October 31, 2004
BIOME Grows
BIOME, the gateway to health resources as part of the Resource Discovery Network, now has 25,000 "valuated, quality Internet resources in the health and life sciences, aimed at students, researchers, academics and practitioners". You can watch for new additions through New Records.
Metrofeed for Toronto
Metrofeed gathers up RSS feeds for a local area into one place. The Toronto Metrofeed offers weather, events. It is still in beta - be patient with the load. Among the main feeds are the Canadian Government News, Better Living Centre, Toronto Bloggers, Toronto MetroBloggers. Can view entries by time and source. Add this page to your newsreader.
Other cities: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, San Diego, Washington, DC, London England
See Say Hello to MetroFeed by Gary Price (Oct 25)
Search Habits Die Hard
Searcher Habits by Gary Price, Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 26) - comments on AP story Experts: Web searches for sex declining, e-commerce increasing - seems most searchers are merrily doing the very simplest of searches completely unaware of advanced techniques or variety of information sources.
NewsGator free
NewsGator RSS Reader Gets Fahree Researchbuzz (Oct 25)- recommends the now FREE online NewsGator newsreader for handling RSS feeds.
Yahoo Images
Yahoo Image Search Breaks a Billion Research Buzz (Oct 25) - Yahoo has a billion images now , and Google may still be at 880 million.
Yahoo Image Search has an Advanced Search with filters for size (large, medium, small, wallpaper), image type (photos or graphics), and color along with keywords (any, all, phrase) and domain. People with mobile phones can search it too. (Why would they need to?) The Altavista Image Search, which Yahoo owns, has a much better set of filters for size (many sizes), color (B&W vs color), source, and type.
Feedster Hacks
New blog from Steven M Cohen about Feedster Hacks . Feedster (feedster.net) is the blog search engine, and a feedster hack, according to Cohen, "can include a bookmarklet, an advanced search mechanism, or even a useful way of using Feedster to fit your RSS/weblog searching needs."
Google Desktop Tips
A Good Source For Google Desktop Tips Inside Google blog (Oct 28) Especially recommends My Google Desktop Search Tips and Tricks by Scott Kingery.
Firefox Rumour
Google to back Microsoft browser foe? "The Web is filling up with rumors about an alliance between search giant and browser maker Firefox." CNN (Oct 27) Here's a rumour -- "The Firefox browser is looking for allies in its quest to challenge Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer and Web users are buzzing about a potential link-up with search company Google."
Enterprise Search Is Different
Enterprise Search: A Different Animal By Susan Kuchinskas. Internet.com (OCt 27) Brief report about the vendors at the KM World & Intranets trade show. "Enterprise search is different from consumer Web search in two ways, he [Matthew Glotzbach, business product manager for Google Search Appliance], said: First, most information is not stored as Web pages on Web servers. Second, there's a different standard of relevance."
Search Engines and Blogs
Web Feeds, Blogs & Search Engines By Mike Rende, Guest Writer Searchday (Oct 28) -- Report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 2-5, 2004, on "how search engines are dealing with blogs and Web feed (RSS/Atom) content, and how providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic."
Of interest --""There are 4.1 million different blogs. That number is expected to grow to 10.3 million by the end of this year," said Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. "
October 30, 2004
New Domains
New Web domain names get preliminary nod By ANICK JESDANUN Associated Press via Globe and Mail (October 28) -- ICANN expects to authorize two new top-level domains - .post and .travel next year. Post has been requested by Switzerland for post offices. ICANN is also considering "eight other proposals including ".asia," ".jobs," and ".xxx." (xxx for adult).
October 29, 2004
Wikipedia Woes
Current Cites comments on an article in Red Herring about the Wiki Wars describing the difficulties in keeping the Wikipedia online encyclopedia free of bias and error - intentional error. Wikipedia may move to employing editors. Another dream and promise of the Web wrecked on the shoals of human perseverity. Current Cites - October 2004
PLoS Medicine
New medical journal made available online by Kata Kertesz, Associated Press (Oct 27) PUblic Library of Science has launched a new journal - PLoS Medicine - it is open access. There is no charge for reading the articles, but scientists will pay $1,500 to have findings peer reviewed and published.
"To bypass the need for subscriptions, the journal will charge scientists $1,500 per article to publish their findings. The articles will be peer-reviewed by other scientists, just as the more traditional medical and science journals are."
There is also PLoS Biology
What's Popular
Local Search and Online Shopping Among Leading Online Consumer Behaviors Results of new survey by BizRate.com and The Kelsey Group to be presented next week at Kelsey's Interactive Local Media 2004 conference. PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch (Oct 28) -- Survey of 3887 online respondents found
- 72% use general search engines 9 or more times a month, but only 35% are loyal to one search engine
- Internet mapping sites were number one "when indexed by familiarity, frequency of use, and loyalty"
- next in line for popularity: Yellow Pages, online classifieds, shopping search sites and entertainment information sites, online travel sites, local destination sites and vertical directories.
