Other Search Engines Archives

A new rankings system is now available within Alexa, we have learned. The new rankings system "now aggregate[s] data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users," according to the official announcement.

Here's more information (in illustrated form):

Most people are seeing a huge decrease in rankings due to the algorithm change. Few, however, are seeing an increase.

While most people have seen Alexa rankings as a false representation of real traffic, the new rankings may indicate otherwise. Until then, perhaps it's still just a number that nobody needs to really worry about.

What do you think?

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Webmaster Talk.

Baidu, the Google of China, reportedly has received approval from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) to become a domain name registrar. Why do we care?

Remember when Google became a domain registrar in January 2005? We, SEOs, did not stop worrying about if Google would use that data in their search algorithms. Most SEOs believe, without a doubt, Google uses some whois data, data that is easily provided to them, in their algorithms.

This week we reported that Google resets link data for expired domains. We have reported several times how Google might use whois data in part of their algorithm:

• Really, Does Google Use Whois Registrar Data to Rank Sites? Can They?
• Google Admits to Improve Search Quality with Registrar Data
• Changing Domain Name Ownership Whois Information & Google Search Ranking Impact
• The "Google Certified Domain Change" Proposal
• Google Registers Domains Through Google App
• Impact of Changing Registrar Data on Search Rankings
• Buy Expired Domains For SEO Link Value?

Will Baidu become a registrar to register domains internally, for others as a portal or use it for search algorithmic purposes?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting that when searching over at AOL Search UK, and restricting pages to just "UK Only," the results you get are rarely ever from .net top-level domains.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, confirmed this to be the case:

I just went to the aol.co.uk webite and did "UK only" searches such as "keyword inurl:.com" -- you're right, AOL is choosing to show only .co.uk and .org.uk for their "UK only" searches. Not so Google.co.uk, where any domain extension can be found.

He adds that when doing a site command for .net TLDs, only a few come up. For example, a site:.net returns for me only 204 results.

This is probably a tweak that AOL set for this certain search criteria. Google powers AOL Search, but AOL is allowed to make changes to the results - if they see fit. They must feel the TLD is more important than the address on the site or the location of the server.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Wikia Search is now live at http://alpha.search.wikia.com/.

Honestly, it seems very lacking - I guess that is why it is an alpha launch?

There has been a lot of pressure to launch Wikia Search. Jimmy Wales promised an early launch and then promised to launch this week and here we have it.

Let's look at one search, although, I have been disappointed with many.

A search on george bush returns a blank "mini article" result at the top. Our president returns a blank mini article? The search results themselves return:

(1) George Bush Is A Crackwhore!
(2) A blogspot result at http://george-bush-gulf-war.blogspot.com
(3) Then this http://www.george-bush-pics.com/

The image results at the top right for people matching on George Bush is just sad.

Here is a screen capture of those results today. Sad.

Hey, but Wikia admits the results are sad. As they say on their about us page:

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.

Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the "miniarticles" that appear at the top of popular search terms. These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:
* Short definitions
* Disambiguations
* Photos
* See also

Michael Arrington wrote Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown and you can find a lot more coverage at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

In July, Jimmy Wales proposed his ideas about Wikia, an open source search engine. Fast forward 6 months and it's now a reality.

According to reports, Wikia is slated to go live next week.

Perhaps this is because Google Knol was announced last month, according to forum members. In any event, the timing is quite coincidental.

One forum member finds it funny that they are already running Google AdSense on the site.

Another forum member believes that the whole concept of an "open source" search engine is open to abuse. But really, it's a bit premature to say that just yet. Open source is not necessarily a concept which is easily abused.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to reports in the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is looking to build a "a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google." His company, Wikia, has just purchased technology to create such an engine.

As you know, many SEO type folks do not like Wikipedia. Can this open source search engine really compete with Google?

Moderator EGOL at Cre8asite Forums puts his thoughts quite succinctly:

Have you watched the content of a wikipedia topic? Lots of goals, lots of agendas, some extremely competent get edited by idiots.....

..... let that compete with a company that is highly motivated by performance, assessment and profits.

The doubt is echoed at Search Engine Watch Forums. Many people feel that it's not going to be much better than Mahalo, which is already being ridiculed by the SEO community.

