SEARCH AND DESTROY by James Surowiecki. New Yorker (May 24) - about the manipulation and misuse of Google's ranking system. Considers Google bombs a prank, but search engine optimization a "racket". Prospects are not good. "Google works best when no one knows it’s there—when people are making their own decisions about which sites are useful or good". But that is no longer the case.
Search business turns serious By Mark Ward. BBC News Online (May 27) "For some people, particularly in business, Google and other net search engines are just not good enough." - Clare Hart, CEO of Factiva, argues the merits of using Factiva for business information.
Yahoo, Microsoft detail search strategies Reed Stevenson Reuters (May 27) - Yahoo will offer customized search to its members. Microsoft and Google have promised better ways to search the personal computer.
Also Search-Engine Wars Flare Online May 28, 2004 By Gene J. Koprowski Insight
Yahoo Adds Anti-Spyware Feature to Browser Toolbar Reuters (May 27) Brilliant - "Anti-Spy for the Yahoo! Toolbar, which is being released as a beta, or test, version, allows users to identify potentially unwanted software that creeps into personal computers."
Search engines try to find their sound by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (May 26) National Public Radio will be transcribing sound files to text files as they are broadcast in order to be picked up by the search engines. Because of this links to more audio files - or at least to pages with audio files - will come up. But there are also specialty search engines that do search multimedia format -- Singingfish, StreamSage, Hewlett-Packard, Virage, Nexidia.
Microsoft Technology Will Widen Searches AP (May 26) - Microsoft is moving up the delivery date for local search of computers in response to rumours about Google's Puffin. "The system being developed by Microsoft's MSN online division "will, as far as the consumer is concerned, be an end-to-end system for searching across any data type," Yusuf Mehdi, head of Microsoft's MSN division, told analysts at a Goldman Sachs Internet conference in Las Vegas Wednesday."
Livewire: Comparison sites hook Web shoppers by Lisa Baertlein. Reuters (May 26) "Last month, 46.6 million Internet users -- or almost one-third of the total U.S. Web audience -- visited a comparison-shopping site, according to Nielsen//NetRatings (NTRT) ." Market leaders are shopping.com, bizrate.com, and nextag.com, but Yahoo Shopping and Google's Froogle are active too.
Coming Soon – the Death of Search Engines? By Rita Vine LLRX (May 24) Asks "Why is searching getting harder and less productive? And what might reasonably happen over the next several months to search engines as we know them? And finally, what does this mean for searchers?"
Trends in Blog Searching By Christina K. Pikas LLRX.com (May 24) - Identifies two categories for searching blogs: "information from within blogs/across blogs or addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your aggregator. " Article describes how to use the inurl operator to search for blog content in a general search engine, and names and describes four leading weblog search engines (Bloglines, Bloogz, Waypath, Feedster).
Inside the Searcher's Mind: It's a Jungle in Here! By Gord Hotchkiss, SearchDay (May 26) - another study on how searchers work their way through search results. This study was done by Enquiro. It used a focus group of 24 Canadians. Gord Hotchkiss, the president of Enquiro, wrote this report on the study for SearchDay. Searchers do distinguish between paid and not paid (less than 20% were confused) and skip over the paid. Again, very few (around 20%) would look at a second page of results.
Of interest - "A typical online research interaction can involve 5 to 6 different queries and interactions with 15 to 20 different sites. Often, the actual contents of a search results page can cause the searcher to take the search in a totally different direction, launching a new query that is at best somewhat divergent from the original purpose of the search."
There is a white paper at Enquiro.
Dogpile.com Upgrades RSS-Enabled Toolbar EContent (May 25) "The Dogpile Toolbar includes a variety of options for locating and accessing syndicated XML content, and now includes functionality that is designed to provide more timely and convenient access to users' personalized lists of RSS and Atom feeds." (http://www.dogpile.com/toolbar.htm)
Father of the Web blasts .mobi domain By: Jørgen Sundgot, Infosyncworld (May 24) "Tim Berners-Lee has issued a statement against mobile-specific domain names, at the same time lamenting the current "land grab" methodology of creating domain names in the first place."
Search Engine User Attitudes By Danny Sullivan, Editor & Chris Sherman. SearchDay (May 25) - summarizes findings from studies done by iProspect, a search engine marketing firm, on Search Engine Users Attitudes (available as a white paper from iProspect).
Most startling is the finding that about 50% of users don't look past the first page of results. Can we presume that they are also using the default of 10 results per page? Also, searchers find the "organic" or "natural" results more relevant than the paid listings. And this is a surprise? Paid listings react best to one or two keywords and not more complex, multi-word queries.
Survey: Google's power overstated CNN/Money (May 25) "In a survey of 2,000 adult Web users, competitors Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, MSN and Lycos delivered correct or useful results almost as often as Google, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a study conducted by San Mateo, Calif.-based Vividence Corp. " There is no mention that Yahoo, MSN and Lycos all use the Yahoo Search database.
Part of the test was to check the number of right answers for leading cause of death for 25-34 year olds. Google users found the right answer 55% of the time. Other search engines were good for 52 to 54 percent. Is that all? Sounds like none of them were very good.
Study concluded that all the other engines need to do to compete with Google is to simplify their search page and display. Yahoo has done that with search.yahoo.com and it hasn't made a big difference, and the Teoma search page is very basic (Teoma is owned by Ask Jeeves). There is more to people's preference for Google than the search box.
Also see Study questions Google's long-term dominance by Matt Hines. CNet (May 25)
Solcara and LexisNexis Unite to Launch News Monitoring Tool eContent (May 28, 2004 ) - "Solcara InTheNews is a search tool that analyses content provided by the LexisNexis 90 day news service in an effort to enable users to more effectively manage, access, and distribute information. Solcara InTheNews uses a statistical and linguistic analysis routine to identify relevant content. "
GuruNet Expands Content, Adds Web Access PRNewswire (May 24) Gurunet is an excellent desktop utility for looking up factual reference-type information - dictionaries, zip codes, etc. It has expanded the content it offers for free at its web site and through a new downloadable utility (Windows only). Subscribers get full access to the content from some 150 sources. Cost is $29.99 US / year.
