Google Faces Trademark Suite Over Search Ads by Brian Morrissey. DM News (Jan 30) -- American Blind & Wallpaper is suing Google for selling advertising to others on its trademarked items.
"In the case of American Blind, Google acquiesced to a request to remove ads on some of the company's terms, like "American Blind Factory" and "DecorateToday" (the name of the company's Web site), but refused to act on more generic, descriptive search terms such as "blind," "wallpaper" and "factory." In a letter to Google in July 2002, American Blind attorney Susan Greenspon requested Google remove ads for 37 search terms."
Keep your Google mania in check There are rivals that can challenge search king by Mark Evans. Financial Post (Jan 29)
Warns people vying to get a piece of Google's IPO that there are new competitors to Google in the wings. One is Dipsie.
"A company you might start hearing more about in the coming months is Dipsie Inc., which is building a search engine it claims will include 10 billion Web pages by later this year -- three times more than what Google offers. There is no surety that Dipsie will become a threat to Google or even emerge as a viable search engine player but it is the kind of rival that should keep the good folks at Google and investors awake at night.
What Dipsie is trying to do is develop search technology that does a better job of retrieving and presenting data. It aims to index many parts of the Web that Google or Inktomi don't. While Dipsie's technology is complex, in simple terms it will use semantic-based analysis to produce searches featuring content and context."
Fugitive Nabbed Because Of Date's Google Search Woman Finds FBI Warrants For Failed Developer's Arrest The Indy Channel (Jan 28)
Google Gives the World a Shake, Again By: Jim Hedger. ISEDB.com (Jan 28, 2004) - Search engine optimizers are finding that Google's ranking of search results is all askew again. They liken it to the upset in November called the FLorida Update and are calling this one the Austin Update.
Of interest -- "Google is not hitting all sectors at the same time. This is actually the biggest reason we feel that what has been labeled the Austin Update is in fact an extension of the Florida Update. Montreal based SEO Serge Thibodeau suggests that there is a trigger at Google that is set off by a specific number of searches per month for unique keywords. As theorized by Serge in his article PageRank: Meet Hilltop, once that number is passed, Google starts filtering using the Hilltop algorithm. If this point is correct, we can expect to see instability on Google for months to come!"
There is no Google Whois. Network Solutions cuts short Google shortcut by Stephanie Olsen. News.com (Jan 27) Network Solutions won't processes queries from Google for whois. They limit queries to slow down the spammers who hunt for email addresses and phone numbers registered for the domains.
Furl.net is a new online service for archiving web pages and searching them.
"Furl is a new web browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages (you know, the ones you want to save for future reference but then can never find again) in a personal "web page filing cabinet". "
Sree Sreenivasan at Poynter Online featured it - Furl it: New tool for surfers (Jan 20).
Fast Search & Transfer Seeks More Customers With New Service
BY PETE BARLAS, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY (Jan 27)
"Fast's new search service provides a speedy and more efficient system for companies and their customers to retrieve information on Web sites and private intranets. The service also helps businesses abide by federal compliance laws by locating key relevant documents."
A Multifaceted Online News and Blog Search Tool By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Jan 27) - describes Rocketinfo Desktop software as " a powerful news search engine with a lot of additional goodies designed for both news junkies and online researchers alike." Describes the software in detail. Concludes - "If you regularly read or search online news sources, and especially if you need to share stories with others, Rocketinfo Desktop is an excellent tool that will not only save you a lot of time, but help you find and organize many useful sources that aren't always easy to locate."
Rocketinfo Desktop is currently software that must be downloaded and installed. However, in the next couple of months it is expected to become available as a web-based application.
New Search Engines are Ready To Jump When Google Changes Focus by Rita Vine, Sitelines (Jan 26) - Lists several new search engines that have been announced in the last couple of months. Also picks up on a very interesting set of search engine predictions for 2004 made at WebProWorld. Concludes that Google may become a "less desirable tool of choice".
Sole proprieter Matt Wells continues to enhance Gigablast. The database has 257 million indexed pages. This includes PDF files that are very clearly labelled. (Would be nice if other engines adopted the same practice.) Search results have two dates - indexed and modified. There is a cached copy of the page, and now there is also a direct link to archived pages at the Web Archive.
Subscribers to myYahoo may add RSS feeds to their news page. This will make MyYahoo a web-based newsreader as well as a source of headline news from major sources. RSS Reader is in Beta - but it has reached Toronto. It is easy to add sources by searching on keyword or site or simply entering the url of a RSS file.
Yahoo Launches RSS Aggregator Beta By Matt Hicks. eWeek (Jan 23)
More information at RSS Headlines Module - FAQ
MSN has joined the party - it will offer MSN users a toolbar for web searching. Microsoft Search Tool Takes On Google DowJones (Jan 26)
Update on Jan 28: Toolbar is at http://toolbar.msn.com/. It does the usual - sits under the address bar, searches the Web using MSN Search, blocks pop-ups (the very same pop-ups for which MSN accepts advertising money), highlights words, links to MSN places. Requires WIndows 98 or later, and Internet Explorer 5.01 or later.
Internet Explorer has always had a fairly good Search Bar for quick searching at MSN or other search engines plus lookups for words and places etc. Guess it never caught on with users.
It is now possible to search at Google by site without adding keywords or other extras. For example site:websearchguide.ca shows Google has indexed 5,200 pages. But there are some oddities. Pages in Canada for site:gc.ca are 938,000 but for Web in total there are 1,480,000.
Learning About Search Engines From Google Engineers By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 26) -- "A new archive of publications by Google employees offers deep insights into many aspects of the search engine's operation. " See Papers Written by Googlers.
Alacritude Turns a HighBeam on Research by Paula Hane. Newsbreaks (Jan 26)
Alacritude has changed its name to HighBeam Research. This will incorporate its e-Library and Researchville services, and in time include an enhanced version of Encyclopedia.com.
eLibrary has 2600 sources with 28 million articles. Searching is free but viewing articles costs $99.95 US / year. The Web search is a metasearch using several engines. Groups can be modified to have only the engines you wish to your. Together they form a "research engine". The tab for "reference search" will be added in March 2004 (or so).
