Metasearch: Stephen Arnold has not given up on metasearch. "Some remarkable innovation is underway in metasearch. Readers will want to look at Vivisimo ... Another Web site using enhanced metasearch is EZ2find." Arnold / Xenky proceeds to review Ez2Find -- an attractive search portal. And he concludes by noting that "Metasearch is becoming increasingly important in searching internal repositories of information". Metasearch: Looking many places at once by Xenky (Stephen Arnold) (May 30, 2003).
Vivisimo: Stephen Arnold, noted speaker at many Internet conferences, reviewed Vivisimo -- Vivisimo: Clustering Delivers Information Overlook (May 2003)
Of interest:
""With Vivisimo's document clustering, there is no need for a controlled vocabulary or for pre-labeling (indexing) of the documents. This manual work is the expensive, slow downside of many taxonomy systems. Manual processing of records, building controlled vocabularies, and double-checking the word lists and word linkages cost money, "lots of it," added Dr. Valdes-Perez."
"Vivisimo makes it possible to deliver organized information to employees without the punishing costs and the complexity of taxonomy building."
Ask Jeeves: Kanisa, a customer services applications company, is buying Jeeves Solutions - possibly for use in call centers. Ask Jeeves will concentrate on web search with ask.com and Teoma. Information Week speculates that this will make Ask Jeeves a more attractive takeover target for AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft.
Kanisa Acquires Jeeves Solutions Line 56 (May 29, 2003)
Kanisa Buys Ask Jeeves's Enterprise Unit destination CRM (May 29, 2003)
Don't Ask Jeeves Anymore Tony Kontzer, Information Week (May 29, 2003)
Overture: Overture's acquisition of Fast and Altavista seems nearly complete. Overture Takes FAST Track With AltaVista Search by Sandy Serva. EContent (May 8, 2003)
Dr Gary Flake is the chief scientist. "Even the best search technologies in existence today only return exactly what an Internet user is looking for about half of the time," Flake says. "The combination of AltaVista and FAST will allow us to develop the best and most comprehensive search products and services with the goal of delivering the most relevant results to users every time a search is conducted."
Search Engine Advertising: Paying Your Way to the Top: Search Engine Advertising by David M Scott. eContent (May 23, 2003) - Are paid listings or search for performance good or bad? This article describes how the system works and says, by and large, paid listings are beneficial. In addition to bringing in needed revenue for the public search engines, the listings also provide information on competitors and services. Those interviewed for this article thought that users were very capable of knowing which results are paid for - though the recent findings by Consumer Watch suggest otherwise. As well, Overture and Google claim to screen advertisers and their listings very carefully.
Search Privacy: Search Privacy: An Issue?, Part 2 by Danny Sullivan. ClickZ Today (May 28, 2003) finds that Yahoo is a greater worry than Google when it comes to privacy. Subscriber activity could be monitored, saved searches would be known by Yahoo. Can we trust them not to use this? Google has looked into ways to enhance searching through personalized search but has been slowed by people's concerns about privacy.
Search Tip: TVC Alert has tips on using search engines for Fast Facts (May 29, 2003)
Alerts: It's getting harder to find a free keyword alerting service. Net2One has been a news aggregator, offering headline news from some 2000 sources grouped by topic and supporting keyword queries as alerts. Net2One has just completed its makeover to charge for the queries - 89 Euro for 3 queries for the year (though you can sign up by June 15 and pay only 49 Euro.) Subscribers may also search the news, and probably view the selections more easily. A "guest" subscriber is limited to viewing the headlines in 8 high level topics and creating a e-newsletter of headlines from selected sources. Exactly how to do that as part of "Configure Newsletter" is not clear and possibly the English version, which only came online on May 26, isn't working properly yet. The Help page, for example, is only available in French. But at this stage, the new Net2One looks more difficult to use for narrowing by topic (topic groupings are much fewer), viewing stories (font colour is pale and text size cannot be increased), configuring the newsletter (I can't find a list of sources to pick from - though they must be somewhere). It's going to have to improve before I'll spend $80 Cdn (49 Euro)
New York Times will be charging for its Times News Tracker starting June 13, 2002. The introductory offer $19.95 US/year for
- The ability to track up to 10 topics simultaneously
- Your own 90-day archive of articles matching your topic selection
- Breaking news alerts
News Tracker faq has more information about the features.
What to do? Yahoo News Alerts are still free. And it may be possible to set up notifiers to watch specific pages for keywords. Trackengine, Infominder, Watchthatpage, and the software WebSite-Watcher (aignes.com) support this.
