Other Search Engines Archives

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on a closed beta launch of a new Japanese search engine by the very popular South Korean portal, Naver. The search portal can be found at http://www.naver.jp/ and it is currently a closed beta.

The early feedback on the new search engine seems positive from what I can tell in the thread. In fact, one member said, "quite positive, and the patented combo SERPS, clean design and cool integrated flash elements seem quite nice." Another said, "Some of beta testers report Naver Japan. It seems to have its original features extisting search engines such as Google and Yahoo! don't have."

I cannot read the language so, hard for me to translate this review properly. But maybe someone will and post the details in the forum.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, a new search engine launched, its name is Topsy. Topsy's tagline is "a search engine powered by tweets." So there you go.

If you look at the WebmasterWorld thread, all you will see is disappointed searchers. Here are some quotes:

Tried a search regarding furniture delivery and I got 7 out of 10 results from the same company/account and looked very spammy...

I don't like it. Very slow and bad results.

The creators should be fined for wasting bandwidth.

interesting. I topsied the name of my city, and thre top results were some public events coming soon, some sports scores, and where to get the lowest gas prices in town. Not relevant results like City Hall or Munipical News. These are things people are tweeting about.

I can see how this might be alluring... but I can also see how the results might turn many people off.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I cannot tell you how many emails I get from PR companies telling me that the next Google is here. Wolfram Alpha, a "fact engine" might be the closest search engine to meet that criteria and in my opinion, Wolfram Alpha does not compete with Google, but it will be a must use search engine.

Wolfram Alpha is a "fact engine" as Danny describes at Search Engine Land. Actually, before reading on here, you should first read Danny's review and then come back here.

I watched the full demo, live, last week and I was honestly blown away. It doesn't replace Google but it does fill a much desired need in the search business. Wolfram can answer your questions with hard cold facts. It is more than a Butler answering questions, it is a whole group of Harvard professors answering your questions with incredible detail and clarity.

Here is a quick demo of the screen shots of Wolfram Alpha:

Wolfram comes in and gives searchers something they have been missing. You can search for very specific things in the realm of science, math, geography, demographics, and so on and get not just the answer, but detailed information from real sources. There is really nothing like this out there at this scale.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some interesting comments from SEOs and webmasters on what Wolfram may have to offer:

Tedster: "I look forward to what this approach may offer. Wolfram brings fundamental genius on the level of Einstein and Hawking, rather than intelligence at the level of Page and Brin."

JS Harris: "Wolfram seems to be a different beast, not only is all the knowledge there but it's being analyzed and compared in some ingenious ways."

But most people in the thread are skeptical for good reason. But we need to think that a search engine does not have to compete with Google to be the next Google. It can fill a new need that has been unfilled in the past. I think Wolfram Alpha will fill that need.

I personally cannot wait to be able to test the new engine out sometime this month. It is currently not live, but they promised to make it live sometime in May.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back in "the day," Alexa was a very talked about tool for checking the traffic data for a third party site. These days, people know to take Alexa's data with a grain of salt. Alexa data can be easily spoofed and tampered with, at least - that is what I am told, so just be careful when using it.

That being said, DigitalPoint Forums has a large discussion on Alexa. They claim it has just updated their numbers.

Scanning the thread, it seems like most webmasters are happy with the new results. One said:

Both of my sites had a massive 1000% change as of the Alexa update.

Again, be careful when using this data.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the very popular chinese search engine, Baidu, will be testing a better labeling and differentiating the paid results from the organic results. The article said, "The company has begun testing a new model for advertising that will place paid advertisements on the right-hand side of its page."

Over at WebmasterWorld we have some conversation on the news.

One member feels like Baidu has nothing to lose. He said, "The revenue hit is what has/will prompt changes, not public pressure. Often times public pressure is good, it draws attention and generates income on its own, but when the dollars start to fade it's time to change. I wonder how much of a black eye will linger in a year, if any."

It is about time, like many of the members think. We will see if it lasts and if it will make a difference in Baidu's ad income.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Is Cuil, the new search engine that seems to have lost momentum, trying to bring brand awareness back to the forefront by adding spam comments to blogs? That's what I'd say -- after all, they spammed my blog:

And that's also what forum members have caught. A Sphinn submission points to a blog post where it's obvious that I'm not the only one who was a victim of the Cuil spam. Even WebmasterWorld forum members are a bit shocked.

On my flickr screenshot (click the image above for the link), Brad from Cuil writes the following:

Hey Tamar, it actually isn't us (Cuil) posting the spam. We are as against spamming as you. We'll be doing a blog post later today to clear things up.

And just as promised, the Cuil team has written a blog post to publicly inform the community that it's not them either.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

The Cuil search engine has been around for a few months, and now that the momentum has died, we've taken the liberty to look at the usage statistics to see how it is faring.

At High Rankings Forum, most individuals forgot about it (and even forgot how to spell it). Some think it's a dead fish in the water; Jill Whalen, however, suggests that Cuil will relaunch eventually once they address the issues that were brought up during the shoddy launch of the service. (Personally, I think Cuil is out of their window to launch in such a fashion; they missed the ball.)

We'll see. I think Cuil is forever forgotten, and I think I'm not alone.

Here's Alexa's usage statistics:

And Quantcast:

And check out the dying Google trends:

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Does Alexa have a separate set of standards that allow them to ignore metatags that other search engines are supposed to ignore? Well, perhaps Alexa thinks it does, because the statistics package site is ignoring the 'noarchive' tag and one webmaster complains that 5000 pages are being archived by Alexa.

Huh?

It seems that, according to IncrediBILL, Alexa only honors robots.txt files and not metatags (huh x2?) If you have a problem, you have to contact Alexa directly.

But why does Alexa think it's above the rules and can't respect/honor the directives in the HTML files themselves? Why should you have to go to them directly?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched and every article out there compared the new search engine to Google. Just scan the Techmeme headlines and see the coverage for yourself. Of course, Danny Sullivan does an excellent job going through the important aspects of the search engine.

Cuil should be taken seriously, if you need to know why, read the articles above.

But let's take a look at what SEOs have to say. We have threads at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and Matt Cutts of Google has a pretty comment heavy discussion going on at his FriendFeed.

The comments in Matt's FriendFeed all suggest that Cuil is a poor search engine with little relevance and technical issues. Yes, Cuil had some server issues last night but they seem to be corrected as of this morning. The WebmasterWorld thread has much of the same reaction, but does take notice to the impressive nature of the management team, the new search interface and the size of the index. Overall, it seems as if SEOs are not all that impressed with the current results, but many do believe Cuil does have a shot.

I personally liked this comment at WebmasterWorld:

When Brett makes a dedicated forum for them, I would like to be the mod. ;)

Webmasters, Cuil has a webmaster section at cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/. They have a robot named twiceler, yes, the user agent is twiceler. They crawl from the IP addresses of 38.99.13.121, 38.99.44.101, 64.1.215.166, 208.36.144.6, 38.99.13.122, 38.99.44.102, 64.1.215.162, 208.36.144.7, 38.99.13.123, 38.99.44.103, 64.1.215.163, 208.36.144.8, 38.99.13.124, 38.99.44.104, 64.1.215.164, 208.36.144.9, 38.99.13.125, 38.99.44.105, 64.1.215.165, 208.36.144.10, 38.99.13.126, and 38.99.44.106.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and FriendFeed.

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 particular search engine, Sensis, and its attempts to provide a better online directory. Apparently the parent company Telstra is very well known to Australians, having developed a sort of infamy, based on the article cited in the Cre8asite post. Could the underlying cause for Sensis/Telstra’s problems be the past history related to state ownership, or is it simply a "dog?"

What this thread gets at is very important to those Google-wannabes out there, and some great points are made about basic flaws in this particular system which makes it less likely that a user would return.

A thread similar in topic to this can also be found at SEW, where someone asked about starting a search engine and got some good answers and guidance.

Here is the Cre8asite thread.

Here is the SEW thread.