"Patrick Spain, founder, chairman, and CEO of HighBeam Research, sees the new service as filling an important niche. “Until now, a research service like this was only available to large enterprises—individuals were forced to make do with less effective research options, such as advertiser-driven free online search engines. HighBeam Research helps its members to become effective researchers by bridging the vast gap between free online search engines and high-end information services that large enterprises utilize.”'
Actually, some public libraries offer cardholders online access to e-LIbrary through their web site.
Canada leads global pack in Internet use - Number of people using the Net rose 7% in 2003 - Mark Evans, Financial Post (Jan 22)
"Ipsos-Insight discovered that 71% of Canadian adults accessed the Internet in 2003, compared with 70% in South Korea, 68% in the United States and 65% in Japan. In 2002, U.S. adults were the most active with 72%, while Canada was second at 62% and South Korea at 53%."
Number of people using the Net worldwide rose by 7% mainly due to increases in users in urban China, Germany, Japan and South Korea.
Google Releases Orkut Social Networking Service By Danny Sullivan, SearchDay January 22, 2004
Google debuts Friendster-clone Orkut By Andrew Orlowski. The Register (Jan 23)
It's not search. It's a Friendster thing. No one knows where it will lead.
Cory Kleinschmidt delivers A Brief History of Social-Networking Sites in Traffick.com (Jan 25)
For a Fee, Wind Up Atop the Search Heap By BOB TEDESCHI. New York Times (Jan 22) - It may be worth it to buy your own name at Google or Overture. Andrew Goodman of Toronto, an Internet marketing consultant and host of Traffick.com, does it to be distinguished by other Goodmans, dead or alive. Google lets people buy other people's name but not trademarked names. Overture will bar advertisers from buying other people's names.
"As Internet users seek to differentiate themselves from people who share their names, some are buying their way to prominence on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The added exposure comes courtesy of keyword advertising, in which marketers - or common folk, for that matter - bid to have brief advertisements appear atop or beside search results whenever Internet users type in certain words. "
iUpload Announces MailbyRSS in EContent (Jan 23)
Could there be a more definite sign that RSS will soon be the delivery mode of choice for e-newsletters? MailbyRSS lets one author RSS feeds by email. Send the e-newsletter by email to MailbyRSS, and it will convert it to a RSS feed for subscribers to pick up. Avoids the problems of mail servers. People can opt-in to the RSS feed at the website. Company does not have to fuss with creating the RSS file. Service is free at the moment.
"MailbyRSS is intended to allow organizations to replace or augment their opt-in email campaigns with RSS feeds, providing them a way to ensure that the information they publish reaches subscribers without being filtered out by spam lists or filters. MailbyRSS accepts both text and rich content email, requires no new computer hardware or software, and is invoked by emailing content to a free MailbyRSS account."
iUpload MailbyRSS has a list of example uses. Brilliant.
How to protect yourself from e-mail scams Robert Vamosi Anchordesk (Jan 19) -- what to do if you receive an email from a company that looks fraudulent - a phishing scam. Don't reply. Instead send the email to the company being spoofed.
Dueling Searchers in a Quest for Ads By Leslie Walker. Washington Post. January 22, 2004
Google and Yahoo will be battling for advertising dollars in 2004 and they are likely to do it by delivering local advertising.
"Flake, [Gary Flake - head of the new Yahoo Research Lab] however, believes the next few years will produce changes in Web design and breakthroughs in online data mining that could help solve the local search challenge. Matching Web sites -- and ads, for that matter -- to relevant queries is a statistical challenge requiring computer firepower as well as human ingenuity. Future systems may consider more than just the search query and content of Web pages; they might also consult profiles of Web searchers. Amazon.com does this now, in effect compiling and consulting shopping profiles of registered users to determine what to show them. "
RSS in Government is a weblog for "News about how RSS is being used by international, federal, state, and local governments". http://www.rssgov.com/. Ray Matthews tracks news about RSS and especially its use by governments. There are categories for several State governments in the US but also one on Canada. Matthews also has a collection of links to RSS resources and events. (Site was mentioned at Researchbuzz.com)
Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites By LISA GUERNSEY New York Times (Jan 22) - summary of study at Information School at the University of Washington about "Keeping Found Things Found". "So far, observation of a few dozen people in their work environments has revealed a hodgepodge of approaches to organizing pages, and bookmarking them is not at the top of the list. "
Cloak and dagger inside the computer By GRANT BUCKLER, Globe and Mail Update (Jan 22) - Some Internet Service Providers are offering programs to detect and remove adware and spyware from clients' machines.
"While spam and viruses raised public concerns during the past year, 2004 will be "the year of the invisible threat," said Alex Leslie, vice-president of technology at AOL Canada in Toronto. "Spyware is a very large problem."
Sarai Zizniewski, senior product manager for core software at Earthlink, estimates 90 per cent of computer users have some type of spyware running on their machines."
Ailing LookSmart for telco By Kate Mackenzie and Michael Sainsbury. The Courier Mail - Australia (Jan 22) -- "Sensis, the Telstra subsidiary that runs the online and paper versions of White Pages and Yellow Pages, said it would buy the Australian assets of LookSmart, which continues to reel from the loss of Microsoft business. "
Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point, by Tom McNichol. New York Times (Jan 22) -- more on Google Bombing. Now "miserable failure" is pinned on President George W Bush, President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michael Moore.
Of interest --
"The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy. "
"Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.
Bombers aim at Google for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - that's where the payoff is. Google handles more than 200 million requests a day and has a 34.9 percent share of online searches in the United States. The nearest rival is Yahoo, with 27.7 percent, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer behavior. "
NewsAlert.com has notified its users that it has been acquired by Marketwatch.com, publisher of CBS Marketwatch. Also - "Within the next three months, MarketWatch will be making several upgrades and adding a variety of enhanced features to the tools you currently use. We hope you will enjoy the upcoming product enhancements ... " Both are now owned by Pinnacor.
NewsAlert has provided alerts based on keywords for business and finance news. CBSMarket Watch has newsletters on business news and has just introduced alerts.
Doing Legal Research in Canada By Ted Tjaden, LLRX.com (Jan 19) Ted Tjaden is a lawyer/law librarian working at the Bora Laskin Law Library at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, where he teaches. He also teaches a web-based course - Legal Research on the Internet - for the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto.