Search Engine Freshness: Greg Notess has new statistics on the freshness of contents of the major search engines. His study looks at newest page, oldest page, and average length of time since indexing. The average of the main engines - Google, Alltheweb, MSN, and Inktomi - is about a month. Altavista, Gigablast, Teoma, and Wisenut weren't very fresh. Search Engine Statistics: Freshness Showdown (May 17, 2003)
Northern Light: Cory Kleinschmidt at Traffick.com says that Northern Light Should Stay Away from "General" Search (May 27, 2003). This is in response to the news that C. David Seuss has bought back the company in the divine bankruptcy sale. Kleinschmidt never found Northern Light to be useful and doesn't think the world needs another search engine to do public web search.
Ah - but Northern Light had features for clustering documents, for search syntax, and for handling natural language queries that no other engine has yet matched. It had an excellent current news service. And the Special Collection drawn from 7000 sources was a modestly priced source of premium content, especially for those who couldn't afford the more expensive commercial providers.
According to the press release, Seuss will first resurrect the enterprise portal for corporate customers. Future for a search engine is uncertain. ""We have started discussions with interested parties about ideas for new approaches to the Web search problem, ideas that represent a collaboration between others who have done innovative work and Northern Light. These ideas may result in uniquely useful Web search services." (Press release)
ResearchBuzz hopes for the full return of Northern Light, and advises it to be "feisty". Northern Light Coming Back? (May 26, 2003)
Classics: Take a break, read the classics. Charles Bowen at Editor and Publisher did that. Web Sites Let You Search Classic Literature - Research Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy (May 20, 2003) Recommends gutenberg.net and Internet Public Library for free online text and classicreader.com. Visit your public library website too - it might have a subscription to NetLibrary.
Search engine performance: Students at Stanford University figured out ways to make pageranking at Google faster. They presented their findings at the World Wide Web Conference. Google could be five times faster ZDNet UK (May 27, 2003). Let's hope Google listens and then hires them.
Spam Blockers: Wonder why your email didn't get to your recipient? It might have been rejected as spam. CNet warns that Spam blockers may wreak e-mail havoc by Declan McCullagh (May 27, 2003). -- Some are adopting challenge-response software. On receipt of a message, the software challenges the sender to confirm the sending.
"In theory, well-designed challenge-response utilities won't challenge mail from known correspondents or mail that you've actually asked to receive. Unfortunately, many current challenge-response systems are poorly designed, which could wreak havoc on mailing lists and other legitimate communications. This could make e-mail far less useful than it is today."
This is getting as bad as add-ons to telephone services to screen out calls from unlisted and untraceable numbers.
Information Science: Information Research is an electronic journal from the UK. "Information Research is a free, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making freely accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. " Discovered by Chris Sherman - What's New in Information Science (May 27, 2003).
WWW Conference The twelfth International World Wide Web conference took place in Budapest, Hungary May 20 - 24. http://www2003.org/. Proceedings aren't online yet, but Chris Sherman got some advance links to papers he listed in Virtually Attending the 12th IW3C2 Conference (May 20, 2003)
Wired News covered the conference. Big Changes for Search Engines by Michelle Delio (May 27, 2003) Says the future will be "fast, smart, personalized to suit every user's needs - and pretty".
MetaSearch Turbo 10 (www.turbo10.com)takes on the "deep net" with its new version of a metasearch engine. This is a WOW product. Never mind canned collections of major search engines. Turbo10 has one, but it also lets you create your own collection (or more than one), picking from about 1,000 listed engines. A few are the big and well known - Google, Altavista, MSN etc. Most are the smaller topic-specific engines that are outside of the reach of the majors and are sometimes called "deep net". Users can create a collection of news search engines, or recipes, or books, or genealogy - as a few examples - creating a collection is merely a matter of scrolling the list. The drawback is that syntax is non-existant for shaping the quer. However, on the positive, Turbo10 will cluster the results into topics which help the searcher select the most relevant results.
Turbo 10 demonstrated its new search engine at the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference in Budapest on May 20 - 24. With this it issued a technical paper titled The Mechanics of a Deep Net Metasearch Engine. "Turbo10 automates the process of creating and maintaining software adapters that connect to, search, and extract results from a multitude of search engines." Article describes how Turbo10 searches the Deep Net.
Turbo10.com is a metasearcher to use and watch.
