Louis Borders Turns the Page The bookstore-chain founder has a new idea—recycling magazine stories. By Michelle Andrews Fortune (Dec ) -- features Louis Borders's (co-founder of the book store Borders) latest venture into online -- KeepMedia. "But Borders sees KeepMedia growing beyond its digital-newsstand origins to become a superstore for all sorts of high-quality branded content, including digital books—some of which are already on the site—and archived broadcast materials." As Gary Price at ResourceShelf says - check your public library first.
Is Google good for you? "Technology analyst Bill Thompson wonders why he cannot stay away from Google, even though he has his doubts about it." BBC News (Dec 19)
Thompson finds Google much more commercial and "far from the great search engine" that it used to be. Yet he continues to use it. He notes that the new Deskbar, while nice, doesn't do much more than what you can do with the Windows taskbar. He likens Google as a brand to Coke or McDonalds. His resolution is to break his bond with Google. "It may be slightly early for resolutions, but I am going to make one anyway. 2004 will be the year I break my addiction to Google and improve the quality of my searching. I owe it to myself. "
A Net of Control -- Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in the works by Steven Levy. Newsweek. (Dec 2003) - The Internet may not live up to early expectations of promoting democracy and openness. John Walker, once of Autodesk, has examined the nightmarish dangers in a web document, Digital Imprimatur. Another equally worried is Lawrence Lessig. Concludes by saying "staving off the Internet power shift will be a difficult task, made even harder by apathy on the part of users who won’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone."
General Cookbooks, Cookbooks By Region, Cookbooks by Technique or Ingredient by Kathy Biehl. LLRX (Dec 22) - toss the print cooking reference and turn to this collection of cookbooks.
Overview of Sources of Canadian Law on the Web, Revised By Louise Tsang. LLRX (Dec 22) New additions and changes are marked in green in this collection of Canadian Law sources.
U.S. Net population levels off by Alorie Gilbert. CNet News.com (Dec 24) Reports on the latest study by Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"While e-mail and searching for information are far and away the most popular on-line pastimes in the United States, on-line banking, travel planning, participating in an on-line auction and downloading music have become the fastest-growing Internet activities in recent years, according to the study."
About 2/3 of the US population uses the Net, and 1/3 of those have a high-speed connection.
Full report -- America's Online Pursuits: The changing picture of who's online and what they do Pew Internet and American Life (Dec 22, 2003)
Where the Net Is Heading in 2004 by Alex Salkever. BusinessWeek Online (Dec 23) -- sees everyone gunning for Google. Also believes that the worldwide digital divide of poor to rich nation will shrik.
"The coming year will bring many more changes to the Internet compared to the past few years. That seems inevitable given how many more people will be using it, the key court cases coming down the pike that could affect it, and more capital investments and startups now looking at it as a rejuvenated source of income."
Web addresses get nip and tuck--and spam By Paul Festa CNET News.com (Dec 23) - There are several services that can be used to shorten a url. Three are discussed here -- TinyURL, Shorlify, and Make a Shorter Link. TinyURL is probably the best known and used. Article notes that abuse by spammers is becoming a problem. Also, volume of use is making TinyURLs longer.
On-line maps spark fear of stalkers Associated Press (Dec 19) - People are getting spooked by the ease with which others can find where they live on an online map through a phone number. On the other hand, the Internet is an information appliance used by millions of people for legitimate reasons.
NewsBank Relaunches NewsLibrary.com NewsBreaks (Dec 22)
"NewsBank, Inc. has announced the relaunch of its NewsLibrary news archive (http://www.newslibrary.com), which offers complete archives for over 260 individual newspapers and other news sources, with nearly 100 million news articles, from the 1970s to the present. " Papers are in the United States. Service is available through paid subscription.
Groxis Ships Version 2 of Its Visual Search Tool by Paula J. Hane (Dec 22) NewsBreaks - Grokker 2 is software from Groxis that displays search results in a visual map. The article notes that it has been well received in "K-12 and higher education markets" and that Groxis has been working with library applications and content providers such as Reed Elsevier.
"The software provides an integrated browser for viewing documents, deduplication from multiple sources, and filters that adapt to the data source to permit data mining. Users can create personal categories on a map, save a map, and e-mail it to a colleague who can use the free Grokker reader to view it."
Google Beta Tests Book Search Service by Barbara Quint (Dec 22) NewsBreaks -- Summarizes what is currently known about Google's entry to the book world. The Google Print service has indexed information about 6,000 titles with follow-up links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-A-Million. There are rumours that Google will introduce a pay-per-view service.
