Mozilla Announces New Version of Weave Tool

This post on Read Write Web discussed that while Google announced that they were going to cancel their Browser Sync tool, Mozilla is releasing a new version of their comparative tool Weave. In the initial version, it was not as good as Google’s but the recent updates will help browsers sync more seamlessly. This could mean a lot to enterprises who want to standardize favorites lists all of their employee’s computers. In addition to synching bookmarks, other applications of this tool include that it saves: cookies, passwords, form data, tabs, and browsing history. Combined, this could help power the enterprise to collaborate better.

The Latest on Google: Search Engine Share and Google SpreadSheets

The latest news on search engine market share came out yesterday. According to CNet and E Week Google’s market share dropped from 63.1% to 62.8%. With all the news surrounding the Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo!, their search engine share still dropped from 11.9% to 12.2%. However, overall world searching did drop from 71.9 billion searches in January to 67.4 billion searches in February.

Also, according to CNet, Google has also announced it’s latest improvements to its suite of software. Gadgets have been added to the spreadsheet application, giving the user over twelve new ways to see data laid out on a spreadsheet. New views are available in a variety of tables and charts, from pie charts to heat maps for population. Also new to the applications is that users can be emailed each time someone else has modified the spreadsheet. Then the changes are highlighted when you log on to your spread sheet. Another neat feature is that users can now access stock data through the spreadsheet through a Finance function.

Next in Search Engines: Human-powered?

In an article today posted at CNet, they discuss the new search engine Wikia. This just launched search engine is completely open. It is the public who will determine what information is found and they also have many other ways to contribute to the search.

This search engine combines three of the main new tools on the Internet: human ranking of pages, a mini wiki and social networking.

To launch the site, spiders will crawl the web to bring up initial pages. But after that, the humans that take over. People will individually rank the sites they come across. After the pages are ranked by humans, the highest rated page will appear at the top on the search page. At the top of the page there will be a wiki about the search subject. The public will maintain this. As for the social networking, you can network with those who have left comments and edited the wiki. In addition to all of this, this site is a complete open source. Users can also tweak the code of the website.

Most interesting is that since the pages are rated by people, SEO will not be a factor in this search engine. I believe that the ability for people to rank the pages is far more valuable than anything we’ve seen before. If we set this in the environment of a corporation, the power of the knowledge that can be generated is huge. It is a chance for collaboration to shine; the most informational web pages can rise to the top. This concept might not take off at first, but I see an advantage to having human generated web pages. Would you use a search engine like this?