Alltheweb: Search tricks at Alltheweb are recapitulated at Pandia.
eContent Institute: The May/June issue of Information Highways is online -- Table of Contents. Of interest: Knowledge Media Institute (at University of Toronto), "Can a bean counter make people use your intranet" - on motivation, "Ideas Rule" - on group decision making support systems, Toolkit - spam fighters, The All-In-One Page - search aid.
Codie Awards: Software & Information Industry Association presented Codie awards in 40 categories covering online information sources (Wall Street Journal, Factiva, Lexis Nexis), education (A.D.A.M, Placeware), tools (Macromedia, ZoneAlarm), companies (Symantec). Take a moment to look at the SIIA Codie list.
Domain Names: Who Was, Who Is, and Who Will Be: Domain Name Ownership Tools by Mark Goldstein. Online. (May 2003) Covers free and for-fee. See also Gary Price's comments on WHOIS- he recommends Sam Spade.
Alltheweb: Alltheweb has clustered results again. They are listed at the bottom of the page. See this example for "digital cameras" reviews. This is probably done from analyzing words in title and part of page. It doesn't look like a revival of using Open Directory Project categories as a base. ATW doesn't say how it does it.
Information Overload: Gerry McGovern spoke at the Australian Computer Society conference about information overload. He pointed to 70% of website content being unread, people becoming less productive and more trapped in the short term, email volume continues to rise with people sending out an average of 20 a day. Article refers to other writers on this topic - Dr David Lewis, David Shenk, James Gleick, Kristan Wheaton. Spinning Around by David Adams. Sydney Morning Herald (May 20, 2003)
Yahoo News: Yahoo has added business content and has more search features. See Gary Price's report on Yahoo News Search.
Web Credibility: Consumer WebWatch reported on the findings of its most recent study into searcher behaviour in using search engines. People are still confused by feature vs sponsored sites. The panel discussion looked at several aspects of paid search. Building Trust on the Web: Consumer WebWatch's First National Summit on Web Credibility (April 24, 2003) Panel members included representatives from Overture, Google, Consumer Reports, Consumer WebWatch, and Hewlett-Packard (librarian Eugenie Prime).
Pandia has some comments also - noting that a survey group of 17 is very small, but also that it will not be to Overture's or Google's advantage if search comes to be distrusted because of questioned creditablity or results. Searchers find it hard to distinguish between regular and paid results.
Movie Reviews: New York Time movie reviews are available online for free back to 1983. NYTime Movies.
Northern Light: David Seuss, former CEO of Northern Light, has bought Northern Light search at the divine bankruptcy sale. Let's hope that will lead to its resurrection. Northern Light to Shine Again Reported by Gary Price in ResourceShelf.
Search Engine Privacy: Danny Sullivan debunks the view that Google is big brother. There is still anonymity with the IP address and cookies. But registration, such as at Yahoo, is another matter. Search Privacy: An Issue?, Part 1 Clickz Today (May 21, 2003)
Google Hacks: Why Google Hacks is a bestseller by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (May 22, 2003) Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest is at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Sherman says -- "Google Hacks is loaded with information, and it's a book that's both an excellent tutorial and a handy reference guide to the search engine." Tara Calishain in her ResearchBuzz newsletter has said that O'Reilly will be issuing a smaller version of the book this summer -- the Google Pocket Guide with just the hints and tips, no programming.
Weblogs: LLRX is alive again - excellent article on Web Logs for Lawyers: Lessons from Ernie the Attorney by Jerry Lawson (May 19, 2003) Lawson compared weblogs to web sites from big law firms, and determined that the weblogs were much more popular. Article reviews four reasons that make weblogs attractive as marketing tools. Especially noted increased use of RSS and newsaggregators. (Picked up from TVC ALert)
Search Strategy: Mary Ellen Bates recommends asking the question - who cares? (May 2003)
Daypop: Gary Price interviewed Daypop's Dan Chan. Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine (May 21, 2003) It's all the work of one man, begun because he wanted to expand his reading. Now has 1000 news sources and 19,000 weblogs.
Opera: The Opera browser, now at 7.1, is getting better and better. Bill Machrone at PC Magazine has been using it for 2 weeks. It feels faster than IE, will block pop-ups (so will Netscape), and has a metasearch on Google and Alltheweb. Better Browsers, Killer Keyboards (June 17, 2003)
Online Travel: My AvantGo users want more travel services for their mobile devices. AvantGo surveyed their users and found that 52% bought over 50% of their travel arrangements online.