Article has some tips on how to search the Print service, but there is a small mistake. To search only the collection use site:print.google.com followed by search terms such as author, keyword, or publisher. EG site:print.google.com happiness
Search Engine Giant Yahoo! Reveals the Year's Top Searches CPU Review (Dec 29)
In a year of war and pestilence people continue to be most interested in entertainment. Top 3 spots were taken by KaZaa, Harry Potter and "American Idol".
Get all the stats at http://search.yahoo.com/top2003
Ay-up.com is a new search engine that sports 4 tabs: web, geo-search, directory, and news. Directory is Open Directory, and the Geo-search and news are not active yet. Web search has only a small index and supports some field searching on title, metatags and date. Ay-Up offers a free site search. People with web-sites that need a search function may want to adopt this. The About page says Ay-up is based in Vancouver - and with all the red at the site, we can guess this is Vancouver, Canada. (Mentioned at Research Buzz.)
Bias cramps Internet Associated Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 18) The Internet is still very Western and in the English language. Problems and solutions were discussed at the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva.
"As a result, there's little specific to developing countries, which remain largely offline. According to the UN International Telecommunication Union, 1.5 billion villages have no access at all to phones or the Internet, and 70 per cent of Internet users live in countries that make up only 16 per cent of the world's population."
Applied Semantics & Stemming: The future of Google Searching! By Emancipator Searchengine Guild (Dec 18) - connects the technology of Applied Semantics that Google bought in April 2003 to the new stemming feature at Google - and by extension the ~ operator.
Keeping Found Things Found: Web Tools Don't Always Mesh With How People Work Ascribe (Dec 17) A study by William Jones and Harry Bruce at the University of Washington's Information School and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research shows that people prefer to rely on their memories to refind information than tools. "... regardless of your "keeping" technique, Jones, Bruce and Dumais have found that, when you want to revisit a Web site, there's a good chance you first try three other options: directly entering the URL in your Web browser (often with help from the browser's autocompletion feature); searching with a search engine; or accessing it via another Web site or portal." That certainly describes what I do.
Article was mentioned in the ResourceShelf - Online Behavior.
Gary Price featured Needlesearch, a toolbar for users of the Mozilla browser as the Web Search Tool of the Week. (Dec 18)
Adobe opens e-book store by David Becker. CNet via Globe and Mail (Dec 18) -- "The Adobe Digital Media Store offers books from major publishers such as HarperCollins Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Random House, plus links to electronic versions of publications such as Popular Science and The New York Times. All are published in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), the company's widespread standard for the electronic presentation and exchange of documents." But who will buy?
Surfwax LawKT (Knowledge Tools) "provides full-text searching of over 50,000 Web-based publications from 280 of the world's leading firms, and searching of major law, Web, and news sites. " There are three versions: Lite - free for one-stop searching, Pro - more sites plus collaboration tools, Enterprise. A Premium version will be available in February 2004 offering alerts and document saving and more meta-search from specialized databases.
Greg Notess has noticed that search for images, news and video at Altavista and Alltheweb have identical results. Some Shared Databases at AlltheWeb and AltaVista
Searching the news services for "jack layton" ndp shows this to be true. The differences are in the interface and display. Alltheweb Advanced search lets you select type of news sources and filter by domain. At Altavista there are the easy to use drop-down boxes for topic, region, sources, and time period. But Altavista News appears to have lost its taste for boolean. Boolean operators OR, ANDNOT don't work.
TIP OF THE MONTH: I Heard The News Today, Oh Boy by Mary Ellen Bates. December 2003 Bates found information on product tampering through local newspapers and radio stations. This newsletter tells how she did it.
Genie Tyburski has more related articles about finding local news.
Search And Destroy A gang of Web-search companies is gunning for Google. The stakes have never been higher by Lev Grossman and Mary Anne Murray Buechner. Time Magazine (Dec 22)
Once people figured out how to make money from it, Web search became very hot. Google had the advantage for a while with superior search technology and a money making formula. That edge is being blurred as MSN powers up, Yahoo expands, and Amazon takes on product search.
Is Larry Page overreaching when he says "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful." or is this a vision they can achieve?
Has some interesting statistics:
- size of Internet might be 500 billion documents (anybody's guess)
- 550 million web searches a day
- advertising income for search engines $2 billion and growing at 35% / year
- 32% of web searches are done at Google. Counting affliliated services like AOL, the number through Google is 70% or all searches.