The update we saw take place in December at Google is reportedly now at AOL Search. A WebmasterWorld thread named Google's update live on AOL reports this, but to clarify, member TammyJo says;

I think it may depend on the "update" you are talking about. The December "update" is most definitely appearing as our site had been dropped and was no where to be found on AOL. It is not re-appearing at the top of the serps. If it is the BigDaddy update they are talking about, I don't think so. (I really am not sure actually,because I decided to break my addictive habit of reading through the entire soap opera this time around :)

So this does not appear to be the big daddy update on AOL.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

PS. Sorry for slow updates, crazy day at the office...

There is this new creative way to search for images, that currently doesn't work too well, but it still is very cool. It is named retrievr and you can search the Flickr image database by sketching something in real time. I found this by way of John Battelle via Research Buzz.

I had to start a thread on this at our forums, under the title, Image Search via Sketch.

You got to love Gary's title for his SEW Blog posting Sorry Bill? WSJ Reports Google Near Deal on AOL. The WSJ article starts off;

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Google Inc. have entered exclusive negotiations about deepening their advertising partnership, shutting out Microsoft Corp. which has been wooing AOL since January, according to people close to the situation.

Gary writes; "If Gates and Ballmer wanted a deal with AOL (Time Warner) for Christmas it appears that they're not going to get it."

All those rumors that AOL would switch to MSN adCenter I guess may be false. We are still not 100% sure which way they will go. How exciting!

And best of all, my dad, posted a thread on the topic at our forum under the title AOL Nears Deal With Google.

Last week, during the SES show, I heard the rumors about the possibility that AOL will be dropping Google AdWords for MSN's adCenter product "really soon." But I haven't had time to post the information here until now. Gary Price has some information at the SEW Blog and Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld started a thread a week ago Tuesday named AOL to Drop Google and Sign with MSN. In that post he links to this Reuters article and quotes it;

Time Warner Inc is closing in on a deal with Microsoft Corp. to team up on an online advertising service to compete with Google Inc, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the talks. The paper said the two companies were now focusing on a deal that would combine their advertising-related assets, with little or no money changing hands. It said they expected to reach an agreement before the end of the year, but that it was still possible that Time Warner's America Online unit could strike a deal with competitor Google instead. Time Warner has been holding talks with both Microsoft and Google over AOL, sources familiar with the situation have told Reuters and other media.

This can be a major shake up for the industry. One member says, "This could have a massive impact on webmaster community." As eWhisper says, "Very interesting things ahead in 2006, and this is just the beginning."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny has a detailed write up on Alexa Offers Fee-Based Vertical Search Service at the Search Engine Watch Blog. Danny explains that this Web Search Platform;

You can create your own search engine by tapping into the 4 billion web pages Alexa has indexed over time. You can search against the entire index or just a selected set, in case you want to make your own vertical search engine.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are still many out there that look at Alexa for popularity figures. But as most of you know, the figures are pretty poor estimates of actual popularity and traffic rank.

A DigitalPoint Forum thread named Shock for Alexa Lovers goes through varies methods to inflate your alexa ranking. Some may work, some may not.

(1) Forum member ebusinesstutor offered an "ethical" method of asking your Web visitors via newsletter to download the Alexa toolbar. This way when they visit you, they will help inflate your web ranking.
(2) I know many who have their employees download the toolbar on all their browsers and constantly visit the sites over and over again.
(3) Some member posted a link to http://www.fakerank.com/ which says it will "boost your rank in 5 days guaranteed."
(4) PortProphecy wrote a JavaScript in message #5 that may help inflate your Alexa rankings.

More discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Thanks Loren Baker for an interesting teaser at Search Engine Journal regarding LookSmart's third quarter 2005 earnings. Judging from the recent statements from the new CEO, David Hills, there should be at least some good news to report. LookSmart has not only been venturing into new partnerships, but seems to be focusing strongly on vertical search.

I recently had a conversation with LookSmart marketing representative Jim Barkow about their products. They are increasing their efforts to launch vertical search engines, and do not overly use the LookSmart brand within them (College search example), in order to create a "more pure search network."

Baker mentions the partnership between LookSmart and Search123, a so-called "2nd (3rd?) Tier PPC provider." Naturally I asked Barkow about the efforts of LookSmart to combat fraudulent clicks. Apparently, LookSmart has been more careful in choosing their partners, based on past click fraud speculation, and they now have "a team of people dedicated to the matter of clickfraud." In terms of the listings provided to/by Search123, "LookSmart will determine the CPC bid and include it in the live feed sent in response to such query. LookSmart will have sole discretion to decide the CPC bid for each search term, and such CPC bid may change frequently."

I would welcome comments or emails from people that have been using this system. If we get some clients going on it, I will be sure to share as well. I am also curious to see how the reports come out on Thursday.

Old search engine has reached a memorable time in its history, LookSmart Announces Receipt of Nasdaq Delisting Letter and Intention to Appeal. Basically, the stock price is not high enough to meet the minimum requirements. Jim Hedger wrote a guest article with the SEM's perspective at SEJ titled, LookSmart to be Booted from NASDAQ.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I wasn't sure this topic would be of interest but the more we got to checking out this search engine, the more curious we became.

The search engine is called RedZee . It's a topic over at Cre8asiteForums in What's a RedZee

A member asked:

"What's really puzzling me is the amount of referrals it's sending this site. It is a new site so I'm not expecting too much in the way of traffic just yet, but RedZee is the second highest referrer. That's the puzzle. Who uses it?"

GeoTrust, probably the second most popular online security brand on the net, launched a new search service today named TrustWatch. Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named “Trust, But Verify" to symbolize the message behind the new search service.

Powered by Ask Jeeves algorithmic search technology, the new service is designed to combat web-based fraud, identity theft and phishing scams. Users simply type queries into the search box at www.trustwatch.com and view easily understood green, yellow and red verification symbols beside each search result that represent the web site's trustworthiness rating.

For example, users wanting to donate money for tsunami relief can type "Tsunami Relief Organizations" directly into the TrustWatch search box. The Ask Jeeves search engine will return relevant search results based on each site's authority on that specific topic, including redcross.org, usaid.gov, directrelief.org and americares.org. Each result will also appear with the TrustWatch rating prominently displayed, so users can quickly select trustworthy sites and donate with confidence.

So I decided to give it a spin, let me take you through it. Searched on web site design services and the first result was http://www.hwg.org/, which was not verified. So I clicked on the little yellow light with a question mark (verification icons explained here) and received this pop up window.

The next two top tabs look like, this and this respectively. To me, this seems pretty easy to spam.

Forum thread started at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Gary reports that AOL.com Portal Leaves Beta, after "a three month beta period, the AOL.com open web portal has been officially released." I personally don't remember what the AOL homepage looked like before, but Gary told me it was not much of a visual change, since the roll out has been slow, in terms of UI. But yesterday, AOL officially announced;

AOL.com is no longer in Beta! hanks very much for all your testing assistance.

Notice the typo in the word "thanks." :)

I started a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

AussieWebmaster posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named MSN Looking to Buy Into AOL. In that post, he links to his blog posting where he writes;

According to an article in today's NY Post Microsoft is in "advanced discussions" with Time Warner to buy about half of its interests in AOL. This deal could take about two months to conclude but offers all types of possibilities.

The folks in the forum are now discussing the what-if scenarios of such an acquisition. Moderator, David Wallace says, "If Microsoft did buy AOL, they would be able to have another major venue to display their organic results as well as their PPC model. It would strike a blow to Google as they would lose a major source for their AdWords distribution." An other member writes, "f it does happen, you can look for MSN to really take their Neural Network technology to the next level. I think that MSN is looking for a way to crack into google.com traffic and they feel that doing it at the grass roots (so to speak) may help them in accomplishing this." Some more good discussion at the Search Engine Watch Forums & at WebmasterWorld.

