Yahoo ends paid inclusion program

One of the last holdovers from a bygone era of search marketing is due to fold at the end of the year. Yahoo's Search Submit program will be phased out by January of 2010.

Yahoo CFO Tim Morse, speaking to reporters last week on the company's quarterly earnings conference call, said that "[w]e think this is a change to help us improve the overall health of our marketplace on an ongoing basis, so it helps us to do it," according to the Inquirer, an IT website.

Search submit and other paid inclusion programs have been widely criticized by many in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, who say that search engines... Read more at Brafton.

Source: http://www.brafton.com/industry-news/no-shortcuts-effective-seo-yahoo-ends-paid-inclusion-program-$1336864.htm

New search engine for tables is developed

U.S. computer scientists have created a search engine that can identify and extract tables from PDF documents, as well as index and rank the results.

The search engine -- called TableSeer -- developed by Pennsylvania State University researchers has an innovative ranking algorithm that also can identify tables found in frequently cited documents and weigh that factor as well in the search results, Assistant Professor Prasenjit Mitra said.

Mitra said TableSeer is believed to be the first search engine designed for tables.

Although some software can identify and extract tables from text, existing software cannot search for tables across documents, Mitra said. TableSeer automates that process, capturing data not only within the table, but also in tables' titles and footnotes. In addition, it enables column-name-based searches so a user can search for a particular column in a table.

The development of TableSeer is part of an open-source project funded by the National Science Foundation.

TableSeer can be tested online at http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu. The source code will be made available near the completion of the project, the researchers said.

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