The User's Guide has more information on what Gurunet offers.
"The Semantic Web is Your Friend" By Libby Miller and Simon Price in Freepint (May 27) - finds that semantic web is emerging through social networking software - refers to the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) project
Google Losing IT's Cool? By: Jim Hedger ISDB.com (May 27) Close look at Google's prospects. Free is what attracts the searchers - "the greatest lossleader ever devised", says Hedger. Advertisers want exposure for the smallest investment possible. Investors want revenue. How will these three co-exist.
Points out that Google has been changed its business model -- "Google has a new business model that seems to stray away from their original intent of building the best information retrieval system ever. With the upswing in Internet marketing, Google is clearly focused on delivering contextual based advertising through the AdWords program. This model has expanded in the past year to cover images and larger ads, including what were once described as banner ads. While they continue to support algorithmic search and continue to offer free-placement (or organic) listings, the real revenue generator is paid-search traffic through AdWords"
Spam now two thirds of all e-mail By Munir Kotadia ZDNet (UK) May 24, 2004 -- "There is no sign of relief for companies already overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unsolicited and unwanted e-mail messages clogging their mail systems. E-mail security firm MessageLabs' filtering statistics for April, which were published on Monday, show that 67.6 percent of all global e-mail traffic is spam. "
Microsoft behind $12 million payment to Opera By Evan Hansen and Paul Festa
CNET News.com (May 24) -- "Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned. "
Questions for Froogle's Mastermind, Part 1 by Shari Thurow. Clickz (May 24) - Thurow likes Froogle, Google's shopping search engine. She says, "As a Web designer who practices usability principles, I'm thoroughly impressed with the user-friendly shopping experience I get at Froogle. " She interviewed Craig Nevill-Manning, Google's director of New York engineering and senior staff research scientist.
Search Wars - Google Gains Market Share and Vertical Search Gains Popularity Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (May 25) - lots of statistics about use of search engines in this summary of a report from Hitwise. For example, "The top three search engines; Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search account for 5.5% of all U.S. Internet visits." Is that all?
The Google News EPpy Controversy Traditional media strongly objected to the nomination of a site that doesn't employ journalists. by Carl Sullivan. Editor and Publisher (May 21, 2004)
Google News was nominated for an EPpy Award in the category, "Best Internet News Service With More Than 1 Million Monthly Visitors." But is it right to nominate something a computer does over what humans do? In the end the Washington Post won.
See EPpy Award WInners Announced for a list of the nominees and winners of all categories for the EPpy Awards 2004. (May 12)
Marketwatch won the Outstanding Individual Achievement Award.
Blogads.com set out to find out who reads blogs (because they hope to deliver ads to them). The Blogads survey included 17,159 blog readers. It showed "blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year." They also read a lot - much of it online.
Science.gov 2.0 Launches with New Relevance Ranking Technology by Paula J. Hane. Newsbreaks (May 24, 2004)
"Science.gov 2.0 lets users search across 30 databases from 12 government science agencies (up from 10 agencies in version 1.0), as well as across 1,700 Web sites—that’s 47 million pages, with results presented in relevancy ranked order. " It uses a metasearch capability developed by Deep Web Technologies for better relevance ranking.
Search Engines in an Iconic Age: Using Search Engines to Find Images by Chris Tighe. SLA b/ite (May 2004) [pdf file] Covers the regular seaerch engine (Google images etc) and several specialized image search engines for professional quality images.
Out-Googling The Top Search Engine Online encyclopedias yield more specialized results by Stephen H. Wildstrom. BusinessWeek Online. Wildstrom lists some of his favourites - Wikipedia, Britannica, Gurunet (a desktop utility).
Click and Eat on the Road By BOB TEDESCHI New York Times (May 23)
Make dinner reservations over the Internet in restaurants across the United States or at least get a review of the restaurant. This articles mentions several web sites:
- "OpenTable.com, a San Francisco-based Web site that offers free reservations at more than 1,800 restaurants in roughly 50 American cities."
- RestaurantRow.com - but you must be a paying member.
- Zagat.com has reviews for 30,000 places in 68 cities. Also Gayot.com.
- addyourown.com - reviews by amateurs
- CitySearch.com has information about restaurants and entertainment in 16 cities and partial coverage in another 23.
Google's desktop bet By Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com May 21, 2004 - Examines the implications of Google's expected new product (called Puffin) for searching personal computers. Others have tried and failed - AltaVista among them. Google has not been successful at enterprise search, and web search and local file search are not the same thing. While Google may be pre-empting Microsoft at offering a better search of personal computers, there will likely be flack about privacy and advertising - because it would come with targeted ads. People are sick of adware and spyware - much better to make do with the Windows search as is.
""Google's real challenge will be in adoption: getting people to download and install it," independent analyst Matthew Berk said. "In order to search your hard drive, you need to install something that's pretty intrusive, that can reach deep down into your machine." "
A Scan of the Headline Scanners by Ryan Singel. Wired (May 21, 2004) - looks at several aggregators (aka newsreaders or RSS readers). These are the tools for picking up and reading RSS feeds. Bloglines is webbased. Others mentioned include Sharpreader for Microsoft.net, Newsgator for MS Outlook (but there are some disadvantages), KlipFolio, NewNewsWire for the Mac, and NewsMonster for Netscape.
David Brown listed the The top five reasons why search is still way too hard in ACM Queue (April 2004) and Gary Price commented.
