Ask Jeeves: Ask Jeeves UK (www.ask.co.uk) has improved its display of search results to show Related Searches for exploratory queries and AJ Recommends for more specific. Images will be included. All ads will be related to the search. Overhaul is similar to the one done for www.ask.com. Ask Jeeves improves search results Net Imperative (July 31)
Natural Language: National Library of Medicine offers COSMO for answering frequently asked questions in a natural language style. http://wwwns.nlm.nih.gov/ Uses NativeMinds software. See Gary Price - Natural Language Searching (July 28)
Altavista: Some changes at Altavista News - dropped the Moreover feed (Yahoo News has that now) but added AV Prisma. AV is now using Open Directory Project for its subject directory rather than Looksmart. So why not Yahoo? See more at Gary Price - Web Search--AltaVista
Video Search: PBS in the US offers searchable databases of archived video. Keyword search will find the segments in which those words were spoken. Gary Price has the details -- Keyword Search Video from PBS, View It Online.
Search Techniques: Microdoc News shows how to Make Google Search Simple with POGs (July 30). These are "pseudo operators for Google" such as dictionary:, world:, convert:, acronym:, dictionary:, currency:, -- more.
These pseudo operators are actually simple search terms that identify what you want very well. They are not Google code words. Some call them "magic words" and could be used at any search engine to improve search results. At Google, results are almost identical whether you use the : or not. I suggest not using it.
Search Aids: UCmore, "the search acclerator", is a free browser add-on that can categorize search results at any search engine and recommend similar sites based on the one being viewed. For example, after analyzing www.websearchguide.ca it proposes Help and Tutorials, Searching the Web, and Directories (in the context of searching the web). The selected sites are very good. UCmore has a demonstration of the search at http://www.ucmore.com/. The toolbar requires Windows and Internet Explorer version 5.0 or above. This is new software and there may be some glitches such as the frozen browser screens I've experienced. Nonetheless, the software is very promising.
UCmore was reviewed at ISEDB.com -- UCmore- Searching without Search Engines (July 31, 2003)
Google: Hackers turn to Google to find weakest links New Scientist (July 30) -Hackers are able to find passwords and other sensitive information in cached pages at Google. But as Danny Sullivan says in the article - "The responsibility for securing a site lies with the people operating it".
Google: Sees all, knows all: Is it God or Google? by Stephen Strauss. Globe and Mail (July 30) More on the NYT article - Is Google God? - somewhat tongue in cheek - considers the attributes of divine technology.
Advertising: Study: Paid search to boost ad dollars CNet (July 30) Jupiter Research estimates that paid search will make up $1.6 billion out of a $6.3 billion total for online advertising. Online display ads will be around $3 billion. By 2008 online advertising, expected to be $14.8 billion, may make up 6% of US ad spending.
EMail: Netomat software can be used to publish a message made up of pictures, voice, and drawings to an email or a web site. Works with Windows and Mac. Still in beta. Trial versions available. A Drawing Board for Multimedia E-Mail by Matthew Mirapaul. New York Times (July 31)
Google Toolbar: Patrick Crispen at Internet Tourbus is hot and cold about Google's toolbar. This toolbar is available to people using Windows and Internet Explorer. The search aids are good but the toolbar is spyware, in that it records the pages viewed. Crispen doesn't say if Google keeps the records. The monitoring can be easily disabled. Crispen is more enthusiastic about the latest 2.0 Beta because it blocks pop-ups - providing a service that Microsoft refuses to do. Internet Tourbus July 30, 2003
Travel Sites: Web sites that help you find your way Joe Sharkey International Herald Tribune (July 29) -- web sites that help travellers with information - times, exchange rates, plane seat charts, distance calculations, trivia.
Google: To look up a word at Google, simply enter dictionary: plus the word. See Need to Find a Meaning - Use Google at Microdoc Google Manual.
Search Technology: The Future of Human Knowledge: The Semantic Web By Gene J. Koprowski TechNewsWorld (July 28, 2003 )
"Some serious computer scientists, although cautious about the promise of the Semantic Web, are ultimately optimistic that it will be everything developers are hoping for -- an online source for all of the knowledge humanity has created in science, business and the arts. "
Surfwax: Genie Tyburski reviewed Surfwax's Legal Search Tools. Surfwax is known by most for its meta-search engine. However, it has also developed tools to help professionals search, save, and share.
Online News: A Closer Look at Yahoo! News by Chris Sherman in Searchday (July 30, 2003) Yahoo News now has Moreover news feeds from 3,500 sources in addition to Associated Press, New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, and USA Today. Service is also rich with special features.
Citations: Google page-ranking has often been compared to citation analysis. Chris Sherman describes A Google-like Portal of the World's Leading Scientists. This is ISIHighlyCited.com from ISI Web of Science. It's a gateway to names of scientists and researchers in 21 broad subject categories.
Overture: Overture will provide Knight Ridder Digital a search engine based on the algorithm search of Fast/Alltheweb (which it owns) and paid-placement results. Also Overture replaces Google at Sympatico.ca. Overture, Knight Ridder Ink Search Pact By Brian Morrissey Silicon Valley Internet.com (July 28, 2003)
Alltheweb: Two tip sheets for using Alltheweb. From Pandia -- Fast AlltheWeb Q-card and from Alltheweb, Query Prefixes - shortcuts to using the calculator and to specifying the collection to search (web, pics, video, audio). (Source: Be Spacific).
Search Engine News: MSN stays wed to Overture, for now CNet (July 25, 2003)
Current Awareness: Customize a web page with headlines from tech sites (Daily Rotation) or legal news and information sites (Daily Whirl) . Pick the sources and style - then read. (Source: ResearchBuzz)
PDF: Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, hits nail on head - PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption. He says, "Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation. " (Source: picked up in OLWeekly, Stephen Downes)
Weblogs: Do Blogs Spam Google Results? MicroDoc News (July 23) It may sometimes look like Google results are clogged with pages from weblogs but this study suggests not.
Online PUblications: Founder of Web-based grocery store tries again with online newsstand USA Today (July 23) At KeepMedia , $4.95 a month buys access to archives of 150 publications. Gary Price reminds people that you can likely get the same article for free through the library. Online Archives (July 23)
Search Engines - Ask Jeeves: Ask Jeeves says it can deliver smart answers - enter a trigger word and get an answer. The ResourceShelf lists the short cuts -- Ask Jeeves Releases List of "Smart Search" Shortcuts (July 23)
Search Engine - Alltheweb: Alltheweb now indexes Excel spreadsheet files and Powerpoint. (Reported in the ResourceSHelf). I've always been sceptical about the value of picking up spreadsheet files - likely to get someone's budget plan for a new car, but the Powerpoint presentations might be advantageous.