More information is posted at GigaOM.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Last Friday, TechCrunch announced that Theseus has been given $165 million in funding to build a multimedia search engine.

Theseus, a German based project that is aiming to develop “the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet.” will received a cash injection of $165 million from the German Government, under approval by the EU.

That's a lot of money, says DigitalPoint Forums member zman. Could it be a European Google killer?

Not really, says one.

Google is GREAT in normal search, but in multimedia and other vertical search, google is already pathetic. So those german guys won't have to kill the multimedia search business of Google afterall. It is not even alive. Look at google images, or froogle.. They should be killing like.com and not google.

Many users hope that Theseus will change its name, because http://theseus-programm.de/ is bad for branding. Google's 6 letter word that is used in conversation on a regular basis is something that everyone recognizes. This sentiment is defended by users who feel that it's only a development website and will not be the final destination for the search engine.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Bill Slawski references the Blogscope search engine in a Cre8asite Forums post.

BlogScope is an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as a research prototype at the University of Toronto. It is currently tracking over 10.16 million blogs with 79.48 million posts. BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search.

So far, it's limited to blogspot.com domains, but the information it gathers is pretty useful. As Bill says, "it has features that I wish that more well known blog search engines were using."

Agreed.

The interface is pretty cool too:

Could it lead to an acquisition?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Many people have opted to sell their products on eBay but are wondering the best way to give their eBay store some visibility. Such is the case as illustrated in a Cre8asite Forums post where a person is looking to optimize their eBay store.

Many great suggestions have been tossed out, and I thought it would be useful to share this with anyone else who may also run into this issue.

1. A good starter guide is the eBay Store SEO Guide
2. Get an database of your inventory and upload it to Google Product Search
3. Set up an informational website with more reviews and the ability to purchase through the eBay shop
4. Study the eBay Search Engine and do some keyword research to determine what works.
5. Write eBay guides because they occasionally rank well in the SERPs.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

As Danny reported yesterday, Jason Calacanis is backing a new search engine named Mahalo.

Mahalo is a human edited search engine, meaning - humans are aggressively cleaning up the search results by hand - something Google says they never do.

Here are sample searches you can look at:
- ipod, showing you the top sites, quick facts, the ipod family, and a ton of information. To me this page looks like a static article on ipods.
- barry schwartz, is an example of a search that was not hand written. They show a message that reads, "Oops! We haven't hand-written a result page for "barry schwartz" yet." And then they show related results for other people like Barry Bonds, and so on. Followed by that, they use Google search results.
- google returns a page like ipod, but more focused around company information - like a financial page.

Mahalo would like to "hand-write result pages for the top 10,000 search terms." They are hiring and you can also recommend sites and links.

Current forum buzz and discussion is mixed. Danny concludes; "overall, the best solution probably isn't all human or all machine but some combination of the two."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

A ton of mapping news came out yesterday. Search Engine Land has a great overview of ma lot of the ones that apply to the search engines.

- Google Launches "Street View" Photography
- Microsoft Virtual Earth Expands 3-D Coverage To Include New York
- MapQuest Introduces New ActionScript API For Richer Maps

Google Street Views:
The Google Lat Long Blog posteda on it linking a video demonstration of it in action. I made my own yesterday at personal blog and here it is showing off my office neighborhood.

Check it out yourself, this is a street level view of around times square

Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D New York:
To see this in action, check out this video and the press release.

I did not demo this because it doesn't run (or run well) on a Mac.

MapQuest API:
Well, Garmin took advantage of it already. Check out MapQuests API for Adobe ActionScript for more information.

Google Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums. Microsoft Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In a launch almost unmentioned at the end of last month, Yell (a UK equivalent to SuperPages) has launched its own PPC advertising solution. According to a discussion on WebmasterWorld, Yell is using the backend of European search portal (and PPC network) Mirago.

The service will allow UK businesses to buy targeted advertising space on search terms such as "plumber" and "bookshop in Bristol" from 20p (around $0.40) per click. The UK Yellow Pages and Yell brands have been seen in the past as very reluctant to adopt new advertising models, with most of their online inventory being sold to existing offline clients in addition to ad space in the Yellow Pages dead-tree directory.