- After Google issues its IPO it might be worth $20 billion.
- Google has indexed over 4 billion pages (but hasn't noted that on its home page).
Plug-in gives shape to Google search by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (Dec 17) "Groxis, a technology start-up that uses graphics to display Web search results, sees a gap in Google's widely used search engine and wants to capitalize on it. "
More positive press for the desktop search utility Grokker 2.
""This plug-in will allow users to map Google results into a form that is usable for educators, students and researchers, where long lists of search results, organized by PageRank (Google's algorithm), cannot provide that capability or value," said R.J. Pittman, CEO of Groxis. "
First Amazon, now Google - indexing portions of books - but in Google's case it is a smaller portion. Google Introduces Book Searches By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Dec 17) Results from the Print search will show with other web results, but don't expect to be overwhelmed be entries specially marked at [Book-Beta] for some time.
More information at About Google Print.
Also see Google Experiment Provides Internet With Book Excerpts by John Markoff. New York Times (Dec 18) -- "While the service does not index or provide the full text of books, the company said it was talking about the idea of being the host of electronic texts for publishers." It's all quite tentative still. How will this affect Google relationship with Amazon? Will publishers be keen? Will searchers find it useful?
Tara Calishain figured out how to list the books that Google has in its print collection. inurl:print.google.com site:google.com See What (and Why) In the World Is Google Print? for her comments on Google's missed opportunities.
Google's Florida Shake Up: A View from the Beginning by Jim Hedger ISEDB.com (Dec 16) A diary of reports about the changes in result ranking at Google and related puzzlement and outrage - begins November 17 to December 16. Concludes by noting that Google is still showing spam in the top ten for commercial keyword phrases, and that Google, according to data collected by Alexa, is showing a slight decline in users while Yahoo and MSN show an increase.
The voyeurs at the search engines will be reporting top searches for the year. Lycos is first out with "The Top 100 items of the year 2003" at Lycos 50. There is an accompanying article to help us make some sense of KaZaA as the number one search. Otherwise it was Iraq, celebrities, sports, health and diet. Lycos 50 also has the 20 top news stories. Iraq War was the most popular (searched for) news story. West Nile Virus was on the list but not SARS.
At Google Zeitgeist the last monthly view available is for September 2003. Year-end figures aren't in sight yet.
Yahoo keeps a Buzz Index too. At this point in time (Dec 17) Paris Hilton in #1 outranks Saddam Hussein in #7 spot.
Study results from a survey done by WebAdvantage.net about search engine used suggests that people avoid sponsored links if they recognize them. When they do use them, they don't find them very useful.
"According to the survey, 85 percent of the respondents claim to click on sponsored links less than 40% of all searches, but nearly half of the audience (49 percent) does not seem to know the difference between paid and unpaid listings." For those who do click on them, "Seventy-eight percent of all respondents feel that they find the information that they are looking for less than 40 percent of the time through sponsored links ..."
From Business Users Prefer Organic Search Results to Paid Listings Businesswire (Dec 16) Detailed results are at WebAdvantage -- Results from WebAdvantage.net's "Business Users Search Engine Survey"
Spotted at TVCAlert.
Research 101 is an interactive online tutorial developed by the University of Washington Library in 2001. It is an excellent starting point for building skills in doing research using a range of resources. There are 6 units covering the basics about types of resources including the Internet, information cycles in the dissemination of information, identifying and defining topics, searching databases and finding material in libraries, and evaluating materials. The tutorial includes a variety of self-tests, animated illustrations, and worksheets.
Spotted at Sitelines.
How Search Engines Make Money By Grant Crowell, Guest Writer SearchDay (Dec 16) -- report from "Search Economics, Search Monetization Strategies," at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, August 2003.
Bush OKs spam bill--but critics not convinced By Declan McCullagh. CNET News.com (Dec 16) - detail on what it covers, who applauds it and why many anti-spammers fear that spam will get worse. Legislation in the U.S. goes into effect Jan 1 2004.
Boost the Power of Your Word Processing Program by Reid Goldsborough. LinkUp Digital (Dec 15 2003) - Reviews two programs that can be used with Word to provide additional funcationality.
Word Menu - an idea thesaurus for $39.95 US
GuruNet - really a search aid to finding facts and definitions quickly through GuruNet's online library of resources.