Yahoo! bets on search by Stephanie Olsen. Silicon.com (January 21 2004)
Gary Flake, previously of Overture, will head up Yahoo's new Research Lab.
"Much of the research is designed to improve web search and the relevancy of sponsored listings so these companies can win the loyalty of visitors and advertisers. "
"Related to search, for example, the lab will focus on how to personalise the experience for people across the Yahoo! network.
"We're here to help, not just in one or two areas, but across the whole spectrum of Yahoo! products," such as finance, news, IM and email, Flake said. "
Work is described at the Yahoo Research Lab website - http://labs.yahoo.com/
Google Alert Automatically Tracks Your Favorite Topics by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Jan 21) Google Alert will alert you to new content on Google that matches your search terms. Chris Sherman likes it. Using Google Alert does take work in refining the search, and as in all things Web, there will be junk to deal with.
New search engine taps into social networks Search tool taps social networks By Chris Gaither, Boston Globe (Jan 21) Eurekster is a new search engine that uses social networks to rank results. You and your colleagues can link together as a network. Then search results are ranked according to the interests revealed by past searches by group members.
"Eurekster gets results like a normal search engine but ranks them according to the interests you and your friends have shown through past searches. For example, if many people in a social network use Eurekster to seek information about the Boston Red Sox, the websites they visit most will rise to the top in future Red Sox searches. Eurekster also lists queries that members of your social network have made -- although it doesn't say who made them -- and recent websites they have visited."
One would have to be very careful in choosing people to join a social network. Also one might want a network for work, another for fun, another for a self-help group.
Eurekster uses Alltheweb for its search engine.
Danny Sullivan has more on Eurekster -- Eurekster Launches Personalized Social Search (Jan 21) This article is a study of personalized search - its possibilities and difficulties. All major search engines are considering it. Eurekster may show the way. Major obstacle will likely be worry about privacy -- "Ultimately, anyone with serious concerns about privacy may shy away from the service, something Eurekster recognizes. In order to work properly, it does need to monitor what you search for and what you visit. The company hopes the promise of anonymity and extra tools to explicitly keep some things private will satisfy most concerns."
Sullivan sees some value for certain groups - reference librarians, medical research firm - any research group.
News Is Really Continuous at washingtonpost.com by Steve Outing. Editor and Publisher (Jan 14) - More newspapers are breaking news online before the print edition comes out.
"The [Washington] Post is one of the leaders in this movement to become less paper and more news. You can spot it elsewhere among leading newspapers -- The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times. Each of these papers will periodically break stories off the print cycle, on the Web because they want to beat their Internet and broadcast competitors."
If you can't get to the newspaper box maybe you'd like to read a digitized version of the paper on your video screen. Chris Sherman looks at two services - Newseum and Press Display from NewspaperDirect. Today's Newspapers Around the World SearchDay (Jan 20) There is also Newsstand where you can buy issues of many papers.
Gary Price finds that Google's link command does not always list all the pages that link to a particular one.
You Might Be Missing Material: Backwards Link Searching (Link:) With Google (Jan 20)
Genie Tyburski has noticed this too -- Google not displaying all reverse links.
Alltheweb is much stronger for searching on links. It allows for modifying the backwards search with other search terms and for excluding the self-reference links (ie site linking to its own pages).
'Push' technology gets a nudge By Hiawatha Bray. Boston.com (Jan 5) - How the idea of Pushing news evolved to RSS for automatically receiving updates. Has the basics on how to read RSS and how to produce it.
Meceoo is a new metasearch engine from France. It means "Mais c'est où ?" - but where is it? It only picks up three engines - Altavista, Alltheweb and Inktomi. It has two features of interest. Users can exclude sites from a search by creating an exclusion list. (Many will put Amazon on that list.) It is also possible to create an inclusion list to preselect sites to include.
Mentioned at Pandia Search Meceoo, a new kind of metasearch engine (Jan 19, 2004)
Yahoo says its News Alerts has new features. [Picked up by TVC Alert]. You can choose to receive breaking news alerts from Reuters or Associated Press or headlines from a news category. Great in theory, but although I have several news alerts set up including breaking news, none ever arrive in Messenger or my email box. Wait until Yahoo announces that they have made the alerts easier to access and that they really do deliver.
Detod Communications is looking for a buyer of the detod legal portal (Detod legal portal for sale - Jan 14). This includes "the blawg search engine, legal research, and "my detod" aggregator; our co-branded pages; and our news. The legal research also has a caselaw database feed that is not live yet, but the code is 98% finished. " Detod Communications wants to concentrate on email hosting instead. [Mentioned at TVC ALert]
Information Research (January 2004 - Vol 9, No 2) available at http://InformationR.net/ir/ - has papers from a conference on digital libraries, held in Finland in September 2003.
Professor Tom Wilson of Sheffield University mentions another article in his covering email.
A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence by Wallace Koehler of Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA,
"This one is a longitudinal study, covering the period 1996 to 2003, and using a sample of 361 Web pages collected in 1996 - eroded by May 2003 to 122. The author comments: There are two interesting trends that emerge from this analysis. First, once a collection has sufficiently aged, it may stabilize in the sense at least that its URLs may become more durable in time. We have shown, for example, that Koehler's collection of randomly collected URLs remained in a fairly 'steady-state' for two years after it lost approximately two-thirds of its population over a four year period. From a collection development perspective, this period of stability has been but of short duration. Additional monitoring is needed to establish resource lifetimes."
Google Developing Ad Service for E-Mail -Sources By Lisa Baertlein, Reuters in Boston.com (Jan 16) Rumour has it that Google is looking at offering an ads-based e-mail service.
"By moving into e-mail -- the Web's most-used program -- Google would open up a huge new market for its lucrative "sponsored links" advertising business that delivers ads tied to keywords in Web searches or on content pages, analysts said."
And then there is the matter of the "stickiness" - of keeping people using Google because they keep their email there. What would be next - instant messenger?
Andrew Orlowski at the Register says that the readers of the Slashdot blog think Google should fix its search first. You got Google mail - report (Jan 20)
Search may be Microsoft's next target, court told By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com (Jan 16) -- "Microsoft may be unlawfully wielding its desktop dominance to put the squeeze on search engines and on document formats like Adobe Acrobat, the state of Massachusetts claimed on Friday."
