Online Shopping: PC Magazine has updated its Last Minute Online Shopping Tips from last year ( Nov 12, 2002) - worth reviewing if you have time.
Google: Google Zeitgeist tracks trends in what people are looking for. This author calls it a "sensitive cultural seismic meter." Postcards From Planet Google by Jennifer Lee (Nov 28, 2002) New York Times.
Online Diary: Odds and ends about cooking with Google, finding books online, and some other bits.
Cranberry Relished and Google Fights by Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell (Nov 28, 2002) New York Times
Google News: Google News has field searching for site: , intitle:, intext: and inurl:. For example -- site:globeandmail.com intitle:moron. Gary Price has more on the new limiting commands. News Search - Google (Nov 25, 2002)
Teoma: A web marketing analyst reports on a chat with Jim Lanzone, Vice President of Product Management at Ask Jeeves. AJ is still maintaining a knowledge base of answers but site owners would be wise to pay to get listed in it although free submission is still possible. Teoma is the search engine at AJ. Paid inclusion at $30 for the first URL buys indexing within 7 days, refreshing every week for 12 months. Direct Hit, which used to track click popularity of sites, has been closed but it tracking capabilities will be "layered in" "some time soon".
A Look at Ask Jeeves and Teoma, an interview with Jim Lanzone with Ask Jeeves by Robin Nobles Ideamarketers.com (Summer 2002 - no date shown)
WayBack Machine: Brewster Kahle, creator of the Wayback Machine, was interviewed in New Scientist -- Way Back When (November 2002). Kahle calls the archive "the people's medium, the wired way". In the interview Kahle talks about size (100 terabytes) and growth, servers and storage being used, and his work to promote universal access.
Communities: "Author Howard Rheingold sees the next big tech trend in Tokyo and Helsinki, where teens busily tap text messages on their cell phones". Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community that first brought attention to communities on the Net, has written a new book - Smart Mobs - to look at the consequences of an always-on mobile communications. Groups are emerging - commercial, social, revolutionary and terrorist.
Learning from the "Thumb Tribes" Business Week Online (Nov 20, 2002)
Unstructured Data: For companies and their stores of internal documents, "the Web changed everything", says this article. Guy Creese of Aberdeen Group, a market analysis company for business technology -- ""We should thank two companies: Google and Autonomy," said Creese. Each of those firms changed the way we think about searching unstructured data, he asserted. Google popularized and improved search techniques, and Autonomy made effective information categorization possible. " Search tools will need to be able to handle structured and unstructured. Creese believes that iPhrase bridges the two.
Turning Unstructured Data into Gold by Kimberly Hill, CRMDaily (Nov 20, 2002)
Google Ranking: A clear article about page ranking at Google. Google uses 100 or more factors in addition to link analysis to rank pages. But companies like SearchKing try to work the link system to put its customers at the top. How much jostling for position can the Web bear? Google's got a secret all want to know by Guy Dixon (Nov 21, 2002) Globe and Mail.
Dolphin Search: DolphinSearch "uses artificial intelligence to search for context and meaning, much like a human, said CEO Andrew Kraftsow." - it understands context. LexisNexis, the large legal and business information provider, is a marketing partner. Detective DolphinSearch by Roger Harris (Nov 14, 2002) Ventura County Star
Inktomi: Inktomi Unveils Web Search 9 Press Release (Nov 20, 2002).
Inktomi has added new features which will show in time at MSN Search, Overture and possibly Hotbot. It claims it reindexes its database every 10 to 14 days and that thedatabase is now at 3 billion documents. WebSearch 9 will offer --
- smart summaries: either word in context snippets, human editor description, paid inclusion subscription.
- index connect geotargeting: paid inclusion customers will be able to target information according to "global region".
- spelling suggestions: will correct mistyped words and names. Database will be built up from user inquires.
- xml interface: content providers can feed "deep web content" to Inktomi, and portals will be able to customize.
Gary Price says they'll also be including pdf and other MS Office documents.
Inktomi Introduces New Web Search Features by Gary Price (Nov 20, 2002)
Who is? Avaquest claims it can answer who-is questions by searching Google. It knows with a very high confidence that George Washington was the first president of the United States, but timidly proposes Kim Campbell as the first prime minister of Canada. You can have lots of fun with this but don't depend on it for an answer. AvaQuest GooglePeople -- http://www.avaquest.com/demos/GooglePeople/GooglePeople.cgi
Newsreels Online: Not just online news, but the old newsreels run in the movie houses from 1910 to 1970. The reels will be at British Pathe web site - great Flash intro.