Commercialisation of Search
Online publishers rail against Google by Jemima Kiss, dot Journalism (Oct 27) Online publishers are not happy with Google especially and search firms in general. At a conference in the UK, Associated New Media managing director Andrew Hart was of the view that "internet search firms are 'parasites' that will eventually kill growth in the online publishing industry". They are worried that the big firms are influencing search results to promote their own sites and squeeze out the independents and smaller players. The Economist, no small publisher itself, had a delegate at the conference.
Google's * placeholder
Google has a one page cheat sheet of commands -- http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html It shows that the * can be used as a placeholder for a word at anytime, inside or outside a phrase. However, do so carefully.
three * ducks -- works alone to find three wooden, blind, plastic ducks
three * ducks row -- collapses completely - with three and ducks often separated by many words
"three * ducks" row -- this is a better construction
Throwing in an * does change the rankings but the words are not necessarily only one apart.
"cutting boards" wooden plastic 93,600 hits
"cutting boards" wooden * plastic 93,300 hits - slightly different order giving higher rankings to cases where wooden and plastic are somewhat apart.
"cutting boards" plastic * wooden 93,300 hits - plastic shows as the more important word.
It may be handy for parts of a company name, or other situations when you know you want words slightly apart.
great * desert australia has significantly different listings to great desert australia
October 28, 2004
Blog Primer
Advice to the Bloglorn By Lois C, Ambash. LLRX (Oct 26) Intro to blogs and RSS feeds for reading and for publishing.
October 27, 2004
Newspaper Index
Newspaperindex - best newspapers by country, from Afganistan to Zimbabwe. Created by Hans Henrik Lichtenberg, a journalist who needed this list for his own work. Available and English and three Scandinavian languages.
Yahoo, RSS and Media
Meeker on Digital World: Blogs, Yahoo Are Winners by John Battelle, SearchBlog (Oct 26) Summarizes some major points made by Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley in her Update on the Digital World. [pdf 21 pages]
Of interest:
" The Internet has become a leading source for news and information over the past decade, but we believe the emerging acceptance (by users and publishers) of Web content syndication services will drive even broader / deeper usage of the Internet as an increasingly relevant news and information medium"
"While Google’s search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information..."
"We believe syndication technology is one of the tools that through a virtuous cycle should propel Internet leaders such as Yahoo! further into the forefront of all media, albeit slowly and steadily."
Yahoo News Advanced Search
Search Tricks #2: News Search by Jacob Rosenberg at ysearchblog (Oct 26) Tips for doing advanced search at Yahoo News -- by location / source / category / language / news type. Also covers RSS features.
Mentioned in TVC ALert.
PCMAG Top 100
Top 101 Web Sites Fall 2004 in PC Magazine (Oct 2004) Always fun to check what's on PC Magazine's list for best tools. Categories include
- Search: Yahoo and Google of course but also About.com whose load of advertisements makes it a burden to use.
- Information: How Stuff Works is still going strong. Also lists ICRC humanitarian organization.
- Travel: Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz - where's Trip Advisor?
- News: BBC, CNN, NYT, and Wired. Really?
Lots more. Also see Sree Sreenivasan at Poynter Online for more comments and background -- 101 Useful Sites Tips from PC Magazine.
-
SNAP for Product Search
Snap.com Offers Multiple Ways To Search "New Web Site Most Useful For Complex Product Searches" Rick Ellis, Boston Channel (Oct 26) Snap.com lets you resort results according to community rankings. This brief article explains, "The company has also licensed a number of databases and crunches the information to infer what someone is looking for by comparing a query to previous searches conducted by other users. It also arranges results by tracking the way people use the links after they leave the site, using that behavior to try and determine how helpful the link was." This might be most useful on searches that many people run - such as those for products.
MSN Search - User Rankings?
New MSN Search to Have "Personalization Sliders"? Traffick.com (Oct 27) -- Andrew Goodman draws on John Battelle and Gary Price for this story that the new MSN Search might incorporate user rankings of search results. Users might be able to set the weighting factors. If this becomes the case it will be the first since Lycos many years ago.
Also see Is This the New Look of MSN Search?> Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 26)
Find.com
FIND.COM AND MARKETRESEARCH.COM IN STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP TO PROVIDE CONTENT TO SEARCH ENGINE Find/SVP (Oct 21)
Find.com, the business search engine (www.find.com), has partnered with MarketResearch.com Inc for online content related to market intelligence reports. Among the industries are Consumer Goods and Retailing, Business & Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Heavy Industry, Marketing, Medical Devices, and Technology & Media. Users will be able to view the titles, abstracts and table of contents for MarketResearch.com reports. Complete reports will be on a pay-per-document basis.
