Net Radio Internet Radio has been under siege as broadcasters are being charged a copyright fee by the record companies for the music they play. USA Today reports that hundreds of stations in the US will go silent on May 1 in protest. "Research firm GartnerG2 says 16% of the 156 million adult Internet users at work and home listen to the estimated 10,000 Net radio stations." This is small compared to air-waves radio but the audience is dedicated. On average, listeners tune in 4.5 hours a week.
Net radio will pull plug this week to protest fees by Jefferson Graham. USAToday (April 29, 2002)
Google Answers Andrew Goodman at Traffick.com thinks Google Answers will fizzle out like all the others - ExpertCentral, Askme etc. There just isn't enough money in it - people won't pay for searches.
If Precedent Is Any Guide, Google Answers Will Fizzle By Andrew Goodman - (Apr 25, 2002)
Quigo Technologies: URLWire carried an announcement from Quigo that this search technologies company had introduced a new search engine, Flipper.com, that would present results from the "deep web" as well as the Open Directory. It is described as "the first meta-search destination to include Deep Web search results. Flipper’s Deep Web results are powered by Quigo Technologies, Inc, and combines paid and non-paid listings".
I tried it and didn't like it at all. The technology may be good (it's hard to tell) but the content is shallow. A search for Bruce Willis will bring up results pulled from Biography.com, allmovieguide, and other commercial entertainment sites - this shows Quigo's ability to index databases. More results come from the pay-per-click Ah Ha, Altavista, and Open Directory. It also does a respectable job on Kofi Annan with material from Time and the Washington Post. But ask for Thor Heyerdahl and the returns of books and videos make it clear that this is play for sales. The categories for the "deep web" access for Flipper are People, Books, and Movies.
This may demonstrate the search technology but it's not of much value to the general searcher. There are much better meta-search engines (Vivisimo, Surfwax, and the new SearchOnline), and there are much easier ways to search commercial - AskJeeves being one.
Quigo's New Flipper Search Engine Exposes the 'Deep Web' (April 24, 2002) URLWire
Make Way for the Deep Crawl by Paul J Bruemmer (Aug 29, 2001) Clickz.com - describes Quigo's technologies for "deep web" crawl.
Web Services Macromedia is looking to make its Flash software (used mainly for singing and dancing intros to web sites) be a component in web services. "Web services are intended to move the Internet beyond today's relatively static, document-oriented Web by increasing the power and flexibility of business-oriented services, from shopping to information retrieval and communications." Flash6 will have features for audio and video and enable a user interface.
Macromedia Lays Out Strategy for More Uses for Flash Player by John Markoff (April 29, 2002) New York Times
MetaSearch Kevin Elliott reviewed Search Online and found it worth a look.
New Search Online Metasearch Site is Loaded With Features Kevin Elliott (April 23, 2002) Websearch.about.com
Search Online (http://www.searchonline.info - note the .info domain) at its core is a metasearch engine but has elements of a portal with news and alerts. At first use it is rather complex and will take time to learn how to use.
- News search component of 1000 sources - can be customized for type of news, number of headlines etc. Can set up a saved search for articles having the specified keywords and have results sent by email. News is powered by Moreover.
- Web search options to search "US Best", "US Indexes", "US Directories", "Canada Web", "UK Web", "French Web" and a couple of others. The "US Best" includes Altavista, Teoma, Yahoo, MSN, ePilot (PPC engine), Alltheweb, FindWhat (PPC engine), and GoogleYahoo.
- Search syntax can be an automatic AND or OR or Phrase. Boolean, title, and url searches are also supported.
- A page may be previewed in a small window on the results page - saves time.
- There are several options for grouping results and sorting them - can be done on the fly.
- Other resource collections are available for Health, Sports, Downloads, Business, Reference, Entertainment, Documents (such as from elibrary - requires subscription - or Bartleby)
- Claims to have 150 search engines in total.
- Results do have a relevance score but no date.
Worth some time.
Web Services: The next wave of change on the Internet especially for e-commerce will likely be web services. Jocelyn Attal, vice president of marketing for IBM's WebSphere spoke about web services and IBM's plans as the keynote speaker at Internet World in Los Angeles. "Web services is a group of technologies, standards, and protocols that use the Internet to get applications to communicate with one another and allow companies to connect more efficiently with suppliers, customers, partners, and distributors. " Microsoft's .Net and IBM's WebSphere are two contenders for supplying the platforms to the business sector.
IBM to Push Grid-Based Web Services By Gretchen Hyman (April 25, 2002) SiliconValley.internet.com
Google Answers: Tara Calishain asks librarians what they think of Google Answers in New Google Answers Service Raises a Few Questions of Its Own (April 22, 2002) in Newsbreaks. Mentions that Google plans to make a searchable database of the answers - that could be very useful.