Net No Threat To Newspapers By Robyn Greenspan, Cyberatlas (Jan 16) -- "Rather than compete for readership, newspapers have developed a collaborative relationship with the Web, according to a comprehensive survey by The Media Audit of 85 U.S. metro markets. The firm found that newspaper Web sites help to extend the reach of their print counterparts, minimizing rivalry between the two versions. "
Web Stars: Best of the Web "Where should you go for news, research, shopping, and more? We compare Goliaths of the Web to lesser-known upstarts--and discover some surprising results." by Josh Taylor From the February 2004 issue of PC World magazine (December 31, 2003)
There are several categories. PC World like Google, DogPile and Alltheweb for search engines. Dogpile got top listing for toolbar too, then Altavista (for its Babel translator), and Google Deskbar.
Other categories: travel sites, drivers and patches, Internet utilities, and more.
Save yourself time - view the print version.
Out-Googling Google By John R. Quain, PC Magazine (February 3, 2004 ) - favourable review of Grokker 2.0 -- "The graphical approach lets you locate related information at a glance. Grokker now supports all the major search engines and can do custom, simultaneous searches as well as views of unstructured enterprise data." Also has a teaser about a new company, Dipsie, in Chicago. Says it is working on a "more complex Web than Google has".
Sue Eipert manages Eipert Information Services for custom research. She has a monthly newsletter "featuring practical tips about business and sci/tech information sources and research strategy for you to apply in your own business". January 2004 issue is about A few good business reasons to search archived web sites. There are several other good articles as well.
Rocketinfo has all Web news search engines beat for number of news sources searched and could far surpass them in features as well very soon.
Rocketnews is the web-based search engine offering breaking news by category and a keyword search by category against an archive of 7 days.
Rocketinfo Desktop operates like a newsreader. This is software available for Mac, Windows, Linus for $29.95 US. There is a free 14 day trial.
Both draw on 10,000 English and French language news sources and 45,000 weblogs. News sources include 600 Canadian. Coverage is international. Rocketinfo also has RSS feeds.
Rocketnews saw some enhancements in late 2003 that included the option to search only the title and excerpt (lead paragraph). This has since been removed from Rocketnews but will be added to the Rocketinfo Desktop. Even better, the Desktop product will be available as a web-based application in a couple of months.
MSNBC.com has a page of Search Tips (Dec 8, 2003) Has boolean search with operators - and, or, not, near. The Near looks for words with 8 of each other. There is also a wildcard (*). Also recommends saving the url of a search to rerun again.
Is the clutter and duplication on the Web weighing down the search engines? Gary Price describes the problem and the extent of duplication seen in search results from Google and others. He recommends searchers turn to smaller, more specialized databases.
Web Search Google, Resourceshelf (Jan 14)
Gary Price at ResourceShelf has news about News Searching at Yahoo (Jan 15)
Details and a search box are at Yahoo News Search Help page
- has 7,000 sources in 35 languages.
- shows all results together - no longer separates Yahoo News and Web News. But the new Yahoo News doesn't link back to the Yahoo News Category
Advanced Search
- search in headline, url or anywhere. (Search in headline and lead paragraph would be better)_
- choose date range back 1 month
- identify source
- get news from a location - such as country
But there is no information about the advanced syntax for news search that Yahoo details at http://help.yahoo.com/help/news/ for searching title or author, using truncation etc. And the syntax does not work for the beta site.
Having one set of search results is good, but I'd rather Yahoo fixed their news alert facility.
Battelle's Search by Andrew Goodman. Traffick (Jan 14) Wry comments about John Battelle's to-be-published book about search.
Battelle had been a founder of Wired and CEO of Industry Standard. He has a blog in which he muses on his ideas. On November 13, 2003 his thoughts were on his work-in-progress -- Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google -- and the idea of a "Database of Intentions".
"The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion. " Whereupon he discovered "an industry of people devoted to search".
Search Guru Danny Sullivan Talks Google By Garrett French, WebProNews (Dec 10, 2003) - reports on Danny Sullivan's keynote speech at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago. Mainly, Sullivan advises all the SEOs in the audience to start paying for listings - "organic listings" alone won't get the traffic.
Has some additional points about the direction of search engines - "invisible tabs"! Search engines will have individual databases for web search, news, images, shopping/products etc. Use of trigger terms will put the searcher into the right zone.
Search Engine Wars Keep Google and Yahoo Going By Jim Hedger, ISEDB.com (Jan 14) Yahoo's switch to Inktomi as it search engine may hurt Google. Article notes that Yahoo is getting more traffic than Google today, and that Google could lose 20% of what it does get when Yahoo cuts the line.
"Yahoo! has displaced Google as the leading search engine of choice starting in November 2003, according to figures released by analytics firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Traffic on the Yahoo! network was measured at 86.8 million unique visits in November to the 53.3 million unique visits at Google. Coupled with Semel's pronouncements, the future does not look a certain for Google as it just eight short weeks ago. Today, Google continues to drive over 75% of all search traffic but when Yahoo! switches to Inktomi, that number will decrease to below 50%, a significant drop in daily viewers. "
Watch out for MSN too. It has a new home page and after tomorrow will not have any Looksmart listings.
Yahoo, Google primed for search war By Evan Hansen and Jim Hu, CNET News.com (Jan 14) - Yahoo has finally announced it will drop Google by the end of March.
"Google currently processes approximately 80 percent of all search requests on the Web through distribution deals with Yahoo, Time Warner's America Online and Ask Jeeves, according to market share data compiled by research firm Comscore Media Metrix. When Yahoo ends its deal with Google, that share is expected to drop to about 54 percent. Yahoo's reach, meanwhile, could jump to 42 percent, based on its own search traffic and a deal that provides Inktomi results to Microsoft's MSN Web portal. "
Day of Reckoning in Search Engine Advertising By Christine Churchill, SearchDay (Jan 14) Describes contextual ads and explains why it is important for advertisers to be separate the contextual ads they place from the search-based ads that show with search results. Overture has decoupled the two. How soon will Google follow?
The typical web surfer reads, has friends, watches less television than non-surfers, and believes what is found on the Internet.
Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study by Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent Reuters (Jan 14)
Findings come from a study done by the London-based World Internet Project of Internet users in 14 countries.
Of interest,
"The study does however support some long-established Internet usage trends including the fact that the wealthiest segments of the population are the most avid users and that more men than women surf the Web. But figures vary widely by country. "
"Despite the existence of countless spoof Web sites and message boards that carry oddball political rants, more than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible. The most trusting users are in South Korea while Swedes are the biggest skeptics about the veracity of Web news."
TIP OF THE MONTH: Some Hidden Google Tools by Mary Ellen Bates (January 2004) Describes ways to enhance your Google search - new interfaces, visual presentation, shortcuts. Google also has a feature similar to Alltheweb's URL Investigator for getting background information on a page. At Google use info: - for example, info:www.batesinfo.com.
A perfect storm for pay-per-click? by Hans Reimer. CNet News (Jan 13) - sees a perfect storm developing for pey-per-click advertising that leads to lower conversion rates. He says that there is "a subversive undercurrent in the form of PPC affiliates employing "pay to click" personnel to artificially bolster PPC hits, and ultimately, revenue. " People are being recruited to click. This could be as ruinous as spam if it isn't nipped quickly.
Google, Yahoo Add New Search Features by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Jan 13) Sherman describes the five features for tracking by number -- area code, universal product code, flights, vehicle ids, U.S. Postal Service. Also compares Google's flight tracker to Yahoo's and finds Yahoo picks up more airlines. He concludes: "These features are useful and mostly helpful, if you have a Yahoo or Google search box or toolbar handy. But since they simply offer further links to more information, it's probably easier to go directly to the partner sites both are using and do these types of searches directly at the source." Absolutely - go to the source for more choice in search, better display, and help.
Yahoo has added a shortcut for Flight Tracker. Enter name of airline followed by flight number such as air canada 698. Information comes from Travelocity as part of Yahoo Travel.
It was mentioned in Yahoo Adds Flight Status Search Shortcut, DM News (Jan 13)
Yahoo's shortcuts are described at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-01.html
If you really would like to track a flight, use FlyteComm.com. This has realtime information on flights of all airlines. It will also show flights by arrival and departure airports in North America.
Yahoo mulls new features for Messenger By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (Jan 12) "Yahoo is gauging demand for new instant messaging features that would allow people to listen to music while chatting, or manage a single address book from IM. "
New Google Shortcuts Tie Into Paid Listings By Michael Singer, Internet.com (Jan 12) Notes that Google has 5 more shortcuts that will help people look up area codes, Universal Product Codes (UPC), flight tracking information, Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, and U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers.
Google taps into a particular database to get the answers. Other advertisers can make use of this in the adwords they set up.
""When you type in the UPC code, it comes out with a link to Upcdatabase.com but some other information as well," Li said. "It's mining the information that Google has in its example but also information about the product as well. If I'm either the product manufacturer or a competitor, I could go to Google and buy my UPC number."
The Google help page has more information about search by number . It would be helpful if Google identified on the Help page which databases they use for these searches.
These shortcuts are for U.S. data only.
Ask Jeeves has had smart answers, its version of shortcuts, for some time, and Altavista might have been the first to introduce the practice, but Google gets more press.
Designs on desktop search By Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com (January 12, 2004) - search is moving to the taskbar. Microsoft, Yahoo, Earthlink are looking into taskbar utilities for search. Google already has one. Groxis may partner with others. "Taskbar search tools are similar to popular toolbar applications that have long been available as browser add-ons, but there is an important difference: They reside in the system tray in Microsoft's Windows operating system, allowing queries independently of the browser or any other applications running on the desktop."
These are handy but they won't replace the browser with its tools for viewing history, setting preferences, and managing bookmarks - or will they?
New anti-spam tools falter as senders quickly adjust By Anick Jesdanun, AP via Seattle Times. Brightmail found that spam has not dropped since the spam law went into law at the beginning of the year.
U.S. Spammers are just tweaking the message to meet the requirements of the law. Article concludes that people just have to get smarter about using their address: "Mary Youngblood, abuse-team manager at EarthLink, said people need to be more savvy in using e-mail. Among her tips: Put numbers in the middle of e-mail addresses to make them harder to guess, and use a separate address for online shopping and newsgroup postings. "
Fast Web browser to be commercialised by Matthew Clark, The Register (January 09 2004 ) Adnan Osmani, a 17-year-old computer engineering student at Sheffield University will file for patents for the Xwebs mega browser, which is said to be 2 to 5 times faster than other browsers over a telephone line. The first version was developed for the Esat BT Young Scientist competition -- "The Internet browser included direct access to 120 search engines and incorporated five different media players for sound and video, as well as DVD functions and a talking guide named Phoebe. "
Alltheweb is changing its privacy policy on February 7, 2004. The main change has to do with the use of Yahoo's web beacons to "research certain usage and activities on its and our website". They promise that no "personally identifiable information" is used. "The information collected through these web beacons is used to find out more about our users, for more accurate reporting, and to improve the effectiveness of our marketing. " The part about marketing is key - they want to direct advertisements. There is a method for opting out.
The Internet is playing a growing role in politics by Pew Internet and American Life (Jan 12, 2004)
"The Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Pew Research Center for People and the Press have released a new report that shows cable news and the Internet are looming larger this year as sources of campaign information, as smaller numbers of Americans are turning to broadcast TV and newspapers. In addition, young people are increasingly saying that they are learning about the campaign from comedy shows such as the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.
But the poll finds that people who say they are learning things about politics on comedy shows don't know much about the current campaign. The Internet, on the other hand, has a well-informed audience and active use of the net for politics is strongly linked to a high level of knowledge about the campaign."
Source: From the Pew and Internet Life newsletter. To subscribe send a blank message to pewinternet-on@pewinternet.org.
There have been changes at Altavista News over the last 2 or 3 weeks. Greg Notess noticed that Alltheweb News and Altavista News were using the same database. Alltheweb's results were identical to Altavista's for the last 7 days. I tested Altavista News and discovered that boolean operators were no longer supported, photos were gone, and fielded search didn't work as well as before. Now Altavista News and Alltheweb News have the same format for searching the news source - either site or url - for example, site:globeandmail.com "paul martin", or url:globeandmail "paul martin".