My AvantGo Travel Survey Paints Picture of Today's Highly Mobile Travelers AvantGo Press Release (April 22, 2003)
Traveler's First Trip is Often the Internet By Robyn Greenspan CyberAtlas (May 20, 2003)
RSS Search: Feedster - A search engine built on RSS Feeds. ResearchBuzz.com
Yahoo: TVC Alert lists all the new things you can do at Yahoo -- Yahoo Tries to Come Back (May 20, 2003)
Open Directory Project: Is ODP alive? Cory Kleinschmidt at Traffick.com is asking. ODP has been saying its servers are overloaded for several months. Kleinschmidt says ODP has always been a mess, but I have long preferred it to Yahoo and certainly Looksmart for its categories and non-commercial operation - except that today many categories don't have editors, it's falling out of date, and performance is dreadful. You Down, ODP? Yeah You Know Me! (May 19, 2003) It will be a great loss to many, including Google, if ODP withers and dies.
Spam or Targeted E-Mail? Steve Outing at E&P looks at newspaper use of the email addresses of subscribers -- how to make sure that "your targeted e-mail is wanted, is relevant, and is anticipated".
Profiting From E-mail In an Ocean of Spam Publishers Discover the Joy of Opt-in, Just as Forces Conspire Against Them (May 14, 2003)
Wondir.org Wondir.org, a community search service, is looking for testers. Chris Sherman says Help Test a WonDir-ful Search Engine SearchDay (May 19, 2003)
Search Strategy: Search engine secrets revealed BBC News (May 18, 2003) advises searchers to get to know one search engine well rather than running same query at several. No, no - search engines rank differently, index differently - you can get a different perspective. Also, while it is certainly worthwhile to get to know the features of one search engine well, it's also important to be able to pick from 3 or 4 top tools and use the appropriately. Who can live with just one screw driver or just one wrench, however adjustable?
Content Management: Free White paper about content management from InMagic. Delivering Content that Makes a Difference by Bill Trippe. Available at http://www.inmagic.com/news/white_papers/white_papers.html
"The paper describes the key components of effective content management and provides relevant case studies to illustrate how companies have organized and managed content at the local level and provided users with access to ongoing views of highly relevant information. "
RocketInfo: RocketInfo has a new page for its RocketNews service that shows top news stories by geographic region and topic. http://www.rocketnews.com/search/index.html. [Spotted by TVC Alert]
Google: Architecture of the Google server system for serving results to queries is described at Microdoc News (May 19, 2003) How a Google Search Result is Served
Wikis: Will wikis - the collaborative web-page software - challenge groupware like Lotus Notees? Business Is Toying With a Web Tool by Amy Cortese. New York Times (May 18, 2003) Describes wikis, the ethos of it "creative anarchy" and its etiquette. Mentions wiki software from SocialText, a San Francisco start-up. Software includes Web log and chat capabilities, and security features.
"Lately, though, the business world has begun experimenting with wikis. For example, at a recent technology conference by the publisher O'Reilly & Associates, participants set up a wiki for posting notes on conference sessions, forming discussion groups, creating a collaborative glossary of emerging technology terms and even organizing ride shares."
"The creative anarchy of the wiki is the philosophical inverse of conventional corporate groupware software. Groupware's highly structured rules and processes do not always reflect the way people really work. Employees often ignore costly corporate-sanctioned software and revert to informal social networks — whether simply e-mail or impromptu water-cooler discussions. "
Blogging: What will the social historians make of all this in 50 years? Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It by Warren St John. New York Times (May 18, 2003) People are blogging their daily thoughts however foolish, unkind, personal, or ill considered.
"While personal blogs have been around for years, their proliferation has caused a wrinkle in the social fabric among people in their teens, 20's and early 30's. Inundated with bloggers, they are finding that every clique now has its own Matt Drudge, someone capable of instantly turning details of their lives into saucy Internet fare."
Google: Is Google the "second superpower"? A search at Google suggests so. Geoffrey Nunberg at the New York Times says As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation (May 18, 2003). Is there is a collective mind at work or is this tyranny of the activists. Article examines Google's "clout in the marketplace of ideas". James F Moore at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School commented that the Internet was a "shared collective mind" and a "second superpower". There were so many links to the story that it seemed the second superpower really is Google.
From the article: "When you search for a common item like "ford" or "baseball," the engines naturally give the highest rankings to major sites that are linked to by hundreds or thousands of other pages. But when searches are more specific — whether "second superpower" or "Sinatra arrangers" — the rankings will mirror the interests of the groups that aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts, hobbyists and, often, the crackpots."
