Domain Arbitration Case

National Arbitration Forum rules in favour of Google (web's #1 search engine) regarding rights to googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com

Google Inc., represented by Rose A. Hagan, filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum on May 11, 2005 asserting legal rights to the Web addresses bearing close resemblance to Google.com. Ruling in Google's favor, National Arbitration Forum arbitrator Paul A. Dorf found that the other party, Sergey Gridasov, registered the googkle.com and ghoogle.com on December 30, 2000 and the domain names gfoogle.com and gooigle.com on January 12, 2001 - after Google registered its domain in late 1999.

The other party was also using the disputed domain names to direct Internet users to Web sites that attempt to download viruses, trojan horses and spyware to the users' computers. The disputed domain names contain links to various products unrelated to Google. The arbitrator found that Gridasov did not have legitimate rights to the Web addresses, and the Web addresses were confusingly similar to Google's trademark rights to its own name. The arbitrator also found that Gridasov was using them in bad faith by presumably profiting from the use of domains.

The National Arbitration Forum is a provider of alternative dispute resolution solutions, including arbitration and mediation, representing a distinguished panel of over 1,500 attorneys and retired judges in the U.S. and in 29 countries.

Yahoo expands its mobile search functions

Yahoo has launched a new mobile search feature designed to let people send short text message queries and receive results via their mobile phones.

The new feature, called SMS Search, is designed to let people get specific information, such as weather, stock quotes and business addresses, and use shortcuts on the keypad to make it faster. For example, typing in "w" and the ZIP code will retrieve a short weather forecast.

If the information sought is not included in the first set of results, users can request and receive additional input. People also can save the responses and reply to them repeatedly over time to get updates of the same information, such as stock quotes for a particular company.

In addition, Yahoo is set to extend its browser-based mobile search function to a broader set of devices. Previously, only PDAs with bigger screens and full Web search capability, such as the Treo and the BlackBerry, could do browser-based searching.

Global Name Registry Releases WHOIS II

The .NAME 'WHOIS II' service will offer enhanced privacy for registrants by removing all personal details from the open WHOIS service.

Global Name Registry, the Registry operator for the .NAME top level domain, today announced the release of "WHOIS II" in a move to protect personal information online.

Global Name Registry (GNR) is the license operator of .name top-level domain (gTLD) for individuals, approved by ICANN in November 2000. The .NAME 'WHOIS II' service will offer enhanced privacy for registrants by removing all personal details from the open WHOIS service. According to the company, GNR is the first gTLD Registry to offer a WHOIS service of this nature. GNR expects to have completely phased in WHOIS II by the end of the year.

Google to Release Toolbar for Firefox

Following in the footsteps of Ask Jeeves and Yahoo, Google plans to release a new version of it's toolbar to support Firefox browsers.

Google software engineer Fritz Schneider announced a new version of the Google toolbar for Mozilla and Firefox browsers to be released this week, according to a recent post in the Mozilla Googlebar developers list.

This version will be compatible with Firefox 1.0+ on Win2000/XP, Mac OS X 10.2, and Linux 8.0+. The features are similar to the current Google toolbar for IE with the exception of the Popup Blocker and Auto-Fill which will not be included for now.

The Googlebar project was initially created to address the widespread desire in the Mozilla community for the Google toolbar to support Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox web browsers. The Googlebar offers advanced search options as well as easy access to any of more than 25 specialized Google searches.

Google Earth: New generation of Internet Searches

Google’s new service, which is based on Keyhole technology, has all the chances to revolutionize the way people search a certain reference over the Internet.

One of the first things Google Earth shocks you with is the speed of the service, provided that you are not using dial-up. Another element that strikes you is the interface which is intuitive and easy to use.

Working with 3D images might be pretty complicated, but Google offered an interface similar to 3D strategies which makes everything easy.

The quality of the images is another aspect that cannot be overlooked, even if some of the images are more detailed than others.

With Google Earth, Google is completely revolutionizing the way we search the Internet. From now on, if you want to know how a place looks like, you don’t have to imagine it, you can just access the Internet and see the real thing.

source: softpedia.com

And now AOL launches video search

Service will allow viewing of music videos, news segments and other content from parent company Time Warner, giving AOL an advantage over rivals Google and Yahoo.

America Online (AOL) launched a new video-on-demand search service Thursday, opening the doors for millions of Internet users to view music videos, news segments and other content from parent company Time Warner, whose mountain of media holdings gives AOL an advantage over rivals Google and Yahoo.

The beta service, called AOL Video, offers free access to search and playback for more than 15,000 licensed and originally produced video assets from Time Warner, including television programs and music videos, movie trailers from Warner Bros. and news clips from CNN, MSNBC and others. AOL's Singingfish multimedia search engine, which the company acquired two years ago, will complement the new service by pointing visitors to audio and video from across the Web.

Yahoo: My Web 2.0 beta

Yahoo recently unveiled a new version of its My Web product, My Web 2.0 beta (myweb2.search.yahoo.com) which it calls a 'social search engine' and also says that the product strongly embraces the concept of tagging. The product will currently be made available to a limited number of users.

My Web 2.0 users can manage their groups through a contact management feature. Queries launched into the personal indexes of a group of My Web 2.0 users deliver results based on Yahoo's new MyRank search technology, which was designed for personal Web searching.

While the first version was more about storing and organizing bookmarks, Version 2 is about sharing that information with others, thus combining web search with what one's community has tagged and shared. Like its predecessor, My Web 2.0 is a free service but it requires users to register with Yahoo and create an account. Another new feature incorporated is tagging, which lets users add descriptive keywords to saved pages and links. With this feature, users won't have to organize saved pages and links in folders and subfolders, according to Yahoo.