Now for the shocking news - Altavista News has cut its archive back to 30 days, thus removing the chief reason to use it. Altavista had been the only news search engine to have entries from the last year. Alltheweb still seems to be limited to 7 days.
Pandia Search announced that there is a version of the Open Project Directory (dmoz) that will display thumbnail oictures s of the home page for the listings. I have never seen the value of these postage-size images of web pages since they are too small to read and at best only give an idea of colour and layout.
Read the article at The Open Directory adds thumbnails Pandia (Jan 8, 2004)
View the dmoz demo from http://thumbshots.org/. When you come to a page of results, click on the red ball in the bottom right to activate the thumbnail pictures.
MSN Makes Personalized Portals Interesting Again by Cory Kleinschmidt, Traffick.com (Jan 10) - Kleinschmidt says that the revamped MyMSN is superior to MyYahoo for presentation. MSN users will also be able to view the EBay content from inside their personal MSN page. He hopes that Yahoo, which still is better than MSN for content, renovates their "outdated platform".
MSN personal page has news and multimedia (especially for people with broadband connections.)
There is a choice of content areas - weather, news, entertainment, health, comics - items from which can be added to the main page and moved around. Among these is Hotmail and the eBay. Only 7 items are allowed on a page, but one can add new pages. MSN offers some prepared pages for Finance, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, House and Garden and a couple of others. The Finance page automatically picks up a personal stock portfolio. Blocks on a page are very easy to rearrange with a drag and drop. Of course, one can change page colours and themes. There is also the option for MSN Video if you have time to watch television on your computer. This page, according to the instructions, cannot be deleted - so think carefully before adding it.
Content is for people in the United States - movie listings, tv, stocks.
Three complaints. Can't adjust the number of news headlines from a source. MSN limits it to 3. Can't get TV listings. Can't add RSS feeds. Will be great when then personal portals can truly operate as a single information centre.
The Canadian MSN portal does not sport these new features.
Watching Google Like a Hawk does exactly that, picking up articles and sites that have a lot to say about Google. Unfortunately, none of the entries is dated. My guess is that the archive goes back about three months. The ads from Google are also interesting and not at all related to search engines or Google - saving wildlife and wilderness, eco-friendly buying, volunteering.
Spotted in ResearchBuzz
Search sites itch for a niche By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (January 9, 2004)
More search shortcuts. Yahoo has a flight search based on Travelocity, Google has added a WHOIS search for registration information on domain names. There are others. "But the challenge for Yahoo and Google is educating Web searchers on their advancements."
Top Internet Trends for 2004 by Rob Greenlee, Web Talk Guys Radio Show (Jan 7, 2004)
Among the top ten are the decline of the web browser, growth in Internet radio, online search beyond the web, professional journalist blogs being syndicated. Re search -- "Online search will go beyond just the web and will dramatically change in 2004. Google will continue to lead the changes to online search, but Yahoo and Microsoft will steal some of Google's search market share. The New Year will continue with the growing effort to index more than just the World Wide Web, as search companies find other deep database information to index and make public on the web. "
Yahoo, NewsGator Extend RSS Aggregation By Ryan Naraine, InternetNews.com (Jan 8, 2004) Yahoo may be adding a RSS aggregator to MyYahoo.
"A full rollout of the aggregator, expected in coming months, would be the first time Yahoo opens its pages to external, third-party links. Right now, the 'My Yahoo' feature integrates content (news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes) within Yahoo's own pages.
Once users add RSS feeds to their 'My Yahoo' module, the portal would be linking out to content from outside its network. It is not clear how that fits into Yahoo's ad-driven business model, which is heavily dependent on its own Web traffic."
NewsGator Technologies, developer of the popular NewsGator software for subscribing to RSS feeds, now offers a web-based newsreader of RSS feeds. NewsGator Online Services will let people read subscribed content from the web reader, through their email (requires POP3), and mobile devices that read HTML. Price will be $5.95 US / month. Service will start Jan 19, 2004.
Full description of new service at eContent (Jan 13) - NewsGator Announces Online Services
A Fountain of Knowledge 2004 will be the year of the analysis engine By Stephen Cass, IEEE Spectrum Online (Jan 4, 2004)
Cass describes the intentions and workings of IBM's Web Fountain. Search engines list documents with matching words. Web Fountain will analyze to make sense of it.
"WebFountain works by converting the myriad ways information is presented online into a uniform, structured format that can then be analyzed. The goal is to provide a general-purpose platform that can allow any number of so-called analytic tools to sift the structured data for patterns and trends. "
WebFountain will convert to structured data the content of web sites, blogs, newsgroups, mailing lists and more.
"WebFountain is not intended for casual surfers. Its target audience includes the business executives who have already shown they are willing to pay for the insights that mining corporate databases can supply. Analytic tools can ferret out patterns in, say, a sales receipt database, so that a retail store might see that people tend to buy certain products together and that offering a package deal would help sales. WebFountain will allow executives to go beyond their own databases and analyze up-to-date information from any online source. "
Factiva has partnered with IBM and will be launching a WebFountain-based service to track the online reputation of companies.
The Wayback Machine Receives an Update Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Jan 8, 2004) - Wayback Machine has archived content up to June 2003. Through an agreement with Alexa there will always be a 6 month lag. Price has other news about books and music.
Leading World Newspapers Online by Bob Berkman. The Information Advisor (October 2003) [PDF File]- Identifies where 4 major newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times) can be found in the for-fee online services (Dialog, Profound, Lexis, Proquest, Factiva).
Source: The Resource Shelf
Mailblocks Offers Free Challenge-Response Web E-Mail by Brian Morrissey. DM News (Jan 8)
Mailblocks has enhanced its free web-based email service with challenge-response. This protects users from spam and is considered better than filtering. With challenge-response, new senders are challenged to verify who they are.
"The free version will not have all the capabilities of the paid service. Two missing features are the ability to manage existing e-mail accounts through the Mailblocks system and accessing Mailblocks e-mail from Outlook Express. The free version is also less robust, with only 5MB of storage, five "tracker" e-mail accounts for marketing messages and e-mail lists, and 15 rules for blocking mail. The premium services offer 15MB to 100MB, 15 to 25 trackers and 25 to 50 rules. " Premium services cost $9.95/yr for 15 MB, $29.95/yr for 100MB (US dollars).