Newsreel archive launched online BBC News (Nov 19, 2002)
Shopping Online: Tis the season. Chris Sherman is running a series this week about shopping online. Look for issues 401 to 404 in the Search Day Archives. He starts with comparison shopping, offers some product research sites, profiles DealTime, and rounds up several specialized shopping search sites.
Online News: BBC is tops for news in the UK Nua Surveys (Nov 14, 2002). News.bbc.co.uk is the most popular news site in the UK for visitors and time spent according to Neilsen-NetRatings. Other popular sites are guardian.co.uk, cnn.com, ft.com, telegraph.co.uk. "The research also suggests that Internet users prefer different types of content on different news sites."
Spiders vs Directories: Search Engine Positioning Leader iProspect Warns That Google Contract Extension With Yahoo! Reflects Industry Mega-Trend: Spider-Based Search Engines Have Defeated Human-Edited Directories -- Spelling Serious Implications For Companies Marketing On Web press release from iProspect (Nov 18, 2002). The title says it all. iProspect advises that being included in Yahoo's Business Express program is essential for large companies and recommended for small in order to get the extra ranking boost that Yahoo provides. Also, web sites must be designed to be spider friendly - no more dependence on flash and graphics. (That will be a relief to searchers.) Pay-for-placement is an option but very expensive for some keywords.
Demographics and Stats: Pew Internet and American Life has two new studies:
Parents Online: Parents in the US with children are more likely to have online access than non-parents. From the press release: "Seventy percent of parents with a child at home use the Internet, compared to 53% of non-parents. These parents are more enthusiastic than non-parents about technology and its benefits and are strong believers that their children need to master computers and the Internet in order to get ahead in life." However, "parents are less likely than non-parents to use the Internet on a typical day. "
Baby Boomers and the Internet: Boomers (38 to 56) use the Internet much more than Seniors (not surprising) but are less wired and active than the GenXrs (18-29) and those that are online check wealth and health sites whereas GenXrs do jobs and houses. As we know, the Web has something for everyone.
Altavista: There's a thread about Altavista in the Cre8asite Forums. Kim put the new AV through some tests and finds that it won't show well in Netscape because of use of CSS pages, the directory isn't as obvious, and there is too much small text - among other points. Read the discussion at Alta Vista - New Design Forgot the Users (Nov 11, 2002)
I use IE 6.0 browser most of the time and find the text at AV fairly easy to read - though I don't like the blue colour. AlltheWeb is the one I find unreadable unless I adjust the text size to medium. Others must have complained. ATW has added 4 choices for text size to the home page - pick the one that works for you. OK - but we shouldn't need to do that.
Themes-Based Spiders: Some search engines use spiders that can derive from the pages it indexes what the site is about overall - its focus or theme. This article says there are no pure themes-based spiders, but Google, Altavista, Inktomi, Fast do some analysis as part of overall ranking. Larisa Thomason at Net Mechanic described it in Search Engine Themes And Page Rank (Oct 22, 2001) (which oddly turned up through Moreover on Nov 18, 2002).
Altavista: This article about the changes at Altavista says that Altavista will interpret the searcher's IP number "to present you with a geographically and linguistically specific starting point".
"The goal, according to AltaVista, is to provide a service that gives you the tools to get the answer to your question, rather than simply index the most relevant content to a set of keywords. Similarly, by unintrusively getting information about the user, searches can be given an element of personalisation from the word go."
UPDATED: AltaVista cleans up (Nov 15, 2002) Computer Shopper
Search Results: iProspect has studied the behaviour of searchers and found that 56.6% of searchers don't look past the second page of results. Only 23% of searchers even look at the second page. Most people always use the same search engine (52.1%). Some (13%) will use different search engines for different purposes. When search results are poor, 27.2% will switch to another search engine, and 7.5% will change words. (Presumably the others quit searching). Many (45.9%) are satified with the results most of the time.
Search Engine Usage Ranks High By Robyn Greenspan (Nov 14, 2002) Cyberatlas
Teoma: Teoma has introduced an OR function. Must be in Upper Case. It appears to work with phrases and somewhat with fielded search:
intitle:("conan doyle" OR "charles dickens") = 19,928
intitle:"conan doyle" = 2985
intitle:"charles dickens" = 16943
However, intitle:"conan doyle" OR intitle:"charles dickens" = 2. Teoma searched for AND - and ignored the OR.
