There is a whole book on Amazon Hacks - 100 tips and tools - by Paul Bausch. Preview it at O'Reilly -- http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/amazonhks/
CNN breaks news via e-mail alerts CNet News (Aug 25)
Email services for International are described at http://edition.cnn.com/EMAIL/ You can customize up to 30 alerts using your own terms or tapping into popular alerts created by others. Accepts " " for words together, and - to exclude. Receive daily or weekly, html or text. Alerts can be suspended when you go on vacation.
MSN Hotmail was the most used web mail service throughout the world except the USA where it trailed Yahoo Mail. In the USA Hotmail and Yahoo together made up 87% of the market. E-mail Around The World, July 2003 in Cyberatlas (Aug 22, 2003)
I-Search Digest, a listserv for search engine marketers, has an extensive glossary of terms used by and about search engines.
Which Travel Site Is Best? by Christina Valhouli. Forbes.com -- reports on online travel industry and comments on 10 travel web sites. Click through a description of each with pros and cons working from 10 to 1. Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity took the top 3 spots.
Microdoc News finds Search Engine Bias -- How Search Engines Interpret the Net (Aug 25) Microdoc News did a survey of 50 concepts at MSN, Google, Alltheweb, and Ask Jeeves and found some distinct differences in the nature of the results - commercial v technical v general. Recommends using more than one engine and being aware of bias.
Search in the Spotlight by Rebecca Lied at Clickz Today (Aug 22) - reports on Search Engine Strategies conference and developments in search engine marketing - tools, products, performance.
Also looks to future -- "Get ready for search by daypart, for geotargeting and yellow pages listings. Expect new evolutions in paid listings as advertisers demand customization of color and fonts and the addition of graphics to their ads. The vertical searches offered by networks such as Business.com are being enthusiastically adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and a host of others. Searching "travel," "finance," or "shopping" can provide more relevance -- and added layers of complexity for marketers."
Trademarks cast shadow on paid search By Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com
(August 19, 2003) Robert Hatta of Netflix asked experts at the Search Engine Strategies Conference if his firm should block others from using its trademarks in online advertisements at Google and Overture. eBay has already done so.
MSN Messenger upgrade blocks Trillian by Jim Hu. CNet News (Aug 20) "Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade to newer versions of its instant messenger application and is shutting its doors to third-party IM products such as Trillian. "
Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine, Part Three by Gary Price. SearchDay (Aug 28) Has 10 Daypop Search Tips.
Andrew Orlowski takes aim at Sergey Brin's (president of Technology at Google) story of a user "who turned to the popular search engine to determine whether a family member was having a serious heart attack and what actions to take". Google heals the sick. The Register (Aug 26)
Genie Tyburski covers methods for Searching for U.S. Legal News in SearchDay (Aug 26) - FindLaw.com, Law.com for headline news and articles, and blawgs for legal issues or events.
Yahoo considers spurning Google for Inktomi by Andrew Colley. ZDNet Australia (August 20, 2003 )
"Yahoo Australia search producer Peter Crowe has revealed that the company had started testing Inktomi's search engine in parallel with projects at a number of the company's regional portals to see if it provides a viable alternative to Google's crawler-based search engine. "
In July, Consumer WebWatch released a study that showed that surfers can't always distinguish between paid listings (or sponsored listings) and non-commercial results. Sixty percent of the participants didn't know that search engines make money by accepting the listings. Forty-one percent of results chosen by participants were commercial but they didn't know it.
Study: Paid Listings Still Confuse Web Searchers PCWorld via Yahoo News (Aug 22)
False Oracles: Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work Consumer WebWatch.org (June 30)
Google Pocket Guide by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, D.J. Adams is ready for ordering.
Computer Buyer at PC Pro in the UK reviewed it (Book Review: Google Pocket Guide Aug 22) and found the explanation of search syntax and of the results page useful. Did note that many of the tips were specfic to the USA.
The O'Reilly web site has some excerpts from the book. Google Pocket Guide.
Jeff Weiner of Yahoo talked about Yahoo direction in search at the Search Engine Strategies 2003 conference.
- Yahoo Product Search with product comparisons
- more vertical search for its topical portals
- personalized search results
Article mentions that Alltheweb / Overture has indexed 3.2 billion documents, and that Altavista Multimedia collection has 550 million files.