Local Search: The Hybrid Future By Greg Sterling, SearchDay (January 8, 2004) Examines the work by search engines to present paid listings to searchers that are local to their area. This local search is aiming at the same market of sellers - and buyers - as the yellow pages.
Of interest,
- "Currently about 17 percent of local SMEs that advertise use paid search (40 percent of small businesses do not advertise). Further, The Kelsey Group has estimated that the current addressable (not actual) market for local paid search is between US$1.16 and US$1.2 billion. Overture contends that local search revenues will be about US$1 billion by 2008. "
- "What search engines such as Google and portals such as Yahoo! and AOL are doing to address these local search deficiencies is integrating more structured content (ala Yellow Pages) into Web search results. For example, Google has very recently added structured Yellow Pages data (business names and phone numbers) to its Search by Location beta test. Formerly, search results were based exclusively on Google's algorithm. However, the inclusion of the new structured data, together with some additional enhancements, have tremendously improved the usability of the application. "
Points to Citysearch as "the model of search and directory convergence".
Consumer Watch | With anti-spam law, it's time to adjust e-mail habits
By Jeff Gelles. Philadelphia Inquirer (Jan 7, 2004) - what the CAN-SPAM Act might be helpful for - maybe it's safe now to click on the opt-out link.
But Business Week says Why Spammers Laugh at CAN-SPAM "While the law promises big penalties, enforcement agencies lack the resources to mount prosecutions and, just maybe, get convictions" by Stephen H. Wildstrom (Jan 7, 2004)
Jack Kapica gets the last word in his ruminations on Google's and Yahoo's reports on most popular searches in 2003. What we look for. Globe and Mail (Jan 2, 2004)
I agree with Kapica's remarks -- "I'm not sure what lists like this can tell us about ourselves, except that we love to make top-ten lists. I'm not sure I like to be part of a society whose primary obsession is a little blond singer, none of whose songs I can remember." People look for entertainment, celebrities and killers - very dismal.
However, Chris Sherman found more "refined" queries at Ask Jeeves' roundup. 2003's Most Wanted Search Terms. SearchDay (Jan 7, 2004)
Sree Sreenivasan at Poynter Online has a page of Web Tips picked from columns during 2003 -- shorten URLs, find personal information, use the Google Deskbar, blow up your bookmarks - and more.
LexisNexis produces a newsletter for information professionals called InfoPro. The January 2004 issue describes enhancements to their Table of Contents services. Lexis has 1,400 TOC sources which can now be viewed through expanding pop-up menu and also searched.
In the December 2003 column, Andrea Diconi described how to use LexisNexis Publisher to push articles to endusers. LexisNexis™ Publisher: A tool that promotes the mission critical role of the IP within the organization
[Spotted through TVC Alert.]
Google's (and Inktomi's) Miserable Failure by Danny Sullivan. Search Engine Report (Jan 6, 2004)
The practice Google introduced of link analysis for ranking results seems to have broken under the strain of Google Bombing. Google Bombing is where bloggers (and others) mischievously or maliciously use links and related text to jack up a target site (often a spoof) to top ranking. The latest in this is "miserable failure" to bring up the official biography page of George W Bush. Sullivan finds that Google and Inktomi have failed to counteract the undue influence these blogger bombers have on search results. He notes that Teoma is unaffected.
New Age Navigation: Innovative Information Interfaces for Electronic Journals by Gerry McKiernan. Serials Librarian (2003) [PDF file - 37 pages]
McKiernan is Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer at Iowa State University Library.
From the abstract: "In this article, we review several novel technologies and implementations that creatively exploit the inherent potential of the digital environment to further facilitate use of e-collections.We conclude with speculation on the functionalities of a next-generation e-journal interface that are likely to emerge in the near future."
Shows a variety of visualization techniques - clusters in 2-D space for articles in D-Lib, stars node for Astronomy and AstroPhysics, simple Vivisimo folders for the Institute of Physics, Concept space at London School of Economics. HighWire Press is notable for use of several visual presentations - Verity TopicMap, Citation Map, MatchMaker to show matching sets of articles based on patterns. Utrecht University uses the AquaBrowser .
Concludes with "Although only a select number of electronic journal collections currently offer innovative and novel interfaces, one can expect that such enhancements will soon become commonplace as digital collections become larger and more complex, and the need for advanced navigation features and functionalities becomes more widely recognized."
On the Google Deskbar by Kieran McCarthy. The Register. (Dec 4, 2003) - Likes the deskbar a lot -- "It has come up with another new, interesting, simple and useful innovation and made its competitors look lazy and sloppy. "
Finding what you want on the web Good searching without Google would not be easy, realises technology analyst Bill Thompson. BBC News (Jan 2, 2004) Follow-up article from the one in which Thompson becomes disenchanted with Google. Nothing really rocks and he looks forward to the Tim Berner's Lee promise of the Semantic Web.
Danny Sullivan picked out an article in JimWorld as a gem because it pointed out that the patent for the famous Page Rank is owned by Stanford University. Has Google been trying other algorithms for ranking results in order to end its dependence?
The "Florida Update" ... Exposed ? in JimWorld by J Cokos (Dec 22, 2003)
A new Super Searchers book has been released, this time for people in advertising and marketing.
Super Searchers on Madison Avenue Top Advertising and Marketing Professionals Share Their Online Research Strategies By Grace Avellana Villamora Edited by Reva Basch
See review by Chris Sherman in SearchDay (Jan 6). Book is available from http://www.infotoday.com/supersearchers/.
Finally -- Google appears ready for IPO Search engine has reportedly named 2 banks San Francisco Chronicle (Jan 6, 2004)
"Google, the most-used search technology on the Internet, answers more than 200 million requests per day. It had a 31.5 percent share of all online searches in the United States in August, according to ComScore Networks' qSearch. The next nearest rival is Yahoo, with 25.7 percent.
Most of Google's money comes from selling advertisements on its Web site. Those ads also run on partner Web sites such as Ask Jeeves and America Online.