Building Nutch: Open Source Search Sponsored by Verity, Effectively Evaluate Enterprise Content.
ACM Queue vol. 2, no. 2 - April 2004 by Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting, Nutch - about the experimental search engine Nutch and writing "an open source search engine".
Gary Price -- "Seruku is toolbar-based application that helps you find and access ANY and ALL web pages that have appeared in your browser. Its simplicity, along with its ability to save the user plenty of time and aggravation, makes it a resource that will appeal to the masses." Quite an endorsement. More at All About Seruku. (May 20 ) Resourceshelf.
Peter Morville, guru of Information Architecture, has a new web site devoted to problem of finding things - Findability.org . There's an email newsletter that will be issued several times a year about new resources related to findability.
Vivisimo's clustering fights "information overlook". Interesting paper - Needed: A More Selective Ignorance. [pdf]
More about A Cure for info overload in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (May 18)
Source: ResourceSHelf.
Gary Price has another smart answer from Ask Jeeves - new movie . For example new movie shrek has a plot outline, movie review score, links to official site, trailer, reviews. Enter the zip code (US only) to get local theatres and show times. If AJ doesn't have any information on the film it still offers a local-showtime box, and links to the Movie Center at MyWay.com (which AJ now owns) for coming soon and just released. Fun.
FindLaw Extends Agreement with Yahoo! PRNewswire (May 19) FindLaw portal is the most visited legal Web site. Content includes West Legal Directory(R), the Internet's largest directory of lawyers and legal professionals. Through the renewed agreement with Yahoo Findlaw's directory will be fully available through the Yahoo network.
Everything Google by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (May 20) - recommends How to do Everything with Google, a new book about using Google, by Fritz Schneider and Eric Fredricksen, both Google employees, and Nancy Blachman, author of the GoogleGuide.
Abebooks Selects Endeca - Abebooks, an online marketplace of 12,000 bookstores, will be using Endeca InFront to power search and navigation at its international sites. Endeca uses taxonomies to improve navigation. Barnes and Noble uses Endeca as well.
Gary Price said , "What I like most about Endeca is the ease with which a user can refine their results by simply pointing and clicking the refinements listed on the right side of a results page. " Resouceshelf
Pandia comments on the competitive aspects of Google's rumoured desktop software, Puffin, for searching local files as well as the web. Pandia Search Engine News On the whole, Pandia thinks Google will hold its own against Microsoft if it "keeps on delivering highly relevant results".
Raileurope.com puts travellers on right track By PETER NOWAK Globe and Mail Update (May 15, 2004) RailEurope.com -- "The site exists primarily to sell rail passes, which is a good thing if you're planning to see more than one city. But it also doubles as an excellent research resource, with a comprehensive database of routes and schedules."
Bookmarklet for Searching Google News Research Buzz. (May 13) - Tara Calishain created a bookmarklet for searching Google News - just highlight text and click on bookmarklet. There are two - one for IE, other for Opera. Might want to keep it on the Links bar in the browser.
Complete RSS - a new tool for searching for RSS feeds and subscribing to them. It recommends Pluck - a free download that works with Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 and higher that provides a news reader and power search function. You can also create up to 3 custom feeds based on keyword search terms - essentially a save search service. Custom feeds are powered by News Trove. Complete RSS has a page of tips and tricks about RSS feeds. Site seems well put together. Bloglines is similar but provides web-based rss reading, rather than through additional software.
Google Personalized By Jonathan Dube. Poynter ONline (May 20) Dube compares the personalized function of Google to A9 Search. Google Personalized is cookie-based. Answer a few questions to set up a profile of interests, and Google will take those into account in search queries. For example, if you specify an interest in Canada and search for "world hockey" Canadian articles and sites will be shown first.
The "News Accumulator" at Surfwax has 4,000 sources, 75,000 topics across 86 categories. Top stories greet you on the main page, with popular topics on the right, and high-level news categories on the left. The search function looks at pre-established topics, determined by text analysis of pages. Entering cold mountain does find the movie - but no other mention of that phrase. Articles date back to February - unusual in a news search service. However, the list includes many incidental mentions of the movie. Surfwax has a box for searching fulltext, but it actually sends the query to Google.
'Future of Search Will Make you Dizzy' By Ryan Naraine in Internet News (May 20) - A9 chief executive Udi Manber spoke to the W3C conference about the future search. About the search engine he helped to develop - A9, he said, ""A9's mandate is to build new search technologies to improve the user experience. We want to invent new things and new ways of finding relevant information. The first question I get from people is, 'Are you going to build another Google?' But, no, that's not what we are doing. There's so much room for innovation that you can build interesting things that aren't available today."
Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool By Reed Stevenson, Reuters (May 20)
Bill Gates preached the benefits of weblogs to a group of CEOs invited to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the audience were Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and others notables. Microsoft has 700 employee bloggers itself. Will Microsoft add blogging and newsreaders to its software?
Eliyon Technologies Surpasses 20 Million Profiles of U.S. Business People, 1.4 Million Companies Business Wire (May 19) Eliyon now has over 20 million people profiles and 1.4 million profiles of U.S. companies. "Eliyon is a revolutionary new search engine of business people, professionals and executives. This rich information source grows by nearly 25,000 business people profiles every day, and constantly refreshes information in existing profiles - having updated 8.4 million profiles over the past year".
Subscribers of Highbeam can also tap into Eliyon's executive database. Has Canadian content.
Eurekster Discusses Combining Social Networking & Search Engine Technology By Andy Beal Li'L Engine (March 28, 2004) -- Interview With Eurekster CEO, Grant Ryan on the future of social searching.