Yahoo! Branching Out its Search Roots By Michael Singer Silicon Valley.com (Aug 21)
Ask Jeeves has added more tools to its smart answers for lookups and calculations. Ask Jeeves Adds Search Tools Boston Internet. com (Aug 25)
"Now, users can query Smart Answers to receive local weather reports, surf conditions and flight delays. In addition, users can enter in more than 100 numerical conversions, such as cups in a gallon or the value of Pi."
See Ask Jeeves Serves Up New Answers by Chris Sherman (AUg 25)
FCC to allow AOL to add video to instant messaging Mercury News (Aug 19) AOL had been restricted to text by FCC in an attempt to get AOL to be more interoperable with Yahoo and MSN. Since then AOL's percent of market has dropped from 65% to 58.5, with Yahoo at 18.3 and MSN at 22.2. Yahoo and MSN already support web cameras in IM.
Groxis Announces Web-Enabled Version of Award-Winning Visual Information Software PR Newswire (Aug 19) "Embedded Grokker(TM) Enables Search Engines, Enterprises and Other Organizations to Integrate Grokker Into a Web Page"
"With Embedded Grokker, the software is integrated into a Web site as a simple browser-based application. Embedded Grokker uses the core Grokker technology to turn thousands of pieces of information -- for example, search results -- into a simple, graphical map. These embedded maps are filterable, customizable and can be saved and shared. A visitor to a Web site can perform a search, reorganize the Grokker map, and then save it and mail it to a friend or colleague, who can reopen the map on the originating site."
No mention of particular public web sites that have adopted this yet.
Looksmart is nervous about being dropped by MSN which accounts for 68% of its revenues. MSN Search Tests Worrisome for LookSmart Boston INternet.com (Aug 18)
Weather.com has a new desktop application for following the weather. "For the selected city, the application delivers current conditions, 5-day and 10-day forecasts, hour-by-hour forecasts and averages and records for 80,000 locations worldwide in addition to features such as "Feels like" temperature, sunrise and sunset information, chance of precipitation, visibility, UV Index, dew point and more. " 7 day trial - $29.99 US / year
Weather Channel Premieres New Subscription Desktop Application Media Post (Aug 19)
Has international cities but only USA maps at this time.
Learn lots about Bookmarklets, Favelets, and Keymarks: Shortcuts Galore from Greg Notess. ONline (July 2003) Bookmarklets are small javascript programs that can be set up as shortcuts to things you do often - calculations, translations, lookups.
Mary Ellen Bates reviews techniques on how to find an expert. First tip was to use the usenet groups at Google and Yahoo. What Do You Know? (August 2003)
University of Michigan has released results on its annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) study. Report looks at ebusiness including search engines, portals, and news sites. Google was a top performer in the search engine category with a score of 82, and Yahoo second as a portal with 78. In news, MSNBC and ABCNews were rated at 74, with CNN and USAToday at 72. University of Michigan Releases American Customer Satisfaction Index. EContent (Aug 22)
Toni Fitzgerald at Media Life Magazine noted that As search engines advance, portals decline (Aug 18). Satisfaction with search engines increased to a score of 78, and portals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN rose slightly to 70.
"Portals are best for general queries and varied information. But web users looking for more specialized answers are using search engines in increasing numbers and it would seem, with increasing success."
Average use from home in July was 26 hours per month, and 31 sessions. At work was higher -- nearly 76 hours/month, 67 sessions.
American Customer Satisfaction Index Q2, 2003: Manufacturing Durables and E-Business August 20, 2003 by Professor Claes Fornell
Aggregators Attack Info Overload by Ryan Singel. Wired (Aug 18) - The number of aggregators / newsreaders available to people who prefer their news as an RSS/XML feed has exploded. Article mentions several.
Project searches for open-source niche by Stephanie Olsen, CNet News (Aug 18) Nutch is developing open source software for searching that will show how it determined the rankings.
"... the project is not-for-profit and aims to advance search by supplying a technology for experimentation. Academic researchers or developers will be able to download the software and adapt it without having to reinvent the wheel, Cutting said. Foreign governments could use Nutch to develop a noncommercial search site for citizens rather than licensing a proprietary, ad-supported technology, he said. Or corporate entities could build a for-profit business around the technology. "
This is more likely to be used for "private" purposes - an organization or a specialized service rather than the spammer-infested web.