Analysts estimate that Google generates between $500 million and $1 billion in annual revenue. The company won't disclose details about its finances other than to say that it is profitable. "
Search Shortcuts as Potential Targets for Optimization by
Jason Mills (December 17, 2003 ) TopListings.com - Lists shortcuts at Google and Yahoo. Advises search engine optimizers to use the keyword targets to associate their businesses with these functions.
The year opens with more talk about Yahoo ending its partnership with Google.
Yahoo Gets Set to Give Google Run for Money Dow Jones via Yahoo (Jan 2) - Rumour has it Yahoo will drop Google in the first quarter. Also "Yahoo wants to combine personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches." Lastly, Yahoo plans to expand paid-inclusion program where paying merchants get more frequent updates and possibly better placement.
Search is everywhere in 2004 by Jim Hu. CNet via Globe and Mail. (Jan 6) - Reports on speech by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel.
Are People Asking Questions of General Search Engines? by Seda Ozmutlu, Huseyin C. Ozmutlu, Amanda Spink (Dec 2003) Online Information Review through Emerald and Informed Librarian - Paper examines use of question format for entering search queries at Excite and Alltheweb in 2001.
"Overall, we are not seeing a move to more complex querying by users of general Web search engines. However, there seems to be some common patterns of Web question and request format query structure. Although a
small proportion of users still prefer to express their information need in question or request format. "
Non-browser Internet Use on the Rise by Ann Mack. E&P (Jan 2, 2004)
"Three out of four home and work Web users go online through non-browser-based Internet applications, such as media players, instant messengers and file-sharing tools, according to Nielsen//NetRatings."
Elsevier to Close Three End-User Portals by Barbara Quint. Information Today (Dec 29, 2003)
Three of Elsevier portals are to be closed, with some services moving to the main site. These are BioMedNet (http://www.bmn.com), ChemWeb (http://www.chemweb.com), and ElsevierEngineering.com.
All require registration but provide many free features - news, abstracts, job postings, e-zines. No date was given for closure.
Year-end report on most popular searches at Google in 2003 is in. Rumours fuel top Google searches BBC News (Jan 4)
"When it came to satisfying the British hunger for gossip and rumour, the web was the place to go in 2003, according to Google."
2003 Year-End Google Zeitgeist Search patterns, trends, and surprises.
Google keeps track by country too. Popular queries in Canada are much different to the US total. Iraq is not on the list, but the Loft Story from France is, along with Canada 411 (for phone numbers), several celibrities the Toronto Star and the Toronto Maple Leafs. Popular brands has only three Canadian entries - Air Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and WestJet. These figures will be somewhat distorted since some Canadians will be using the google.com site rather than google.ca.
It is interesting that the same celebrity names turn up in several of the country lists - Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, Christina Aquilera. Searchers in Japan and Italy, however, tend to stay with their own culture.
Finding answers took new directions by Jan Dempsey. The Post-Standard (Syracuse) December 31, 2003
-- Picks 10 notable new search services from 2003: Froogle, Ask a Librarian, New York Times Movie Reviews, New York Times historical archive and others.
Marcus Zillman features information visualization tools in the December 2003 issue of the Awareness Watch newsletter. All of the Touchgraph powered browsers at www.pmbrowser.info are described, as well as anacubis, Groogler, Kartoo and a few others.
Bringing order to chaos Associated Press in the Globe and Mail (Jan 2, 2004) - Discusses how Vivisimo, Grokker ( downloadable program), and even Teoma help to bring order out of chaos by grouping results by topic.
Play trivia games at http://www.funtrivia.com/. Pick your category, find a group, form your own group, win a prize.
Lots of lists and "best of" at Fimocolous (http://www.fimoculous.com/). January 2 entry on this weblog lists the top 30 blogs of the year. There is also a complete Year in Review 2003 with nearly 30 categories for lists - books, movies, news stories, tech / science, ideas and more. Rex Sorgatz in Minneapolis picks these up as part of his work watching media and culture.
Blogging and RSS — The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators by Will Richardson. Multimedia and Internet @ Schools (Jan 2004)
"... more and more teachers and schools are starting to experiment with the technology as a way to communicate with students and parents, archive and publish student work, learn with far-flung collaborators, and "manage" the knowledge that members of the school community create. In fact, many are seeing Weblogs as a cheaper alternative to course management systems. "
Describes the value of weblogs as a content management tool and RSS as a delivery method. Includes some tools for getting started.
RSS aggregators mentioned were NetNewsWire [http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/] (for Mac OS X only) and SharpReader [http://www.sharpreader.net/] - both downloads. Also the web-based Bloglines [http://www.bloglines.com].
Toolbars: Trash or Treasures? By Greg R. Notess. Online Magazine (Jan 2004) - There is a plethora of toolbars to choose from today. Most are written for Windows and Internet Explorer. Notess reviews the advantages and disadvantages of these and warns that the chief disadvantage is dependence on one search engine. Notess himself rarely uses toolbars.
However, some toolbars support a meta-search and also selection of particular engines such as the new Copernic meta-search. Most importantly they can be a time saver for routine factual questions.
How We Use Information Technology by Reid Goldsborough. LinkUp Digital (Jan 1, 2004) - Goldsborough interviewed John Horrigan, author of the the Pew Internet & American Life Project on information technology, titled “Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States” . Horrigan found that young technology users - the Young Tech Elites - have developed coping mechanisms for dealing with the quantity of information.
In the Wake of the "Florida" Update by Karon Thackston. High Rankings Advisor (Dec 31, 2003) -- More about how Google is moving to semantic-based algorithms for ranking results and how this will affect copywriting by search engine optimizers (SEO). Mentions that Google is picking up more information-based directory sites and information pages and possibly less commercial.
"The reports are true... Google IS moving to a semantic-type system.
But that doesn't mean keywords are on their way out at all. After the
changes are made, Google will be going beyond *just* looking for
keywords on your page. They'll want well-written copy... actual
language that speaks to your site visitors. That means your copy will
take on a more important role than ever before. And that's great
news!"
E-mail: Where It's Going by George Keizer. TechWeb News (Dec 31, 2003) "E-mail is mutating, and within five years will both recede into a background of ubiquity and blend with an even wider range of collaborative functions, according to predictions made by a messaging research firm." Functions could include publishing, subscription management, encryption.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |