SearchEngineUpdate with Vanessa Zamora - 04-15-2008 Part I
Abstract: 1. AOL Acquires Sphere, 2. Yahoo Search Crawler Slurp 3.0
Vanessa Zamora
Video Content Producer, SearchEngineWorld
4:51 pm on April 15, 2008 (utc 0)
Transcript
Tuesday April 15, 2008
AOL Acquires Sphere
As AOL aims to reinvent itself, it has announced the acquisition of content engine Sphere, which gathers relevant online information from blogs, video, media, photos, advertisements and archives collected across the Web and connects it to current articles on publishers’ sites. The contextual results are displayed in a pop over window or an integrated widget to enhance articles. Sphere will come under control of Executive Vice President of Programming at AOL Bill Wilson, whose division includes AOL’s content properties. The acquisition will help enhance content on AOL property sites, provide AOL with access to advertising inventory across Sphere’s network, and grow AOL’s reach to content publishers via the widget. The acquisition adds to the almost $2 billion AOL has agreed to spend on purchases since 2006 as the company tries to boost site traffic and advertising sales.
Yahoo has announced the rollout of an updated version of the Yahoo Search crawler, Yahoo Slurp 3.0. Expected changes include crawling from a much smaller set of IP addresses, although still from the crawl.yahoo.net domain. Yahoo recommends that Webmasters move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if using any other method to avoid incorrect recognition issues. Crawlers will also publish a new user agent, Yahoo Slurp 3.0. Existing robots.txt directives for 'Slurp' or 'Yahoo! Slurp' will continue to work, but directives specific to 'Slurp/2.0' won't be recognized by the new crawler.
4:51 pm on April 15, 2008 (utc 0)