WMW members have not looked favourably upon this launch, criticising issues with Mirago's ad-serving system and the relatively high minimum cost per click set by Yell.

Competitor (both offline and online) Thomson Local have had a PPC solution for a few years now under the name of Web Finder, publishing ads on behalf of businesses on their own local listing directory as well as other partner networks. I beleive that they have had problems matching the conversion rates of major networks such as Google though, even for more home-turf searches such as for plumbing products.

I personally feel that Yell still has tremendous potential, even though it is several years late into the PPC market. Yellow Pages is a very strong brand in the UK and can reach a less internet savvy audience that other networks have yet to corner. It may be optimistic to state that they will dominate the UK local search market, although their strong brand and accurate human-moderated source of business data is a massive asset that could give them a large chunk in this developing area of search - as long as they get it right!

Further Discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A webmaster posted a question at both Search Engine Roundtable Forums Search Engine Watch Forums asking what is the htdig-noindex meta tag do.

Both threads point to http://www.htdig.org/, which is an open source search engine. This open search search engine, named ht://Dig supports a noindex meta tag "htdig-noindex." So if you want to block this search engine from indexing you, just add:

<meta name="htdig-noindex">

The search engine recognizes and supports the following meta tags:

• htdig-keywords
• htdig-noindex
• htdig-email
• htdig-notification-date
• htdig-email-subject
• robots
• keywords
• description

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums Search Engine Watch Forums.

Answers.com runs a nice answer engine that does just that, it tries to give you an answer as opposed to just search results. Many search engines do this already, they try to give you an answer in the top box, Google has their OneBox, Ask.com has their SmartAnswer, Yahoo has they ShortCut - but BrainBoost does this elusively.

Gary Price took a look at this a while back when Answers.com Buys "Answer Extraction" Engine Brainboost for $4 Million in Cash and Some Shares of Restricted Stock. Also, Philipp has a older look at this answer engine where he looks at brainboost answers.

This came under recent forum scrutiny when EGOL started a thread at Cre8asite Forums after stumbling upon it.

I asked BrainBoost, how many fingers do I have? the response was, "Brainboost is not a chatbot. It was designed to answer questions which are factual in nature." OK, I guess that I most likely have five fingers, but yet it is not factual that everyone that would ask that question would have five finders. In any event, I then asked the engine, how many championships did michael jordan win? and I got my answer from several sources.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

As expected, Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, has launched his search engine, named Wikiseek.com. (This is not a search engine by Wikipedia, but it does use Wikipedia's content - sorry, still catching up). All I have seen are negative reviews about the search engines, you can read Danny's huge analysis at Search Engine Land, his conclusion:

In the end, if you want to search Wikipedia, just go to Wikipedia and search there rather than Wikiseek. That seems the better experience. Or search at Google -- it tends to bring up Wikipedia pages all the time for relevant queries.

I have searched through the various discussion forums and honestly did not find much conversation on it. There is a large thread at WebmasterWorld and a very short one at DigitalPoint Forums.

The overall consensus is that it is currently a poor search experience because of the restrictions of only showing results within the wikiepdia community.

I also did notice someone at WebmasterWorld noted that http://wikiseek.com/ returns a 404, they need to 301 that to the www version.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Wow, tons of buzz over the weekend over a new search engine started by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia. The new engine is to be named wikiasari. The story was broken on The Times in the UK, where it describes how the engine will leverage the community.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Techcrunch has claimed to post an exclusive screen capture, which was rejected;

The TechCrunch story is also wrong. This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Also, this is not an Amazon powered engine, but Amazon is funding part of a large part of the project.

We currently have a lot of discussion in the forums on this topic. The Google killer? :)

Brett Tabke came in Christmas eve to comment:

Lets try some math:

If you have 1000 people making editorial decisions at the rate of 3-4 pages a minute for 400 minutes a day = 1600 pages per person per day - or about 1.5 million pages per day. If you have 5000 people doing that - you have about 7.5million pages per day, or about 150million pages per month.

Strangely enough, I have heard the figure 150 million pages used in reference to the bulk of the long tail in the top two search engines. Meaning that the top 150million pages on the web comprise 95-98% of the search engine listings popping up in search engines on any given day.