How interesting.... :)

A new search engine is pitching a new market segment, COWS! Yea, you got that right, they predict that by the end of this year, "23% of all internet users will be cows." The search engine is at www.mloo.com and it basically serves up results from an other engine as well as throw in Google AdSense, within the SERPs. I like what is hardcoded in the last 10 searches, on the left hand side. I prefer to use Ask Jeeves when searching on cow related searches.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are hundreds of search engines out there that are powered by either Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or an other engine. Should you expect that the search engines that are driven off someone else's technology, provide the same exact results? Bruce Clay has always had an outstanding Search Engine Relationship Chart so you know who is powering who (it changes all too often). But even though Netscape is powered by Google, it doesn't mean you will see the same 10 results in Netscape that you will in Google. I believe this applies to Yahoo! powering AltaVista, Inktomi, AllTheWeb and so on. Even though Yahoo! Search is a technology comprised of the above three, they each are slightly flavored for their target searcher.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke posted the news at WebmasterWorld that Claria launched a new search product. The press release describes "RelevancyRank".

RelevancyRank is a revolutionary search capability that ranks Web pages based on consumer surfing behavior. The technology incorporates basic metrics such as click rates, as well as critical post-click metrics of consumer behavior - such as time spent viewing a site, number of pages viewed at a site, number of return visits to a destination Web site, historical interests based on Web-wide surfing habits, and conversion behavior.

Brett feels that "Microsoft made a major mistake in passing on Claria."

A simple but fun test to see which image search engine is the best at finding "stick man" pictures.

In my humble opinion the best are ranked in this order, for this search:
# 1 Ask Jeeves
# 2 Yahoo!
# 3 Google
# 4 MSN

It is far from scientific, but an email from Pixsy encouraged this post, they didn't do too well.

I will be interviewing a potential PHP developer this afternoon (see top of the index page) who was born in Russia. During my WebmasterWorld travels, I found a new thread named SE popularity in Russia. The thread creator, Blackie, who claims to have "actual SE use by different people in Russia." The results he posted include:

Yandex - 49,46%
Rambler - 22,27%
Google - 12,38%
Mail.ru - 5,12%
Aport - 2,29%

I'll update this entry later after speaking with the person I am interviewing. Of course, it will be his opinion.

There is a wonderful thread at WebmasterWorld named Which are the leading search engines in Europe? I am not sure how statistically valid all of the responses are, but these are real people with real experience talking about which engines are the most popular in the European market.

UK Engines: Google, Yahoo, ASKjeeves, MSN,
UK Portals: Wanadoo, NTL, Tiscali, Lycos, BTopenworld

Netherlands Engines: Google (~85%)
Netherlands Portals: startpagina.nl , planet.nl

Germany Engine Stats: Google 81.6% , Yahoo 4.5% , MSN Web-Suche 4.3% , AOL Suche 2.5% , T-Online 1.6% , WEB.DE 1.2%

Sweden - Besides for G,Y,M,A eniro.se
Denmark - Besides for G,Y,M,A eniro.dk
Norway - Besides for G,Y,M,A kvasir.no

The thread goes on...

Gary Price blogged about New Web Engine From China Now Online. iAsk, SINA Corporation "self-developed algorithmic search engine", is using that dock effect that Apple has created. Gary also notes the name is a bit too similar to Ask, for a search engine.

Here is the dock effect being used at iAsk:

Here is what Apple's looks like:

And the old Google X:

For fun, I posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Randfish, popular amongst the forums, has posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named OpenRank - An Open Source WWW Index. Basically, he started OpenRank "with the goal of creating an open source index of web pages." In the thread there is a lot of confusion about the intent of the project. Randfish clarifies that this will not be used for searching, which seemed clear from the introduction, but it will be used to gather data for Webmasters to better understand where they stand in terms of the whole Web in search engines.

1. Create an alternative to PageRank using the link structure stored in the database. This new measure of global popularity would be both "accurate and precise" and could help people see exactly what links are influencing their "OpenRank"

2. Create a measurement system of local popularity by segmenting pages into subject-specific communities and then examining the popularity of pages based on their links within those communities.

3. Create tools that would conduct more advanced and comprehensive link analysis then is currently available using the APIs or link commands at the search engines. One could, for example, see the exact number of links to each web page with a particular anchor text or view all the links sorted by anchor text, or by extracted page topic or poularity, etc.

Besides for this being a huge project to undertake both technically and financially, I am not sure how practical it is. Most search engines indexes, i believe, do not overlap that much. There were studies done that Yahoo! index has maybe 30% (not sure on the figure) overlap with Googles. If this is the case, then one can imagine the difficultly with this. Spidering the Web is a huge task, we built some small spiders and its not easy. I respect and wish this project the best, I will do what I can to support it.

Visit OpenRank at http://www.openrank.org/.

Yesterday, I installed Tiger and the process went pretty well. Skipping over all of the other OS related topics, let's quickly discuss Spotlight, Apple's new OS Search technology.

After installing Tiger, and restarting, Apple started to index the contents of my harddrive behind the scenes. It really did not slow down other tasks I was performing at the time, so that was nice. After conducting a few searches, I was disappointed with the speed. Don't get me wrong, it is a hell of a lot faster then Apple's previous seach, but I was expecting more based on the reviews. I am using a G4 1.25GhZ PowerBook with 1GB RAM. I will test this on several other macs, including Dual Proc G4s, other PowerBooks and iBooks. But I think it should be snappier.

My biggest disappointment is that it does not search Microsoft Entourage, my default email client. This was expected, "Microsoft says Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents will appear in Spotlight searches (but not Entourage, due to the way the e-mail client was built)." MacWorld has a great write up on Spotlight, better then I can do at this time. Leaving for Toronto SES now.

Update on Apple Tiger. Posting will be slow today, since I will be playing with Tiger and doing other work. I will update you with its search features as soon as I have time to play with it.

Thanks.

14 Days Ago I wrote a quick preview of Apple's Spotlight Search feature in its new OS named Tiger. Last night I received an email that my order has shipped and I will be expected delivery day is for May 2nd, this Monday. I can not remember every being so excited to upgrade to a new operating system. But with the 200+ features, including the single new feature I am most excited about, Spotlight - it does make me want to be an early adopter.

Last night, the Wall Street Journal released an article (hope link works) named Tiger Leaps Out in Front: Apple Operating System Offers New Approach to Searching, Smart Folders, Better Browser. The article starts off with;

Despite all the advances in personal computing, one problem has remained constant: It often is really hard to find a file months or years after it was created. To have any hope of doing so, users have to create a logical, structured system of folders, and take care to give consistent, descriptive names to their files. But few have the patience to do that.

The author continues to say that "Spotlight, is the first universal, integrated search system ever offered as part of a mainstream consumer PC operating system. In seconds, Spotlight can peer inside e-mail, office documents of all kinds, photos, songs, address books, calendars, and all manner of other files to see which ones match a search term you type in."

He continues by saying;

This is a big deal. Along with a similar built-in search capability Microsoft is working on for its next version of Windows, Spotlight could spark a major change in the way people use computers.

Midway down the article the author gives a detailed overview of how Spotlight works. No wonder I am so excited.

Dear Barry:

I have some news that I thought might interest you for the Search Engine Roundtable. Multiply just launched the first "social search engine" - which finds content published within one's social network and ranks results based on social proximity.

It's much different than what Friendster/Eurekster does which, as you know, is to show someone the topics that their friends have searched.

Here's a link to the news release that we're distributing today:
http://multiply.com/info/press/search

I've attached a short, one-page PDF as well, so you can see what makes this kind of search so compelling. Download file

Thank you in advance for looking it over. Again, I thought you might find it interesting. Hope you don't mind that I sent it along. Feel free to call or e-mail me if you'd like to discuss it some more.

Regards,

Marc Bernstein

Kind of under the weather, so I am posting releases today.

John Battelle wrote an entry the other day named Snap Does Suggest One Better. In that entry, John discusses how Snap is a much more advanced Google Suggest. Bill Gross, founder of Snap, told John;

Google suggest is awesome, but doesn�t do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the �network� of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way. Just try typing in, say PASADENA, or SOLAR ENERGY, or anything, and watch what a relevant list you get because it�s using the collective knowledge of the whole network!

Pretty cool stuff. Check it out yourself at Snap.com. Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Apple Computer is 14 days away from shipping Tiger: Mac OS X 10.4. I already ordered a few copies from MacZone. Besides for all the new cool functionality included such as dashboard, very improved iChat AV, Automater, Safari RSS and more, they have done some really good work with search. Apple named the new "find anything, anywhere, fast" built in search engine Spotlight.

Apple says it is super fast because "Spotlight indexes every file on your computer transparently and in the background, so you never experience lag times or slowdowns." On the usability front, "A permanent new fixture of Tiger�s menu bar, the convenient Spotlight search field gives you instant results encompassing not only files, folders and documents but also messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, System Preferences and applications." They say that Spotlight is "Organically Organized", where Tiger utilizes something called "Spotlight Smart Folders" to save your search results. One of the flashier features is "Star Power" which places these illuminated spotlights on your files when you do a search, screen capture here.

I am excited, a bit too excited.

A new thread is just getting started over at Cre8asite Forums named How to get answers to questions. In that thread, moderator, Barry Weldford, asks what search engines are out there to give you answers to specific questions? He brings up the name of one such engine, named BrainBoost, which works well.

I then brought in Ask Jeeves, which is known for its question and answer's ability. The famous example is searching on When was Michael Jordan drafted?, which gives you one of those "Smart Search" features that Ask is so well known for.

So I decided to compare the two. Whereas, Ask Jeeves served up that answer in a nice little box, BrainBoost gave the correct answer as well, but not in a nice little box. I went on to try out other questions:

Q: When was Michael Jordan drafted?
A: Ask Jeeves got it right, no box this time. But look at those nice "Related Topics" on the right.
BrainBoost got it right as well.

Q: Who was the 27th president of the united states?
A: Jeeves again with class.
BrainBoost right again.

Overall, Jeeves has a nicer interface and seems a lot quicker in returning results. Other engines will give you the results, but not boxed in like Jeeves. Does it matter, I believe so.

Ixquick metasearch engine released today an updated and more powerful search engine for its users. It has gone to great lengths to integrate a new international phone number search, a very useful and unbiased lowest price search, and support for more languages than before. I got an email from Ixquick a couple days ago giving the oppourtunity to beta test its new search, and decided to take a quick peek at what they had changed. I was quite impressed with the extensive amount of information that a single search could bring me. I was dully impressed with their Star System which helps bring more relevant results based on the "consensus" of the other search engines. It looks to compare your rankings across 10 search engines, and if yours matches highest among the majority its likely you will earn a top spot. I mentioned to Ixquick how this could serve as a useful too to SEO's, as instead of guessing your coverage and ability to target a specific phrase you can do a search for it in Ixquick and it will tell you the result most favored by all the engines. I see this effectively useful in terms of a link standpoint. Like for example, want to know who dominates the search engines for "internet marketing", take a look. Our good friends at WeBuildpages do amazing well at it.

Some of the other unique features of the search engine include the new International Price Comparison tools. That according to their press release:

"Comparison-shop over 5,000 merchants with
Ixquick's Lowest Price search, an unbiased tool for finding the lowest prices worldwide." Very handy I found when searching for digital cameras or mp3 players.

Also, new is if you don't happen to like something in the search results you can click on the "X" next to it and it will get rid of it. Or if you like it, click on the check symbol to get similar pages.

For those interested in more information you can check out the press release. Or check out Ixquick here: http://www.ixquick.com

I didn't find any forum threads on the search engine today.

Maybe some of you guys can help me? Anyone ever hear of PCNbot from the IP 38.113.223.130? I have found two threads on the name, but no answer as to who they are. One thread is at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums.

I used to use HotBot all the time to quickly check the difference in search results between many search engines. Now it looks like HotBot gives the searcher on two engines to choose from, Google and Ask Jeeves. I think back a year or more ago, it allowed you to search with AltaVista, Inktomi, Google, Ask, AllTheWeb and others. I guess since there are only now four main players, two being new to the game (Yahoo! and MSN), there was a need to drop some. But specifically, according to a thread over at WebmasterWorld, HotBot has dropped Yahoo! as an option.

A while back, Google surpassed the 8 billion mark, and Gigablast Broke 1k the other day. John Battellle reported; Exalead, a company that powers AOL France's search (I was introduced to its founder by Alta Vista founder Louis Monier - yup, he's French) announced today that its stand alone search engine has surpassed the 1-billion-pages-indexed mark. (The engine launched in October)." Louis Monier was on the panel at SES on the search memories session, you can see his picture there, smart, visionary and funny guy.

Gary Price reports that Exalead's Paris-based CEO, Francois Bourdoncle, said "that the company plans to have a two billion page web index online in the near future. He also said that his company is about just ready to introduce a desktop search tool."

And if you want to see, for fun, how I got acquainted with Exalead, I made a short (50 second) QuickTime Movie file. The download size is 2.4MB, I saved it as a zip file here.

Spurl, where search engine meets bookmarking, hit the 1 million 'spurl' count on December 23rd. Here is the announcement posted at the Spurl Help Forums:

On December 23rd Spurl.net passed the 1 million spurl mark. One million pages, hand picked by you - the users - to share with each other. Pretty good, and probably makes Spurl.net one of the largest user edited web site collections / directories in the world - and we're just getting started!

Coincidentally December 23rd also marks Spurl.net's 11 month anneversary, as Spurl.net was originally launched on January 23rd, 2004 (named "I like!" for about 2 weeks), you can read the original announcement here: http://wetware.hjalli.com/000126.shtml

A lot of things has happened since. The service has matured - largely based on excellent feedback from users from all over the world. A lot of functionality and features has been added and Spurl.net is now set up to be able to go through an even faster rate of growth than we saw in 2004.

A lot of good things are coming this year. Among them:
- Finally: A search engine, using the human information from the Spurl.net library.
- A new and improved Spurl bar
- More ways to "dig into" the ever growing collection.
- A new group mechanism for collaboration
- And an API so that you can build Spurl.net into your own applications.

...and this is just in the next couple of months.

Anyway - happy new year, thanks for your great support in 2004 and happy spurling in 2005!

Appears Gigablast has joined the billion page index club today with a press release indicating they have 1,014,363,952 pages indexed. An excellent milestone to achieve for a smaller engine, moving them further along in the search space of the major players. There is some forum discussion over at WMW at this, detailing the new index and some new features added making them even better before. One of the members details that they have added a site search, custom search options, and better and faster searching abilities. According to Gigablast:

Among these are Dedicated Site Search (DSS) and Custom Topic
Search (CTS). DSS gives webmasters the ability to provide their website's
viewers with search capability for the specific website being viewed. CTS was announced on December 20, 2004 and allows webmasters to tailor
their website's search feature to a custom topic.

Nice job guys!

Earlier today I wrote a summarization of specialized search engines. Gary over at SEW blog posted a new search engine that search the National Geographic Magazine for free. This way, people like my Dad, who has been collecting National Geographic magazines since 1888 (just kidding on the date), can quickly find out which magazine to find the content in. Nice find Gary, how do you always find these things!

Here is a nice thread at Search Engine Watch Forums based on an article by Mary Ellen Bates named Searching for Quick Answers To Odd Questions. I'm just going to list the Specialty Search Engines below as a reference:

Refdesk: good for answering factual questions
InfoPlease: good quick fact database
Statistical Abstract
of the United States: US Census Data
HowStuffWorks: this is great when you want to know how to build a toaster or something
Internet Movie Database: Movies
Quotations Page: quotes
Librarians' Index to the Internet: what it says
Snopes: Urban Legend References
Scirus: The Science Search Engine
Internet Archive: archive of historical websites
FindLaw.com: Legal Information Resource
SingingFish: Owned by AOL (i think) streaming audio or video search engine
Find Articles: Article Search Engine
eBizSearch: By IBM academic and commercially e-biz articles search engine
Search Systems: Free Public Records Directory
Cite Seer: Computer and Information Science Papers

Danny beat me to it with his Google, Yahoo Post 2004 Most Popular Search Terms entry, however, I will link to the top search reports by the search engines here anyway.