Google's Florida Update: One Month Later By Gord Hotchkiss. SearchEngine Guide (Dec 15) It's widely recognized that Google has changed it algorithms for ranking results. Hotchkiss refers to Danny Sullivan's observation that Google could have two systems working now, one for more competitive (commercial) searches and the other for less competitive. But Hotchkiss goes another step and wonders if Google is starting to use the concept technology it acquired from Applied Semantics.
"Applied Semantics Concept Server used language patterns, including semantics and ontology to try to both determine the real meaning of the words on a website page and also to anticipate what people are looking for. It tries to interpret concepts based on the use of words, their proximity and the patterns they occur in. What if Florida was Google's first attempt to start introducing this concept to their search engine?
The other unique aspect about Concept Server is that it can refine results on an ongoing basis as it becomes "smarter". It starts by feeding concepts or results that it feels matches the searchers intentions. If the response isn't positive, it will try to do a better job next time. "
Is this what is really at work and the system will become self-regulating?
Google Here, There, and Everywhere "As the search giant keeps expanding into new services, it's becoming a rival to just about every other Net company out there" by Alex Salkever. BusinessWeek Online (Dec 16) Imagines a time in the not-to-distant future in which Google is the search interface to everything. Speculates on what this might mean for the competitor Yahoo, and for sites such as MovieFone or EBay.
Monetizing Graphical Search By Susan Kuchinskas Internet News.com (Dec 15) Compares the clustering of results into hierarchical folders that Vivisimo does to the graphical representation of spheres by Grokker. "Released Monday, Grokker 2.0 lets users search indexed material and retrieve results organized into spheres of different colors and sizes, some of them nested inside each other. "
Grokker is desktop software available for Windows 2000 and XP. There is a 30 day trial. Price is $49.95 US. Preview the software through the demos at the Groxis site.
Fortune has more about Grokker. Going Deeper than Google "Revamped search software called Grokker could be the future for finding information" By David Kirkpatrick (Dec 16) He described what a search is like --
"Grokker creates a visual representation of a search. When you type in, say, "nanotechnology," Grokker starts organizing data from the multiple search engines. You see a big circle, within which are smaller circles with labels including "conference," "technology," "science," "research," "reports," "news," "molecular," "material," and so on. Each represents a subset of data on nanotechnology. Click on, say, "molecular," and that circle will enlarge so you can see several further subcircles, one of which is "molecular assemblies." Click on that, and another category becomes visible entitled "molecular assembly sequencing software." Now you could, in theory, have typed that exact phrase into Google and gotten to the same websites. However, in many cases you can't be sure what you're looking for because you simply don't know what's out there. Grokker gives you an easy way to delve into a data set, and it often leads to info-revelations. "
More on the natural language search engine, BrainBoost, at Pandia. The new BrainBoost search engine answers your questions (Dec 11)
Google Enhances Froogle, Offers New Ad and Search Features by Chris Sherman SearchDay (Dec 15) - various small enhancements.
Alacritude to Add Gale Content Newsbreaks (Dec 15) Alacritude will be adding articles from Gale, a Thomson company, to eLibrary. This will increase its sources to 2,600. Alacritude will be introducing a new search engine in 2004 also that will include web and proprietarydatabase content.
See also press release -- ALACRITUDE ADDS MILLIONS OF ARTICLES TO ELIBRARY, ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH THOMSON GALE
There is a continuing discussion at TVC Alert about how much attention librarians should give to teaching the use of boolean in search. The Boolean Debate has involved Gary Price, Stephen Abram, Genie Tyburski, and Cindy Carlson (who started it). I will throw in my two cents here. Boolean is useful for the OR to pick up variants - and will continue to be until search engines are better at handling stems and variants. And the discipline of identifying concepts in constructing a search query can be helpful - but that could be taught without ever mentioning boolean.
December 2003 newletter from Information Technology Division of SLA has a Special: RSS? What is it? (PDF)
RSS -Syndication for Real People Right Now by Marie C. Kaddell
RSS – A Really Simple Solution for the News Needy by Greg Kaplan
Personalized Content – The future of RSS by Steven M. Cohen
The WSIS: whose freedom, whose information? Solana Larsen OpenDemocracy.net (Dec 9) -- UN World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) brings together mor than 130 of the world’s governments to discuss the Internet and technology. "Thorny issues like internet governance, security, intellectual property, open source software, and not least, who should pay for new infrastructure and technology in the developing world, are on the programme. " There's not much agreement on anything.
