FAST: Avi Rappoport now tells how Fast works. Anatomy of a Search Engine: Inside FAST SearchDay (Oct 31, 2002)
Alexa / Google: Gary Price lists new features at Alexa and explains old ones. Web Search--Alexa/Google (Oct 28, 2002)
MyWay Portal: More on MyWay - it was developed by Bill Daugherty and others at Bulldog Holdings, the same people who did iWon. What a difference! They hope to attract disaffected users from Yahoo. Revenue will come from text advertising links - mainly the ones from Google. MyWay promises no banners, no popups, no promo emails, and complete privacy.
Ad-Free Site From the Masters of the Web Hard Sell by Saul Hansell. New York Times (Oct 28, 2002)
Can he take down Yahoo? by Stephanie Olsen. CNet News (Oct 31`, 2002)
FAST skins: On Halloween AlltheWeb was in black and pumpkin - a demonstration of the new skins a person can choose. This is an application of XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) enabling people to personalize their experience at ATW. It's a gimmick.
FAST reveals new skins on Alltheweb, makes popular search site fully XHTML and CSS compliant Press release (Oct 31, 2002)
Evaluating Web Sites: A group from Consumer WebWatch, Stanford University, and Sliced Bread Design have studied how people evaluate web sites.
"We found that the “design look” of the site was mentioned most frequently, being present in 46.1% of the comments. Next most common were comments about information structure and information focus. In this paper we share sample participant comments in the top 18 areas that people noticed when evaluating Web site credibility. We discuss reasons for the prominence of design look, interpret the findings in light of Prominence-Interpretation Theory, and outline the implications of this research for Consumer WebWatch."
How do people evaluate a web site's credibility? Results from a large study. B.F. Fogg et al, Stanford University, Leslie Marable, Consumer WebWatch, Julianne Stanford, Sliced Bread Design (Oct 29, 2002)
Google Answers: Google Answers is out of test and officially in business. This article says there are 500 researchers ready to handle questions. Users pay 50 cents to ask a question plus an amount they set to attract a researcher to take on the query.
Google: What's it Worth to You? By Colin C. Haley (OCt 30, 2002) Internet News.
Google: Avi Rappoport writes a special report for Search Day -- Anatomy of a Search Engine: Inside Google (Oct 30, 2002). Points came from a presentation by Google to Search Engine Strategies Conference 2002.
New Portal: I can't believe my eyes. The Excite Network has launched a new portal called MyWay. It's powered by Google for web search and directory; it says it doesn't have banners or pop-ups; loads quickly; has news from AP, Reuters, NYT, CBS, MSNBC; has a mypage that looks a lot like Excite.
From the Mission page: "My Way makes money through clearly identified sponsored listings and text links. We also keep our expenses low by partnering with the best and most trusted providers in the business instead of doing everything ourselves. Does it work? Yes. In fact, we will be profitable in our first month of operation."
Amazing. Let's use it. http://www.myway.com
Internet gets physical: Scientists in three centres in the US and UK, using robotic arms to move a cube were able the feel the force exerted by each other over the Internet. Might this "lead to new collaborative applications in telemedicine, education and art"?
Researchers transmit sense of touch, feel fine By Chris O'Brien. Mercury News (Oct 30, 2002)
Looksmart: Andrew Goodman of Traffick asks, will Looksmart survive in Looksmart: Fact or Fiction? (Oct 25, 2002). Looksmart has turned into an ad service for small and large businesses. Goodman names " Six leading contenders in the pay-per-click race: Google AdWords Select, Overture, LookSmart, Inktomi, eSpotting, and FindWhat." Also Business.com and ah-ha.com. Goodman sees Looksmart as attractive to the advertisers because it feeds MSN results and to the using Web public because it still has a strong editorial staff. Looksmart will likely carry on.
Future: Tim Berners-Lee looks to the future in this article by Owen Gibson in the Media Guardian UK. The next step (Oct 28, 2002) -- voice services, semantic web, and problems with patents being hoarded by companies.
Tech Newsletters: Andrew Brandt has a list for you in PC World. Info in Your In-Box "
These 15 mailing lists and online newsletters deliver tech news and tips right to you--for free." (Oct 25, 2002)
Information Visualization: Groxis tries its hand at displaying search results visually rather than as text in a new software program called Grokker.
... "Grokker builds a visual map of the general categories into which documents fall by using what computer software designers call metadata, which describes each Web page or document. The program currently works with the Northern Light search engine, the Amazon online catalog and as a tool for scanning a user's own PC file collection."