- Google Top 2004 Search
- Yahoo Top 2004 Search
- Ask Jeeves Top 2004 Search
- AOL Top 2004 Search
- Lycos Top 2004 Search

I have asked Paul Forster to provide a summary of a new search vertical for the job market named, Indeed.com.

Indeed is a search engine for jobs; a window to search all jobs on the web. Indeed enables you to search millions of jobs across all career fields - jobs that are listed on job boards, newspaper sites, and niche sites. In one simple search, you can find the very latest job listings throughout the web. You may save your searches and have jobs delivered to you by email alert or RSS. For example, here are results for a Search Engine Marketing job search.

Indeed's unique technology combines a simple interface, precision search and comprehensive coverage. Launched in November, 2004, Indeed.com is currently in Beta. The founders of the company, Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, also founded the leading finance job site, Jobsinthemoney, in 1998. Having run Jobsinthemoney for six years, they are applying their knowledge and experience to Indeed. They aim to change the way people search for jobs; to make job searching much easier, faster and more accurate.

About one and half weeks ago we discussed the topic of Search Engines to Provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services. Today, Shari Thurow wrote an excellent article recapping all the issues and topics related to this story in a ClickZ article named Search Engines and the SEO Business.

Andy reports that Ask Jeeves and Lycos is getting into the SEO business. Andy is not worried for his company, Keyword Rankings. He said:

I don't see a threat here for anyone other than very bad SEO firms. The good ones will still find plenty of clients. Besides, the search engines already offer PPC management solutions, yet PPC management is still being outsourced to third-party, impartial, SEM firms. The same will happen with SEO.

Some of the forums already picked up the news and are discussing it now. Over at I Help You Forums Kal lists the two pages to find these servers, Lycos's Site Side Optimization and Ask Jeeves Direct Marketing Solutions. Lycos clearly lists out the prices on a per page basis, Ask Jeeves does not. If you had a dynamic site with 100,000 pages, it can get pretty expensive.

I think someone asked why don't the search engines sell SEO services at one of the last conference I attended. I thought it was a no brainer, and so did the people who answered the question on the panel. It would be a conflict of interest for a search engine to provide SEO service.

These threads are definitely worth checking out in the following forums:
- I Help You
- Search Guild
- Search Engine Watch

Last month we found one of the first talking web directories, today we find news of a talking search engine named Speegle. The Herald writes, "A SCOTTISH computer speech technology company has launched what it claims to be the world's first talking search engine."

And funny enough, GoogleGuy was the first to post this news over at WebmasterWorld.

This is some rather big news from the other day, AOL Drops Yahoo's Overture for Google in Europe, and it is currently being discussed over at WebmasterWorld. In the forum thread, they are trying to figure out who decided to leave who. I'll take the simplistic approach that Google was offering a better deal.

I do not follow WiseNut, the index that powers LookSmart on a daily basis, but there was a report at Search Engine Watch Forums that they have updated the index. This of course sprung my interest to do some searches with WiseNut.

If you do a search on seroundtable.com at wisenut.com you will see a gray box at the top that says "WiseGuide categories for "seroundtable.com"". Now for this search, it comes up with two categories; search engines and others. I was disappointed when I clicked on Others, because it has many pages related to the search engine category listed. Oh well, it is not perfect.

Found this new search service by way of a post a SEW forums named Google To Snap?. The search engine is named Snap and it describes "Why we built Snap", the three main reasons being (1) user control (2) user feedback and (3) transparency.

This engine has a very interesting interface that helps you narrow down your results in seconds. Snap has a nice list of technology partners including X1 a desktop/email search search company, LookSmart, Smarter an online comparison shopping network, Gigablast and the ODP. More about Snap here.

Check out Snap when you have a free moment.

All this talk in the forums on hubs and authorities, but yet no one really has built a search engine that searches exclusively the hubs and authorities. Of course, limiting the index to just include hubs and authorities would make for a less broad search engine. However, Kozoru, is looking to build a search service that searches hubs and authorities. Below you will find a quote being pulled from Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld.

"We're going for a niche," said Kozuru Chief Executive John Flowers." We're specifically focusing on providing answers to specifically tailored questions.

"If you're asking a question about what car in 2003 had the highest safety rating, or how do I change the oil in my Acura, you can get those results in a regular search engine. But you'll have to sift through a lot of answers."

"We are trying to determine who the most authoritative sources are," he said.

So where do you plan to travel next? Ask a travel search engine to pull up a destination, plane tickets, excursions, transportation. Forget a retailer, search is more effective for research. This particular article is chock full of information about travel specific search engines and why people are using them more regularly and to what rate. Which could be declining in some cases. Search engines are playing a part in planning peoples travel it says, and the travel specific search engines are on the rise.

Do I agree with this article? Most of it, but not all. One reason I decided to post this article, was my recent experience in planning a trip to Scotland via the internet and some of the trouble I ran into. I found the backpacking company, hostels, airline information, tickets to comedy shows, researched the areas I was traveling, and so on. But I didn't use a search engine to find a travel planner. I already had one, and I think this is where this article is missing out, in that these real people are way more effective in helping with your plans. While services like Expedia, Travelocity, or Orbitz are rising in popularity, mainly because you get to skip the step of using a travel planner, and a website to book the flight. This is great. But have you ever tried to book a very extensive trip on Expedia to different countries? It can be a nightmare, and a long process, I would rather forgo. So for those trips I use a travel planner, a real person. For everything else I use a search engine. :-)

Check out Yahoo's new travel search engine, and the article on Search Leads Travelers to Destinations.

With a cleaned up look, and a host of new features, this is one engine that deserves some head turns. The BETA stage for Amazon's A9 search engine is now over, and in place Amazon has scaled down the homepage a little with some new colors, and host of new features. Search results are conducted normally but with the added "Image, Movie, and Reference" search. You can know conduct searches on the following:

Web - provided by Google
Books - Amazon
Images - provided by Google
Movies - provided by IMBD.com
Reference - provided by GuruNet
History
Bookmarks
Diary

The best things about the new features is in my opinion the layout. I am using a 1680x1050 screen, it very handy to be able to switch back in forth with vertical windows in the same site. A single search can return results for over 8 different things, and with the push of a tab on the right hand side you can easily find the images corresponding to that search. Similar to how Google does it with invisible tabs. See a search for the road less travelled. Now try to click on the buttons on the right. Pretty easy huh.

Check out the new A9 for some fun today, www.a9.com

A big thanks to PK, from SEOchat for breaking the news on there, continue to discuss A9.

Readers have expressed interest in learning about new search engines that prop up here and there. The developers of iZiTO sent me an email with a press release. I'll attach the press release below in the extended entry part. But first let me show you what I found cool about this meta engine.

I'll start saying that this search service is a bit slow, which is expected since it requires flash. But it has its pros.

They allow you to "park" results, so if your browsing the search results page, you can click on a little P and that will store the result in your parked results section. In addition, when you click on any result, you can easily get back to the SERPs page without clicking the back button. The interface allows you to "X" out of the results, you can also skip to the next or previous result and park the page. This does facilitate some of the areas where a searcher wants to gather a dozen or so pages on a specific topic and then read them all at a later point in time. Here are some screen images.

search results page: View Large Image

More images on the detailed page...

Continue reading "iZiTO - Personalized Human Intelligence Search"

Doesn't really interest me, but AOL has released a beta URL to view the redesigned AOL homepage. The beta site redesign can be found at http://betasp.web.aol.com/. Here is a screen capture for you:

I remember the days when I used to hang out in the tech support rooms at AOL, because they didn't charge you per minute if you were in the tech support area. Forgot what they called those rooms back then. Oh, the days when the Internet was not unlimited. I actually got my dad's AOL subscription terminated because I was one of those stupid kids who highjacked those tech rooms. I didn't spend my whole life in front of a computer screen, just seems that way. :)

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

So what if, hypothetically speaking, Google decided to release its code, make it open source, and let millions of seos, marketers, hackers, webmasters, soccer moms, ex-presidents, and NBA super stars do with it as they please? Would the world be a better place, would it be possible to even consider? I don't know, but the things all these people could create would be interesting. I am guessing though open source will have to start small and work its way up to the bigger players. For Google, open source is a bad idea, for other niches and directories its a great idea.