Altavista has joined the Toolbar club. (http://www.altavista.com/toolbar/default). Use it to search Altavista indexes, including the large image database, or to search the site you're at. Other functions: translation, highlight terms, lookup facts (dictionary, times, conversion, weather, zip codes). The lookup functions are mainly for US cities and zip codes. Like the Google Toolbar and probably now "de rigeur" it has a popup blocker. Requires IE5+ on WIndows 95+.
Pandia recaps news regarding possible new search engines in More new search engine development (Aug 11) -- Kaltix, IBM's Web Fountain, and Nutch.
Rex Murphy, weekend columnist in the Globe and Mail (Aug 16) - Japes of Wrath - spent part of the power outage in Ontario running searches at Google for the name of the singer of "The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia". (Column is not online.) Some quotes will amuse ---
"No, I only know these things in the sense that I found them on Google, the scratch for every trivia itch".
"And such is Google's readiness and comprehensiveness - it is for our times what the Encyclopedia Britannica used to be when the world wasn't wired - I came away, not enlightened, but more cluttered than when I went in. We don't know more in the computer age; we plaster our brains with sticky notes."
For Surfers, a Wave of Hotel Bargains by Bob Tedeschi. New York Times (Aug 17) - Looks for bargains at the new TravelWeb and compares service to Expedia (who has virtual tours of rooms) and Hotels.com (where hotels can be found by the site they are near).
Eudora e-mail software is now at version 5.2.1 with enhanced filtering and security login. Good alternative to the virus prone Microsoft Outlook. Eudora E-Mail, v. 5.2: A Review by J.A. Hitchcock LinkUp Digital (Aug 15)
Hit The Web, Then Hit The Road CBS News.com (Aug 1) About useful travel sites - reading newspapers in advance, using Frommers, getting restaurant reviews (Zagat), checking festivals (Festivals.com), using maps, checking weather.
Yahoo may continue AltaVista site Computer Weekly (Aug 15)
"Yahoo may continue with the AltaVista website after it completes its acquisition of Overture Services, and may use some of AltaVista's search technologies on its own portal sites."
"FAST has, traditionally, been very strong in the basic science of crawling and indexing, AltaVista has been pretty strong in different needs and features of search, such as multimedia search and clustering search, while Inktomi has been good focusing on relevance."
If they put those pieces together, it will be a stupendous search service.
Endeca chosen to power Brookstone’s Web site The Journal of New England Technology (Aug 13)
Endeca is noted for its "guided navigation" that can pick out relevant products. Try it at http://www.brookstone.com/world.asp
Search engines refining focus Robert Mullins San Jose Business Journal (Aug 11)
"Consumer, or Web-wide, search has become lucrative for both search companies and merchants that pay search engines to place their businesses prominently in search results. Enterprise search -- which includes an enterprise's internal Web site for its employees, or for its customers to search for that company's products -- does not include paid search. "
Bookmark this one page Lookup Directory from Melissa Data -- http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/index.htm. Has US phone numbers, addresses, and demographic data as well as Canadian addresses and Worldwide Place Names.
Featured in Search Day -- A Hearty Buffet of Look-Up Databases (Aug 14)
Snippy is another aid for researchers to save web content and search it afterwards. "Use Snippy to save, organize, annotate and share snippets of useful web content. Simply "drag and drop" text and/or graphics to Snippy and save into a category or project. Snippy date-stamps snippets alongside your comments and the original URL. " 30 day trial No price quoted! (Mentioned in TVC Alert)
IBM developed a search engine for a record company that may have wider applications. Called Web Fountain, "The technology reads and understands text, and uses natural language to make correlations between words. Unlike traditional search, Web Fountain searches everything on the Web, including chat rooms, when set to that parameter."
IBM's Path From Invention To Income by Lisa Di Carla Forbes.com (Aug 7)
See Gary Price's comments and analysis Web Search - IBM (Aug 10)
Also - IBM Takes Search to New Heights by Barry Taft eWeek (Aug 11) - provides short description of Unstructured Information Management Architecture, which is the basis for Web Fountain.
Hoover's Gets Even Better by Paula Hane. Newsline Newsletter August 2003 -- Full description of free and for-fee features.