A New Company Tries to Sort the Web's Chaos By John Markoff (Oct 28, 2002) New York Times.
More on Google Censoring: Will never please all the people.
Google censoring web content: "Should Google decide what counts as an unacceptable website? Bill Thompson doesn't think so." BBC News (Oct 25, 2002)
Sites missing from Google: Report by AP in Globe and Mail (Oct 25)
Yahoo Changes: This posting by a search engine marketer at HighRankings.com asks why pay Yahoo $299 US a year to be listed when Yahoo mainly shows sponsored sites from Overture and results from Google? Good question. And if people stop listing in Yahoo, its value as a subject directory plummets. But Yahoo has also been changing its front page to look very much like a full portal - movies, music, etc etc.
High Rankings Advisor Issue 031 Yahoo/Google Changes (Oct 23, 2002)
Bias in Search Engines: A study by City College in New York of search-engine results on a product search for a refridgerators were very similar and not complete. They called this an "indexical bias" and suggested that this could become serious social problem.
Warning on search engines: no competition breeds bias By Nathan Cochrane (October 22 2002) Next
Google Toolbar: The beta version of yet another update to the Google Toolbar will ask you if you'd like to participate in distributed computing - ie have your computer used in the background for calculations or other processing. The button on the toolbar is Google Compute. Say yes if you approve of the project and don't mind your computer being used. Distributed Computing: Google Starts Folding! (News) By Talez at Kuroh5hin (Oct 21st, 2002 )
Google and sites: Google in France and Germany has dropped some "anti-abortion, pro-Nazi, white supremacy and anti-semitic listings". OK Google excluding controversial sites by Declan McCullagh in ZDNet News UK. (Oct 24, 2002)
Google News: The new Google news developed out of a program Krishna Bharat at Google developed for his own use. Now editors and journalists either quake or delight in its ability to bring together related articles on a subject. Bharat said, "It will broaden people's perspectives. They will be able to understand news from multiple sources [and become] more informed. Searches also avoid bias. Machines do that very well".
Google wants to be part of journalism's future by Suleman Din. Rediff.com (Oct 18, 2002
Search Engine Freshness: Gary Notess has checked the freshness of the main search engines with some surprising results. Alltheweb was 3 weeks, not the 12 days they claim. Google was 1 month - tho oldest pages were 53 days. Inktomi was 2 weeks - best of the bunch. See them all at Freshness Showdown. See also Gary Price's comments on Web Search. Google may refresh a page, but it doesn't necessarily follow the links to refresh others or get new ones.
For Fee: Gary Price comments on the for-fee services eLibrary (article titles to be included in Inktomi results), Northern Light, and Factiva and reminds us to check with the public library first. Fee-Based Content--eLibrary (Oct 22, 2002)
Newsseer: Gary Price reviewed this new news tool - it can learn what you like from what you read. NewsSeer: All the News that Fits You Personally in SearchDay (Oct 22, 2002)
Get the Facts: Viewpoint -- Personal Computing: Learning The Facts Of Life Via The Web recommends several Web resources for finding facts - encyclopedia, dictionaries, biography, and general reference. From Industry Week (Oct 22, 2002)
Google Sued: Google does change its algorithm for ranking from time to time and does reindex its database. That is its defense against SearchKing who is suing Google for a drop in its rank. SearchKing runs an ad network - lower ranking in Google results means lower revenue. This war over ranking and the efforts to promote sites (and their ads) is getting ugly.
Search Engine Marketer, Ad Network Sues Google by Christopher Saunders. SiliconValley (Oct 22, 2002)
Google, Yahoo, Overture: The real war is for click throughs on advertising. Overture has been much more successful with advertisers than Google with its AdWords, suggests Jennifer Evans in her article about search engine wars. She sees the Overture model where content and advertising are blurred winning at Yahoo, MSN and other places. Although Google is currently supreme as a search engine, she sees threats from MSN Search, Alltheweb, and Teoma. AlltheWeb maybe. Not Teoma - not yet - it's too small. Not MSN - it performs poorly at search - has features that don't work, results sets that are odd, and too much advertising.
Search engine wars Part II: Yahoo and Google By Jennifer Evans. Globe and Mail (Oct 23, 2002)
For Fee: eLibrary is listing its articles with Inktomi and will turn up in search results at MSN, About.com, Overture, and Looksmart - but to read them, you'll need a subscription to eLibrary.
Millions of Premium Articles From eLibrary Now Available Via Leading Web Portals PRnewswire through News Alert. From Alacritude (Oct 22, 2002)
Also Inktomi will be indexing Amazon's full catalog through Inktomi's pay-for-performance program.