Of course! Why didn't 100s of web search gurus think of this? Brad Hill has written Google for Dummies. In addition to web searching, it covers Usenet, Froogle, Google Answers, and for businesses, Google AdWords. There is also a section on creating weblogs through Blogger.
Book review: Google empire gains a guide Dave Bailey (Dec 12) - gives it a favourable review.
Wiley has an information page on Google for Dummies with Table of Contents and sample first chapter. ($21.99 US)
Check delays and weather conditions at airports in the United States using the airport code. Example -- sfo airport -- for San Francisco. Information is provided by provided by the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center.
http://www.google.com/help/features.html#travel
Lycos Weather (http://weather.lycos.com) is another way to check on weather and airports. It has more information and has information for Canadian cities.
Google can handle parcel tracking IDs, patents and other specialized numbers when the correct prefix is used. I suspect that this is U.S. only. http://www.google.com/help/features.html#number
Introducing Copernic Meta—Taking Internet Searches to Another Level "This free application lets users search multiple engines in Copernic offers free search toolless than a second directly from their Windows desktop bar."
This new toolbar from Copernic works with Windows 98 and above and Internet Explorer. There is a demo at http://www.copernic.com/meta/web/ that works on the Web and is recommended for non-Windows users or people who can't install software to their computers.
Toolbar supports search of the Web, Images, Audio, Multimedia, News, Shopping.
The Web search uses Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, About "and more". Copernic doesn't show the source engine for the results. However, results can be sorted by source. A search for "glycemic index" pulled in results from Overture (likely paid placement), Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, a "Meta Search Partner Network - which is the Infospace family of engines, Teoma, About.com, Inktomi, Open Directory, Looksmart, Findwhat and Ah-Ha - both paid placement, Alltheweb.
Images come from Fast/Alltheweb and Ditto.
Audio - Fast
News - ABC News and Fast
Shopping is Copernic's Shopping Online and uses PriceGrabber, a comparison shopping search engine that serves mainly the United States.
The toolbar itself has extra features for directly searching on words with Alt+Click, and for creating keyboard shortcuts for particular search engines.
Copernic offers free search tool Globe and Mail Update (Dec 10)
Vivisimo has a mini-toolbar for quick access to Vivisimo clustering either as a meta-search or on particular search engines. Works with Windows 98 and above, and IE 5.5 and above.
Beating Information Overload with News Aggregators by Dennis M. Kennedy . ABA Law Practice Management (November / December 2003) - Shows how to use a News Aggregator and RSS news feeds to stay uptodate without being overloaded. Recommends FeedDemon and Newzcrawler as two News Aggregators. Lists a sampling of blogs for lawyers.
Tales of Technology: As it has with everything else, the Internet transforms advertising by James H Morris. Post-Gazette.com (Dec 7) -- Buyers and sellers benefit from the new advertising mode on the Internet.
"The Internet is a new communications medium for carrying out commerce. Commerce still needs middle men, but their role is going to drastically change in this new medium."
In whose ‘domain’ is the world wide web? - By Abigail Fernandes. The Asian Age (Dec 2003)
There are more signs of internation opposition to ICANN's dominance in managing the Internet. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a private company in the U.S. that was set up by the U.S. Government in 1988 to oversee the domain name system and IP addresses.
"An expected 5,000 representatives from intra-governmental, business and non-profit organisations are expected to try and devise an action plan for addressing issues regarding the Internet like how to close the digital divide, supervise the Internet and deal with problems like spam and pornography on the Web. A principal point of debate will be if the Internet should be overseen by the UN instead of American groups like Icann."
Yahoo pitches antispam system Newly passed bill inadequate to halt junk e-mail, firm says By Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe (Dec 10) - Yahoo has invented DomainKeys as a way of identifying and validating email senders. If all mail servers adopted it, spam would be squashed - they say.
House Accepts Revisions on Antispam Bill by Jennifer 8 Lee. New York Times (Dec 9) The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 only needs the signature of President Bush to become law.
"The bill would create a single set of rules for all commercial e-mail, both junk and solicited, that forces the senders to include a valid postal address and an opt-out mechanism in the body of the e-mail. Companies are prohibited from using deceptive subject lines and false return addresses, and the most serious violators could receive fines of as much as $6 million and prison terms of up to five years.