Found a neat little post over at SEOchat, about open source search engines and the possibility they would hit mainstream.

Check it out, Open Source Search Engines

A reader has asked me to share some information on a meta search engine named IceRocket. So what I did was compare the results for a single search phrase, web design, between the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves). I have attached the results in this ice rocket comparison excel file. Funny how very few of the top results match across any of those engines. So you know IceRocket uses results from WiseNut, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, Altavista, Alltheweb, Lycos and others.

Where IceRocket differentiates itself from the other meta engines is its interface. The most noticeable option is the "snapshots" view, defaulted on, where you can see a small snapshot of the page indexed - I believe this is from Alexa's database. IceRocket has placed very useful links that pertain those specific pages, including an "Archives" link that jumps you off to the Way Back Machine for that result, here is an example of OSWD's archives. In addition, it allows you to get a "QuickView", similar to how Ask's Binoculars Preview worked. Here is an example screen image of the QuickView for OSWD. Also make sure to catch the "related searches" on the right of the page and the "blog results" directly under the related searches. There is no doubt that blog results are going to be a major component of search in the future. On some of the results, you will also see Directory listings by Yahoo! and Lycos, more on that in my email interview with Blake Rhodes from IceRocket.

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Interview:

Roundtable: Please tell me about your background and why you developed IceRocket.com?
Blake Rhodes: I developed it last year when I was in college. I felt there were some things that I could do that would make searching the web easier and more fun, so I did them. At the time I was living in Fort Worth, TX and I was a senior at TCU, since I have moved to Dallas where IceRocket is located. There are still many things we feel the other engines aren't doing and we will be constantly adding features to our site.

Roundtable: Can you tell us a little bit about what features you have added to the engine that other search engines are not doing?
Blake Rhodes: Snapshots, quick view, Alexa Info, Archives. We have a "find a friend feature" . We use some different image sources that other don't use. We want to give our users every tool we can that will make finding where they want to go easier.

Roundtable: I tend to like some of those options. May I ask which engine powers the main results? I assume you pull the snapshots from Alexa? I like how you put category listings at the bottom to both Yahoo and Lycos, why not the ODP?
Blake Rhodes: We have several engines that power our main search. The directory categories is something we have just recently been working on, like in the last day or so, we are doing a lot of testing and we won't know exactly what direction we are going with that for a week or so.

Roundtable: When you say you have several engines power your results. Do you then have an algorithm above those results that you use to combine and present the IceRocket.com results? Can you give us any detail on those results and why you feel that they are more relevant?
Blake Rhodes: Yes we have our own algorithm that sorts the results.

Roundtable: A couple more questions for you...Your About us page (http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=about) says "is a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet." Would you say that your trying to focus on the commercial side of search? What I mean by that, do you want to have more results containing services then information? Example, search on a "camera" - do you want sites that sell cameras to come up or sites that have camera reviews/how to build cameras to come up?
Blake Rhodes: In the long run, I want both. There will be people looking both to buy things such as cameras and also those looking to gather information. We want to be able to accommodate both types of users. We are a work in progress Barry, we aren't perfect but we are getting better every day:)

Roundtable: Thank you very much for your time.
Blake Rhodes: Thanks Barry. I took a look at your site and I like it. You have a new reader!!

For some reason, people assume that the "other search engines" like Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. are not used. A thread over at JimWorld named Do people still use Yahoo? discusses just that.

A member asks "Everyone seems to use google and I was wondering if it was really worth it to optimize a site for Yahoo?"

Some of the quick responses include:
thejenn (JimWorld Admin) said: "Yahoo! currently captures about a third of the search engine market." She then adds, "Also, it's important to remember that until MSN launches their own search engine, they are using the results from Yahoo!'s engine. So, add another 15%-20% marketershare on there for MSN and Yahoo! is covering almost half of the search engine market."

I am a Mac user and today I downloaded this new tool named Inquisitor. Basically, it is this little program that is out of the way. You can begin typing in the little search box and as you type it the search is refined. You can search Google, News, Images, Shopping, Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Seems like a neat tool so far. Let's see if its something I continue to use. Check out the images below. Top right image, is when I types "search engin" and the bottom right image is when I completed typing the last letter "search engine".

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

I find this funny, Gary Price points out that A9 is ranked the number one search engine "...if you list them alphabetically".

I find it funny that a search engine guy, Udi Manber, throws out the directory ranking default (not Google directory but alphabetical ranking) as a joke to show how they would be ranked the number one engine.

Just funny.

Oh, I hope to post a couple more times tonight, tomorrow will be a crazy day for me - a little like today was. :)

I promised I would write on this for a reader. So here it is. Looks interesting, but I did not have time to play with it.

Spurl.net is a kind of "search engine meets bookmarking" application - where users can store, search and share their online findings.

Spurl.net allows users to keep track of all the interesting and useful content they find online and then - at any time - do a full text search in all the marked content. This helps users find again information they've previously searched for and quickly becomes a great productivity tool for its users.

While this is the main function of the application, it also serves as a fully featured online bookmarking application, making a users bookmarks (and thereby the searching ability) available from any internet connected computer.

Spurl.net also makes use of the fact that thousands of users are using the system and can recommend pages by matching user profiles, point to related pages and show everybody what's hot within the Spurl community at any time.

Marking a page (or "spurling" it, as it is called), is done with a single click of a button, popping up a window where users can optionally categorize the page and enter a range of information about it to later help them find it again.

As so many people spend much of their time in work and play online, Spurl.net helps users manage their media consumption and keep track of the useful bits in the information overload.

A former Alta Vista employee has been accused of stealing the source code of the Alta Vista engine. The funny thing is that this employee now works at MSN.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

It seems everytime I am turning around these days, someone new has the newest, greatest, and most POWERFUL search engine on the planet. I just wish someone would make a search engine to find my lost car keys. I and every other internet user has lots of choices these days when it comes to search. You've got: MSN...the new new search engine. Yahoo...the once upon a time new search engine (while back), Google...we still have the best search engine in the universe. Ask...our search engine answers questions, and now Apple...the search engine with the user in mind. I like it. Barry will be excited too. ;-)

Apple is taking on Microsoft and the major engines in a battle for the best desktop search and eventually web search capability. Apples plans to release Mac OS 10.4 Tiger next year to the excitement of many mac users. Integrated with the ability to let users search their hard drives and the Web using a single tool. Microsoft is taking on this challenge as well with the release of its Longhorn OS. Apple delivers Tiger in the first half of '05, it's possible it will have quite a lead on Longhorn which will be released sometime early 2006 (est).

Steve Jobs puts it well, in that it is "easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk."

Check out the new article here: Apple-MS search engine battle begins

These thumbnail's next to the search results are becoming popular. There were several smaller engines that used them in the past. Recently Ask Jeeves launched its Binoculars(TM) Site Preview Tool and now AOL has launched a view that allows its French Netscape users see a snap shot of the screen. This view is much like how Alexa's screen capture works. Take a look at Netscape France's results for SearchEngineWatch. You will notice that there are three little boxes on the far right of the thing blue bar. Those are the different views you can choose from. I personally like the option to select one of these three views.

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Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

"Starting at around 8:30 am EDT (12:30 UTC), a number of sources started to report a widespread Akamai DNS issue. Large web sites, which use Akamai for its DNS service, did no longer resolve. Effected sites are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple and likely many others.

Some effected domains have removed the Akamai DNS servers and are reachable again using their own DNS servers.

Typically, the domain itself (e.g. 'google.com') still resolves, but popular hostnames, like 'www.google.com' will not resolve. As a result, the web site is no longer reachable.

The effect appears to be world wide. Some of the Akamai servers do respond to pings, but do not respond to DNS queries."

I wasn't going to post this here but its covered at all the major SEM forums.

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• SEO Chat Forums
• HighRankings Forum
• and others...

I would like to apologize for the less frequent updates here the past few days. I hacker from China has been attacking my local network affecting the Internet and productivity at my company. We have successfully installed and configured a Cisco PIX to block the hacker and everything seems to we working well now. I will be away for the remainder of the day at meetings.