Inktomi Expands Agreement with Amazon.com; Inktomi Index Connect Helps Drive Sales at Amazon.com Business Wire (Oct 22, 2002)
Google vs Yahoo: "OneStat finds that Google is still the most popular search engine claiming 55.1% of global searches between August and September 2002 -- up from 53.2% in the two months prior." Yahoo has 20.6% of worldwide share.
Google Gains Virtual Ground Bizreport.com (Oct 17, 2002)
Top 100 Sites: PC Magazine names the top 100 sites for this year over 12 categories. I checked Search and Reference and liked most of the 15 picks. Yahoo and Google are of course on the list. But I was surprised to see About.com. Many of its guides are guideless - people have quit, and the site is popup heavy. Check for yourself -- Top 100 Web Sites. PC Magazine October 2002
Ask Jeeves drops Popups: AOL did it and now AJ - would that this becomes a trend. There were 5 billion pop-ups April to June according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. And more are expected. But not at Ask Jeeves. They say the ads don't relate to the search so don't belong. There is more about AJ's search service in this article at CNet.
Pop-ups pushed down at Ask Jeeves By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (Oct 18, 2002)
Copyright: Cindy Carlson wrote a succinct article on The Big Picture: Limiting Information Access at LLRX.com (Oct 15, 2002). She writes, "Everything I've been reading makes me realize that while our technological capabilities have kept on expanding, and more people are taking advantage of the technologies available, frustrations about access to information aren't likely to go away as long as there's money or power in the act of keeping information confined.". Specifically there is the case of Eldred v Ashcroft about yet another extension of the copyright period and also the problem of removing information from the Web.
Search Utility: Gobox.net is a new desktop tool for searching the Web. Claims to be able to address 90% of our searching needs. It provides quick access to Google, AOL, Yahoo, phonenumbers (presumably US), news and some shopping. What - no Amazon on the list! Has a spell checker too. It's for Windows but you can leave your email address to be notified of a Mac version.
Yahoo: Yahoo reported $60.2 million in revenue for its 3rd quarter and $30 million came from directing traffic to Overture. That's a chunk. This article looks at the symbiotic relationship - Yahoo as a search destination and Overture as the advertising agency. It raises some questions about dangers for Yahoo in being too dependent on outsiders - Overture for one, and Google as the next. CEO Terry Semel has said that search is Yahoo's greatest asset. It's unclear if they realize that the Yahoo directory is the greatest asset and not search per se.
Yahoo's Overture economy By Jim Hu. CNET News.com (Oct 16, 2002)
Pay for News: Bernhard Warner at Reuters News in London UK says, "Attention online news junkies: your free lunch is coming to an end." Several European newspapers have started to charge for puzzles, articles, archives. They predict that only current day news will be free and everything else by subscription or micro purchases.
Is the End in Sight for 'Free' News on the Web? Reuters.com (Oct 17, 2002)
Online Maps: MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, and others get most of its city data in the US from Navigation Technologies. These guys drive around checking streets. But the data isn't always right. Despite this online mapping is enormously popular. MapQuest had 23 million users in the first 6 months of 2002.
Online mapmakers: Popular, prolific, not perfect By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY (Oct 7, 2002)
Semantic Web: Will the problems we have with finding information on the Web be solved by the Semantic Web? Is the Semantic Web even possible? This article describes the dream and the reality.
"The trick may be to build a new Web, one based on the meanings and syntax of our language but invisible to the humans who speak it. This world, dubbed the Semantic Web by the researchers and academics who are planning it, is one meant for machines, not people. The goal is to allow computers not just to process and move our words and data but to understand them."
The Semantic Web, the next step in the Web's evolution, promises even more dramatic changes By David M. Ewalt (Oct 14, 2002) Information Week
Weblogs : BLogdex from MIT lets one study society through weblogs. It "is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses." It "focuses on the referential information provided by weblogs, or the links that people place on their sites. By amalgamating these pointers, we can get an instantaneous look at internet fashion from democratic means." Well - some new features are being promised: new design, link statistics, "social weather index" - should be interesting. Follow weblogs at http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ .
Internet on Oct 3: If you suffered from a very slow Internet on October 3 it was likely due to UUNet's problems (and mistakes) in upgrading route tables. The consequences of long e-mail delays and crippled businesses speak to the fact that the Internet is now an essential utility.