Search Engine - Hotbot: Hotbot has changed the labelling for the search engines it offers. Hotbot itself is the Inktomi search engine, Lycos is Alltheweb - but for how long?, Google is Google, and Ask Jeeves is mainly the Teoma database though with none of the search features. .Gary Price had some information -- Web Search--Hotbot (July 24)
Weblogs:
Estimated number of weblogs - 2.4 to 2.9 million in June 2003.
Likely percentage that are English - 53%.
Percent of Internet community who blogs - 2%.
Percent of Internet community who reads blogs - 4%
Blogging By The Numbers by Robyn Greenspan. Cyberatlas (July 23)
Companies: NewsAlert, the business news alerting service. will be under new management. Marketwatch.com will be buying Pinnacor (previously Screaming Media), a maker of web-based financial tools.MarketWatch.com to buy Pinnacor in $103.2 million deal Mercury News (July 23).
Search: Yellow pages vs paid listings -- Will Search Engines Slay the Yellow Pages? by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (July 24) Panellists at the Directory Driven Commerce Conference think yellow pages online will survive by serving local markets. Not noted was the value of yellow pages as an overall directory to business service which the search engine can't provide.
Tools: Chris Sherman reviewed Copernic Agent , desktop search software that comes in three versions: the free basic, premium - more engines and features, pro - tracker and page analysis. He described Copernic Agent as " a meta search engine, invisible web explorer, online research assistant and extensive tool box, all combined into an elegant, easy to use program." Very true. Copernic Agent: Jack of All Searches SearchDay (July 23)
Tools: Genie Tyburski at The Virtual Chase recommends iBrarian as a low-cost way for capturing Web pages. Quick, Easy Web Capturing Tool. AskSam offers a similar tool in SurfSaver - save the page, add notes, search offline.
iBrarian $24.95 USD - requires Microsoft Internet Explorer v5.5 or newer on WIndows 98 and up.
Surfsaver pro $29.95 USD - Internet Explorer 4.x or higher and Netscape Navigator 4.x. Will integrate with IE 6.0. Windows.
Weblogs: The Internet Roundtable at LLRX in "A Continuing Discussion of Law Firm Marketing On the Internet" tackles What Are Blogs and Why Is Everyone So Excited About Them? By Jerry Lawson, Brenda Howard, Dennis Kennedy, Ernest Svenson and Tom Mighell ((July 21, 2003) -- excellent article -- describes the weblog and its appeal and provides advice and resources for getting started.
Current Awareness: Cindy Carlson has more on finding information about search engines. XML/PDF Forms, Online CLE and More on Search Engines, LLRX (July 21, 2003)
Search Strategies: Selecting Web Sites for “Beyond Google” Resource Discovery by Rita Vine, LLRX (July 21, 2003) Rita Vine, co-founder of Workingfaster.com, recommends developing a search toolbox of starter sites to use when undertaking research rather than doing a broad brush search at a search engine. The article describes the qualities that her staff employ in selecting starter sites and the resources they use to identify new ones.
I called the search toolbox an All-In-One page in the May/June Web Search Alert in Information Highways. Search Portfolio, the service provided by Workingfaster.com, is described there.
Search Techniques: Dr Elwyn Jenkins of Microdoc News has opened a new weblog about searching Google. There is an online guide to the syntax and features of Google that is quite comprehensive and well illustrated with search examples. Microdoc Google Manual .
Galaxy: Galaxy is a directory, as it turns out of some size - 3.2 million listings classified into 700,000 categories. It has added ranking algorithms to display the contents of a category. Browsers can also change the order to be by URL or alphabetically by title. Ranking is partly based on external link analysis, third party search engine rankings, and some assessment by the Galaxy staff. This does improve the Galaxy directory. However, one must still scroll through an astonishing number of featured listings and poke through many commercial listings.
Galaxy also claims to offer vertical search engines that are topic specific - but for any query the same results are returned regardless of the topic.
Galaxy.com Acquires Enhanced Directory Browse Technology Press Release (July 22, 2003)
Search Tools: Verity, iPhrase Hone Search Intelligence By Dennis Callaghan. EWeek (July 21) "Verity Inc. and iPhrase Technologies Inc. each announced last week search tools that promise to make searches more intelligent and to deliver a search experience tailored to individual users."
Privacy: Special Report from Business Week on Safeguarding Privacy (July 22)
- Privacy: For Every Attack, a Defense
- Covering the Traveler's Electronic Trail
- Why Biometrics Is No Magic Bullet
- Ever-Sharper Eyes Watch You Work
All concerns about privacy are discussed: government surveillance (TIA in the United States), company databases on their customers, travel records, workplace monitoring, Internet activity.
"Of course, privacy is a battlefield where no side holds the high ground for long. The next conflict is likely to be over Internet privacy -- particularly, the efforts of cyber-libertarians to preserve the natural anonymity of Netizens from business and government tracking. Three major initiatives now put online privacy at risk: Digital rights management (DRM), which protects content from being copied and shared online; digital IDs, which ensure that you are who you say you are online; and so-called Trusted Computing, a Microsoft (MSFT ) initiative that will give individual PCs a seal of approval before they can download music, movies, and software." From Privacy: For Every Attack, a Defense
Search Strategies: I have an article in Information Highways (July / August 2003) on Search query saving tips - about why, where, and how to save Web searches. Features Google Alert, Search Alert, Profusion, Copernic Agent Pro with some mention of TrackEngine and Website Watcher.
RocketNews: You can now choose to search only weblogs at RocketNews. Other options are general, business, science, technology, health, sports, entertainment. (Reported in TVC Alert at The Virtual Chase)
Interestingly, searching rocketnews in weblogs in the past 5 days returns no hits. google news gets over 300 most of them about the new advanced features, but a few dating well before 5 days ago. Nor are all sources actually weblogs. Several stories were from news.google.com, one from Foxnews, some from Google Groups (newsgroups). (Note that using quotation marks does make this a tighter search -- "google news" -- but still has some anomalies.) Searching on google news using the other categories will bring up different sources and stories. There was very little overlap with the weblog search or even between the general and business categories. Since Rocketnews does not have an option to search all categories at one time, it will be important tin some instances to check several individually - such as general, business, technology and weblogs.
Google News: Google added to its Advanced Search the capability to search a particular publication and within a date range. Means we don't have to remember the hacks that Tara Calishain of Research Buzz devised. http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search
However, Google doesn't offer a list of its news sources. To determine Canadian sources, use Advanced News to "Return only articles from news sources located in" Canada published in the last day (set "return articles published" to last day) on a very current topic, one that will have been covered by most news sources - such as the dollar or, these days, bse.