Consumer advocacy groups say, however, that it is doubtful that consumers will see a drop in advertisements for consolidated mortgage rates, impotence-fighting medications and digital cable descramblers because those could still be considered legitimate under the new law. "
Also see Congress passes anti-spam bill Associated Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 8)
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - December 2003 also reviews ConsumerSearch. Editors at ConsumerSearch (www.consumersearch.com) bring together product reviews and consumer reports from a variety of sources, picking the best and synthesizing.
His conclusion -- "While it does not have the breadth of coverage of Consumer Reports, Consumer Digest or Consumer Guide, ConsumerSearch offers an innovative solution, and saves consumers a lot of time and agony by synthesizing published reviews of products and services in a very appealing fashion free of charge. Users will be happy with this resource and reference librarians will be appreciated when they guide their patrons to it."
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - December 2003 issue reviews Amazon Search Inside the Book.
Péter Jacsó fully describes how to use Amazon Search Inside the Book to bring up excerpts from books that will answer reference questions or for general interest. he calls Search Inside the Book a quasi-bookstore experience because we can now flip through the pages. Examples illustrate getting travel information about a place (southeast Oahu).
"It makes many genres of books ready-reference tools that were never considered as such because you could not instantly locate tidbits or passages of information about concepts, events, people, locations, procedures, treatments, customs and practices, even if the books had informative titles and good indexes. "
Get the big picture about relationships among the main search engines in the United States (and Canada) with Bruce Clay's Search Engine Relationship Chart - updated in December 2003. The Flash version will isolate the connections for the node you point at with the mouse. Click on a node to get information about the search engine - the company, its crawler technology, and its paid inclusion and placement programs. PDF version also has the SE information but not the same graphics. Links to the charts are on the home page for http://www.bruceclay.com/
MSN forces LookSmart into UK retreat by Susie Harwood. netimperative (Dec 8) "Troubled internet search firm LookSmart is pulling out of the UK market - its only European venture - after the loss earlier this year of global client, key distribution partner, and chief revenue source, MSN."
Northern Light is Sailing Back into Business Research by Paula J. Hane. Information Today Newsbreaks (Dec 8) Northern Light is relaunching as "The Northern Light Business Research Library" as a "professional business tool for professional use.” The library will have 1,900 journals. It opens for enterprise use in January 2004, and for individual subscribers in March. More information about the service and the tools is at http://www.northernlight.com/library.html
Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch is running a series about shopping search engines during the week of December 8. Shopping Search Week.
He notes that "shopping search now also provides a lot of valuable information that's simply beyond the capabilities of general search tools. Things like consumer reviews, merchant ratings, lists of the most popular products, total prices that include tax and shipping -- all of these features are designed not only to help you find the best deal, but to help you research and compare products well before you're ready to buy."
Also see my newsletter about Comparison Shoppping on the Web.
What Happened To My Searches On Google? by Danny Sullivan. Searchday (Dec 7) - Sullivan covers several changes at Google.
- ranking algorithms have been tweaked and many have complained about placement of some commercial sites. Sullivan suggests some alternatives for people who feel they aren't receiving top-notch results: Alltheweb, Teoma, Inktomi through Hotbot, and Dogpile.
- stemming - Google does it now. You can stop it with +
- Google Web Directory - a program bug has been causing Web results to turn up in a Directory search!
- Product searches - Google is promoting Froogle.
'Miserable failure' links to Bush BBC News (Dec 7) Latest Google bomb targets President George W Bush as a "miserable failure".
Shopping Search Engines Listing Information Web Advantage (Dec 4) - Has information on rates and paid listing arrangements at the main comparison shopping search engines.
Northern Light to Introduce New Online Business Research Tool for Enterprise Customers Press Release from Northern Light (Dec 5, 2003) "Northern Light's Business Research Library combines the Business Web™ with a comprehensive periodical database, organized by industry " Will have 1,900 periodicals, 100 million pages classified into 50 industries. To start January 15, 2004. Fee not stated.
SuperPages.com Enters Local Search Fray by Brian Morrissey. DM News (Dec 4) -- "Yellow pages publisher Verizon Information Services announced a deal yesterday with paid search provider FindWhat.com to put local paid listings on its SuperPages.com site."
Meta Search Engines are Back By Greg Jarboe. SearchDay (Dec 4) - about the changes at the Infospace stable of metasearchers, Vivisimo, and Mamma.
Checking the Flight Line By Alan Cohen PC Magazine (Nov 19) "FlightView system provides live status reports on the progress of 5,000 flights an hour." Gary Price at Resourceshelf also recommends FlightTracker at CheapTickets.