Hoover's Unveils Enhanced Online Service Hoover's Press Release (Aug 12) "Doubles Industry Coverage, Delivers Intuitive Navigation & Powerful Search Tools"
Mentioned at ResourceShelf
- Daypop has indexed 59,000 weblogs.
- RSS Readers - Peter Scott's list.
Quigo has technology for sponsored searches that Overture wants. Quigo's technology can deliver more relevant ads based on its system that mixes semantic algorithms with human intelligence.
"For example, a web page featuring a travel article about Hawaii could offer advertising for hotels in Hawaii, airlines flying to Hawaii, unique tourist attractions in Hawaii and more. One advantage of AdSonar is in giving publishers the option of a human editorial setup for defining relevancy parameters and 'teaching' Quigo's machine learning algorithms which parts of each page should be targeted. The human editing process ensures that only the relevant parts of each document are targeted for ads, significantly improving the relevancy of the results." - from Press Release
Quigo offers the online publishing and ad serving industries a new contextually targeted advertising system Press release (Aug 13)
Overture picks Israeli start-up Quigo to lead search engine battle against Web giant Google By Galit Yemini Haeretz.com (Aug 14) --
Press release
Google can answer math questions now. It has a built-in calculator that will do arithmatic and evaluate some mathematical equations. Enter the terms in the search box -- 5*10 See Google calculator.
Alltheweb also has a conversion calculator for length, time, speed, temperature, weight, area, cooking/volume and can do 5*10.
This may be useful to people with handhelds with wireless Internet connections. Use this instead of a calculator.
Articles are featuring back-to-school types of resources. New York Times' Online Diary - August 13 by Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell had some homework helpers:
National Geographic One-Stop Research - searches across all the National Geographic publications and productions. -- www.nationalgeographic.com/onestop -- good for big topics like rain forest, tigers, Egypt. Has the Arctic and Alaska, but not Nunavut or the Yukon.
Foreign Languages - - www.learninglanguages.net - "brings together the best online foreign language resources for English-speaking K-12 students and teachers". Has Spanish, French, and Japanese. This is an Internet Scout Project from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Virtual School Museums -- www.fno.org/museum/list.html - sites created by kids.
Expedition 2003 - expedition2003.org - Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean.
Love, hate and newspapers by Jack Kapica. Globe and Mail (Aug 11)
Newspapers are trying different models for web presence. AOL Time Warner is moving to for-fee subscription-based access - witness recent change at Business2.com and Fortune. Google cached pages of news articles is under fire. Salon is still struggling. Younger people tend not to use the sites although they can be attracted through news about local area.
Internet or Web? There's a difference by Carl Smith. Popular Science via CNN.com (Aug 12)
"The Internet, of course, is the maze of phone and cable lines, satellites, and network cables that interconnect computers around the world. The Web is the name given to anything on the Internet that can be accessed using a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. "
Google to display IEEE technical journals content Managing Information (Aug 12) Sometime in September Google will be displaying the abstracts from IEEE journals and publications in search results. Full article will be available to IEEE subscribers and on a pay-per-view basis.
Gary Price wondered if this was the beginning of paid inclusion at Google. Google said no. Web Search - Google - August 13
Google Revs Up Searches by Jim Rapoza. EWeek (Aug 11) - EWeek Labs tested Google's search appliance for enterprises.
"However, although the appliance will meet or exceed most companies' requirements for a search engine, it lacks some advanced features found in other enterprise search engines, including the ability to dynamically create topic categories and the ability to directly access databases for searches."
E-Content has a "white paper series focusing exclusively on content and
content-related issues for executives and professionals".
http://www.econtentmag.com/WhitePapers/LeadershipSeries/ContentStrategies.html
Contributions by the Gale Group, ProQuest, OneSource Information Services, Javien Digital Payment Solutions.
Google doesn't have true proximity operator like Altavista does with Near. But you can play games with * to substitute for a word. Rita Vine reviewed the main points in Microdoc-News. The Experts Declare "Nothing New" on Google Proximity Searching (Aug 11)
She noted Kevin Shay's Proximity Search API is a better alternative - http://www.staggernation.com/cgi-bin/gaps.cgi. It allows one to set up the proximity search for two words n words apart combined with other search terms, to sort the results by proximity.