How and Why the Internet Broke by Michelle Delio. WIred News. (Oct 4, 2002)
Books from the Net: Brewster Kahle, a long-time archivist of the Web, is promoting printing books in the public domain directly from the Internet. His bookmobile is crossing the country to do instant printing of books at schools. His last stop will be the Supreme Court where Lawrence Lessig is arguing in the Eldred vs Ashcroft case that copyright should not have been extended by 20 years in 1998.
Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile "Angered by a law that extends copyright terms for 20 years, a crusader named Brewster Kahle wants to use the Internet to make books available to everyone." By Richard Koman. Salon (Oct 9, 2002)
Search Engines: Javed Mostafa answers the question - How to Internet search engines work? - in the October issue of Scientific American 2002. He explains in technical language preprocessed data (ie SEs crawl pages and create a database), smart representation (the index), prioritizing results (ranking), context (learning from the searcher's earlier searches) and distance (distributing the database), and limitations.
Specialized Search Engines: Gary Price has an article in the October 2002 Searcher - "Specialized Search Engine FAQs - More Questions, Answers, and Issues".
Mainly he defines the "specialized search engine" and gives us reasons to use them.
The definition lays out five types - but essentially the specialized search engine deals with one subject area and sometimes one format. Google News, for example, is a specialized search engine. Also AlltheWeb's Video collection.
He lists five reasons for considering specialized search engines.
1. "search a smaller portion of Web space, limited to a specific subject, domain, format. This should increase precision and lower recall." (True)
2. may be easier for "less sophisticated searchers to use". (I disagree - some SSEs can be more difficult.)
3. content may be updated more frequently than at a general search engine. (Very True)
4. likely provides access to content that is not crawled by the general search engine. (Very True)
5. "drill down to material not directly accessible via a general search engine" (Much like reason #4)
Wireless Internet: If you think you'll need to browse the web on your cellphone, Opera has the browser. Opera debuts full-screen mobile browser AP from the Globe and Mail (Oct 15, 2002)
Inktomi: Will Inktomi go the way of Infoseek and Excite? David Shabelman says Inktomi fights an uphill battle (The deal.com Oct 15, 2002) . It has lost some key customers (such as AOL), and didn't win the Yahoo contract. If it loses another customer, it will be in big trouble.
Its two main customers for public web are MSN and Hotbot. Some of the Inktomi features such as * for truncation and case sensitivity aren't working at either Hotbot or MSN. And search.MSN.com is erratic in bringing back results from searches on Inktomi.
Link Analysis Craig Fifield reports on link analysis at Google and Teoma from sessions at the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Article is especially helpful in describing Teoma's study of "subject communities". Search Engine Strategies: Looking at Links (Oct 15, 2002)
Internet Ads: Ads are noisier and more intrusive and people still don't want to buy. Where or when will this stop? Internet ads becoming more insistent by Leslie Walker at the Washington Post, reprinted in International Herald Tribune (OCt12, 2002)
Yahoo: Tara Calishain dug deeper at Yahoo to discover some gold. It's still possible to search only the directory at http://dir.yahoo.com/ and use the old Yahoo syntax of t: to search on title, u: for url. It also has its own Advanced Search with More Options to support searching a particular category, control on date, and change number of hits per page. Good.
See Yahoo Ch-Ch-Changes ResearchBuzz (Oct 14, 2002)
Technology Newsletter: Stephen Arnold, a consultant in the use of information technology and frequent speaker at conferences, has begun a bi-weekly newsletter with news, analysis, and comment about information technology - available at http://www.xenky.com/
"The Arnold IT Web site is intended for those who are clients, attendees at a conference where Mr. Arnold speaks, and the readers of Mr. Arnold's articles, columns and books. " Be sure to become a reader.
Yahoo: Yahoo not only renewed its agreement with Google to supply web page results but it has blended those results with its directory content into Web Matches. Now on a search Yahoo shows
- Inside Yahoo - other parts of the portal especially the shopping part
- Directory Category Matches - (a blessing)
- Sponsor Matches - (at least they are clear)
- Web Matches - the mix of Yahoo and Google
Matches from Yahoo's directory are marked with "More sites about" and a link to the specific category. Matches from Google are not marked in any special way.
Yahoo describes the new look in a page about What's Changed. It refers to "third-party search providers" rather than Google directly - leaving room, as Danny Sullivan speculated, of deals with other search engines - possibly Inktomi.
Yahoo Renews With Google, Changes Results by Danny Sullivan (Oct 9, 2002) - describes changes and rationale. Says the merge with Google results will help on searches that returned a low number of hits from the Yahoo directory.
I thought Yahoo was fine the way it was - excellent even. Why fix something that isn't broken? Why make Yahoo so similar to Google in which results get listed?