Gary Price learned more from a Google spokesman through a phone interview about selection and training of researchers to man the Google Answer desk.
Browser - IE5 Traffick.com has tips on Microsoft tools that work with IE5. These include Web Accessories, Toolbar Wallpaper, Explorer Bars and Web Developer Accessories. Web Accessories in particular has some tools of interest to web searchers - quick search, image toggler, text highligher, web search.
Cool Downloads for Internet Explorer 5 by Cory Keinschmidt (April 19, 2002) Traffick.com
For fee Whether two thirds of Internet users say they won't pay for content, it's coming our way in the form of subscription services. Bob Redeschi of the New York Times writes "All across the Web, consumers are buying newly offered information and services. Beyond the long-established vices of pornography and gambling, the Web now offers a variety of paid services that include dating tips, weather alerts, college classes, financial advice, diet counseling, career help and high school reunion information, with fees ranging from pennies a day to hundreds of dollars a month."
Pay Features Gather Steam on Web by Bob Tedeschi (April 22, 2002) New York Times.
Google and Copyright Indexing and linking is becoming hazardous for search engines. New York Times examines the complaint by the Church of Scientology for linking to copyrighted materials about the church being displayed at the anti-scientology site Operation Clambake. For links Google has had to remove, it will direct viewers to a copy of the complaint at ChillingEffects.org. ChillingEffects then lists the web addressess for the removed pages. "With its Chilling Effects partnership, Google is subtly making the point that the right to link is important to its business and to the health of the Web, said David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University who specializes in Internet issues."
Google Runs Into Copyright Dispute by David F. Gallaher (Apr 22, 2002) New York Times.
Last week there was another case in which Germany's national railway operator Deutsche Bahn AG brought suits against Altavista, Google, and Yahoo for links to a German-language publication Radikal for providing information on how to disable parts of its railway system.
Google May Remove Controversial Links by Ryan Nariane (April 17, 2002) InternetNews.
Altavista Altavista may soon be offering search suggestions for refining a search. Altavista calls this Paraphrase. Chris Sherman wrote "In the current Beta, the Paraphrase terms are derived from the titles and abstracts of the top ranked documents. In the second phase, AltaVista plans to incorporate data from offline computations using the full text of its more than 600 million indexed Web pages, as well as using behavioral information from actual queries from AltaVista users." The service is available to only a few. Rollout is expected "in the near future". Altavista has also said it has increased frequency of re-indexing. See Chris Sherman's report, AltaVista Testing "Paraphrase" Tool (April 16, 2002), for more information.
Ask an Expert at Google : Google has a new answering service. Pay $.50 to ask a question and an amount between $4 and $50 to indicate how much getting a good answer is worth to you. Google staff will do the research (tho Google will accept applications for new researchers). Those who ask the questions may rate the answers. Registered users may add comments. Go to answers.google.com. Questions are listed there with answers, comments, and ratings. They make for an interesting read especially when a question matches a personal interest. The How-To and FAQ pages are required reading for anyone planning on asking a question.
See Google Selling Answers (Apr 18, 2002) at Internet News.
A couple of years ago the "ask an expert" service was very popular. WebHelp had several hundred researchers, Looksmart Live used the Looksmart staff, AskMe enlisted people on the Web. Today the numbers have dwindled. Abuzz through the New York Times, Askme, ExpertCentral, and AskEric (for education) are four that seem to still be in business. It was a service that seemed to be dying out along with Web energy. Perhaps Google will help revitalize it.
DirectHit: Ask Jeeves closed DirectHit.com on April 1, 2002. This was a popularity search engine that monitored click-throughs on search results and length of time the searcher viewed the target site. Technology will be incorporated in Teoma - it is said. Hotbot, interestingly, still shows results from DirectHit and the logo. MSN Search has a link to the Top Ten at DirectHit but DirectHit is a redirect to Teoma.
Blogs: Andrew Sullivan likes weblogs too -- The Blogging Revolution Weblogs Are To Words What Napster Was To Music. Wired Magazine, May 2002. "Blogger could be to words what Napster was to music - except this time, it'll really work. Check back in a couple of years to see whether this is yet another concept that online reality has had the temerity to destroy."