"THE outcomes of Google's popularity contests can be useful to know, but it's a mistake to believe they reflect the consensus of the "Internet community," whatever that might be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy — the picture that's implicit in all the talk of the Internet as a "digital commons" or "collective mind.""
Alltheweb: Alltheweb has a bookmark for the URL investigator that will display extra information about a site in one click. Also Alltheweb can convert things - just type convert: followed by the measure to be calculated, for example: convert:60 kilometers . Does length, weight, temperature, area, cooking quantities, speed and time. From Alltheweb What's New (May 15, 2003)
Google Cache: Google cache is explained in TVC Alert -- Response to Q and A. (May 13, 2003).
My Yahoo and Moreover: Andrew Goodman lets off a scorcher about Yahoo's deteriorating My Yahoo service and Moreover's mishmash of blogs and news. Two-and-a-Half Point Online News Manifesto. He's right. Yahoo headlines do get stuck - and btw, Sympatico is even worse. Moreover, Goodman comments, was supposed to be the new "Reuters" of topical news. It did well at that for a couple of years, but today seems to pick up anything - one paragraph entry or a real article, good and bad. Goodman doesn't mention that it's much harder to view the news at Moreover, and that Moreover no longer gives individuals free feeds.
Health: JAMA reports on a study of Use of the Internet and E-mail for Health Care Information (May 14, 2003) It found that use of the Internet for health information is not as widespread or commonly believed. About 40% of respondents turned to the Internet for information in 2001 and 1/3 of those who used the Internet for health could say it affected heath decisions. Internet had no effect on contact with doctors (94% said that Internet use had no effect on the number of physician visits). 5% used the Internet for prescriptions. But - the study was 2001 data - and it may indicate that the health care system is slow to adopt the Internet for communication with patients.
InfoToday 2003: Presentation links for the InfoToday conference May 5 - May 8 2003 are up. Of interest to searchers:
Fine Tuning your Search Skills by Mary Ellen Bates. Examines free and for-fee options. Uses a real research example. Excellent tutorial on methods and resources to use for conducting research.
Legal Research of Non-Legal Professional by Steven Anderson. Well structured - for US law.
Five Cool Tools for Searchers by Sheri Lanza (often writes for Information Today)
Also sessions on taxonomies, indexing, content management, XML, Digital libraries and collections.
Daypop: If Google does introduce a search engine for weblogs what will it mean for Daypop? Can Daypop Stay Out of Google's Headlights? by Mark Glaser. OJR (May 13, 2003)
Google News: Microdoc News is not impressed by the "regional" Google News either. It compared the Australian version to the UK and noted that although different sources were used for each region the stories were very similar. Microdoc News thinks the problem lies with the news source - they are all running basically the same copy. How Regional Is Google News? (May 13, 2003)
If you'd like to compare the actual headlines of newspapers go to http://www.newseum.org/
Google News: Google Offering International-Specific Google News Research Buzz (May 12, 2003) Especially note Google News Canada -- http://news.google.ca/ Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India are also available.
Google News Canada debuts by Jack Kapica. Globe Technology (May 12, 2003)
"Google News Canada, launched Monday, gives more prominence to stories and sources local to Canada while it searches current news headlines and photos from more than 4,500 international news sources, company spokesmen said."
But as Rita Vine at Sitelines points out - this only has stories that mentions Canadian come to the top on the main page, it doesn't affect the search, nor is there a way to select by news sources by country.
Google Dance: What is the Google Dance? Richard Zwicky (May 9, 2003) SearchGuild -- "The name "Google Dance" is often used to describe the period when a major index update of the Google search engine is being implemented.... The Dance can easily be identified by significant changes in search results, and by an updating of Google's cache of all indexed pages." Also describes how Google updates its servers, what to check when the dance is happening, and why it matters to people in the search engine optimizing industry.
Overture: Overture Readies New Search Products By Brian Morrissey. SiliconValley.Internet.com (May 9, 2003) -- Overture lays out plans for paid listings, paid inclusion, and content match.
Google Hacks: WebTalkGuys Radio interviewed Rael Dornfest, co-author of Google Hacks. Discussion of 30 minutes can be heard through streaming audio. Some excerpts with search tips are available in text. Mastering the art of Google - straight from the experts - A conversation with "Google Hacks" co-author Rael Dornfest
Changing Web: Is the Internet and the Web living up to the ecstatic predictions of a few years ago? 'New Media': Ready for the Dustbin of History? by Steve Lohr. New York Times (May 11, 2003) takes a somewhat neutral position. So far e-commerce has won, but high speed access may still make a difference. And of course, it has changed our daily lives through email and personal research - health, travel, jobs.