The Advanced Search has changed too. The form is very similar to Google's Advanced Search with options to search in title, text, URL, or links to page, and to limit searches by language, domain, date along. There are also the Google options to find similar and related. The form is complex and awkward. Gone is the old and nicely simple Yahoo syntax of t: for title.
Greg Notess and Gary Price are not impressed with these changes. Price recommends people move to the librarian done directories. I agree. Yahoo is no longer a directory. Fortunately there are still the categories one might exploit, but it will be more difficult to distinguish directory from engine. One wonders, also, how committed Yahoo will remain to the directory it built its reputation on.
Yahoo! Renews & Mixes with Google by Greg Notess at Search Engine Showdown (Oct 9)
Yahoo Renews with Google as Fall-Through Search Provider by Gary Price at Virtual Acquisition Shelf (Oct 9)
This changes apply only to Yahoo.com. All other Yahoos retain the early format and negotiate independently for provision of third-party results. Yahoo Canada is the old style, showing Yahoo results as Web Sites, and Google pages as Web Page matches. All the more reason to make Yahoo Canada the portal for Canadians to use.
NewsSeer: NewsSeer will search for news stories and learn what you like. At present it crawls 30 sources every 5 minutes. Gary Price named it Web Resource of the Week and describes the tool in detail in his weblog posting -- Personalized Search and Recommendation Tools In Development and Ready to Explore: NewsSeer (Oct 1, 2002)
Browsers: PC Magazine looks at browsers for the PC and the Mac. Likes IE 6.0 and Netscape 7.0 for the PC and IE 5 and Netscape Navigator 6.2 for the Mac (4 stars for all of them). Also reviews a variety of add-ons to help in browsing and capturing pages. See The Bionic Browser By Sean Carroll, PC Magazine (Oct 15, 2002)
Google: Rumours and complaints about Google - will it charge for the news search? is relevance ranking deterioriating because Google has had to tweak its ranking algorithms to combat spammers?
Google may charge for internet search By Simon Goodley Telegraph.co.uk (Oct 4, 2002)
Google Degraded? Geeks Aghast by Paul Boutin, Wired News (Oct 5)
AlltheWeb: FAST announces changes to its search service but no word about the change in FAST Topics at Alltheweb. Does have regional filtering, document depth, embedded content (video, images, audio etc), personal homepage search. Also has changed display of results to include keyword in context snippets plus the metatag description when available.
FAST Unveils new Specialized Search Options, Further Improving Relevancy for Millions of Alltheweb Users. Press release (OCt 2, 2002)
Altavista: Scandal brewing about Altavista giving preferential ranking to paid-for-inclusion results. It all centers on an e-mail sent to the Web marketing consultant Andrew Goodman offering his customers better placement for money. Altavista has called it a misunderstanding - but some feel where there's smoke there's fire.
Is AltaVista searching for top dollar? by Stephanie Olsen, CNet News (Oct 1, 2002)
AltaVista and URL Inclusion by Tara Calishain (Oct 1, 2002) - gives good advice to Altavista.
Google Fight: This is fun - use www.googlefight.com to compare results on two words or phrases. For example, which has the greater coverage on the Web - Internet Explorer or Netscape? god or satan? I tried thurber versus perelman, the two US humourists. Thurber won by a good 20,000. Try it.
Metatags: Danny Sullivan echoes Andrew Goodman in proclaiming the web page metatag dead. Sullivan in a letter to subscribers to his service notes that only Inktomi indexes the metatags attached to web pages for keywords. The metatag quickly became a "spam magnet", says Sullivan. Metatag descriptions, however, still have some merit - this is where the page author can describe the document. Google doesn't use it but FAST does - showing a KWIC display for search terms and then the metatag description if available. Forr Goodman's take on metatags see - An End to Metatags (Enough Already, Part 1) (Sept 9, 2002)
Death Of A Meta Tag
The Search Engine Report, Oct. 1, 2002
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-meta.html
MetaSearch There's a new meta-search engine with the curious name of http://ez2www.com/ - easy to world wide web. Pulls in Alltheweb, Altavista, Google (for now), Open Directory, Teoma, Wisenut, and Yahoo - a good set. Shows categories from ODP, does a summary of results by engine, and it will group results by topic. Worth looking at though when I did nearly all the searches timed out.
Google Answers: Jessamyn West writes about her experience as a researcher at Google Answers in Searcher (Oct 2002) -- Information for Sale: My Experience With Google Answers. At Google the principle that the customer is always right is taken to the extreme where people offering $4 for an answer expect the full services of a professional researcher.
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