Google has introduced a Web API service by which Web developers can embed searches of Google into an application. This may mean that more alerts on specific topics will be added to sites. Google Continues Flirt with Web Developers Internet News (April 12, 2002)
Law of Competition: NEC Research Institute have been examining competition for links on the Web. The main law is that "winners take all" where a small number of sites enjoy a large number of links to them while others are almost unknown. This applies especially to the large search sites. However, there is a less biased distribution within an individual web community. This analysis may have implications for new e-commerce endeavours. Winners Don't Take All: Study Clarifies "Law" Of Competition On The World Wide Web Internet Wire (April 15, 2002)
Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web has more data and explanation. See http://modelingtheweb.com/
Penn State published a clearer summary in World Wide Web Community Behavior Makes It Less Vulnerable to Attack, More Friendly to New Sites (April 15) Dr. C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor, Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology and professor of computer science and engineering] is quoted as saying, "The Web actually works better than people thought it did. Company websites, for example, are more likely to connect to sites that are relevant rather than simply to sites that are well linked. This implies that the web's growth pattern is driven by rational process rather than simply by a desire to connect to the dominant sites."
Teoma Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz reviewed Teoma and found it weak. The intent is good - proposing topics and pointing to directory pages - but the execution is incomplete. Teoma The Search Engine (April 2, 2002) Part of the weakness may be because the database is still small (200,000 urls or so).
Looksmart Looksmart joined the pay-per-click club by converting a monthly fee for small businesses for a keyword-based listing to the pay-per-click model. New arrangement is described in LookSmart Debuts CPC for Small Business Internet News (April 11, 2002). Contributors to the i-Search mailing list where search engine placement is discussed suggests that the small businesses are not happy. Better a monthly fixed rate than a variable and uncontrollable rate.
Privacy There's less and less of it. Yahoo made headlines when it announced it would be sending e-mail marketing messages to its email subscribers. Users have 60 days (starting from a week ago) to change their account to NOT receive the promotions. Go to my.yahoo.com and select My Account Information or go directly to http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount. Saul Hansell in the New York Times reviews the new policies at Yahoo and Excite and warns that these companies, in giving out their mailing lists, are sure to damage themselves. Seeking Profits, Internet Companies Alter Privacy Policy (April 11, 2002)
Yahoo Andrew Goodman of Traffic says Why Yahoo is No Longer Good (April 8, 2002) It's the clutter. Yahoo used to have a very simple design with fairly fast loading pages. But now with ads, shopping features, sponsored sites and paid inclusion, it's getting harder to see past the clutter. Goodman also reports on changes to Yahoo Mail that will allow more spam. This is the road to disaster. In an effort to favour the advertisers Yahoo has become high-handed with its users. Goodman wonders if "Yahoo is being groomed for acquisition".
Looksmart Yahoo isn't the only one. Looksmart is almost impenetrable thanks to its redesign to give prominence to ads and sponsored sites. Run a search for english literature and most of the first screen is taken up by irrelevant "featured listings". Use the categories to drill down from Find People to International White Pages and after sponsors there are only six "reviewed web sites". Where are all the others? Perhaps the others declined to pay to be listed or there is no Zeal volunteer editor to look after this section.
Syntax Chris Sherman describes the OR operator in To OR is Human (April 9, 2002) OR is really ANY - ie - look for any of these items. Sherman explains it all and what to do.
Teoma and Google Leslie Walker of the Washington Post weaves together Teoma's identification of mini communities, Google's new news engine, and the latest research on Web communities in Search Engines Home In (April 4, 2002).
Communities NEC has developed a method for identifying communities on the Web. Its studies show that the Web is self-organizing into communities of related information. Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities describes the study and illustrates with the example of the web community formed around September 11.
Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Andrew Tomkins at the IBM Almaden Research Center developed algorithms for Trawling the web for emerging cyber-communities. This paper was presented at the The Eighth International World Wide Web Conference in May 1999.
Beware A new kind of advertisement is spreading over Web sites. Quicken.ca has it, now Yahoo too. It floats across or down a page making it impossible to read the text. One has to wait for it to pass. This kind of ad is described in Caught in the Web of ads: The online sell becomes more intrusive (April 6, 2002) Seattle Times.
But now there are also pop-up downloads. Software products pop up unrequested and ask Do you accept this download? Web surfers brace for pop-up downloads (April 8, 2002) CNet News. Say no.
Teoma Richard Wiggins writes about Teoma for Newsbreaks - Teoma Search Engine Goes Live (April 8, 2002) There are some comments from Lou Rosenfeld, know for his work on information architecture, about clustered search results. He notes that "“There is some scientific data that clustered search results can be better than simple relevance-ranked lists. And we’re beginning to see more sites employ clustered results, so perhaps there is increasing anecdotal evidence that it benefits searchers. But those sites (e.g., BBC) are providing access to much smaller subject domains and content collections. They can employ more human expertise to manually derive some of their clusters.”