Of interest -- ""In the early days, in the 1990's, we thought that media was the big application on the Web," said Michael Kinsley, who founded the online magazine Slate in 1996. "But it turned out to be e-commerce." "
"So the promised wonders of new media may yet arrive. In the meantime, the Internet has changed daily life in ways most people could not have imagined in 1994. People manage their lives and relationships via e-mail and instant messaging, and second-graders are skilled Google searchers. "
Google: Google indexes about 3 billion pages from some 10 billion on the Web. Microdoc News analyzed What Google Leaves Out (May 10, 2003) Their test seem to indicate that Google drops older pages that don't haven't been changed or used.
Weblogs: Have you been finding results from a Google search clogged with blogs? Google to fix blog noise problem By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco The Register (May 9, 2003). Google's CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned that Google would be creating its own blog search. Orlowski thinks (and hopes) this will mean weblog results will be removed from the Web search.
Online News Alerts WSJ.com pings the news by Lisa Bowman. CNet News (May 8, 2003). "The online leg of The Wall Street Journal on Thursday began offering stock quotes and snippets of its news stories to users of AOL Instant Messenger, in an attempt to attract new subscribers to its site." Hmm - getting breaking news through an Instant Messenger - variant on the idea of the always-on ticker bar.
Paid Search: Special report from News.com on In Search of Profits - Engines pin hopes on new keyword advertising by Stephanie Olsen (May 8, 2003). Gives a very clear description of content-targeting, defines the three types of paid search -- paid listings, paid inclusion, in context, and reviews the market and revenue projections. Meantime ContextWeb, a newish player, is trying to change the search experience from a list of hits to a progressive refinement based on pages viewed. All this in one article.
Corporate Search: Entopia Knowledge Locator Wins Technology Award for ''Best Search Engine;'' Entopia Recognized By The 2003 Software And Information Industry Association Codie Awards Business Wire (May 8, 2003) via Newsalert. Of interest: "The Entopia Knowledge Locator combines semantic or concept content analysis and document lifecycle information with metadata created from the user profile, expertise and social activity; organizational profile and the context of the query within the enterprise to determine "true relevance" and eliminate the noise that hampers most traditional search engines' effectiveness. Additionally, the Entopia Knowledge Locator simultaneously identifies and ranks documents, sources of information and people related to the query. "
Something for everyone: Internet Resources Newsletter - May 2003 - from Heriot Watts University Library -- "The free, monthly newsletter for academics, students, engineers, scientists and social scientists."
US Government: FirstGov.Gov Unveils Redesigned Site by Gary Price. ResourceShelf (may 7, 2003)
Searching: OneStat has been counting search terms again. One-word queries make up 25% of total, and two-words, 29%. Only 22% are over 4 words. I question how useful these figures are without knowing the nature of the query. Number of words is a function of type of query. Many searches are navigational - to get the url of a known site - where only one or two words will be suffice. Searching Online: From Keyword to Key Phrase E-Marketer. (May 7, 2003)
Paid Inclusion: Paid inclusion may not working for Looksmart. Earnings are down, though there may be other factors. Paid Inclusion Hot, LookSmart Not By Brian Morrissey. SiliconValley.Internet.com (May 6, 2003)
Of interest - "Overture estimates about 40 percent of the 210 million daily Web searches generate revenue " - meaning, I presume, that advertisers pay on 40% of the searches rather than that 40% lead to purchase. Article indicates that paid listings are more popular as a "value proposition" than paid inclusion.
Film Buffs: Jennifer Evans at the Globe and Mail looks at Movie Sites. (May 7, 2003) See also my WSG newsletter about movie reviews.
Surfing: Only in the UK -- "surfing on the loo" -- Portable toilets with Web access. CNN (May 9, 2003) Ah - it's a hoax - bit of British humour. Microsoft: Internet-ready toilet project a hoax Mercury News (May 13, 2003)
Advertising: Traffick.com reports on the sneaky practices of Overture and Google-the-good -- Not to be outdone, Overture plays shell game with its advertisers and Xtreme Advertizing 2 Kidz: Kiss Your $$$ Goodbye. Also, Looksmart is still not doing well -- The trouble with LookSmart: flat click pricing
Yahoo! Yahoo must have listened to people. It has made it much easier to run a pure search and to search the directory exclusively. Start at http://search.yahoo.com/. Tabs make it very easy to jump from Web, to Directory, to News, Yellow Page, and Images. On the News page, Yahoo offers to set up a news alert on those search terms. You just need a Yahoo account. Yahoo even makes it easier to open a search result in a new window - if you know to click on the tiny double-window icon. Pages seem less cluttered too - perhaps better display of the sponsored results. All of these are good changes. These apply only to Yahoo.com, and not Yahoo.ca.