Stephanie Olsen at CNet News points out that this is catchup for Google. "AltaVista, for example, allows visitors to search by region, time frame and publication. In addition, specialty sites such as NewsNow search more than 10,000 news sources, in comparison to Google's 4,500." Also the date range options at Google are limited to June and July (surely temporary?).
Google boosts headline search ZDNetUK (July 22)
Ask Jeeves: Might Google try to buy Ask Jeeves? Don't dismiss faithful Ask Jeeves by Amanda Lang, Globe and Mail (July 21).
Lists: Charles Bowen says "Journalists love their "best of" lists" (Editor and PUblishers, July 15). They have created Lists of Best for books, movies, and music. Visitors can create their own lists of books, movies, cds that they'd like to keep, be reminded of, and rate. In time, the site owners plan to install a recommended system to help members get leads on other titles that might interest them.
Lycos: Lycos has a new search utility called SideSearch which on a Lycos search will show results from a second search engine on the side. It was reviewed by Chris Sherman, Lycos Offers "Second Opinion" Search Results, July 21. More information at http://install.sidesearch.lycos.com/install/default.asp
E-Mail: General Commission on Terminology and Neology, part of the French Culture Ministry, wants the French to send courriel rather than e-mail. E-mail? The French beg to differ by Jo Best, News.com (July 18)
Google: Google Dance finally explained by Serge Thibodeau in IESDB.com (July 21, 2003) explains how Google updates its index. The Google Dance refers to the monthly update cycle of the databases, during which search results may vary at Google sites. The update drops, adds, updates, and reranks.
Health: Taxonomy Developments in the Health Field by Barbara Quint. Information Today (July 21, 2003)
"The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced an agreement with the College of American Pathologists (CAP; http://www.cap.org) to add CAP’s SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms) to NLM’s Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). With 344,000 concepts, SNOMED CT is the world’s most complete clinical taxonomy. Federal health agencies have combined funds to acquire a permanent license that makes the taxonomy available free to all users. With the federal commitment, experts predict a surge in the development of new information services in health care. "
E-Commerce: Developing Systems of Online Payment by Bob Tedeschi. New York Times (July 21, 2003) There is still hope for micropayment systems - the kind that would let us do nickle and dime purchases. Previous efforts have failed, as this article explains, but others are still trying. BitPass, based in Palo Alto, Calif., uses a "virtual card" obtained through a credit card purchase, which merchants will recognize and dock pennies from. It's said to be easy for merchant and customer. Paystone Technologies in Vancouver, BC. offers a similiar service. Peppercoin, based in Waltham, Mass., collects money for the merchants and transfers in larger chunks - but it requires that consumers install software.
Amazon: Amazon is negotiating with publishers to offer a searchable collection of non-fiction books according to a report in the New York Times -- Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books (by David Kirkpatrick, July 21, 2003) drawn from publisher comments. Others have tried this - NetLibrary (now part of OCLC), Ebrary (strictly for libraries now), and Questia (for students) - with less than stellar results. But Amazon may have some extra synergies with its product line of books, CDS, and various other products together with reviews on restaurants, movies, and books. This could strengthen its appeal with searchers and also sell books.
Plan might be called Look Inside the Book II and is rumoured to be launched in the fall. "It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter or a few selected pages provided by the publishers of certain books. But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms like "Caravaggio," "sans-culottes," or "Osama bin Laden," and then see a list of books mentioning the term along with the sentence that contains it. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around that citation."
Article also quotes figures from ComScore Networks on share of search market in May: "Google's Web site accounted for about 32 percent of the four billion Internet searches conducted in May, compared to about 25 percent from Yahoo, 19 percent through American Online and 15 percent with Microsoft's MSN service ..."
Google Alerts: Jonathan Dube, a MSNBC Sr producer, uses Google Alerts to stay on top of his beat. Google Alerts , Poynter.org ( July 17, 2003)
Feedster: Feedster, the search engine for RSS feeds, has added many search options and syntax capabilities for searching weblogs. Tara Calishain calls it a "jaw dropping array". Feedster Updates Its Search Engine Research Buzz (July 8, 2003) Read Feedster's help page especially page about Available Fields to Search.
Shopping Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines Starting To Click by Ken Spencer Brown. Investors.com (July 18) DealTime, Pricefrabber and MySimon are profitable. Main competition is from the retail sell-everything giants Amazon and eBay, and also e-commerce portals - Yahoo SHopping specifically. "Big retailers, shopping portals and shopping-search sites may not seem to be direct rivals at first, Strand admits. They appeal to different types of shoppers and have distinct business models. "
Search Patents: Overture to a patent war? By Stefanie Olsen CNet News (July 18, 2003) -- "Dominance in Web search may be determined by the scope of a company's patent portfolio, rather than its ability to shuttle people to Internet sites. " In buying Overture, Yahoo got 60 plus patents related to search technology and bidding systems. Google and MSN have been amassing patents too. How will this affect competition? ""If (search companies) turn around and offensively try to shut down competition then you could see significant lags in innovation and dimishing the quality of people's access to information," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Google: More Google bashing, this time at Slate.com -- Digging for Googleholes: Google may be our new god, but it’s not omnipotent. By Steven Johnson (July 17)
Johnson identifies three "googleholes" - things Google can't do well - and argues that Google is not a good reference source and is certainly not an oracle. True - but this argument is about the Web and its search engines in general - the problems are not unique to Google. All the problems arise from the search query - the real issue is the education of users.
1. Shopping - says that results are skewed to the online stores, for example, a search for flowers brings up online florists. Frankly this could happen in real life with a real person. Would the author go to a librarian and just say - flowers? What would the librarian say? Do you want a florist? This example also shows the benefits of using a clustering search engine such as Vivisimo, where results are grouped somewhat about what they are about. Florists will be separate from horticultural papers.
2. Synonyms - states the problem of "skewed synonyms" where apple finds the computer and not the fruit. Again, it's incumbent for the searcher to state what he wants. Is it to find apple farms in Washington state? One word searches are rarely going to be fruitful. Again, clustering would help.
3. Books - or rather the lack of them online. Google indexes pdf files and will point searchers to these but won't direct searchers to books because it can't point to what it doesn't have. The searcher must appreciate that not everything is online or accessible to Google.
Johnson grants that Google can't be held responsible for these holes. The problem is in the hype that Google is an oracle. "We’re wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It’s closer to a collectively authored op-ed page — filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion — than an encyclopedia. It’s still the connected world’s most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web’s wider anarchy. Just don’t call it an oracle."
Better queries and a critical eye will separate the op-ed and the advertisement from the higher quality factual and evalutative content. Mind, the search engines could probably help out by doing more with content analysis and prodding the searcher for more details.
Recommendations: Do consumer comments and ratings of products at online sellers help others? Researchers from the University of Minnesota have found that the way the comments and ratings are asked for can influence the answers.