That said, I would rather have machine based results. Humans are easy to manipulate (Ever hear of Dmoz? lol).

Also, Li Evans does a good job summarizing things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Microsoft China To Display Baidu's Search Ads. Yes, Microsoft asked Baidu if they would run and manage the ads on their China properties. My reaction and the communities was something like, wait a second, shouldn't Microsoft be powering Baidu's PPC ads? But no. Baidu is the powerhouse in China, so Microsoft decided Baidu is the best bet for monetizing their Chinese properties.

WebmasterWorld senior member, walkman, said;

am I missing something or should it be the other way around?

But Quadrille feels this is just a way for Microsoft to learn from Baidu and as soon as the contract expires, they too will enter the Chinese PPC market.

It's just Bill poking his tongue out at Google China! More seriously, it's probably a fairly short contract while MSN develops its own China search.

Win or Loss for Microsoft? Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday on IBM's co-announcement with Yahoo! on the release of a free enterprise search application named OmniFind. OmniFind is defined as a entry-level enterprise search software solution.

Features Include:

• It will index up to 500,000 documents
  
• Search internal documents as well as web documents
  
• Supports 200+ file types
  
• 30+ languages
  
• REST & XML
  
• Uses open source Apache Lucene
  

Yahoo! and IBM got some good feedback on this release. More details at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/productinfo.php.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

I reported at SEW yesterday that Ask.com To Power Lycos Search & Search Ads. In short, Ask.com took the Lycos deal from Microsoft, to power Lycos's search and ppc engine.

Ask.com, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) and LYCOS, Inc.(www.lycos.com), a leading web portal, today announced a multi-year agreement whereby Ask.com will be the search and sponsored listings provider for the LYCOS Network, including LYCOS.com, Hotbot.com, Tripod.com and Angelfire.com. Under the terms of the agreement, Ask.com will provide branded algorithmic search, including Web Search, Image Search, and Zoom Related Search, as well as the Ask Sponsored Listings advertising product across the LYCOS Network. LYCOS is the fifth most popular portal in the U.S., consistently ranked as a top 20 U.S. Web property, with more than 6 million monthly unique visitors using LYCOS Network Search. In addition, LYCOS will transition its current sponsored listings advertisers currently using its pay-per-click platform, InSite AdBuyer, to Ask Sponsored Listings, and will promote the Ask.com PPC product to advertisers throughout the LYCOS Network.

Now, some folks such as Andrew Goodman, who are heavy in the PPC arena, are saying We don't have a huge amount of time to think about Ask and Lycos these days.

I have not seen much forum discussion on this topic yet. There is a thread at WebmasterWorld that doesn't add much, there is more questions then excitement about this deal.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

Most of the search engines are sporting fancy and scary logos for Halloween today. Here is a run down of this years Halloween search engine logos.

http://www.google.com/search?q=halloween

http://events.yahoo.com/halloween06/

http://www.ask.com/web?q=Halloween (sporting a whole background change)

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/guides/halloween.htm

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Greg Sterling has a detailed write up on the much recently talked about human guided search engine named ChaCha at the SEW Blog. In short; ChaCha "offers users two ways to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live "guides."" Here is a guided search that Greg conducted (I tried it on Safari and it did not work);

My query was "Best LA hotel to stay in with kids?"

Guide: Welcome to ChaCha! Please wait a moment while I search for your results.
Guide: Please hold a moment.
Guide: I will find a good result for you.
You: still looking?
Guide: I appreciate your patience while I find exactly what you need.
Guide: I am looking for details on kid-friendly hotels.
You: thanks
Guide: I have found several but will soon have one that is well-suited for your search.
Guide: Do you want 5, 4, or 3 stars?
Guide: hotel rating that is.
You: how about most stars for under $200 per night
Guide: OK - one moment.
Guide: how many beds?
You: 2
Guide: ok.
Guide: Kids stay free at these.
You: okay, thanks
Guide: Let me check on the rates.
Guide: The nice thing is that these both have full suites.
Guide: So if you are with kids, you have refridge, etc...
Guide: Is that good for you?

So do you find a guided search useful?

We have threads at WebmasterWorld and at Search Engine Watch Forums with the answers from the community.