Danny Sullivan describes the changes in Yahoo's Search Engine Continues Evolving Search Engine Watch (May 6, 2003) Among these changes are the shortcut tricks for dictionary, maps etc.
Future of Search: Peter Coffee in EWeek puts forward the interesting thought that Google is the "most value-adding interface layer" operating system we have. Search Engine as OS (may 5, 2003) The analogy is workable -- "The OS provides a means for applications to interact with hardware and for users to interact with data and applications.".
"Internet search is becoming more deeply integrated into distributed functions and services. Increasingly, our interactions with the Net will be through task-focused applications in, say, logistics or procurement using massive, sophisticated search farms as our repository for data today and for more active resources such as supplier bid management tomorrow. Program-to-program interactions, using messaging standards and XML-based data formats, make Google and semantic-Web competitors, including Microsoft's notable research efforts, the operating system for a worldwide network of loosely coupled machines and databases."
Search Skills: Microdoc News studied the searching behaviour of 545 university students from several countries -- How Experts Search Google (May 6, 2003) Students used a variety of formats and some syntax. Microdoc News identified the search style of the most profilic searchers (150 students) as "experimental" - beginning with a simple query, then refining with more complex or alternate queries, and only as a last step using more precise syntax. More prolific students were also using Google as a "navigation tool" to find known sites.
Looksmart: Looksmart has announced its third quarter results - net income moved up to $.01 / share - out of the red. LookSmart Reports First Quarter 2003 Results PR Newswire via NewsAlert. (May 5, 2003) Product development statements are of greatest interest - improvements to the search engine Wisenut, clean up of the web index, new features for small business listings, purchase of Grub.
Books: Pandia Post Newsletter is about Searching for Books. (May 2003) There is also a review of Google Hacks.
Indexing: Indexing Resources on the WWW is a webliography produced by the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia about indexing - web, book, journals, databases - all kinds. Recommended and described by Chris Sherman -- How Search Engines Make Sense of the Web.
Google and Privacy: Another article in which all worries about privacy on the Web as well as free speech and many other modern day information anxieties are directed at Google. Google: An Engine of Change Mercury News (May 5, 2003) Some people are thinking about regulation -- "Underscoring the power of Google to reach into daily lives, some have even suggested that the search engine eventually could be subject to regulation, akin to a public utility."
Images: British Library Opens New Online Image Service - Newbreaks, Information Today (May 5, 2003) Images Online has opened with 8,000 images from its collection of illuminated manuscripts, photographs, maps, drawings and plans to grow to 17,000 by end of 2003.
Hotbot: Greg Notess has an information page about the new Hotbot with details on syntax. Review of HotBot (Inktomi) (May 3, 2003)
Teoma: James Mathewson interviewed Teoma's head of Research and Development, Apostolos Gerasoulis, and Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves Web properties. What makes a good search engine? Teoma's model might be just what users are looking for. Computer User (April 2003) It helps to explain how Teoma identifies "interlinked communities" and uses this to improve search results.
Audio / Video Search: More about Singingfish: Advancing the Art of Multimedia Search in eContent (Apr 24, 2003). Use it at http://www.singingfish.com/ [Via ResourceShelf]
Recommendation Systems: Amazon has been using a recommendation system for a few years - it works on the principle of collaborative filtering -- if you like a book that X and Y also like, then you will likely like others that they read. Most people who spend 5 or 10 minutes trying to train the agent are more amused than edified by the recommendations. Lisa Guernsey writes about Making Intelligence a Bit Less Artificial in New York Times (May 1, 2003) Amazon and Barnes and Noble and some others don't rely entirely on the computer matches - they have humans tweaking their recommendations. Guernsey warns that "Some companies want to be able to weight the results that appear on a recommendation list so that products they want to clear out appear at the top and out-of-stock items are suppressed." Let's hope not - what trust there is will be destroyed.
