Yahoo isn't giving up on search. It is, however, giving up on trying to catch Google by offering users just another set of "ten blue links," Vish Makhijani, general manager of Yahoo! Search told InternetNews.com.

To that end, Yahoo today re-launched its search, replete with special features designed to improve the experience and better enable rapid, accurate searching. Chiefly, that will be due to the new Yahoo Search Assist feature and efforts to integrate audio, video and photos into general Web search results.

Makhijani characterized Search Assist as a "step beyond" pre-filled search queries; It's a drop-down menu that allows searchers to narrow and broaden their queries by topic and concepts, delivered via an AJAX interface. There's also a new feature called Yahoo! Search Shortcuts, which integrates ratings, reviews, photos, and official websites into a box at the top of a search results page.

The new features are supposed to differentiate Yahoo from crowd of search engines that are starting to look all the same.

Full article: internetnews.com 

Labels: Ajax, feature, photo, search, Web, Yahoo

Google's Mission

As you may know, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This article discusses how Google is doing just that by providing easy to use JavaScript-based APIs that allow a wide range of web developers, from experts to casual bloggers, to integrate rich and compelling Google provided search and feed data seamlessly into their web pages. More specifically, this article reviews the overall architecture of Google's AJAX Search and AJAX Feed APIs and shows how to use the technologies they provide. As you'll see with this article, integrating cool search and Internet feed technologies ranging from traditional web searches to compelling multimedia searches is actually very easy to do without even requiring a hard core AJAX programming background.

Introducing the Google AJAX APIs: AJAX Search and AJAX Feed

Have you ever wanted to integrate rich, multimedia, search, or feed-based Internet content into your web applications/pages only to realize that creating your own AJAX infrastructure for doing this turned out to be a daunting task? Fortunately, Google provides a solution to this by providing very easy to use JavaScript APIs known as the AJAX Search and AJAX Feed APIs. These APIs are cousins to the popular Google Maps API and are functionally similar in that you can use them to easily insert rich AJAX content into your pages simply by adding small amounts of JavaScript code.

The AJAX Search API allows you to easily integrate some very powerful and diverse Google based search mechanisms or "controls" onto a Web page with relatively minimal coding.

Full article: developer.com

Labels: Ajax, APIs, code, search

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Download: Google Web Toolkit 1.4 

Labels: Ajax, javascript, Toolkit, Web