Directory of Open Access Journals offers access to nearly 600 full-text "open access" journals. Open access" means offering users the right "to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles". The collection is searchable by journal title, subject or keywords.
Greg Notess reports that Google is automatically stemming words. Google Starts Auto Stemming Searches (Nov 28)
Google will look for some word variants automatically and bold the words in the snippets provided for each result. This is seen in the search -- socially responsible investing -- social, socially, investing, investments, investors, responsible, responsibility. You can turn it off by enclosing the whole phrase in quotation marks -- "socially responsible investing" but not for individual words.
It will do some singular / plural forms. Enter -- apple orange fruit salad -- and you get apples and oranges as well - even salads. But if you start with plural it won't look for singular - at least not for this salad.
While it is good that Google is starting to consider word variants, this unpredictablility is going to be annoying to searchers. When should they consider word variants and when not? How can they turn it off when they want precise results? Altavista's recognition of * as a truncation operator is a much better practice. Even Google's new ~ helped with word variants. But this arrangement of sometimes on and sometimes off will be confusing.
Note: Danny Sullivan found that + will stop the stemming. +investor (Dec 7)
Are You Practicing What We Preach about Searching? By Cindy Carlson. LLRX (Nov 29, 2003) Carlson responds to comments made by Stephen Abram at the November Internet Librarian Conference in which "he thought librarians were spending too much time focusing on teaching people how to search, as opposed to teaching them how to choose the right resource". Carlson defends boolean but does agree that "source selection and analysis" is important.
Microsoft Retires NetMeeting Pioneering Web conferencing application to be phased out. Joris Evers, IDG News Service in PCWorld. November 25, 2003 -- "Microsoft is retiring its six-year-old NetMeeting online conferencing application. Instead, the company will push Office Live Meeting, formerly known as PlaceWare, for online meetings."
Online sales take off over Thanksgiving AP (Dec 3)
In the United States they started to shop right after the turkey dinner. "That shows how consumers are increasingly using the Internet as an information tool -- scouring for deals and then purchasing as much as they can online before heading to the malls for those early bird specials and other deals on Friday. The change in shopping patterns also reflect how millions of homes have converted to high-speed Internet connections, making it easier to shop from home, analysts said."
Searching With Invisible Tabs by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay (Dec 2, 2003) Many of the big search engines provide access to specialized search too. Google has news, images, newsgroups etc. But who notices the tabs on the page? Sulllivan says very few people do. He says that tabs across the top of a page at a search engine don't get searchers using those collections rather than a broad web search. The keywords that Ask Jeeves, which Sullivan calls hidden tabs, are better but they too have a downside in the assumptions AJ must make.
The article nicely explains the two approaches while also emphasizing the importance of finding and using specialized databases.
Swets Information Services Launched eContent Magazine ( Dec 2, 2003) Change from Swets Blackwell.
Online Paid Content: Trends & Opportunities eMarketer (Dec 2003) Excerpts from a for-fee study concerning the online paid content market. High growth has been seen in purchases of music (148%), personal diet and dating (122% / 48%), but a drop in research (-13%). Doesn't give percentages of revenue. Costs $695 to learn more. Mentioned at TVC ALert.
Do Search Engines Suppress Controversy? by Susan L Gerhart at Software Engineering and Computer Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Nov 9, 2003)
Study team picked five topics with known controversies and ran searches to see if the results picked up the controversies. "("Belize", "distance learning", "Albert Einstein", "St. John's Wort", "female astronauts"). The results were mixed, 2 controversies showed and 3 were virtually missing when search results were plied from three popular engines (Google, Teoma, and AllTheWeb) and two meta-searchers (Profusion and Copernic, querying and collating from different engines). Most enlightening were the factors that suppressed or revealed the controversies."
Study concluded that "Search technology is biased to present the "sunny side" of topics. You have to search harder for the "dark side".
The Brave New World of Book Buying by Reid Goldsborough. Link-Up Digital (Dec 1) Does providing portions of the full text decrease sales or increase them? Views vary. Jani Baker, director of product public relations at Amazon said -- "“We’ve found by offering customers lower priced options, it causes them to visit the site more frequently, which in turns leads to higher sales of new books,” she continued. “It encourages people to try authors and genres that they might not otherwise have tried. Also, when customers sell used books, they have more `budget' to buy new books.”"
