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Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Blitz Gallery

People are doing nice games with BlitzBasic. (Blitz comes in two main flavors: Blitz3D for 3D games, and BlitzPlus for 2D games. And then there’s BlitzMax with extra complexity. BlitzBasic might be the best games programming language available if you’re working solo or in small teams, as it’s extra easy to handle.)

Google Local Business Center

Google now allows you to add your business to the Google Local listings. (I think the page is new, the copyright is from 2004.) [Via Battelle.]

OpenSearch

Amazon’s A9 search engine launches OpenSearch, as Battelle reports. A9 say “OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication.” They are pointing to a set of sample searches.

Microsoft Firefox Default?

Interesting bit: when you just enter “http” into the Firefox adress bar and press enter, it will take you to the Microsoft homepage. This might sound like fodder for conspiracy theories, but what actually happens? The answer is simple: if you do not use a full URL, Firefox will start its default search function. And searching Google for “http” has Microsoft.com as first result (Google heavily weighs in link text into their ranking calculation, and many people use “http://www.microsoft.com” as link text). And of course, entering “about:mozilla” into Firefox is fodder for yet another conspiracy theory...

MicroSense?

“Microsoft Corp., which runs the No. 3 U.S. Internet search engine, plans to start a service where clients will pay to be listed alongside its MSN search results, people familiar with the plans said.

The service will be similar to competing programs from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft will announce a pilot program March 16, said the people, who asked not to be identified.”
– Bloomberg, Microsoft Plans Service to Sell Internet Search Ads, March 14 [Via SEW.]

Gmail on Google.com

Google has started advertising their Gmail service on the Google front-page. You can’t always see it (I can’t); there might be the usual geo-location targeting the US only, or some other randomization. Chad Brandos sent a screenshot.

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