Internet Stats: More than half of US, Canada Online and 74% of those in the US are active users. US and Canada have 182 million, roughly 30% of the estimated world total for 2002 of between 580 million to 655 million. Population Explosion. Cyberatlas
Weblogs: Stephen Downes has an excellent article on the growth in popularity of weblogs and their usefulness for education. More Than Personal: The impact of weblogs in After 5 - The e-learning newsletter for New Brunswick(May 2003)
Key comment: ".. the network of weblogs forms a set of interlocking communities, so that on the whole, a new idea or a link to a new article can move very quickly. What's even more significant is that these ideas and links will only propogate to those parts of the network where the information is of the most interest." Next step - weblogs for distributing learning.
Birthdays: Anybirthday.com can give you the birth dates of 135 million people in the United States and send you a reminder 1 week before the event. American Automated Systems has built this database from Public Records. The FAQ says that "the majority of U.S. adults over the age of 21 are listed" but that some States may be missing because they don't make public records available. Inquiring on the birthday is free, but getting the address costs money. You can have your name removed.
Google: Google Friends Newsletter for April 29, 2003 has a tip from the Google Hacks book -- Hack #31: Google Images Special Syntaxes. Also, free Google search for web sites, more languages and some puzzles.
Wiki: We're seeing more of Wikis - a collaborative application on the Web. David Mattison describes what, why and where -- Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool. Searcher (April 2003)
Lifestyles: Frugal Fun on the Web by Judith M. Levinton in LinkUp Digital (May 1, 2003) Be pennywise and frugal, find bargains and save money - lots of sites for spending time.
Search Strategy: Microdoc News concedes that Google can answer questions too if the question matches one posed in an FAQ document. The Google Question Base (May 1, 2003)
All about Google: ResearchBuzz found this - Google'World from indicateur.com. It's a directory to pages about how to use Google (mostly at Google), technology papers, tools that use Google. Google Hacks is under News and Information > Books - the only one. Three alert tools for monitoring new results at Google are listed. Weblogs about Google are in several languages - this is an international collection. This should be a very useful site. But how will Google feel about the use of its trademarked name?
URLS: Greg Notess deconstructs the URL - uniform resource locator - in Unlocking URLs: Extensions, Shortening Options, and Other Oddities Online (May/June 2003) - "Watch the URLs. Check them when evaluating Web content and be careful when citing them. Make sure others will be able to see what you see. Reduce them to their minimum functioning version when citing. Above all, mine the full URLs for the information that they contain."
Information Visualization: Tim Bray, co-founder and CTO of Antarctica Systems, was interviewed by Paula Hane in Information Today. Visualizing Online Information (May 1, 2003) Talks about the successful applications of the Antarctica's graphical interface, Visual Net, and the differences between Antarctica and its competition.
Web Searching: PC Magazine can tell us How to Find Anything Online (May 27, 2003 issue). The claim might be overstated but the article is a good primer on the main search tools and basic strategies. There are several parts - use the Print version for easiest reading.
Google was the Editors' CHoice, but they also said it "no longer dramatically outperformed its competitors". Engines covered were Google, Alltheweb, AOL, MSN, Yahoo.
MSN received a favourable review but with no mention of the sources of MSN's results, namely Looksmart and Inktomi. The reviewer felt MSN was better at natural language. Well - none of these engines are good at natural language queries - they don't parse a sentence for emphasis or identify concepts. I suspect the better results at MSN for certain queries were due to other factors. Also the reviewer uses + as an operator. These four engines search for ALL the words. The + sign to AND a term is not needed - just a quibble.
The tips to "search better" are good as far as they go. There was no mention of using subject directories or clustering tools to narrow the field. And more might have been said about ways to work with words. The reviewer(s) did not care for meta-search engines. And no wonder considering the ones they thought to mention -- Dogpile, IxQuick, MetaCrawler, or Mamma.com. For meta-search, Vivisimo, Ez2Find, Fazzle, and InfoNetware are far superior in features and display.
The future of web searching is seen to be in Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is explained well in this article as a method of calculating word associations - although the analogy made to library card catalog escaped me. There is a difference between subject classification (the card catalog / OPAC system) and analyzing the text of pages for word associations in order to group by similar profile.
The set of articles closes with Niche Search - a list of specialty sites and search engines - very much worth some time browsing.
PC Magazine wraps it up with Toolbox
featuring three toolbars - Google Toolbar (can't live without it), Teoma Search Bar, Yahoo Companion; desktop search - software, Copernic Agent - very good review, FirstStop WebSearch; and a visual meta-search tool - Kartoo. Grokker, a kind of visual meta-searcher with clustering capabilities, was also previewed.
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