Apparently, Technorati is still going. The seven-year-old blog index site once threatened to be to the web’s nascent conversational search paradigm what Twitter Search is now, but has limped along for the last couple of years - plagued by server downtime, broken links, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Blog Search’s rise and…

Citigroup tested 200 of the most common queries to determine which major search engine delivers what it considers to be the most relevant results and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) won by a wide margin. From the report released Tuesday: 71 percent of the time a Google search brought up the most…

For a change, Yahoo’s search business is grabbing some headlines this evening with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Search Pad, a tool it initially introduced in February, and is now slated to go live tomorrow. Search Pad lets Yahoo searchers take and save notes as they visit various websites (It automatically asks…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is expanding its real estate listings on Google Maps in a move that could pit it against existing listing sites and could also create additional tension with listing services. Starting Monday, users in Australia and New Zealand can search for available properties on Google Maps, according to…

Recent high-profile disputes with the Chinese government don’t seem to be cutting into Google’s revenue there. The company’s second-quarter ad revenue in China is expected to increase by 25 percent, compared to the first quarter according to BrandRepublic, which cites domestic reports (via Marketing Pilgrim). Operating revenue is also expected…

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) said Wednesday that its relaunched Bing search engine would begin to index some Tweets in real-time—becoming the first major search engine to do so. In a post on the Bing community blog, Microsoft’s Sean Suchter said that starting later today the company would highlight new Tweets from…

Moving to boost its online real estate listings, newspaper publisher AH Belo (NYSE: AHC) (NYSE: BLC) has led a $2 million investment in online real estate brokerage Sawbuck Realty. Sawbuck’s service lets people search for listings and then connects them with real estate agents. It takes a cut of any…

The latest evidence that Microsoft’s Bing is off to a successful start: Web analytics firm StatCounter says Microsoft’s share of the search market was up 0.5 percentage points to 8.23 percent last month. Google’s meanwhile actually dropped slightly from 79.07 percent to 78.48 percent. “Steady if not spectacular might be…

A battle is intensifying in the white-label local search market. MojoPages said Tuesday it had raised $5 million in a first round of funding—money it said it would use to boost its core private-label search offering, which lets media companies put local directories on their sites under their own brands.…

In January, Ask.com gained some market share, ending six straight months of falling share, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). Who gets the credit? Nascar, according to Ask.com’s new president Scott Garell. Since the start of the year the company has shifted almost all of its marketing efforts to the racing…

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies. Poster: Daniel Tunkelang Blog name: The Noisy Channel Company/Title: Chief scientist of enterprise search firm Endeca Backstory: Tunkelang was taken aback by the extensive coverage in the…

Search marketing tech and services firm ClickFuel has raised $2.5 million in its first round of funding. Baird Venture Partners led the investment; Baird Principal Jim Pavlik, and Partner Bill Filip are joining the startup’s board. Founded in 2008 by AuctionPal co-founder Colby West, it’s now helmed by Steve Pogorzelski,…

The sudden interest in the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was apparently too much for Twitter’s search engine, which quickly got overloaded and returned results that were increasingly delayed—when it returned them at all. Later Thursday evening, Twitter said it had disabled the search field on users’ home…

At the company’s annual meeting Thursday, CEO Carol Bartz began her presentation by saying that one reason she had been intrigued to join Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) earlier this year was because, “It had more than lost its speed—speed of decisions, ability to attract new people to the site.” Bartz outlined…

A seemingly rare departure from Microsoft’s search team, which has stepped up its efforts to recruit top engineers from rivals: Hugh Williams, a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) search development manager, is heading to eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). Williams tells us via e-mail that he will be leading the e-commerce company’s search development…

Travel search engine Kayak is accusing Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) of basically ripping off some of its features in its revamped search engine, which puts a heavy emphasis on travel search. And, indeed a quick look at Kayak and the Microsoft travel search offering—dubbed Bing Travel—shows that the two sites look…

In a Q & A with readers on Yahoo’s corporate blog last month, new Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz was asked what the “one thing’ was that she would like consumers to instantly associate with the Yahoo brand. She took 187 words to say that Yahoo “means a lot…

AOL’s video search engine Truveo is launching a global revamp tonight—across 17 of its country-specific sites, including in the U.S, where it is aiming for a less-cluttered, almost Google-like home page. Truveo is the second-largest video search engine worldwide, behind Google (NSDQ: GOOG), with 25.6 million unique visitors, according to…

The number of search queries that users made on Facebook increased last month—not so surprising until you consider that it was one of only four sites that comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) tracked that showed gains in queries month to month. The others included YouTube and Craigslist. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and all…