"Eurekster makes use of its own SearchMemory™ technology which remembers the sites a user finds useful and presents them higher in the results the next time they search. Then, Eurekster lets a user and their friends share their searches and sites, so when they do a "hotel" search, for example, they'll see the hotel sites their friends also found useful, moved up in the results and marked with an icon. "
Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft By JOHN MARKOFF New York Times (May 19) Google has been testing a "powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers." This puts Google in a full head-to-head with Microsoft who will have similar function in the new Longhorn system. Microsoft's intentions seem to be to remove the need for a browser. This is Google's response -- "The disappearance of the Web browser and the integration of both Web search and PC search into the Windows operating system could potentially marginalize Google's search engine. Google, well aware of this threat, hired a Microsoft product manager last year to oversee the Puffin project as part of its strategy to compete with Microsoft's incursion into its territory." But will embedded search also mean advertising? Likely. Are there privacy issues? Yes. Article did not ask if the indexing of personal files will slow down a personal computer.
Also available at IHT as Google Invades Microsoft's Turf.
Yahoo releases e-mail standard to fight spam By Andy Sullivan, Reuters USA Today -- Yahoo has developed a method for validating the sender called DomainKeys. This "would embed outgoing messages with an encrypted digital signature matched to a signature on the server computer that sends the message." Yahoo has submitted it to the standards-setting Internet Engineering Task Force and will let developers use it for free.
In Google's Shadow, Ask Jeeves Grows By: Brian Morrissey DM News (May 17) - Interview with Jim Lanzone, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves about AJ's acquistion of Interactive Search Holdings. Aim is to improve user experience at myway.com, excite.com, and others, as well as at Ask Jeeves itself.
"One area where Ask Jeeves hopes to make search listings smarter is with its branded-response unit. The graphical banners are returned on certain searches to give users more interactivity. For example, a search for "cheap tickets" yields an Orbitz unit where a searcher can enter dates and travel destination to check availability immediately. Ask Jeeves has deals with 200 advertisers for branded-response units, which accounted for 31 percent of its sales last quarter. "
Canadians Are More Active Online Searchers Than Their U.S. Counterparts, According to comScore Networks (May 13) - from comScore qSearch
More detail on the study done by comScore. Use of Google is much higher than either Yahoo or MSN. Google gets 62% share of searches and has a searcher penetration of 65%. Yahoo has 15% of search but does reach 41% for searcher penetration - meaning that 41% of searchers do use Yahoo but only for 15% of their searches. MSN is about the same at 12% and 46%. In the United States, Google receives 36% share of searches, Yahoo 30%, MSN 16%, and all others 18%.
Blog Development Tool Ships: Six Apart adds plug-in options, authentication tools to Movable Type. Peggy Watt, PC World (May 13, 2004) Six Apart has released a developer version of Movable Type for blogging but will be continuing to enhance the shareware version also. Different licensing options apply for consumer and commercial.
Ovid Launches Portal Advantage Service with Medical Content by Barbara Quint. Newsbreaks (May 17)
"Ovid Technologies (http://www.ovid.com), a Wolters Kluwer Health subsidiary, has announced a Portal Advantage Service “to help societies and publishing partners, independent journal publishers, foundations, and corporations to build fully customizable portals.” Initially, the service will aim at providing medical content, Ovid’s dominant market. Besides allowing content providers to re-deliver their own content, the service will expand access to new content and resources."
Microsoft turns its might to growing field of search ALLISON LINN Canadian Press (May 16)
With the possible exception of the Google IPO, nothing has been more hyped than Microsoft's entry to the Internet search arena. There have been many press releases over many months but nothing to show for it. Here is another article describing Microsoft 's intentions to introduce its own technology "later this year".
Of interest:
"About 42 per cent of U.S. Web users went to Google's search engine in March, compared with 31 per cent for Yahoo and 29 per cent for MSN, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. "
Microsoft will replace its use of Yahoo's Inktomi first.
"Microsoft also is gradually unveiling a news search product, called NewsBot, similar to Google's news offering, which uses software to sort news stories based on relevance. Other technologies being developed include BlogBot, to search Web journals, and AnswerBot to better answer questions posed in plain English. "
And, Microsoft is working on projects "Stuff I've seen", and "Stuff I should see".
Tara Calishain has created a bookmarklet for setting up Google Web Alerts. A bookmarklet is a bit of javascript that is embedded in a link that can be in a favourites list or on the link bar of the browser. Google Web Alerts watch for new hits on keyword searches. See New Google Bookmarklet for Google Web Alerts
New York Times has destination guides to all parts of the world that includes access to feature articles, news, deals and discounts. weather and more. NYT Travel - look for Destinations.
FyberSearch is a new web search engine created by a 19-year old. It has a few interesting features - changing the required keyword density in search selection, and searching only the meta tags. Very small database.
Nerac.com To Deliver Newswire Feed Twice Daily; Nerac Clients To Receive International Business News Through a Single Source Business Wire (May 14). Nerac provides information services to researchers in science and technology. It has recently joined with ProQuest Information and Learning to offer a Newswire Feed for business news from around the world.
Net search wars heat up CNet (May 13) "
Yahoo boosts free e-mail storage to 100MB, while Google makes moves on Yahoo Groups. "
How Info-Overload Experts Unwind By Elaine Porterfield Wired (May. 13, 2004 ) - Conference in Seattle at the University of Washington looked technology overload and its impact on our lives. Information, Silence and Sanctuary was organized by Professor David Levy. "the group tackled issues and ideas related to the physiological and psychological effects of stress created by the speed of modern life. It also explored theories on how society has gotten to this point. "
Yahoo boosts free e-mail storage to 100MB By Jim Hu. CNet May 13, 2004
Yahoo is raising storage for Yahoo Mail from 4 MB to 100 MB, and giving the service a face-lift along with more connections to Yahoo services. Listen to Yahoo radio while doing your email?