SEW Moderator David Wallace said;

I feel it is something that may have been useful before search engines came into being. Nowadays... why would someone want to wait while someone else searches for them when search engines can deliver results in nano seconds?

Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld said;

This is is a surpising first time human powered. No one has ever tried anything like this before. Especially someone with money and resources. Looks like they are currently bird dogging for more of the later ($$). Once this puppy comes out, I think it will be very significant. This is just day one of the story I think is going to be very big about March of next year.

It also stands to win the relevance race.

For many, the results brought back were not satisfactory but for (at least) this one user, he was happy with the result set:

Guide: Hi there. I will be helping with your search. Guide: Hello, what kind of internet marketing are you looking for? Guide: SEO, advertising, etc...? Info Seeker: internet marketing tip Info Seeker: about SEO good tip for free and effective Guide: Ok let me find some sites with tips on SEO Guide: The first listing is Webmasterworld.com Guide: A online community of webmasters with fantastic resources about SEO and everything you could want to know about marketing and building a website! Guide: Are these links of help? Info Seeker: great thanks

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Earlier this month AOL Messes Up by Releasing Sensitive Search Data. Well, the other day they acted on that mistake by forcing the CTO to resign and firing the researcher who released the data, as well as his manager. AOL wasn't kidding when they said they will be "giving everything away for free."

Maureen Govern, who became technology chief last September, has left the company and her position has been temporarily taken by John McKinley, her predecessor. The researcher who released the data – that was aimed at academics researching search patterns but was widely copied across the web – and the researcher's supervisor have also been fired, according to people familiar with the matter.

Do you feel this move by AOL's top management to release a top manager and the two individuals closest to the slip up was good enough? Do you think those who decided to make AOL a free portal are more to blame?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I wrote about it at the SEW Blog yesterday;

Techmeme is reporting a huge amount of concern over AOL releasing, then pulling, search logs done by 500,000 users over three months. The purpose of the release was to help search researchers better understand user behavior in conjunction with an industry event for search researchers happening in Seattle, SIGIR. The data was posted on the AOL research site, but has since been pulled.

Much more at SEW blog, Danny postscripted later on.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there are any issues with using hotlink protection for your images and the same images suffering in image search. Hotlink protection, if you do not know what it is, is when you want to dissuade others from pulling your images directly from your server. You can use hotlink protection, such as with htaccess, to either block or serve up a different image, to those pulling the images from you. But does this affect your search rankings in image search engines like Google image search?

Most of the folks in the forum discussion say there is no issue with Google and hotlink protection. Some recommend that you allow certain domains to display the images properly, such as your own domain (duh) and the shopping search engines (if that applies), news engines (if that applies), blog engines, image search engines and so on. But that list can get long.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! Search Blog announced that AllTheWeb is the first of the Yahoo! owned search properties to test out a new search technology called Livesearch. Livesearch is similar to Yahoo! Instant Search in that it shows results as you type, but it also "related queries, spelling suggestions, and enables you to use keyboard shortcuts to help you find the right query faster to get to the results that you want." Let me tell you, it feels incredibly quick and sleek.

Only issue, I went to it on Apple Safari and saw this message.

For an optimal Livesearch experience, we only support the following browsers with javascript at this time: Windows 98/2000/XP - IE 6.0, Firefox 1.5 Mac OSX 10.3 - Firefox 1.5 Mac OSX 10.4 - Firefox 1.5 We plan to support Safari soon. Please let us know if there is interest. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yahoo!, yes there is interest.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Monday, some of the big news was Amazon A9 & Alexa Dropping Google for Microsoft's Windows Live Search product. It is always nice to let that type of news settle a bit and see what the forums have to say about it. We have three active threads, that I am aware of;

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums

Many are happy to see more competition come Google's way. In this case, Google is the leader and Microsoft is the underdog, and who doesn't love an underdog? Some speculate that AOL may switch to Microsoft also, but that was shot down before.

DaveN mentioned on WebmasterRadio.FM yesterday that he thinks this is an incredibly smart move for Amazon. Amazon has generated so much buzz about A9 and Alexa with the announcement, it is huge. If they would of just resigned with Google, no one would have paid any attention. If they would have dropped Google for Yahoo, there would have been a splash. But partnering with Microsoft, now that makes a huge statement and generates a ton of buzz.

Forum discussion at:

• WebmasterWorld
  
• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• DigitalPoint Forums

Quietly Alexa switched from being powered by Google, for its Web search platform to Windows Live. If you conduct any search at Alexa now, you will see a new logo on the right top portion of the page that looks like;

I am surprised Microsoft didn't play this up, maybe it was part of some of the conditions of the switch?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (subscription required).

Earth Day was this past Sunday and there was a ton of news and blog buzz on the search engines being creative with their engines on that day however, there were no threads in our forums. Today, I finally noticed a thread at DigitalPoint Forums about the special day. The thread creator notes which engines made an effort for Earth Day and which did not - also asking you to comment on which you find to be your favorite.

Continue reading "Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006"

Dogpile.com, a meta search engine that uses Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com results, created an incredibly creative April Fools Day logo. The logo was posted at DigitalPoint Forums. You can see the full size image of it here. Pretty funny.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

In our continued Ask The Moderators thread, the next question we explored was by Viggen. He asked our roundtable of moderators the following question on what he calls; "private search engines."

what search engines are you using for private searches and why...

We opened up a thread named Private Search Engines Explored for moderator only discussion, and last night opened it up for member discussion as well.

I found it interesting in how each moderator interpreted the phrase "private searches." On one hand, does this mean searches conducted at a password protected search engine? Or maybe it means, searches conducted on a company intranet? Perhaps, he is asking about searches one does each day, but are private in nature? Or maybe he is asking about vertical search engines?

The roundtable of moderator's responses were pretty vast.

Rand Fishkin discussed how he uses Del.icio.us to search on tagged content, Ask.com for "non-search type searches" and Yahoo! for link command searches.

Dazzlindonna explained that if private search engines means vertical search engines, she doesn't use them. Donna is a big fan of major search engines and bookmarking for private searches.

Darrin Ward sticks with Yahoo! Search as his default and Google as his back up, he may also use MSN.

Ben (Phoenix) says he doesn't value Yahoo! Search at all, he sticks with Ask.com and Google. He also is a big user of Google Alerts. For internal private searches he uses Desktop Search, like Google Desktop Search. As now uses Bloglines more and more each day.

I personally use RSS News Searches exhaustedly. I subscribe to searches on a few dozen keyword phrases to be notified via RSS about the latest news and discussions taking place about those keyword phrases.

We would love you to join the conversation at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Danny reports that Paul Flaherty, the founder of Alta Vista has passed away. Alta Vista was one of, if not, the first major search engine around. Chris Sherman has an old but valid history of Alta Vista paper and you can also read about Mr. Flahery here. I have no more information about the death, other than we should all show our respect at the forum thread I created at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is a quick follow-up post from last month's coverage of some threads at Cre8asite and SEW, discussing creating new search engines and titled Building a better search engine.

Apparently, after a month or so of trying, SEW member David has decided that he can't do it by himself after all, and is asking for others that may be interested in partnering with him on the project. If you have thought about building a search engine or directory but also felt it was too large of a task, perhaps you should contact him?

All I ask is that if you get something going you come back to the forum and let us know how things are doing, as I am sure many would be interested in hearing more about the trials and tribulations of undertaking such a project.

See the request for partners at post #20 of the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There has been a lot of recent news on Accoona, a search engine "with interactive tools that provides users with better web, business and news results; powered by proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology." The news is that Accoona Relaunches 'AI Search' Engine specifically "targeting media outlets and businesses."

So I dug up a thread on this news at DigitalPoint Forums and found that most of those that replied to the thread think Accoona is a poor search engine. In fact, one member created a site named Acoona Sucks based on his initial experience with it. Why does Acoona suck? Because they have a representative joining forums and posting information about Acoona without telling the forum folks that they are from Acoona and have a bias. To be fair, it looks like they have posted under their name in the past, back in March, here and here.

So does Accoona suck or is it not that bad? Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

With the recent popularity of Google and other major search engines, it seems like many people still feel they can break into the market and offer a “better mousetrap.” Opinions vary on this subject, with many people claiming that companies are just trying to jump on the search bandwagon while it’s hot, and others defending the right to be innovative and come up with a good competing product.

A thread over at Cre8asite Forums discusses one partic