Also, it won't properly nest the query even if parentheses are used. With "charles dickens" (hardcastle OR weller) it looks for ("charles dickens" AND hardcastle) OR weller. Many pages come up about many wellers who weren't Dicken's Sam Weller. Total count was 121,982. But, (hardcastle OR weller) "charles dickens" has 21, 503. It looked for hardcastle OR ("charles dickens" AND weller).
Be very careful using OR. Teoma doesn't have true boolean construction.
Teoma has also introduced a spell check in beta.
See also Greg Notess - Teoma OR and Phrases (Nov 12, 2002)
Inktomi: Inktomi returned to its core by selling to Verity its enterprise search technology (which had been based on the Ultraseek technology it had bought from Disney). Inktomi is going to focus on web search and make its money from paid inclusion for which it already has over 100,000 customers including Amazon and Walmart. This article says it will be introducing changes in the next week.
Inktomi Exits Enterprise Search By Colin C. Haley (Nov 14, 2002) Silicon Valley internet.com
Postal Code: Tad Piesakowski of BBC News says you can learn a lot about your neighbourhood - and the neighbours, just doing a search on your postcode (as they say in the UK). I found mainly myself and postings made long ago to mailing lists. Web reveals hidden lives BBC News (Nov 14, 2002)
Opera Browser: Opera is on the move again. Rebuilt, faster Opera browser debuts by John Borland. CNet News (NOv 12, 2002) It's said to be faster, has email and newsgroup reading, meets Web standards - worth trying especially if you find your browser is slow.
Online News: Rumours that ABC News and AOL Time Warner's CNN will merge. Cyberjournist.net reports CNN and ABC News...A Marriage? A look at the potential impact on the online news sector (nov 2002). Some interesting figures:
- 20.5 million in the US visited CNN.com; 8.5 million visited ABC News sites.
- both attract more men especially 25-34 age. Men make up 50% of Internet users in the US and 52% read general news, but 59% of CNN users are men, and 56 % of ABC News.
- audience skew to the two-member household. Hard to know what to make of that figure. Maybe larger households don't have time for the detail at CNN.
- proportionaly more people on the West Coast use ABC and CNN.
MyWay: MyWay says "Yahoo is toast". Web portal takes aim at Yahoo! AP reported in Globe and Mail (Nov 12, 2002) MyWay promises to be a fast, free portal just like in the old days - and as we noted before, it is using everyone's favourite search engine - what Google would look like if it were a portal.
More on Altavista: People are hopeful that AV really intends to be a better search engine. But the greatest reason to cheer may be that it has eliminated pop-up and pop-under ads.
AltaVista Advances Internet Search With New Features and Functionality for `Power of Precision' Searching Business Wire through News Alert (NOv 12, 2002)
Also see Chris Sherman Can AltaVista's Phoenix Help it Rise Again? (Nov 12, 2002) "Whatever direction AltaVista chooses, it seems (finally) to be on a path toward redeeming itself in the eyes of its formerly loyal community of users. Time will tell, though, whether this Phoenix will genuinely help AltaVista rise once again from the ashes."
Google and Dmoz directories: There have been problems connecting to business categories in the Google Directory. This post in google.public.support (Has Google Search Changed?) reports that DMOZ redid its hierarchy of categories for Business and the Google Directory is not in sync yet. (Nov 7, 2002)
Online News: Steve Outing at E&P Publisher says News Sites Need To Go On Diets (Oct 30, 2002). He points to the home-page brevity of the International Herald Tribune as a model to emulate. USAToday and Washington Post are two examples of too much (to which we can add the Globe and Mail). He thinks Google News is effectively spartan too.
Fazzle: It used to be SearchOnline.info, a fairly good meta-searcher with a range of search engines and features, as well as news and a search alert system. Now it is Fazzle.com and it intends to serve the Pay Per Click community more. Will have to wait a bit to see how this affects search results.
Fazzle Meta Search Engine Launches PPC Service, Web Marketing Tools URLWire (Nov 8, 2002)
Altavista: Altavista has a new look and some new features.
- Changed logo to a swirl in red. The mountains are gone.
- Now indexing pdf files.
- Database is over 1 billion pages.
- Is refreshing 50% of commonly used pages every day. (Based on monitoring which pages people look at).