Return To The Sad Days Of More Than A Search Engine? By Danny Sullivan, Editor SearchDay (May 14) How the world churns - we had the portal wars where attention was on addons not search. Google marched in and swept up the searchers. Now Google is doing the portal thing. Will search suffer?
A Personalized Google Amazon's new A9 Web search. By Jonathan Dube. Poynter Online (May 13) - Reviews A9 Search, the new search engine from Amazon that is powered by Google. Says, A9 "takes Google's search results and adds some useful personalized features"
Skyscrapers in Cyberspace: Maps and History Online By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL New York Times May 14, 2004
"Skyscraper Museum has put online more than 2,000 documents about historic New York buildings by connecting the digitized images to an interactive map of Manhattan.
Starting today, visitors to the museum's Web site (www.skyscraper.org) can use the map to zoom into a neighborhood, select one of 120 big buildings and see its past depicted through postcards, construction photographs and other documents from the museum's archives. Each building is also shown as a three-dimensional drawing that can be viewed from four angles as a stand-alone structure or surrounded by its neighbors."
Site is called Visual Index to the Virtual Archive, or VIVA.
Canadians Are More Active Online Searchers Than Their U.S. Counterparts, According to comScore Networks PR Newswire (May 13) - Canadians use search engines more but they don't shop online. Also 60% of home users have a broadband connection.
"A comparison of search engine market share in Canada and the U.S. reveals significant differences in the competitive landscape of these two countries. Google, which has a 6-point share lead over Yahoo! in the U.S., holds a dominant share of the market in Canada, accounting for 62 percent of all searches conducted by Canadian Internet users in April 2004. In April, more than 40 percent of Canadian Internet users conducted at least one search at MSN and Yahoo! (as represented by "Searcher Penetration"), a reflection of the massive reach of their online properties, which are visited by 96 and 75 percent of the Canadian Internet population, respectively. "
What has happened at Open Directory? (www.dmoz.org) It no longer shows site results, only categories. While categories is important, so were sites. The searcher needs to use both to find the right category and see the breadth and aspects of a topic. This could be one more stage of dying for this much used directory. Google has demoted it to being among other tools rather than a link from the main page. Altavista uses it but not very well and who knows for how much longer. Dmoz has been very important to web search sites, powering their directories and as a seed bed for their indexes - such as the new ObjectsSearch. But right now, dmoz as a directory for searchers to use is crippled.
Péter Jacso reviewed two totally different sites in his May 2004 issue of Digital Reference: Adherents.com about religion and affiliations; and Keep Media, a low-cost source of articles. Re KeepMedia, it has about 160 publications and costs $49.95 US a year. Competitors are Highbeam Research and XanEdu, both for fee, and of course the databases that your public library probably offers for free.
ObjectsSearch is another search engine based on the Nutch technology. Idea is to explain the ranking and show the anchor text. Can use it to search the Web, see results clustered (separate search), news and weblogs, and images. Uses dmoz Open Directory. Still in beta.
Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web Meme by Steve Cayzer. Hewlett-Packard (2003?) -- "Our vision is to use semantic web tools and ideas to help move blogging beyond communal diary browsing to rich information sharing scenarios. We have built a simple prototype as an illustration of this vision. "
How Search Engines Teach Users To Search Garrett French WebProNews (May) - search engines are making it easier to do quick lookups - the ready-reference question - with shortcuts and smarter answers. Clustering helps too, such as at Vivisimo. Gary Price is quoted on the future - more niche engines, and select your own databases through federated search.
Search engines take the stand By Declan McCullagh CNet. (May 13) - Legal researchers and even judges are using web search engines, especially Google, to get background information for cases. There are some examples of bizarre reasonings in this article. Gary Price, Resourceshelf (May 13) , wonders if the public really understands how search engines work or appreciates that the results may be insufficient or wrong.
Mary Ellen Bates asked Is Boolean Dead? in eContent. (Apr 5) New tools don't change the need for information professionals to be able to understand and intuit - to be "zen researchers" - and they need tools that will help them "sniff out" the answer. Searchers still need to do boolean searching to find A and B without C or D.
Agreed. But good luck using boolean operators on the Web. The new Yahoo Search does not support boolean well (and it dumped the Near operator at Altavista), Teoma can't do nesting, Google has some strange sets, and Gigablast can't count.
Winners of the 2004 Webbies were announced on May 12. There are two awards for each of the 30 categories. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences selects the nominees for both. It selects the winner of the Webby Award, while the public chooses the winners of the The People's Voice Awards.
In the Education category, the BBC Human Body and the National Geographic sites won. The CBC Halifax Explosion was one of the 5 nominees.
HealthyOntario won for Government and Law.
BBC News received the Webby. But the people voted for the The Smoking Gun, a web site owned by Court TV cable channel and claiming to have "confidential documents" - mostly about celebrities. Rocketnews, a very useful news search engine with RSS newsreader capabilities, was passed over.
Google Groups Adds Mailing Lists & Other Features, Competes With Yahoo Groups by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay (May 12) Discussion groups aren't dead! Google Groups has been the site for searching postings at newsgroups. Registered users can also post messages. Now, registrants may set up discussion groups public or private. ( Google Groups - Beta) The private ones can be used to bring together friends, family, or members of an organization. This is in direct competition to Yahoo Groups, as Sullivan notes, and Topica.
Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box By DAVID POGUE. New York Times (May 13) - Positive article about GMail in the New York Times. Says that " Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself." It will provide a lot of space - 1 GB, 500 times what Hotmail has. Archives are easily searched - no file folders required. It will handle threads - the back and forth of email. There are only 3 text ads, and a few related links that are merely suggestions based on the content and might be useful.