Wiggins also points out that Teoma is logging the selections searchers make. He didn't mention that this may be a connection with the DirectHit technology for identifying popularity for later ranking.
Guide to the Net The LivingInternet.com is a fairly comprehensive guide to the Internet past and present. It has background and instruction about the Internet in general (history, importance, security etc) and the Web, newsgroups, e-mail, mailing lists, irc (chat), muds and more. It is organized by tool rather than function or activity. Although it covers many aspects of the Web it tends to older tools such as e-mail and muds but not web forums or instant messengers. The Home page provides a good overview of the course content.
This is the work of Bill Stewart who states in the About page that he has been working on this since 1996 and that he updates it weekly. He mentions that this course is used by many "universities, colleges, libraries, schools, and training organizations" .
Rankings Yahoo, MSN, and Google rank 1,2,3 as the top search engines. Yahoo gets 35 million visitors in a month and Google 27 million, but Google users stay 26 minutes and Yahoo only 9. AOL and AskJeeves are in 4th and 5th position. But for real staying power, users of eBay stay 2 hours!
Top Ranking Brands and Channels for February 2002 CyberAtlas report (April 4, 2002) lists stats for top brands in 6 online categories.
Report: Search Engine Wars Heating Up from ECommerce Times (April 4, 2002) has more comment, suggesting that experienced searchers are using the search engine more (Google) and directories (Yahoo) less. Also that people "do not appear to be deterred from using a search engine based on whether it uses paid listings in an effort to achieve profitability." These speculations may be premature - Google is good for the simple search but directories are needed for a more focused search. It's too early to know the effect of paid listings and paid inclusion on the use of search tools. Part of Google's success has been in clearly separating the paid listings from the search results.
Search Engines: Lisa Guernsey writes about Google, Teoma, Wisenut, and Altavista in Upstart Search Engines Try to Topple Google (April 4, 2002) New York Times. Teoma can present "authority" pages and sites, Wisenut claims to suppress spamming pages, and Altavista has started to updated portions of its site 4 times a day (or so it claims and if it's true, comes not a minute too soon). But can they put a dent in the 150 million queries Google processes each day?
Search Terms: Sex Loses Net Appeal reports BBC News (April 2, 2002). Searching for sex on the Net has dropped from 1 query in 6 in 1997 to 1 in 12 in 2001 says a study from Penn State University in the US that monitored searches at Excite. Study showed that searchers are spending more time looking for jobs, travel, and commerce. Also they are less patient and will look at only 1 or 2 pages. However, as Danny Sullivan points out, studying only searches at Excite may not represent the Net as a whole.
The Penn State Press Release , New web searching trends: Sex is out, e-commerce is in (April 1, 2002), had more comment about the behaviour of searchers. Firstly they tend to take the first thing they get, and don't spend much time. Amanda Spink, the associate professor leading the research, blames the search tools in part. "We believe there is a need for a whole new generation of Web search tools, one that is grounded in a more thorough understanding of human-computer interaction that is evidenced today."
Browser: Robert Vamosi at the ZdNet AnchorDesk is tired of security patches for Internet Explorer and recommends Netscape 4.79, Netscape 6.2, or Opera. Sick of IE? Why it's time to try a new Web browser (April 3, 2002). Several readers weigh in with what they like or dislike about the alternatives.
Teoma: Owner AskJeeves has relaunched the Teoma search engine (www.teoma.com). Out of beta, Teoma sports new colours and logo. Its database is still small at 200 million urls, but it is expected to grow to 500 million by the fall to put it in the same league as Inktomi. Teoma uses page and link analysis to identify from the results set major resources on a topic - resources such as directories and webliographies that will point to specific sites. It can also group results into topics - though now Teoma shows these as "suggestions to narrow your search". Lastly, it lists the top 200 results matching the search terms. Teoma like everyone else has "sponsored results" from Overture.
Teoma does not support syntax other than "quotation marks" to mark words together, - to exclude words, and + to require stop words - such as +who framed roger rabbit.
Some say that Teoma is taking on Google - but it has a long way to go. Technology: Souped-up search engine Teoma to take aim at Google by Michael Liedtke (AP) in Nando Times (April 1, 2002)
Andrew Goodman at Traffick spoke with Paul Gardi former president of Teoma. "Teoma "structures" the appropriate communities of interest "on the fly," and ranks the results based on a range of factors. Authorities (high status pages) as well as hubs (good resources pointing to related resources) can score well. The team is also beginning to work on integrating some of the Direct Hit technology into the mix. "Direct Hit is another piece of information within Teoma," explains Gardi." Teoma Adds Style to Jeeves' Substance (April 2, 2002)
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 |