Being that I am the resident Inktomi guy (soon to be the Yahoo dude) here at seroundtable.com. Thought it would be helpful to post some recent Inktomi related discussions about what happened to the long time Inktomi network. What Yahoo's role is in working with the Inktomi distribution. Whether MSN is still powered by Inktomi?

The short answer is that MSN is still powered by Inktomi, and some of its results are getting a little blending of Yahoo/Overture primary results, with the addition of paid ads, and some Looksmart sprinkings. Yahoo's offical work is the Inktomi is part of the Yahoo/Overture Network, and that all search technologies including the "historic Inktomi network" as Danny Sullivan put it, are now part of the "Yahoo Search Technology Index". So its easier now to just lump it all together and brand it Yahoo!, and ask questions later.

The good news is that if you paid for Inktomi before the switch, your urls will still remain in the Inktomi index until they expire. You can no longer purchase inclusion (PFI) into the Inktomi index, and additionally Inktomi Slurp, is now Yahoo Slurp. They may be appear as Yahoo! Slurp or inktomisearch.com in your logs of spider activity but virtually they are the same thing. However, just because you paid for inclusion into the Inktomi network a while back it does not mean you are going to get into the Yahoo! Index. Unfortunate, yes, but I think it was a smart move on Yahoo's part, in that you now have to find other means to get into Yahoo and its distribution network. So that means you have to find a way to get into Yahoo for free (not difficult at all) or pay for Site Match, and have your site reviewed and ranked but pay for it. Be sure to check out the good thread on the topic over at SEW.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch forums - MSN Powered by Inktomi?

I can't believe the number of posts and phone calls I get with inquires on the Alexa rankings. A thread at HighRankings is discussing this now, so if you don't believe me, ask them.

Alexa ranking information is terribly skewed and shows a false representation of the actual traffic rankings on the Internet. The sole reason that the data is skewed is because Alexa obtains its statistics from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. How many average Internet users surf with the Alexa toolbar? I don't, you might but I expect some of my readers to have it installed - you are search enthusiasts.

I enjoy looking at the figures, comparing very similar sites but that is all. Make sure to understand how the data is obtained before using these metrics. This is a common statistical accuracy problem. There is a academic term for this? Anyone in academia?

Looks like Lycos is following Google's lead with Gmail by providing 1GB of storage to its users. Yahoo! then recently announced it will be providing "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid email customers. Now Lycos will offer 1GB of storage to its paid customer.

Lycos announced Tuesday that it is upgrading its service to give consumers 1GB of e-mail storage. But unlike some rival services being developed, the Lycos service is not free. Users will have to pay a monthly fee of 3.4 pounds ($6.01).

Forum Coverage at:

• HighRankings
  
• WebmasterWorld
  

It seems as if Google is now offering beta Gmail accounts to its AdWords customers. As Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting points out at HighRankings forum, "Google appears to have launched a program of offering Gmail to it Adwords advertisers. I've received a bunch today offering Gmail to my various Adwords-using clients, starting with the biggest Adwords spenders."

Want a Gmail account? Become a big spending AdWords customer. Just kidding. ;)

UJIKO is this new search engine that uses the Yahoo! search technology but gives you a completely new interface with customized or personalized options.

delete result ******************** love result

"When you click on one of the results, the page is stored by UJIKO and will instantly appear in the first results next time you search. Choose which site will be first with the heart-grade or, on the contrary, filter the one you dislike. All sites you find can be modified: title, description and heart grade will be memorized and displayed during another query. Finally, you can create filters to mark or delete some results depending on their addresses (URL) or description."

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Yup that is right, A9, is today's Alexa's number one mover and shaker. A9's traffic increased 2,100% from an Alexa 13,194 ranking of to a proud ranking of 490.

How are Movers & Shakers Calculated?

The movers and shakers list is based on changes in average reach (numbers of users). For each site on the net, we compute the average weekly reach and compare it with the average reach during previous weeks. The more significant the change, the higher the site will be on the list. The percent change shown on the Movers & Shakers list is based on the change in reach. It is important to note that the traffic rankings shown on the Movers & Shakers page are weekly traffic rankings; they are not the same as the three-month average traffic rankings shown in the other Alexa services and are not the same as the reach numbers used to generate the list.

A thread over at SEO Chat named, Anybody wanna buy a classic search engine? discusses the advertised sale of Lycos for $200 million.

Instead of buying real estate or investing in the Google IPO, why not buy your own search engine?

I think at one point most of us have probably wondered what it would be like to query a search engine that returns 3D results. Nothing beats actually being able to see the contours, shapes, colors, textures of something. Words are so boring sometimes, and in reality how much do they actually tell about an image. Google at best can only highlight and index the words around the image or those words in the file name. But actually being able to scan an images itself and return results based on its properties is something new. The researchers and scientists at Princeton University have created "have put a 3-D search engine on the Web that lets anyone sketch an object using a computer mouse, add a textual description, then search for similar models in design databases."
I drew and tried a search for "star" that brought back some interesting results.

Its definately worth a quick peak here: Princeton 3D Model Search Engine

The Wall Street Journal today reported on how Amazon has begun testing its new search engine, named A9.

"Where A9 seems to take a more distinctive approach to searching is with a feature that displays a users' history of searches on the site so that they can quickly resume prior hunts for information."

Just a new face to all the other personalized search services with Book Results as well. So when you do a search on Web design you can click on open book results and A9 will find matches within books. In addition, A9 will show "your search history, which keeps track of which searches you have done in the past, and what search results you have seen and clicked on."

The news is all over the place, Google Launches Gmail, Free Email Service. But many forums say its a big April Fools day hoax.

Over at JimWorld Logan put the rumor of it being a hoax to a halt by placing a link to About Gmail.

We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test. If you're interested in receiving updates on Gmail, submit your email address using the form at the bottom of this page.

In Yahoo!'s last act, it striped AllTheWeb of its search technology and assimilated its own search technology into the core of the AllTheWeb search query box. Can we expect the same for Inktomi?

Forum coverage at:
WebmasterWorld
SEO Chat
ABAKUS Forum

There were whispers at the recent search engine strategies conference on possible penalities Inktomi has been issuing in the past few months. Yes, there have been outbreaks too. One in particular was the penalization of sites that contained footer navigation with a certain amount of cross-linking going on between sites and also internally. Now, while footer navigation is a good method for search engines, Inktomi seems persistant on the "pages need to be designed for the users, not the engines" ideology. What interests me, is if this particular penalty is a manual editorial review or incorporated into the algo as a temporary ranking penalty. If you have been penalized by Inktomi, this might be worth checking out. Several members of SEOchat have also posted other penalities that have arisen recently, and their thoughts about this possible reasons.

Check out Inktomi Penalizing Footer Navigation here.

Yesterday I received an invitation to be someone's Orkut friend. That invitation persuaded me to spend some time in the Orkut network. While doing so, I saw some familiar faces at the forums I attend on a regular basis. So I went to add a few as a friend. However, back in early March Orkut upgraded their friend's module to allow for five categories of friends.

- haven't met - acquaintance - friend - good friend - best friend -

Now, this might be considered a good upgrade but to me, it makes things a bit more confusing. Most my "orkut friends" I have never met in real life. Would they go under the "haven't met" category of friends? If I put those friend's under the haven't met category, will they be insulted? For now, everyone goes under "friend" - in order to be neutral. The "best friend" category will probably not be used by me for a long time. None of my real best friends would join this network, or not at least within a years time.

This just adds more to the dynamics of social communication on the Internet. All those that are in the Orkut network know about the other methods of categorizing friends (with stars, hearts, cool, etc.). Those are just my thoughts on this complex social community technology.

The grandfather of search engines, AltaVista and the "new Google", AllTheWeb close up the add url shop.

AltaVista Add URL:

Search results on AltaVista will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

AllTheWeb Add URL:

Search results on AlltheWeb will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

The ABAKUS forum is currently the only one discussing this.

