Yahoo! and Google Join Hands In OpenSocial Foundation

The two big online masters Yahoo! and Google have joined there hands together to support the OpenSocial developer platform for social networking sites. OpenSocial is an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.

Yahoo! has joined leading social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn to support the project, which Google has described as a non-commercial initiative that will work with external developers to enhance and improve the platform.

The list of partners include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. The most conspicuous absentee from the alliance is Facebook, which has a developer platform of its own.

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 – A New Webpage Spider

The new version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates has been launched called Yahoo! Slurp 3.0.

The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for 'Yahoo! Slurp,' though it'll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs

Google Search Box Expanded to 32 words

You can now actually add much bigger queries in Google searcch box and Google will adjust the search box's size after you perform a search.

Earlier the scenario was different If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it was difficult to edit that because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries.

Google has limited the queries to 32 words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.