"Other Gmail features include an excellent spelling checker, a built-in address book, auto-complete for addresses, the ability to specify a Reply To address (a different e-mail address for replies to your messages), indicators (>>) that denote messages sent only to you, in-message photo display, online help and one-key shortcuts (C for Compose, R for reply, and so on) that let power users cruise through entire e-mail sessions without ever touching the mouse. The automatic spam-removal feature is adequate for the moment, but once thousands of people begin to use the Report Spam button, Google plans to harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers to refine its spam filters in innovative ways. "
And GMail will allow 9 months of non-use before shutting down the account.
Read This, Jump Into Blog Fray
By Daniel Terdiman Wired (May 12) What's Making Blognews lists the top 100 stories being linked to at political blogs - about 600 of them. Links may be to stories in the news media or prominent weblogs. Stories are flagged as rising, falling, or with a star (new). Very interesting approach.
The Unfolding Saga of the Web
By Michelle Delio. Wired (May 12) - Interview with Dr. Stuart Feldman, head of IBM's Internet Technology division, about the past and future of the Web. Feldman will co-chair WWW2004, the 13th World Wide Web Conference.
Considers the Web to still be "bratty" and hopes that the brattiness will be kept as more order and control is brought to the Web. "It is amazing to me how bohemian neighborhoods continue to coexist so nicely with the rapid gentrification of the Web. But as society increases its dependence on the Web, it will have to get more serious, more civilized. " Foresees a future of more sharing of applications. There are privacy issues - people will have to make choices.
Opera upgrades browser Globe and Mail Update (May 12) Opera is at 7.50 for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. It has email, newsreader, IRC-compatible chat client, contact database, and support for RSS newsfeeds.
Also Opera parts curtain on next act (May 12, 2004) By Evan Hansen. CNET News.com - compares to Firefox and Safari who have stripped their browsers down to just a browser. But Opera is still small at 3.5 MB. Also the new email system dropped the folder system and uses methods similar to Google's GMail for archive searching.
Searching for Balance By Robyn Greenspan ClickZ April 30, 2004 - Refers to a study by iProspect, a search engine marketing firm, about searcher habits. "The survey revealed that across the four major search properties — Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL — just over 60 percent of respondents found an organic search result to be most relevant to the sample query. However, respondents preferred one type of search over another, depending on the property. " Searchers were more likely to click on an "organic" (meaning not an paid listing) at Google (72.3%) and paid at MSN (71.2%).
Not noted, though, was that paid listings are usually not relevant for anything more than a two word search.
Google blog somewhat less than 'bloggy' By Stefanie Olsen CNet (May 12) Google has joined the party and opened a blog at http://www.google.com/googleblog/. By-line is "Insight into the news, technology, and culture of Google." Ewan Williams, creator of Blogger, is the program manager. Stefanie Olsen has noticed Google editing its blog entries over its expansion to India.
Intelliseek Launches BlogPulse.com to Track Trends, Issues, Personalities in Blogosphere PR Newswire (May 11) via CBS Marketwatch. - Blogpulse.com, from Intelliseek, is a new blog search engine that can pick out trends in topics, names of people getting attention in the blogs, and most linked sites or stories. It's all about buzz.
"Intelliseek developed and launched BlogPulse as an outgrowth of the company's expertise in locating and analyzing unstructured data and consumer-generated media for marketing and business intelligence. "
Web Search: On to "Sense-Making" by Ben Elgin. Business Week Online (May 6) "IBM's Dan Gruhl and Andrew Tomkins explain how Big Blue's WebFountain technology tries to answer "why" questions"
Of interest:
"Just as intriguing, WebFountain is attempting to bring a time axis to Internet search. Today, search engines provide a snapshot of how the Web views a certain topic. But it's largely a medium without a memory. That makes it next to impossible to spot trends or easily analyze how things shift over time -- which could be compelling information. Imagine the value a marketer would get from an answer to the question: "How have mentions of my brand changed over the last six months?" "
Toolkit: Picturing the Web A look at visual search engines By Paula MacKinnon. Information Highways (May / June 2004) - lists and describes several "visual search engines". A few are really just based on text annotations. The really impressive ones can interpret shapes such as eVision, Vima Technologies, and Idée.
The Web for Book Lovers Pandia Post (April 30 2004) - finding good free books online. Also links to an article about searching inside books at Amazon.
Reuters RSS Reuters (May 11) Reuters is pulling its feeds out of services like Yahoo but has added a number of RSS feeds for individuals. Standard topics are here: top news, business news, US news, sports, entertainment, etc.
Google polishes up Blogger site by Stephanie Olsen. ZDNet/ CNet -- "Still a free product, the Blogger revamp will enable people to publish to the Web via e-mail, a personal digital assistant or a cell phone; to create simple "About me" pages that can be linked to multiple Web logs; and to enable readers to post comments to their sites. It also provides more than 30 templates for "blog" layout, according to Google."
This Is Your E-Mail; This is Your E-Mail on Gmail by Rebecca Lieb Clickz Network (May 7) Says that when Googele's Gmail goes live it will be huge. Quotes an estimate that Gmail could make up 5 to 10% of all email inboxes. The format will be a serious challenge for e-mail marketers.
"What we do know is it's going to be really, really big -- big enough to change a lot of the rules legitimate e-mailers have been playing by. If Gmail's format changes your e-mail message format, it's something you're just going have to deal with. You've been warned."
mozDex is a new search engine - in beta - that will explain why results are ranked as they are. It is seeded from the Dmoz Open Directory.
From the about page: "Our goal is to index the entire web in html content. We want to be able to provide a powerful and open search service to the community. While we do offer paid inclusions to help us pay for the service, we pride ourselves on fair and honest results. "
Each hit has links for cached (copy of the page), explain (details about the ranking) and anchor (text of anchors that point to that page).
The explanations of the scoring are blindingly technical - and not many will want to figure it out.