About a year ago, AllTheWeb was one of those promising search engines. Sometimes referred to as the new Google has now lost its edge. In a post at WebmasterWorld named Is AllTheWeb On Death Row?, markd brings up his concerns with AllTheWeb in light of the latest industry trends and relevancy results.

Nice new interface for the powerful search engine aggregator Queryster was launched today.

One of the cleanest ways to search multiple search engines.

Check it out.

I received an email the other day from Jeff Kang, the person who created Queryster. This search engine tool allows you to enter in a query and then click on the search engine that you want to request results back from. It then takes you to that search engine results page. The ability to jump to an other search engine is at the top right corner of each page.

It is a nifty and fun tool.

Check it out at http://www.queryster.com/.

People at WebmasterWorld have been reporting this morning that Yahoo has finally made the switch from Google's Search to Inktomi's Search. It looks like Yahoo switched back to Google soon after. Lets keep watching Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld's thread on this can be found here, if your a paid subscriber click here.

SEO Chat thread covering this can be found here.

update: 3PM (EST) - Looks like Inktomi results are back in Yahoo Search. They don't match Inktomi exactly but they are not Google either.

Check out Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry, the Yahoo! engineer, a few days back on this.

update: 4:30PM (EST) - Google Results Back. Getting a bit dizzy here.

Looks like Lycos is officially closing up it's search engine business, and instead becoming a dating service (and a few others things)...

http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3311971

Thanks Brette Tabke from WMW

I have just found out that if you would like to check your rankings in the new inktomi powered Yahoo you can go to http://search.yahoo.com/ and type in your keyword: I am using "online phramacy" because I am on the first page lol
Normally you would see the google powered: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&ei=UTF-8&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

However if you go to the address bar and at the end of your kw portion of the url add: &tmpl=E088

Like so: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&tmpl=E088

This gives you the results for the new Ink powered yahoo :-)
Try it out!

It looks like the user agent for AlltheWeb.com has changed. Noticed this in my web logs today (I did a trace route on the IP to make sure it wasn't a spoofed user agent, and it traces back to overture.com)...

Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler

Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineWatch posted a very interesting article on Personalized Social Search.

Eurekster launched its beta search engine gives you personalized results based on your past search patterns at Eurkster.

Visit http://home.eurekster.com/howitworks.htm to learn how eurekster works. Also make sure to check out Danny Sullivan's article here.

Ok, this originally was a comment (lol...it was pretty long heh), but I realized that it's length and content would be better suited for a regular blog. I guess this is a follow up to the last entry regarding getting back your listing in Inktomi. So how does one get back their rankings in Inktomi if blacklisted? Well I talked with a Positiontech rep. today, and he and I went over some of the details to stuff that can be tried to get back your rankings.

Basically there are two approaches that people can take in order to get back their ranking in Inktomi if by chance you have been blacklisted. Honestly from what I can tell there is some grey area as to what blacklisted or banned means (despite a lot of research into this). But it comes down to you were penalized for bad techniques or code, which means you are still in Inktomi index but not ranking anywhere, meaning this can also be blacklisted. Or for some reason you get completely blacklisted from the Ink database for doing something really bad, meaning your site does not appear in the results at all. Hence, permanantly banned for eternity. Alright, back to what you should do to get your rankings back.

1. If you use Positiontech or similar company to submit your urls to Inktomi and you find yourself blacklisted, RE-OPTIMIZE the page with clean new html, get rid of anything that could be hindering you. Go to the Positiontech interface and "de-activate" your url. Wait about 1 week, and then go back and "re-activate" your urls. This way your site gets out of the original submission process and once re-activated it can be feed back into the results.

2. Get a new domain and put your content elsewhere. I have to say this is probably the easiest of the bunch. Sometimes its more of a pain to try to get relisted then to use a new domain and hosting account for under 10 bucks you could pick up at enom.

3. Pray that your site will get a periodic review by the Inktomi people and get resubmited back into the database.

Its not secret that Inktomi keep a large record of all the sites that it deems "blacklisted" or spam. They do go back and check these, but there is no time frame as to when this might happen.

I hope this answers most of the questions. :-)

While its relatively not too difficult to optimize for Inktomi in general, getting blacklisted by Inktomi is actually a little easier than most realize. I believe a lot of it stems with people over or out doing the optimization of another website that ranks well in Inktomi. Keyword density is not always a magic bullet for Ink. The problem with getting penalized in Inktomi is that most are not even aware of what they got blacklisted for in the first place, they assume the worst and that the "sky is falling". Well despite titanic fears of the worst and short of getting abducted by aliens there shouldn't be anything to fear, its relatively easy to get back your rankings in Inktomi. The first thing people should do is look at their website to begin with. Do this before emailing Positiontech or Inktomi with vague questions as the to the nature of your site. If you identify possible problem areas and be specific you are more likely to get a better answer. Here are some problem areas that have popped up in the past for people who got blacklisted.

1. Hidden text contained within or off the viewable area of the website or page
2. Formatting meta-tags that are incorrect in syntax or appropriate length. This applies to meta data and titles as well.
3. Meta data that has nothing to do with the page itself.
4. Cascading Style Sheets can create problems when used incorrectly.
5. Cloaking pages that either direct or feed the Slurp robot something other than what is originally there.
6. Affiliate URL's, inserting affiliate id's within a URL.
7. Redirecting visitors for no apparant reason
8. Heavy inbound linking for artifically raising link popularity, could possibly apply to networks of sites that cross link only with a single network.

While doing some testing (and playing around I might add) this week with some of the "backdoor" and free submission url's for Inktomi. I managed to succeed in getting a brand new site spidered by Inktomi within 5 days of my initial submission. Now while I used to use these free submission forms before, back in the days when $39 was way to much money to spend to SEO for Inktomi, 5 days for getting Slurp to find a site was unheard of! Whether it was a fluke or not, I figured that it was would be benefical to post some of these urls, and let other SEO's and webmasters test them out.

Submit to Inktomi for Free - The problem: Its unreliable, no guarantees, and does not update within 48 hours. While this method is surely not as effective as pay for inclusion, who can beat the price? If you are strapped for cash then this might be a temporary option to get your pages into Inktomi until you can pay for more reliable methods.

http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Submit to Inktomi through one of its Web Search Partners - This is one of the Inktomi backdoors many are not aware of and all it takes is a little searching to find them. I have used these on multiple occasions in order to test how effective they are and as well get pages into the Inktomi index for free. One of things I discovered was that taking a look at a list of Inktomi partners (http://www.inktomi.com/customers/index.html) was not only good to get a feel of where their search engine results would appear, but also where I could find submit fields for inclusion into the Inktomi database. Note: These pages do not stay up for long, so do not be surprised if you find they no longer exist.

http://goo502.goo.ne.jp/cgi-bin/feedback/addurl.cgi
http://search2.msn.fr/suggestions/ch/

Not really all that useful, but noticed DMOZ has a red button in it's categories now (bottom right), which shows thumbnails of the websites in the category.

It also looks like some coder over at Amazon or Alexa (same company, so whatever...) got bored and added a few minor things:

• Shows average time it takes to load a page
  
• Reviews were wiped out (although "star" ranking remains), and new reviews are now "Amazon" reviews instead of Alexa reviews
  
• Shows what percentage of sessions show popups
  
• Sccreenshot update form works now on non IE for Windows (now it's simply a link instead of a form)
  
• 3 month average traffic ranking seems to be updating more frequently than once a week on Monday
  

Speaking of Alexa... I got bored the other day and busted out the packet sniffer to see what it's actually doing when sending/receiving data to the Alexa servers, and it doesn't have a checksum (like the Google toolbar uses for getting PageRank). It does have a cookie which seems to be embedded, but it the lack of the cookie doesn't prevent you from getting data, which you can see by clicking here (you will need to view the source since it's XML... unless of course your browser supports XML natively).

And to answer the question on a lot of your minds, no... you can't spoof Alexa traffic by simply pulling the URL (I tested it already). Maybe it's the missing cookie data or something... and I'm sure if someone wanted to do it badly enough they could figure out how to, but I didn't really care about that part of it... I was mostly just curious about how it worked.