"To avoid bias, recommender systems should give consumers an environment that allows them to provide ratings without having to see previous ratings, and should provide fine-grained rating scales rather than simpler thumbs up, thumbs down ratings, according to the researchers."
Recommenders Can Skew Results Technology Review (June 26, 2003)
Search Technique: Mary Ellen Bates - tip of the month - Is that your final answer? recommends we use more than one search engine. Results do differ significantly.
Gigablast: Greg Notess has some minor updates about Gigablast -- Gigablast Keyword Highlighting and OR (July 17, 2003) Gigablast is a smaller search engine with 190 million indexed pages. It supports search on the title or on a site. It will search for any of the terms (an OR). Therefore it is best to use the + to require terms.
Information Visualization: Grokking the infoviz. The Economist (June 19)
Perhaps the time is ripe (or nearly so) for information visualization tools. Groxis's tools is called Grokker and is available to consumer for $99 USD. Article describes the usefulness of graphic aids. Other companies mentioned include Antarctica (geographic map model), Panopticon (heat maps), Plumb Design (Visual Thesaurus).
Concludes -- "Instead of succeeding as a stand-alone application, information visualisation is more likely to show up on web pages. Consider the cases of Which? Online, MarketMap and InterfaceFLOR, a carpet manufacturer that uses the enterprise version of Grokker to let customers design their own floor coverings. Integrating new interfaces into websites helps overcome both adoption barriers: data integration is much easier and the interface can be optimised to the task at hand."
People Search: Description of the U.S. public records search service, USSearch.com, that is also used at Yahoo. Yahoo! and Your Personal Information By Chris Sherman (July 17)
Health Resources: The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report on using the Web for health -- "Internet Health Resources: Health searches and email have become
more commonplace, but there is room for improvement in searches and overall Internet access." ".. Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online. This makes the act of looking for health or medical information one of the most popular activities online, after email (93%) and researching a product or service before buying it (83%). " Full report at Internet Health Resources (July 16)
Search Statistics: ComScore Media Matrix released figures on share of searches for May 2003.
Google Sites 32%
Yahoo! Sites 25%
AOL Time Warner 19%
MSN-Microsoft Sites 15%
Ask Jeeves 3%
Since Google powers AOL and Yahoo, it must have a total share of over 70%.
Reported in Traffick.com with comments. Numbers? We Got Numbers! (July 16, 2003).
Internet: Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) to increase the number of Net addresses (IP numbers) from 4 billion to 35 trillion at least. Everything can be connected from mobile devices to refridgerators. IPv6 is expected to be more secure, offering a unique address for each application.
"Perhaps the biggest difference most Internet users will see in IPv6 is the ability to experience constant communication between virtually every electronic device. With an almost unlimited supply of addresses, every new washing machine, for instance, could have its own IP address, allowing it to alert a service person electronically of a needed repair before it stopped working in the middle of a cycle. "
Exploding Universe of Web Addresses by Jeffrey Selingo. New York Times (July 17)
Browsers: Will people turn from IE to Mozilla? Mozilla grew out of Netscape and today surpasses Internet Explorer in features. Mozilla announced that it will become the Mozilla Foundation, independent of AOL and determined to carry on the browser wars. "Currently, Mozilla owns only 1.2 percent of the browser market. Netscape has 2.9 percent, and IE controls 95.3 percent, according to OneStat.com. "
Mozilla Wants to Rumble With IE Wired News. (July 16)
UK Search Engines: Search Engine relationship chart for the UK from AlphaQuad Internet Solutions. Google seems to have the largest presence.
E-Mail: Who goes there? E-mail is adopting challenge and response to block spam. Do I Know You? E-Mail Barricades Reuters via Wired (june 8, 2003)
MapQuest: MapQuest finds place for Google by Jim Hu. CNet News (June 23, 2003) AOL's MapQuest will pick up ads from Google that relate to an address - such as for restaurants, hotels, and events.
Pay as you go: Serious searches available for a fee by Jan Dempsey. The Post Standard - Syracuse (June 18, 2003) Reviews premium information sources where you can pay for articles as you need them. (Source: TVC Alert)
Hoaxes: Mary Ellen Bates Tip of the Month on Fraud, Scams and Misinformation (June 2003) Covers the Nigerian scam, virus hoaxes, and weird and unbelievable information.
Search Techniques: Genie Tyburski put up presentations she did, June 11, 2003, at the June SLA conference on Web Tools (search tools and tips) and Around the World in 60 Sites (focus on law and government but some are for fun). It's clear that she likes Track Engine for monitoring pages and RocketInfo for news searches.
Google.com: Google now redirects users from google.com to the Google version for their country (including language). Pandia Search shows how Google users who are not in the U.S. can bookmark the U.S. Google site - use http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en Take this with you on out-of-country travel. It would be much easier to link to that site than fool with changing preferences for interface and language. Pandia Search Engine News (June 10, 2003)
Google Bomb: There seems to have been an enormous dustup about "weapons of mass destruction" as a search at Google. Anthony Cox, a pharmacist in the UK, created a spoof page that suddenly became number one at Google because of the links to it. He tells the story in The war on the web in the UK Guardian (July 10) Does show that Google's ranking is susceptible to high volume linking.
Internet: Spinning a new Web by Rachel Ross. Toronto Star (June 2, 2003) -- "If the Net were rebuilt from scratch, could it be more secure, simpler, better?" Reviews origins of the Net in TCP and IP addresses and notes weaknesses in security and speed.
Google News: Q and A with Krishna Bharat of Google News Google Friends Newsletter (July 2003) Bharat, the inventor of Google News, shares some information about the service.
- 4,500 English-language sources
- "relevance is determined by information retrieval techniques that look at the distribution of words in the article and surrounding pages on the web. If the article matches the query well it is deemed relevant and gets a high score. Other factors include the importance of the source, timeliness of the article, and importance of the news story, relative to other stories in the news currently. "
- aiming to have Google News in more language
Search Engines: MIT is developing a search engine that will be more suitable for slow Net connections such as those in undeveloped countries. Service is to be e-mail based. World's poor to get search engine News International (July 16)
BananaSlug: BananaSlug adds serendipity to a search at Google by adding an extra word at random to the query. The choice is yours - world cities, themes from Shakespeare, jargon word, word from dictionary - and others. Mentioned at Traffick.com Another Interesting Google API Tool (July 16)
Ultraseek: Verity To Release Ultraseek Search Engine Information Week (July 11, 2003) "Verity Ultraseek 5.1 represents Verity's first foray into selling more basic corporate search tools after years of selling complex information-retrieval, classification, and categorization technologies to large companies."
Yahoo and Overture:
Yahoo to buy Overture for $1.63 billion CNet News (July 14, 2003)
Is Yavistawinkoture! the Winning Search Forumla? Microdoc News (July 14) - lots of questions.
Yahoo Picks Up Overture Research Buzz (July 14) - recaps the scene.
Yahoo's Overture may force Microsoft's hand ZDNet (July 15)
Yahoo's Search for Dominance by Cynthia Webb. Washington Post (July 15)
Yahoo to buy Overture by Danny SUllivan. SearchDay (July 15) - might be a good thing for searchers. WOnders is MSN will try to buy Google.
Why Yahoo is buying Overture by Mathew Ingram. Globe and Mail (July 15) Identifies three reasons: increase cash flow, prevent someone else from buying Overture, make use of higher value Yahoo shares.
Why Google Should Be Worried by Alex Salkever. Business Week (July 15) "By buying Overture, Yahoo! is challenging its rival in the booming paid-search market -- and giving Microsoft a headache as well".
Yahoo! Move Alters Paid Inclusion Industry By Brian Morrissey. Silicon Valley Internet.com (July 15) Yahoo owns Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb - each with paid inclusion. That leaves Looksmart - (MSN anyone?) Paid inclusion still small at $200 million / year but Looksmart expects it to increase to $ 3 billion in 2007. Of interest - 40% of searches are commercial (product related).
Hydralinks: Hydralinks iLor is a browser utility to help you browse and save links. Very handy. Chris Sherman reviewed it Speed Up Your Searching with HydraLinks in SearchDay (June 19, 2003) The free plugin works with Teoma, the for-fee at $29.95 USD can be used on any web site.
Social Web: Specail technology report from Business Week Online on the Social Web (June 10, 2003)
"Every year, millions more people around the world are using the Internet to interact in more ways than ever before -- to date, find old classmates, check on medical ailments and cures, to read and express alternative views of the news, and even to get live sales help online"
"Today, an estimated 4 million people worldwide use the technology to connect to the Web -- and each other -- from just about anywhere, a number that's expected to grow to 63.3 million by 2007, according to market consultancy Gartner."
Articles are about general use and capabilities, dating, weblogs (The Wide World of "Open Source Media") , spam, privacy.
Search Engine Freshness: Greg Notess has new figures on age of pages at the search engines. The main engines - Google, MSN, Hotbot Inktomi, and Alltheweb tend to be about 1 month on average. Alltheweb has older pages than the others. Altavista and Teoma lag some, and Gigablast and Wisenut trail some distance behind. New Freshness Showdown by Greg Notess (May 27, 2003)
Webby Awards: Judges and the people chose -- And the Webby Award goes to ... Mercury News (June 6) CBC Radio 3 won for broadband, Movable Type (for bloggin) for best practices. Google News for news. There are many other categories. Check to see what people think are the best sites and services today.
Browsers: Microsoft announced last month that the next version of Internet Explorer will be offered to people who get the next version of WIndows Operating System or who sign up with MSN Online. At roughly the same time, AOL said it would stay with IE as its browser for the next 7 years. What does this mean for Netscape? What does this mean for the general Internet user? IE/AOL/Netscape: what happens next? Jeffrey Zeldman in the Daily Report (June 1, 2003)
Content Syndication: Content Syndication: Ready for the Masses? by Tont Byrne. EContent (June 2003) -- Argues that organizations should consider syndicating their content for broader market or industry reach but has found that most don't even though distribution through RSS makes it fairly easy..
Yahoo News: Yahoo News runs Tech Tuesday. Has feature articles, tips and techniques, downloads, and advice.
Information Research: Information Research is an e-journal "dedicated to making freely accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines." Covers "refereed papers and working papers in the fields of information science, information management, information systems, information policy and librarianship." Recommended in SearchDay. What's New In Information Research (May 27, 2003)
E-Books: Wiley InterScience has introduce pay-per-view for " instant, full-text access to an extensive collection of journal articles or book chapters available on Wiley InterScience-without the need for a subscription". Collection has 700 book and journal titles. Looks like price is $25 USD for 24 hour access to an article. Wiley InterScience Pay-Per-View.
Statistics: Nationmaster.com has piles of statistics on countries. Pick topics and see how countries compare or make your own charts. Has historical data also. For Most Taxed as determined by budget revenues per capita, Canada sits in 37th spot and the United States in 30th. Source was the CIA World Factbook 2002.
Charles Bowen reviewed the site in What Country Watches the Most TV? E&P (July 11)
Something Funny: We need this list of some funny spots on the Web -- Laughing all the way to the Cartoonbank by Laura Shin. USA Weekend (July 13, 2003)
Google Search Techniques: Microdoc News does some clever things with Google Date Hacks (July 12) - mainly looking for pages with numeric dates (mm dd yyyy) in the text or the url.
Yahoo and Overture: Here's a surprise. Yahoo to buy Overture Globe and Mail (July 14, 2003) Yahoo bought the Inktomi search engine last year (but hasn't done much with it). Now it will own Overture, known for its prowess at making money through paid placement listings, and Overture's new acquisitions, the search engines, Altavista, and Alltheweb, both with paid inclusion programs. This is consolidation on the grand scale. What will this do to Google who has only the adwords program? What will it do to competition? Will the hoped for drive to improve search services at Overture sag? What will MSN do? It had been rumoured as a suitor for Overture too.
Metasearch Engines: Pandia Search offers a new metasearch engine - Powersearch - http://www.pandia.com/powersearch/.
- collates results
- shows source engines
- warns that most results from MSN and AhHa are paid listings
- has translate option
- can hide summary description
- can group results by site
- options for type of search (Web, news, actions, music files etc), country of origin (based on domain)
- can select language
- claims to support Boolean match
- appears to search Yahoo, Fast (Alltheweb), Lycos, MSN, Hotbot (but which engine at Hotbot?).
The metasearch engine is powered by CurryGuide, a division of the British Highfield Business Corporation. The search at CurryGuide (search box at http://web.curryguide.com) has some different features.
- picks up from Google and Teoma as well.
- has Find more like this
- Advanced Search form
- can save the result
Neither CurryGuide or Pandia let you choose the engines to be used.
Comparing Search Engines: Google, MSN, Yahoo & AllTheWeb: How Do They Compare? Microdoc News (July 10, 2003) - Each has merit: Google has size (partly from indexing blogs), MSN is good for finding sites, Alltheweb is good for foreign languages, Yahoo still has some directory strength.
Language Coverage: Tests by Microdoc News suggest that Alltheweb might have better language coverage than Google and more copyrighted material. Google & AllTheWeb: World Languages Best in AllTheWeb (July 9, 2003)
Google Size: Microdoc News estimates that the Google database is about 3.6 billion web pages (determined by searching on the) and speculates that Google may not be interested in growing it any further. Instead the aim is to keep it current. Microdoc News has some proof that Google is dropping older pages. "I do not believe Google sees itself as the archiver of all webpages. Rather, Google is the way people find relevant information they are seeking. If no one is seeking the information, or no one is now linking to the information, I believe those webpages containing that information are dropped from the database. " When Will the Google Database See Any Growth? (July 8, 2003)
Google Search Technique: Microdoc News describes how to do Proximity Searching in Google (July 4). Main tip is to use * as a wildcard within a phrase - each * representing one word. Tara Calishain has been advocating this for some time too. My favourite example is "three * mice" where * might be blind, round, white, brown, etc.
Microdoc had an earlier article on Ten Ways to Search Google - all good tips. Most of them work with words - entering a quotation, using question format, writing a sentence - along with a few tricks like entering a phone number (people do put these on their web pages).
Keeping Up: Microdoc News listed resources for Keeping Up with New Web Stuff (July 3)
Content: There are thousands of content providers who offer niche services. Games, how-to-build advice, outlanding information, marketing information are a few of the areas Tara Calishain describes in Emmerce: Small Content Providers Searcher (July/August 2003)
Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi is a short-range wireless technology that makes it possible for mobile computing devices to connect to the Internet. Hotspots have sprung up at airports, hotels, and coffee shops. Some predict a fallout because of high competition and lack of profits. But Intel is investing heavily in wireless chips for portable computers and aiming to introduce Wi-Fi to homes as a way to get broadband.
"There are now about 40 million Wi-Fi users, he said, and new access points are selling at the rate of about 15,000 a day, which makes Wi-Fi a much faster-growing technology than cellular telephony.
While prices for connection times are certain to keep falling, industry executives say they are already seeing usage patterns that suggest that Wi-Fi commercial services are working and are here to stay."
Led by Intel, True Believers in Wi-Fi Say It Will Endure by John Markoff. New York Times (July 11, 2003)
McDonald's and Starbucks are two companies who are quickly adding Wi-Fi access to their outlets. "The Gartner report says about 29,000 public hot spots will be available by the end of the year in North America, an increase from 3,700 last year. By the end of next year, that number is expected to reach nearly 51,000."
Eating Out and Logging On by Bob Tedeschi, New York Times (July 14, 2003)
Gurunet: Gurunet, the very handy desktop online reference tool, has introduced a Homeword edition for students and teachers. Cost $39.99 US with some educational discounts available. GuruNet Introduces Homework Edition of its 1-Click Fact Finder Software; Child-Friendly, Instant Reference Tool for Students of All Ages Press release. June 30, 2003
Google: Google's intitle and inurl searches do not work. Google no longer recognizes intitle: or inurl: as valid syntax. Only searches for all words in the title or in the url are processed (allintitle, allinurl). Greg Notess first noticed this in May. The capability to search for words in the title and the body was one of Google's search strengths. We hope they fix it soon. Google Field Search Problems Search Engine Showdown (July 10)
Enterprise Search: FAST Search has a video replay of CNBC's interview with CEO John Lervik in which Lervik comments on FAST's plans in the enterprise search market. FAST bought Altavista's enterprise business to get their customers and will be upgrading them to the FAST search technology. Top players today in enterprise search are Verity, Fast, and Autonomy. He sees good growth in market value and further consolidation. Future of Enterprise Search on CNBC Europe (July 1, 2003)
Looksmart: Looksmart will provide Web search and paid inclusion to Lycos. LookSmart Inks Search Deal with Lycos By Brian Morrissey. Internet News. com (July 9) Article states, "Under terms of the deal, LookSmart will provide search results for commercial terms beginning in the third quarter. Lycos will also have the option to sell LookSmart's paid inclusion product, LookListings, through its InSite search-marketing program."
Daypop: Gary Price interviewed Dave Chan, founder and manager of Daypop the weblog and news search engine. Daypop crawls a weblog as often as every 12 hours and keeps material for one week. There is background information about the trend analysis done at Daypop for Top 40, Word analysis, Wishlist analysis, and Authority analysis. Interview closes with 10 Daypop search tips. Web Search - Daypop - Part 2
Personalization: Search Engine Personalization: An exploratory study by Yashmeet Khopkar, Amanda Spinks, C.Lee Giles, Prital Shah, Sandip Debnath. FirstMonday June 2003 -- Looked at 60 search engine sites. Only 13 % had some degree of personalization mainly limited to email, business / financial information, and certain search resources. On the whole, personalization is not well developed and writers called for a "user modelling component". "We suggest that the personalization process be taken to a new level: A level where the user does not to be actively involved with the personalization process."
The challenge for the search services will be to offer personalization in a way that does not mean encroaching on privacy.
Factiva: Free Pint interviewed Claire Hart, President and CEO of Factiva. Among the topics covered is the planned integration of Factiva with Microsoft Office 2003 - she mentions that Factiva has agreements with IBM, Alacra, Plumtree, and Epicentric also. Factiva's move to Knowledge Management product is also explored and especially Factiva's work on taxonomies. Interview with Clare Hart. Freepint at the SLA Conference June 2003
MSN Search: More signs that MSN will be developing its own search engine - Microsoft brains take on Google by Simon Sharwood. CNet News (July 9) -- "Microsoft has hired top scientists in its quest for search algorithms that will allow it to compete directly with Google."
Google Cache: Google is under fire for possible breach of copyright because it saves copies of web pages in its cache. The New York Times in particular is not pleased that pages it has put into for-fee archive might be found for free through a cached copy in Google. Others are concerned too - though sites can opt out of having their pages saved. Of note - average age of a page is 100 days. Google cache raises copyright concerns by Stephanie Olsen. CNet News. (July 9, 2003)
Gary Price pointed out that Google only copies the first 101 K of a web page and 120 of a pdf. (ResourceShelf - Web Search - Google)
Taxonomy and Web: Information taxonomy plays a critical role in Web site design and search processes Jie-Hong Morrison (Jul 1, 2003 ) Builder.com
Article presents the benefits of a taxonomy (or classification scheme) in searching and says that "both taxonomy view and taxonomy structure are involved at different stages of the Web search process"
- Creating the database - indexing content within a target topic area
- Browsing the taxonomy and drilling down into a particular topic
- Reviewing search results organized by topic
"By integrating taxonomy throughout the Web search process, we can provide a more efficient search experience. Less time is wasted in failed searches or in finding the wrong information, thereby facilitating an effective decision-making process."
Enterprise Portals: Portals are evolving into process, collaboration and intelligence centres. Can-Do Portals Turn Viewers Into Doers by Penny Lunt. Transform Magazine (July 2003)
"Portals have come a long way since they first made the scene in 1998. In the beginning, portals simply provided views into data; today, portals expose core business processes, they extend beyond the enterprise and they're empowered with business intelligence. Most importantly, the best portals are producing tremendous returns on investments."
Article includes descriptions of company portals that excel.
Arts Online: ArtsJournal is an online journal / weblog on the arts scene internationally for dance, ideas, music, theatre, visual arts, and media -- "a daily digest of arts, culture, and ideas". Douglas McLennan, a music and arts reporter in Seattle, Washington and formerly of Winnipeg, Manitoba, has maintained the site since 1999. There are free email newsletters with headlines and a premium version with articles. Newsfeeds are also available for a fee. The site was reviewed in Conversing on the Arts by Clicking a Mouse by John Rockwell. New York Times (July 9, 2003)
Natural Language: Meaningful Machines uses "statistical and phrase-based approaches" rather than rules-based to figure out meaning. I Really Know What You Mean By Sebastian Rupley. PC Magazine May 29, 2003
Resource Discovery Network (RDN): Turning gateways into portals "Ruth Martin reports on a project to transform the subject hubs of the RDN into portals, allowing users to conduct more powerful, seamless cross-searches in their disciplines with a single sign-on. " Update (June 2003) -- plans for adding more portal features at the RDN hubs such as an alerting feature and newsfeeds.
Search Strategies: Mary Ellen Bates advises searchers to ask themselves who really cares about the information that would answer the question at hand - whether that be health, market research, or any other topic. Then identify the best information tool for the job -- "the fastest way from question to answer is often not a search engine but an information tool" . Who Cares about Information Quality? [SearchDay, June 17, 2003].
See also Gary Price's comments on information quality and use of directories.
Document Delivery: Changes in Document Delivery at Infotrieve and The British Library by Marydee Odala. Information Today (June 23, 2003) -- Infotrieve is moving to 100% delivery of content electronically to the desktop. It has also begun to charge casual visitors to the web site for article search. British Library can send out PDF copies of articles to be read through Adobe 6.0.
Business Research: Information Advisor: Searching for Company Data by Bob Berkman - available through Gary Price's ResourceShelf - Business Research. (June 26)
EMail Alerts - Publishers: Email Alerting Services of Major Publishers / Vendors from The University Library System, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Scholarly Journals Online: Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/) offers some 200 scholarly e-journals by subscription to academic communities. ProjectMuse has been enhancing its service with new journals, "links from 14 of its journals to earlier issues of these titles available through JSTOR, a non-profit organization dedicated to the digital preservation of scholarly journals", and a journals alerts email service.
Search Behaviour: Consumer WebWatch issued its report on consumer use of search engines. Among the findings were that searchers were unaware that some results were pay-for-placement, and once they did know, they considered the search engine less credible. Also searchers tended not to look past the first page. There were only 17 people in the study. Small as the set was, it does indicate that people aren't as web savvy as believed.
False Oracles: Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work
Results of an Ethnographic Study by Leslie Marable. Consumer WebWatch (June 30, 2003)
Also see Gary Price's comments on educating searchers. (June 30, 2003)
Newspapers Online: Tribunes and Tribulation The Top 100 Newspaper Archives (or Lack Thereof) By Larry Krumenaker. Searcher Magazine -- Krumenaker has compiled a catalog of location of archives for the top 100 U.S. newspapers. His favourite source is NewsLibrary - low cost archive service with 61 of the top 100 papers. There are several other tips for people on limited budgets.
Specialty Resource: Gary Price featured EEVL - The Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing as Resource of the Week. (July 3, 2003)
EBooks: Microsoft is giving away ebooks during the summer. "Some 60 premier fiction, non-fiction and reference titles -- from authors such as Amy Tan, Bill Bryson, Margaret Atwood, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, Douglas Adams and John Updike -- will be available from the Microsoft Reader Web site, starting July 4." Three titles will be available each week - over 20 weeks. Need MSN Passport and Microsoft Reader. Get the reader and then check the Microsoft Reader site for new titles each week. Q&A: This Summer, eBooks Are Free (July 2, 2003) This is probably of best use for people with laptops they can take to the cottage or a beach.
Gaming on the Net: In my day college students let bridge and euchre infringe on their class time. Today it's online gaming. Pew Internet Project reports on Let the games begin
Gaming technology and entertainment among college students (July 6)
"Computer, video and online games are woven into the fabric of everyday life for college students. And, they are more a part of college students' social lives than many would suspect."
"The new Pew Internet Project report shows that college students integrate gaming into their day, taking time between classes to play a game, play a game while visiting with friends or instant messaging, or play games as a brief distraction from writing papers or doing other work. Gaming is integrated into leisure time and placed alongside other entertainment forms in their residence. It forms part of a larger multitasking setting in which college students play games, listen to music and interact with others in the room."
Audio / Video Search: Singingfish, the search engine for finding audio and video on the Net, has redesigned its web site.
It now reports on the top audio and video searches for the month. In June Eminen, Matrix Reloaded, and 50 Cent topped the charts. Check June's top 10 at Streaming Media Report.
The Advanced Search lets one limit a search to music, movies, news, radio, sport, television or finance. For example, use Singingfish to find a newscast from the BBC on Britain's decision not to adopt the euro. There is also some field searching - to restrict the search to an title, artist, and site.
A clip may be shared (emailed to another).
Vivisimo: Vivisimo is a full featured meta-search engine, known for being able to cluster results into folders. As well it has several options for viewing results and under its Advanced Search, several search engines / databases to choose from. Chris Sherman reviews the features in Power Searching with Vivisimo. (July 8)
RSS News: Feedster, the RSS feed search engine, has taken over rssSearch. (Reported by Danny Sullivan in Search Engine Report July 2003) Feester has an Advanced Search where you can limit searches to a particular blog or group of blogs.
Yahoo News: Moreover News now feeds Yahoo News with content from 3,500 sources organized into a shallow tree of Moreover categories. Moreover indexes over 35,000 news stories a day. Its news is also picked up by MSN, Ask Jeeves, Altavista and 80% of all online news searches. Moreover Technologies Integrates Real-Time Relevant News Content Into Yahoo! News Search PR Newswire via Moreover (July 7, 2003).
MSN Search: Signs are that Microsoft is developing its own crawler and search engine. At present MSN relies on Inktomi, now owned by Yahoo. Microsoft's MSN Search To Build Crawler-Based Search Engine by Danny Sullivan. Search Engine Watch (July 1)
Search Strategies: Paul Krupin has written a book titled Magic Search Words with various tips on improving search - including using additional standard terms to refine a search. Reviewed in Search the Web Like a Pro by Reid Goldsborough in Link-UP (July 1, 2003)
Bookmarklets: Bookmarklets are bookmarks to functions - running a search, doing a calculation. Greg Notess reviews a variety of shortcuts -- Bookmarklets, Favelets, and Keymarks: Shortcuts Galore Online Magazine (July/August 2003).
Of interest: set up shortcuts to bookmarks in Internet Explorer 6.0, use keymarks in Netscape 7.0 to run a search at a particular search engine, search a library catalog by ISBN number.
Info Today 2003: Paula Hane reported on the InfoToday 2003 conference held in New York in May - keynote by Larry Prusack on putting ideas to work, Patrick Spain, CEO of Alacritude, LLC, on opportunities in the information marketplace, and Craig Silverstein of Google on new directions in search. InfoToday 2003. There are links to the presentations from the Info Today conference page.
Uptodate with Search: Cindy Carlson at the revived LLRX.com lines up ways and means for staying uptodate on changes at search engines. Searching about Search Engines (June 30, 2003). Good list of coping strategies, main blogs and other news sources. Websearchguide.ca got a mention. One other resource I would add is Sitelines from Workingfaster.com.
Search Technology: Ex-Altavista product marketing manager, Arnaud Fischer, identified a few critical factors for a search engine to succeed in What's it Going to Take to Beat Google?, SearchDay (June 12, 2003). All must be relevant, fast, and easy to use. The real test is in personalizing the results to the person's need and interests - training the engine, assisting in disambiguation. He sees increasing strength in vertical / specialty engines and thinks meta-search engines might be able to get an edge by aggregating the better results and improving relevancy.
GuruNet: Chris Sherman reviewed my favourite search utility, GuruNet, and found it a GuruNet: A Handy Information Magnet by Chris Sherman (June 11, 2003).
""We're trying to bring multifaceted information, facts and simple answers to the point of need," said Bob Rosenschein, founder and chairman of Atomica, the company behind GuruNet. The thin-client utility uses a library metaphor to organize information by subject, making it easy to browse, search, or simply highlight words to get relevant information. "I think of GuruNet as doing well with questions of 'who is' and 'what is'," said Rosenschein."
Toolbars: Many search sites offer toolbars with extra utilities. Chris Sherman reviewed them June 23 to 26.
HotBot's Swiss Army Knife Deskbar (June 24) -- access to FAST, Google, Inktomi and Teoma and more than 200 specialty sites. This is an adaptation of "Dave's Toolbar" and includes additional functionality for calculator and calendar.
Dogpile's Toolbar Fetches More than Search Engine Results (June 25) -- run a meta search on the Web or a specialty area (dictionaries, thesaurus, news etc), or a specific information type (yellow pages, weather, maps).
A Gaggle of Search Engine Toolbars (June 26) -- roundup of others - mainly WIndows 98 / IE 5.0+: Ask Jeeves, CNet, GGSearch (Google tools), Gophoria, Trellian (meta search), Macintosh Search Google, Copernic Agent (software utility - much more than a toolbar), Rocketinfo Desktop (for news -- $$).
Sherman suggests that Dogpile might be for the casual web user, and Hotbot for the more serious searcher. Hotbot does have more function and could be more robust tool. Dogpile presents its meta-search results by search engine - a limitation. Speciality content is mainly US.
Google Toolbar: Google released Toolbar 2.0 in beta. New features include a pop-up blocker, autofill for forms, blogthis for users of Blogger.com. Pop-up blocker can be adjusted to allow certain pop-ups and is said to be "intelligent" in what it blocks. Being a Blogger.com user, I may find the Blogthis utility handy - though it's easy enough to get to the Blogger posting screen without it. Autofill for forms may save some time, but can we really trust Google not to use the personal information?
Buttons and options can be adjusted through Options.
Certain useful features include setting the Google search engine to a particular country - (google.ca), use Google as the default search engine in IE (rather than the MSN default), vote for sites (assuming you have the time for this), open a new window to display results, button for getting page information.
See Google Releases Updated Search Toolbar by Chris Sherman, Search Day (June 30, 2003)
Images: Corbis is suing Amazon for copyright violation on hundreds of pictures of celebrities. Corbis sues Amazon over digital images CNet News (July 1, 2003) -- "The complaint accuses Amazon of vicarious infringement for allegedly allowing its "trusted retailers" to offer Corbis images through its site. "
Advertising: Overture is selling a new service to match ads to online content on Web pages. "Content Match" can be seen at MSN.com, Edmunds.com, and MyFamily.com Overture Unveils New Ad Product 'Content Match' to Compete With Google Service. AP (July 1, 2003) via Editor and Publisher.
News Aggregators and Current Awareness Marcus Zillman writes and speaks about Internet Resources and he founded botspot.com. In a recent Internet 101 column he covered News Aggregators on the Internet - RSS readers, news aggregating web sites, and RSS search tools. (June 2003).
Other columns by Zillman are at http://www.ecurrentawareness.com/.
Zillman weblog covers web search happenings, often related to current awareness.
Invisible Web: Jennifer Laycock at websearch.about.com describes the Invisible Web and offers some suggestions on directory resources to use to locate specialty sites.
What is the Invisible Web
Finding the Invisible Web
US Government: Media Labs at MIT has opened a new community website to help people in the US access information about their politicians and government - Government Information Awareness - http://opengov.media.mit.edu/. Site has been "seeded" with some databases with politics-related information, but much will come from contributions by individuals. Expect this site to be very busy. MIT project lets citizens 'Google' feds
Site lets public track government officials CNN (JUly 7, 2003)
Audio Ads: Audio advertising on web sites is more prevalent - perhaps even the norm at large US web sites. Martin Patriquin in the Globe and Mail says they aren't popular in Canada and mentions that Zero Knowledge Systems has the software to block the ads. Canada resists trend to U.S.-style audio Web ads (July 2, 2003)
Advertising: If you like a web site, you are more likely to pay attention to its ads. According to research from the Online Publishers Association -- "This research shows that the media halo effect works with online advertising, as well, and that advertisers who target sites that attract loyal, high affinity audiences will, indeed, see superior results." Familiarity Breeds Content. Cyberatlas (July 1, 2003)
Internet and Community: Is Google God? asks Thomas L Friedman in the New York Times. (June 29, 2003)
Friedman sees information being easier to find and to disseminate- thanks to Google and technologies such as Wi-Fi. What might this mean for the USA and its relation to the world? "While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us — whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet — more than ever." Info-tech will make it easier to build "little island kingdoms".
News in June: Chris Sherman provides a recap of notable web-search-engine news items in June. Search Engine Milestones for June 2003 (July 1, 2003).
Of note, Copernic Agent software was selected by PC Magazine as best search toolbar. Copernic will have the field. Intelliseek is dropping its BullsEye software.
Altavista has expanded its multimedia index to over 500 million files - the largest anywhere.
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