Danny Sullivan shouted hurray that mozDex shows the anchor text of incoming links. But it doesn't show the linking pages, and often the text is the minimalist "please click here". Otherwise, it is often the title of the page. Value?
mozDex - experimental.
Search engine tackles tricky lists New Scientist Print Edition (07 May 04) Work by Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington to create a search engine that can make understand sentences well enough to extract lists of scientists, or botanists, or anything.
"Etzioni's ultimate aim is to have KnowItAll answer questions such as "list all British scientists born before 1900". The software cannot do that yet, because it lacks a module that can understand "natural-language" questions of this type. That will come later, he says. "
Startup tracks your interests to customize a news search Seattle Times (Apr 12) about Findory.com -- "Findory News, offers free, instant personalization of news searches at www.findory.com. It learns from the news you select to read and finds articles that match your interests. And it won't make you sign in or use a password. "
Do What I Mean by Robert Cringely. PBS.org (April 22) - MeaningMaster is a technology developed for natural language queries based on the use of a lexicon that has 200,000 words interconnected based on meaning. It has been years in the making. Article mentions that both Google and MSN are interested. First reason for interest, of course, is for contextual advertising.
Sorting Out SiteMatch By Barry Lloyd. SearchEngineGuide ( April 23, 2004 ) - Examines the workings of Yahoo's SiteMatch - the program that replaced the paid-for-inclusion programs of Altavista, Alltheweb, and Inktomi. The account helps to explain why there are still some differences between Yahoo's search engines. The old PFI programs are being allowed to run out on their respective engines but do not apply to Yahoo. Also, the old Inktomi ranking algorithms are still being used for Hotbot and MSN, while Yahoo (and now Altavista and Alltheweb) use the new. It's hoped (and expected) that Yahoo Search will index sites within weeks, rather than Inktomi's within months.
Barry Lloyd is hopeful that Yahoo will be good for webmasters.
"Yahoo's new search engine has brought some healthy competition to the search engine field. Their fundamentally different way of ranking sites since the changes on Google some months ago have been a lifeline to many on-line businesses. Many observers have applauded their relevance, though others have complained at the ease at which they can be spammed. It is obvious that Yahoo is taking a very pro-active stance against spam (some would say that they are becoming way too harsh), so it is going to be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. Certainly, few can continue to state that SiteMatch is going to flood the results with "paid spam". The criteria for inclusion are tough."
Viewpoint is another toolbar to enhance web searching for people who use Internet Explorer and link Yahoo. Distinguishing feature is that it shows thumbnails - as if smaller-than-a-postage-stamp image ever helped anyone assess the worth of the page in one glance. There is a demo of the search at the web site but it doesn't have the thumbnails!
Viewpoint Search Toolbar for Internet Explorer : A class apart (April 30)
Masters of Cinema has been picked by the Internet Scout Project as providing "links to information about DVD releases of such films, along with
articles about their technical specifications and clarion calls to the
companies providing such releases. " There is more foreign content than at most film buff sites.
Google's Orkut Personal Information Offered Outside Orkut By Danny Sullivan, Editor SearchEngineWatch (May 7) A lesson to all of us - the networks that people set up in supposedly private areas can be breached as they were with Orkut, as Sullivan reports.
All Music, All But Invisible By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (May 6) Recommends All Music Guide for its biographies and discographies. It's very well organized by genre and decade (at least for easy listening). It also invites user ratings. However, as Sherman says, it is invisible to search engines. Lots of information here and buying opportunities (mainly through Barnes and Noble) but no sound bytes.
Niche search engines for business research by Susan Eipert (April/May 2004) - recommends government sites, non-profit, catalogs, white papers. Mentions HighBeam as a useful sources.
Yahoo, Lycos sign chat services swap deal NetImperative (May 7) Yahoo Europe will use chat from Lycos, and Lycos Europe will use MSN instant messaging.
Ask Jeeves Closes Acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch (May 6) By Acquiring the search sites of Interactive Search Holdings, Ask Jeeves increased its reach to 25% of domestic (US) searchers and became 7th largest property on the Internet in the US.
"Jeeves' search and search-based portal brands include: Ask Jeeves (Ask.com and Ask.co.uk); Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com); Excite (excite.com); iWon (iwon.com); My Search (mysearch.com); My Way (myway.com); My Web Search (mywebsearch.com) and Teoma (teoma.com). Ask Jeeves also owns the search technology Teoma, proprietary natural language processing technology, as well as portal and ad serving technologies."
Newsmap takes stories from Google News and shows them in bands across the page in coloured boxes. This is a flash application and the aim is to reflect "the constantly changing landscape" ... "objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it. " It needs a full screen and is quite a load on an older computer, but when the text is large enough to read it is interesting. Tara Calishain reviewed it -- Get Your News In a Big Rectangular Flash App in ResearchBuzz (May 5)
Academic Index searches only reference-quality resources selected by librarians. Resource Discovery Network, the Internet Scout Project, Virtual Learning Sources are three of the included sites. Collection has 137,000 pages. Academic Index was created and is maintained by Dr Michael Bell, former chair, Texas Association of School Librarians.
UJIKO is a new search engine from the makers of Kartoo. It has some visual elements and is 100% Flash. But it also depends on popups to display individual sites. Results are somewhat clustered into topics. Controls on the side let you file individual results, create filters, and send results but you need a widescreen to see it all. Has versions for US, UK, and France. Gary Price reviewed it in Web Search-UJIKO (April 30)
Two excellent articles on problems with searching in the April 2004 issue of ACM Queue about Enterprise Search.
Enterprise Search: Tough Stuff - When searching fewer documents, shouldn't it be easier to find what you're looking for? by Rajat Mukherjee and Jianchang Mao, Verity.