- Dropped the Looksmart directory categories from the front page. Still available if you click on the Directory tab.
- Added features to news and renamed it News 2.0. Can search news publications by region, time period or topic.
- Add a link for "more precision". This opens a new search box with more options. I'm betting not many people will use this. One article said that more precision will "will search for pages based on natural-language questions". This doesn't appear to be the case - at least not on Nov 9.
- Changes apply to the Canada and UK versions and presumably all the others.
See also AltaVista searches for a new image (Nov 8, 2002) By Stephanie Olsen. CNet
Web Search--AltaVista by Gary Price (Nov 11, 2002)
Teoma: Teoma added syntax that is very similar to Google's. Also the database is up to 350 million pages. These changes are not on Teoma's help page yet.
site: limit to a domain, eg, site:utoronto.ca mcluhan
intitle:marx engels - looks for at least one word in title. Can be combined with site: and inurl. Doesn't appear to work with intext.
inurl:shakespeare
intext:marx engels has only 4 hits, whereas a plain marx engels has 53,000 hits. Intext either doesn't work properly or means something other than in text.
See also Teoma Introduces Some Syntax, Database Enlarged by Gary Price (Nov 1, 2002)
Google: Google claims 3 billion pages - "Searching 3,083,324,652 web pages". A portion of these are links it knows about rather than the full page. About 40% are non-English.
Google Answers: Google fired Jessamyn West for her article in Searcher about Information for Sale: My Experience With Google Answers. She reports on her subsequent correspondence with Google at http://www.librarian.net/surreal.shtml . West worries that Google Answers with its commercial operation will denigrate the work of reference librarians and Google Answers claims that librarians are using the service. Somehow I doubt it - but perhaps West will find out.
Image Search: This tool from Princeton will search for images in its database based on an image. Either find one through a keyword search and find similar, or use the whiteboard to draw a shape and find some matches. It offers 2D and 3D shapes. http://shape.cs.princeton.edu/search.html
Princeton Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group describes its research into shapes as: "Our goal is to investigate issues in shape-based retrieval and analysis of 3D models. As a first step, we have developed a search engine for 3D polygonal models ... The main research issues are to develop effective shape representations and query interfaces."
Best Business Sites: Time magazine put together its list of Best websites for business (NOv 4, 2002) by Mary Anne Murray Buechner and Jyoti Thottam.
Net Demographics: From Nua Surveys:
Non-English speakers dominant online (Oct 31, 2002) - Native English speakers may be only 36.5 percent of the global online population. European languages is estimated at 35.5% and Asian at 25.8%.
More than 600 million people have Net access (Nov 1, 2002) 605 million had net access at the end of September. Of that 182.67 million were in North America at only 30.1 % of the total. Europe is 31.5% and Asian is 30.9%.
Given these numbers we should soon see some changes in Web content.
Google Power: Does Google's power threaten the Web? by Stephanie Olsen. CNet News /ZDNet UK (Oct 31, 2002) - Interesting article on connection between top ranking and advertising.
"So powerful has Google become that if you're not listed on its indexes, you might as well not exist - and getting that listing appears increasingly connected to advertising and currying favour."
Testing Search Engines: Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan ran a test to see how well search engines could deliver a preselected "perfect page". Tests were run on Google, Alltheweb, MSN Search, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Lycos, Yahoo. Guess who the three top performers were.
The Search Engine "Perfect Page" Test in SearchDay (Nov 4, 2002)
Looksmart: Looksmart is making money but is it really delivering results? LookSmart bounces back from the dot-com crash by Garry Barker. The Age (Nov 4, 2002)
"Paid listings now represent nearly 80 per cent of total revenue. Small business listings were up 44 per cent and paid clicks up 37 per cent to 120 million, compared with 51 million in the third quarter of 2001."
Natural Language: Albert is ready to receive questions at its demo site http://websearch.albert.com/ . The Albert Meaning Interpreter accepts natural language queries and straight keyword searches and expands them through a knowledge base to help remove ambiguity. The demo site uses the Fast Search engine.
"The Albert Meaning Interpreter (AMI) works by intuitively inferring the underlying meaning behind users' search requests. It analyzes queries at a conceptual level and creates an expert query which is then fed into an index to find the relevant information. This approach not only significantly increases the accuracy of the results returned but it also allows users to express their requests as they would in every day conversation."
From Albert About Us.
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