Webmasters Wary of Latest Google Tweaks by Matt Hicks. eWeek (Dec 1, 2003)
Several more weigh in on the recent changes in Google ranking. Of interest -- "More than anything, the most recent brouhaha over Google algorithm changes points to the danger of relying too heavily on search-result positioning for one's business, experts say. All sites should follow a set of accepted best practices for being search-engine friendly, such as including enough content with key phrases and having descriptive titles on Web pages, said Heather Lloyd-Martin, president and CEO of SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions. "
Google Dance Syndrome Strikes Again by Danny Sullivan (Dec 1) - Google has a new ranking system that has turned some things topsy-turvy. Sullivan describes a method for comparing the old ranking with the new. Google shows the new and Scroogle (from GoogleWatch) shows the old.
This mixup with small retailers angry and searchers confused can't possibly be good for Google.
Google reigns supreme in search, says OneStat Net Imperative (Dec 1) -- Google is up to 56.1% in global usage.
Google 56.1
Yahoo 21.5
MSN 9.4
AOL 3.7
Lycos 2.3
Altavista 1.9
Ask Jeeves 1.6
Cover Story: The Google book by Sharon Nelson. New Straits Times -- Dorling Kindersley (DK) has teamed up with Google to produce book and web site e.encyclopedia -- www.dke-encyc.com. Book has broad categories with stories, web site adds pictures, sound and more guided access to the web.
The web site seems to be open to all (there is no registration required). However, content is limited to examples of recommended links DK provides.
Information Today is running a weblog -- http://www.infotodayblog.com/ -- InfoToday staff are posting entries from the Online Information 2003 Conference in London, England.
Always worth a browse, the December 2003 Internet Resources Newsletter is online.
There are a few new-ish search engines listed.
Mooter clusters results and shows them in a spray of lines. Accepts "" to marks words together. There is some information about the technology is at http://www.mooter.com/corp/.
NetNose Searchers can go through a process to rate a random page for quality, trashing the sites that don't seem to match or won't load, noting if the site uses popups, is adult, or costs money.
For general browsing there are options to Vote (and place in a category as for kids, or research etc), or to Trash.
It claims to offer the top sites and seems to have a small database. It defaults to searching for ANY of the words and does not appear to have phrase search.
Objects Search has a Web Search and a News and RSS Search. Very new, very small, very slow.
Wotbox (used to be Wotbot) identifies the country of a web site with its flag. Has grown to 6 million pages. Advanced Search supports filters on title, description, body, url and country.
Newsknife has a list of the top news sites for 2003. Newsknife says it rates sites from the user's perspective. They consider "quality in a general sense, for example asking whether a site has provided useful background material for a particular major story" and performance for the web-news users -- especially recency of stories.
Top three were BBC News, CNN, CBS News. CBC had been in the top 5 in 2002 but has dropped to 9th position in the 2003 roundup. CBC News was recognized as being "Good at picking the major cluster of stories of the day, and breaking stories promptly" along with BBC News, Fox News, ITV News - UK, Sky News – UK, Yahoo! News.
Holiday e-Tail Performance Index
Gomez is monitoring the performance of the top 37 shopping sites in the United States over the holidays. It looks at speed of the homepage and transaction speed at online apparel stores and mass merchants (books, music, electronics).
On December 1, BizRate was the fastest at .3 seconds for response, and Yahoo Shopping one of the slowest at 5.1. In analyzing transactions, Gomez has found that "site performance is highly dependent on connection speed. " Of course broadband is significantly faster than dial-up but high-speed doesn't have a huge advantage over low-speed.
Micromedia has a page of Free Studies About NextGen Behaviors. Articles relate mainly to use of the Internet by young people.
New York Times has some tips for people who decide at the last minute to take a holiday.
Most Popular Travel Vehicle: a Whim by Bart Estabrook. New York Times (Nov 30)
Sites mentioned were --
"Site59.com, 11thHourVacations.com, Hotwire.com and LastMinuteTravel.com are among the Internet sites that appeal to vacationers who decide to get away on the spur of the moment. Even the carriage-trade tour company Abercrombie & Kent (www.abercrombiekent.com) has recently started a Signature series of vacations designed for spontaneous journeys to places like the Galapagos, China and Botswana."
Even eBay has a Toolbar writes Cory Kleinschmidt at Traffick.com (Nov 30). It offers alerts and a search box. Kleinschmidt has more amusing comments about the toolbar craze.
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