Searching vs Finding: How do you help computers find the information people really want? by William Woods, Sun Microsystems Laboratories
Source: TVC Alert
Walter Mossberg at Wall Street Journal has found a way of Making the Internet A Little Easier On Aging Eyes It's a program for Windows called Web Eyes http://www.webeyes.us/ for $ 19.95 US. It can adjust any font and will also reformat a page to book style.
Maporama International Chooses ADC Worldmap to Strengthen its Cartographic Coverage Worldwide. Press Release (May 6)
New partnership between Maporama and ADC Worldmap makes Maporama's global coverage even better. ADC Worldmap is the Desktop Mapping Division of American Digital Cartography, Inc. (ADCi). It specializes in GIS/Desktop Mapping.
"Thanks to this new partnership, Maporama International has integrated new cartographic data featuring 429,000 cities and 9.9 million kilometers of roads worldwide. Users of Maporama solutions will also be able to localize 13,445 airports, 19,713 cultural landmarks, 54,371 railway stations and 5,358 marine ports."
Web Search for Tomorrow by Ben Elgin. Business Week Online (May 6) -
Describes some new developments in search technology to watch for:
- personalization but may take another couple of years to get it right.
- trend searching - taking snapshots over time. IBM's WebFountain does this but it will be along time before the technology is available for consumer search.
- desktop search. Microsoft has the lead with "Stuff I've Seen" being tested by staff.
- better results through clustering. Vivisimo excels at this. ixMatch is mentioned - has software for corporate use.
Groxis Unleashes Grokker 2.1 Now Featuring Google(TM) PRNewswire via CBS Marketsearch (May 5) - Grokker, the search tool that shows results as orbs, has added a plug-in for doing searches on Google.
Images Get Their Own Search Engine Penelope Patsuris Forbes (May 4) Pixlogic is a new startup from California that can do visual search or have "image understanding". No demo available.
PubSub.com will run saved search queries on weblogs and send you the results in an RSS feed to be read in your newsreader. The site has several prepared search / feeds for politics, sports, technology and entertainment.
Pandia Search lists all the Yahoo! Shortcuts. These are one word commands that will quickly look up defintions, get information on flights, find a hotel, get a traffic report - though most of these are US specific. New Yahoo! shortcuts
Searching the search engines "BBC ClickOnline's Kate Russell looks at metasearch engines - services that collect results from other search engines and directories. " (May 4) Recommends Dogpile, Searchive, and Ask Jeeves.
Tools to aid search quests (May 5) Mentions a couple more tools for the web searcher: Web Ferret toolbar, Scannery for company information, Watch That Page for alerts, and Search Engine Showdown for staying uptodate.
Viruses Target IM by Liane Cassavoy From the June 2004 issue of PC World magazine (May 04, 2004)
PC World identifies virus threats for users of instant messaging and offers tips on avoiding them. Mainly - be very wary of clicking on links or downloading any applets. Some anti-virus programs now cover IM (Norton and McAfee) - another reason to upgrade to the latest version of the software when it becomes available.
Why Google Is Peering Out, at Microsoft By JOHN MARKOFF. New York Times (May 3)
Suggests that Google is taking the high road as a centralist, universalist information system, while others (Microsoft) are decentralized and focused on the desktop.'
"Like many other aspects of the company, Google's ideas about how to expand the uses of its computer system - which by last fall had expanded to more than 100,000 servers in a dozen data centers on two continents - offer a radical break from the past. Indeed, while much of the world has been pursuing a computer vision that is increasingly decentralized, Google is taking the opposite course - using the Internet to make its computer system, the world's largest, available everywhere."
Google is secretive about its plans but, "it is certain that Google intends to extend information-searching in many directions: mobile applications for wireless gadgets, more effective online shopping, and social networking are all obvious applications of its technology."
Google has been successful in lowering costs through such methods as designing a file system that uses thousands of computers, allowing for drive failures, and building systems from scratch.
Company attracts the top computer scientists and gives them a day a week to work on their own projects.
Dear Big Brother -- Free Web-based E-mail Services Can Cost You Some Privacy by Robertson Barrett. Special to Consumer WebWatch April 21, 2004 - Questions how private the web-based email system from Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail), Netscape and others really are. Finds that they all gather information. Has some advice on how to be assured privacy.
SpamArrest and Vanquish - Will they help you with your spam problems? by J.A. Hitchcock. LinkUp Digital (May 3, 2004) - Reviewed two software products to help block spam in email: SpamArrest and Vanquish.
"Of the two services, I prefer (and use) Vanquish. Except for not being able to click on the subject line and previewing the message, Vanquish is less expensive, more effective, and offers more features and options than SpamArrest. It does work with any POP3-compliant mail program, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape, Opera (M2). However, it is only available for Windows machines, not other operating systems like SpamArrest. "
Both use a combination of identifying approved addresses and challenging others to verify that they are who they say they are.
Search Engine Prefixes and Shortcuts Greg Notess in Online Magazine (May / June 2004) Several search engines offer one-word shortcuts or commands for retrieving certain bits of information - weather, definitions, calculations, etc. Notess recaps the ones at Alltheweb, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo.
Will RSS Readers Clog the Web? by Ryan Singel. Wired (April 30) The newsreader software used to pick up RSS news feeds from sites is bogging down the servers because of the amount of checking they do. "The trouble is, aggregators are greedy. They constantly check websites that use RSS, always searching for new content. Whereas a human reader may scan headlines on The New York Times website once a day, aggregators check the site hourly or even more frequently. " Some are proposing converting RSS Readers to a peer-to-peer network - one would check for many.
Google Enhances Image Search EContent Magazine (APril 30) - Google Image Search includes images from news stories and links to news headlines. Database now has more than 880 million images.
OneSource to be acquired for $103.5M Boston Business Journal (APril 30) - infoUSA, known for its directory services to businesses, will buy OneSource Information Systems Inc, an aggregator of business content including company and industry profiles.
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