Proximity is good to use when you're looking for a term that might be expressed in more than a couple common phrases, such as market share and share of market.
Andrew Goodman at Traffick.com muses on the sagacity of the new ad campaign for Ask Jeeves that leaves the high-priced butler out of the picture. Will we be able to ask Jeeves or not? Jeeves, What's the Point of All This?
Columbia University ran an experiment with email to test the notion of "six degrees of separation" - that everyone can be linked to each other through just six people.
There was a list of 18 people to pick from as targets. 60,000 people participated in 166 countries. Researchers found that it took 5 to 7 email to reach the target.
Email experiment confirms six degrees of separation New Scientist (Aug 3)
New York Times looked at the figures more closely. Degrees of Separation Are Likely More Than 6, Especially in E-Mail Age by Kenneth Chang (Aug 12 )
"Of the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail.
As in most social networks, it is not just a question of who knows whom, but who is willing to help. .. When the researchers asked people why they did not participate, less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered."
Searching for the personal touch by Stephanie Olsen. CNet News (Aug 11) -- In general article reviews aspirations of web search engines to enhance their services through personalization. In specific terms, article puts spotlight on Kaltix, a new start up company that may have technology to speed up Google's PageRank computations and enable consideration of personal interest profiles.
New search engine called NetNose asks people to rate the results and add sites they think should be in the results set. Sounds like work. Search is for ANY of the terms (rare these days) - can use AND or + to require terms. There is no provision for phrase searching in this beta version of the engine. NetNose will also have tags to identify types of information, for example - research for "Term papers, health, documents". This is in the future. For now, only the tags for Adult and Buy work - figures. See Pandia Search Engine News - New 'democratic' search engine.
National Geographic has a map machine -- "Its Map Machine lets you see the world in new ways, from the street maps of North America and Europe to historical maps of railroads and battles, as well as assorted physical, political, cultural, and panoramic maps. Shoot, there's even a terrain map of Mars."
National Geographic Site Maps the World by Charles Bowen. Editor and Publisher (Aug 5)
Maryjee Odala has kicked the tires with Google's new synonym operator - tilde ~. Google Introduces Synonym Searching, News Alerting Features Information Today Newsbreaks (Aug 11).
She found that the ~ will work on fielded searches. "In addition to free-text synonym searching, the new advanced search feature works in fielded searches. Search for browser intitle:~help, browser inurl:~help, allintitle:browser ~help, or allinurl browser ~help, and you will retrieve synonyms for help occurring in the title and URL fields, respectively. For example, enter intitle:~cancer and Web sites with pain, one of the synonyms for cancer along with disease and oncology, in the title will show up on the results list."
Google is not divulging details on how the tilde works but the "synonyms" are computer generated and Odala sees page ranking at work. ~apple will bring up computers, so be sure to say what you really want -- ~apple fruit.
It may be that Netscape the portal will carry on while Netscape the browser fades away. It does have connections to AOL Time Warner publications. And now it has a learning center with a variety of online courses on computers and technology, entertainment, personal enrichment, relationships, and business. These are done in partnership with Powered Inc. Prices are set at $9.99 to $14.99 US plus materials. Courses run about 4 weeks.
Netscape and Powered, Inc. Collaborate to Launch New Online Education Service,. Press Release (AUg 5)
New top-level domain goes .pro CNet News (Aug 8) -- RegistryPro is looking for doctors, lawyers, and accountants to take out .pro domain names. Golf and tennis pros need not apply
Expect to see ads on all manner of web sites. Google's AdSense program will make it easier for smaller web sites to host targeted ads and received some of the advertising revenue.
Google ads now self-serve by Paul Festa and Stephanie Olsen. CNet News (Aug 6)
Traffick.com has more on the features from the point of view of a site that is likely to use them. August 7, 2003 - AdSense
The benefits of blogs for libraries are described in Blogs for Libraries by Greg Schwartz at Web Junction.
"WebJunction is an online community of libraries and other agencies sharing knowledge and experience to provide the broadest public access to information technology." WebJunction was launched in May 2003 and is the work of 5 partners including OCLC and Colorado State Library. (About WebJunction)
NetNews Tracker searches Usenet groups at Google Groups and will email hits that match your keywords. First three queries are free. (Mentioned in the Internet Resource Newsletter - August 2003).
NewsNow crawls over 11,000 sources every 5 minutes. http://www.newsnow.co.uk In May New Media Insight found that 54 percent of journalists polled used NewsNow and 80 percent thought it was good. Free search is restricted to one word queries. Must subscribe to Business Services to get full suite of search and delivery features.
Faganfinder offers a wizard for translating chunks of text. Paste it in and select the language. Twenty-nine languages are listed including Latin, Urdu, Welsh. Faganfinder uses a roster of nearly 30 translation tools that includes Systran, the service used by Altavista and Google. Faganfinder makes an International Keyboard available for entering characters not on your keyboard. It's another great service from Michael Fagan.
Fagan Finder Translation Wizard http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/
More at ResourceShelf - Resource of the Week - The Translation Wizard from FaganFinder (Beta)
Google has come through for researchers again. It has added an alerting service to Google News. Up to 50 alerts are allowed. They are easy to add and delete. Changes must be done by deleting and creating a new one. Full syntax is supported. Google recommends creating the search using the Advanced Search at Google News and then copying the search query into the Alert's search box.
News Alert page is at http://www.google.com/newsalerts
Google spreads into news alerts by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (Aug 6) - Mentions the news alerts of competitors - CNN, Yahoo, New York Times ($) "and others".
Google Alert (www.googlealert.com) may be considering offering news alerts too. It is surveying its users on what they would like to see in a "more powerful premium service". News alerts, html and rss feeds were two of the possibilities.
Jonathan Dube at Poynter Online offers some tips for constructing the alerts. Naturally you can use "" for words together, OR, and - to exclude. Mainly keep in mind -- source: to limit to a news source, and location: to limit to a country - eg. location:ca Google's New News Alerts (Aug 7)
Danny Sullivan predicted a balance of AOL, Microsoft, and Google in an interview on Web Talk Guys Radio -- Search Engine Showdown, In case you're wondering where's Yahoo, most of the interview is about the Overture-Yahoo combo and how MSN will react.
Gary Price at SearchDay features EEVL: The Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing as a A Search Haven for Engineers (Aug 6). This is one of the "gateways" to resouces included in the Resource Discovery Network in the UK. EEVL is a directory to resources, a search engine to the full text of those resources, and has news, e-journals, and tutorials.
Opera browser gaining users by John Borland. Cnet News (Aug 5)
Opera is still on the radar. It has been downloaded 10 million times this year. Market share, according to OneStat figures may be .6%.
"According to Web consulting company OneStat.com, which monitors worldwide browser share, only about 0.6 percent of surfers currently use Opera, compared with more than 95 percent for various versions of Internet Explorer, about 2.5 percent for Netscape Navigator and about 1.6 percent for Mozilla, the open-source version of Netscape. "
Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine, Part Two by Gary Price. SearchDay (Aug 5) - interesting for explanation of trend analyses done on words, news bursts, wishlists on weblogs (some people aren't shy), and authority or blog importance.
Wacked (http://yes.wacked.us/) - indeed! It's a new metasearch engine that lets you pick 4 search tools from lists of directories, search engines, and metasearch. Except - ixquick is a metasearch engine and it was listed as a directory. Lists are interesting for including obscure and unknown engines -- Crashinto? Scrub the Web? Globito? Results from each engine show as a vertical band on a web page - very difficult to read. (Mentioned in Search Engine Watch newsletter (Aug 5).)
Waypath.com is a new engine for searching weblogs - over 203,000 at this time.
"Waypath's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically, using available technology. "
I searched on Oliphant Ontario and was delighted to find a blog about the South Bruce called the South Bruce Peninsular .
There is also a URL search. It doesn't find entries from that URL. Rather it finds weblogs that have similar themes. Sitelines is a blog about web searching by Rita Vine, a librarian. Searching on www.workingfaster.com/sitelines finds other library oriented weblogs, as does searching on Gary Price's www.resourceshelf.com.
Internet Research Toolbar helps people save, search, and manage information from the Web. Windows and Internet Explorer 5.0+. Cost is $59.95 US, 30 day trial. Mentioned in TVC ALert.
Google has added a method for widening a search through synonyms. Put the ~ before a word. Google gives the example of browser ~help to get guides, faq, tips, support, tutorials, helps, helper and a few more. The "synonyms" are in bold (not, unfortunately, in a list at the top). Not all are truly synonyms. Some are word variants, others are antonyms.
To check if your use of ~ made a difference, run the search without and note the number of results returned. Naturally there should be more with the ~ since Google is looking for the occurrence of ANY of the terms.
However, Genie Tyburski did note the anomaly that ~research had fewer results than research alone. This is true also for cancer, heart, feet. Puzzling.
When to use this?
Any time you are doing a broad-brush startup search. You might be interested in health taxonomies. taxonomies ~health finds healthcare, medicine, medical.
Or when you know that alternatives could make a difference. For example, if doing a search on syndication through RSS you might look for alternatives to RSS such as XML and RDF. Enter syndication ~RSS.
The use of the synonym operator might help increase relevance, since Google will rank results more highly if they have many of the terms.
References
New Google Feature: Synonym Search - Microdoc News ran ~ through several tests and advises that one use it sparingly.
Synonym Operatorat Waxy.org gives several examples of words with synonyms. To find out Google's synonyms use the operator and then exclude the keyword; eg. ~help -help
Big News! New Google Operator Google Weblog
Google Help page Very brief mention.
Battle of the Blog: Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs By Paul Festa. CNet News (Aug 4)
The push to develop a new format for syndicating content indicates just how important and popular this form of publishing has become. Dave Winer, previouly CEO of UserLand Software was the prime developer of RSS as we know it today. He is now at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Continuing as keeper of the code he has locked down the core of the code from further change. But some want more features in addition to plain syndication - such as publishing, archiving, and editing. Those arguing for an alternative include Sam Ruby of IBM supported also by Google, Six Apart (Movable Type), Tim Bray (co-creator of XML). Will a standard emerge from all of this?
Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site by Kristie Lu Stout. CNN (Aug 4)
Flurry of activity in articles about Hong Kong in the Wikipedia shows off its open source outlook and global reach. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written by volunteers using the weblog-like wiki software. There are over 132,000 articles.
Gary Price writing for SearchDay has tips in how to use MSN Money Portal for business research on publicly traded companies -- Searching for Corporate Milestones. (Aug 4)
Jason Parker at ZDNet recommends three toolbars in Want to speed up Web searches? Here's how (Aug 4) They are Google Toolbar - very popular, Nutshell - several choices in search engine, and for Mac users the Safari Apple Web browser. Where's Hotbot's toolbar?
Blogs Have a Place on News Web Sites by Steve Outing. Editor and Publisher (July 31, 2003) -- the many ways newspapers can make use of weblogs whether done by staff or independent journalists.
Most notably, there are the new moblogs - mobile weblogs with photos and text done over a photo phone - use these for celebrity watch and event coverage.
Some, like Rafat Ali in London UK make money from a niche weblog. His is paidcontent.org on new-media paid-content strategies.
Clearly, the weblog can be adapted to many purposes and is here to stay.
AOL Pledges $2 Million to Mozilla Foundation by Sheri R. Lanza. Information Today (August 4)
Signs are that Netscape will wither away. AOL laid off some Netscape staff; Mozilla, which had been the underpinning to Netscape browser, became an independent foundation; and AOL pledged money to Mozilla. Word is not final but many think Netscape is dead. Pity - it had become a better browser than IE with its search function, newsreader, popup blockers, and web page display. A new release of Mozilla is planned for later this year - and I for one will do my best to switch from the limitations of IE6. See http://www.mozilla.org/
Google Localization Produces Patchy Results Based on tests with Australian sites Dr. Elwyn Jenkins found that Google mainly filters on domain names and is especially spotty properly identifying Australian sites. He has set up a new blog at sizzle.net.au to help direct Google to Australian sites.
Guide to Australian Searching in Google from the Microdoc Google Manual. Dr. Elwyn Jenkins makes a good point that the country filter may not bring up all pages for a country. It's a good practice to include identifying words - city, region, phone number.
If You Liked the Web Page, You'll Love the Ad by Bob Tedeschi. New York Times (August 4, 2003)
Display of paid listings has migrated from search engine results to the pages of online publishers - newspapers, iVillage, and other "content sites". The players are Google, Overture, and Sprinks.
"When serving ads for content sites, both Overture and Google employ technology that infers the topic of a page by scanning for words and phrases, searching through a database of tens of thousands of advertisers, then delivering a relevant text ad. In some cases that is not difficult. For instance, on Weather.com's golf forecast page for Norfolk, Va., Google's service — which it calls AdSense — can deliver ads for marketers who had bid to have their ads appear above Google search results whenever users type "Norfolk Virginia golf courses" or some similar phrase."
Ads can be inappropriate. A story in the New York Post about a murder with body parts put in a suitcase came with an ad for luggage.
Google's service is said to be highly automated, whereas Overture's is assisted by editors. Sprinks uses more "contextual analysis" which may be more topic based. It is expected that as more content sites require registration and some personal information that contextual analysis will be able to take into account the person's profile.
Pandia has reviewed the new wotbot search engine (Aug 3, 2003) Currently at 6 million pages, wotbot plans to grow to 100 million by the end of the year. Search interface is simple, and the Advanced Search is forms-based. Features of interest include the flag display for country (not always correctly derived from the URL), site preview as part of search display, and, surprisingly, the option under preferences to turn off sponsored links. Wotbot is still very much under development.
Music: Downloaders Disregard Legal, Copyright Issues by Robyn Greenspan. Cyberatlas. (Aug 1) Jupiter Research sees online music tripling by 2008 to $3.3 billion. Pew Internet Project found that downloaders aren't concerned about copyright.
Google: Google girds for heavyweight challenge as its influence widens. AP (Aug 1) -- In only 5 years Google took over search. Yahoo and MSN are manoevring to launch a full attack. This article says Yahoo has spent some $2 billion in its counterattack, and Microsoft will spend $49 billion on developing a new search engine.
RSS: Jim McGee in his blog McGee's Musings has brought together postings and comments about the widening use of RSS and information aggregation. There is increasing acceptance by publishers, business, and professionals. A look at recent user level activity in the RSS world (July 25)
Article mentions Info Aggregator - "an RSS-to-IMAP service. It lets you receive and read RSS feeds in your favourite mail client. It delivers all the latest news and blog posts directly to your mailbox."
Search Strategies: Anant Patil, WebMaster at AskSam Systems, has Research Tips: Finding the Right Information on the Web - short article that covers main points.
Subject Directory: Alllearn, an Alliance for Lifelong Learning in the UK, makes its subject directory to academic website available to all. "Created by experts, AllLearn's Directories index leading academic websites that meet the highest intellectual standards." See http://www.allianceforlifelonglearning.org/er/directories.cgi
"AllLearn, a not-for-profit distance learning venture among Oxford, Stanford, and Yale Universities, was formed in September 2000 to provide the highest quality, college level online courses and educational offerings to alumni of these three great institutions as well as to other adult learners." Site is interesting as well for its offering of online courses in arts and humanities.
Online Video: Feedroom.com is an Internet broadcaster with partnerships with Reuters, NBC, Tribune Company, Playboy, Miramax Films, Business Week, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, General Motors, AT&T, and Bausch & Lom. It offers news and entertainment and "delivers more than 30 million streams of video per month to millions of viewers worldwide".
" The FeedRoom operates the most extensive local video news network in the United States. The FeedRoom sites offer local television stations the opportunity to take advantage of both the surge in popularity of streaming news video and proven demand for more and better local new coverage online. "
The intended customer is the corporate web site, but individuals may view several channels at the www.feedroom.com site. FeedRoom also offers free video alerts for news, business, technology, and fashion. Subscribe at http://subscription.videolink.feedroom.com/FeedRoom/FeedRoom_prefctr.asp.
Thanks to Rod for tip.
Internet Resources: July issue of Internet Resources Newsletter from Heriot-Watt University Library is online. Excellent for new and notable sites.
Microsoft: Microsoft.com revamps search by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (July 31) -- Microsoft is getting into search. It has developed a new search tool for its corporate web site, microsoft.com. It's looking to replace Inktomi at MSN.com with its own search engine, and it is developing a new search facility for Windows that will search locally and, through msn search, on the Net.
However, Traffick.com says "Microsoft.com's internal search engine blows chunks". I looked for "work offline" because of pesky message about my internet connection I get all the time. Microsoft.com returned no results, Google site search found several leads.
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