"Find.com was founded in June 2004 as a partnership of FIND/SVP Inc., Empire Media and TripleHop Technologies. Find.com provides a solution for business professionals in need of precise and reliable business-related information. The search engine allows access, on a free or pay-per-document basis, to research not generally available through other search engines, including Frost & Sullivan, Gallup, Datamonitor, NetContent, BNET/CNET, PricewaterhouseCoopers, BitPipe, InfoEdge, FIND/SVP, Choicepoint, Mintel, and IOMA. "
Internet Archive for Due Diligence
The Internet Archive and the Search for Integrity by Genie Tyburski. The Virtual Chase - published in The Cyberskeptic's Guide to Internet Research (APril 2004) Recommends using the Internet Archive in any case requiring due diligence. The Internet Archive holds some 30 billion web pages dating back to 1996.
October 26, 2004
News Alerts for Lawyers
News Alerts Keep You Informed Genie Tyburski. The Virtual Chase (Oct Short guide to news alert services for a law offices. Includes the for-fee Factiva, LexisNexis and Dialog, along with some newspapers, Yahoo, Google, RocketNews, and Nexcerpt for handling all the clippings and briefings.
Hoover's Online
Hoover's Online Launches in the UK and Canada EContent (Oct 26) "D&B Canada is now marketing Hoover's business intelligence about more than 2,300 public and private Canadian enterprises".
Copernic's Coveo
Copernic Finds a "Seam" in Enterprise Search Traffick.com (Oct 25) -- Copernic has spun off a new company - Coveo - to market the COpernic search to enterprises. Coveo has a desktop product -- "Coveo's desktop product is "designed to integrate with our enterprise search." This, of course, means an "interruption-free experience" in the process of scouring corporate intranets for documents."
Firefox goes for 10%
Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers By Ingrid Marson, CNet News (Oct 25) More people are switching to the Firefox and away from IE.
You're not as safe as you think
Security for Internet Users Deemed Weak TED BRIDIS, Associated Press via Silicon Valley (Oct 25) Internet users aren't as safe as they think from spyware, malware and viruses.
October 25, 2004
Google Desktop
Google Introduces Desktop Search Tool by Paula J. Hane. Newsbreaks (Oct 25) Bottom line -- "There’s no question that Google Desktop Search offers great improvements over using the current search functionality in Windows."
Local Search - Google v Yahoo
Local Search: Comprehensiveness or Precision? By Chris Schroeder. Media Post (Oct 19) -- Local search -- " "Google is more about comprehensiveness, and Yahoo! more about precision.""
Yahoo EMail
Yahoo! Adds to E-mail, RSS Assets ClickZ News (Oct 22) Yahoo bought Stata Labs, "developer of the searchable e-mail client/RSS reader Bloomba and the SAproxy Pro spam filter". Yahoo must have plans.
Google not doing portal
Google rules out becoming net portal by Richard Waters in San Francisco. FT.com (Oct 25) Google says no portal, no browser.
Firefox has more fans
FireFox is Looking Foxy by Cory Kleinschmidt, Traffick.com (Oct 24) Kleinschmidt finds the Firefox browser attractive enough to promise to try it and review it.
Yahoo and Adobe Blending
Yahoo, Adobe team up for new Web services May Wong, AP via Globe and Mail (Oct 25 2004) -- Yahoo and Adobe are going to put Web search features into Acrobat Reader software. I don't see the value of this. It's easy to have another window open to do a search, or to use a deskbar product to search from anywhere. But maybe they plan some more dramatic blending of features later.
Google Desktop and Security
Does Google Desktop Search Pose Risks? "The powerful search application may be too good at what it does, experts say." Tom Spring, PC World (October 19, 2004) -- more on the implications for security and privacy from Google's Desktop Search. Of interest -- ""This is basically a spying program," says Richard Smith, an independent privacy and security consultant. "Like a gun, it is extremely useful and potentially very dangerous.""
RSS Primer
One-stop way to read news, blogs online - RSS allows users to get free, Automatic feeds Verne Kopytoff, San Francisco Chronicle (Oct 25) - Another primer about using a RSS aggregator / newsreader to read news online. Of interest - "The future of RSS will move beyond text, according to many industry experts. Music, radio and video, already available in RSS feeds to a limited extent, will probably become more popular, they said."
October 22, 2004
Yahoo Local Search
Researchbuzz says - Yahoo Local Gets Way Enhanced (Oct 18) Local.yahoo.com has enhancements - can sort the results and get a 1 mile radius. When can we expect it in Canada?
Don't kill the search engine
Is Web Search Becoming Useless? by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (Oct 22) - hits nail on head in comments about an article on searching in PC Magazine. "If the results of a Web search are useless, it's more likely because the searcher hasn't given thought to where he will find what he seeks. If you use search engines to find answers instead of sources, you'll be disappointed, unless you are seeking basic facts or opinion."
Are news sites expanding or contracting?
Open Season: News Sites Add Outside Links, Free Content by Mark Glaser. Online Journalism Review (Oct 19) -- Good news for news junkies -- "Now sites such as the BBC and News.com are linking more outside their domains, and WSJ.com and NYTimes.com are opening up more free content in a nod to the "news conversation" online." Several news sites are either extending the availability of their content (New York Times and WSJ) or enriching their stories with more outside stories (BBC). The article didn't notice the changed policy at the Toronto Globe and Mail to put more articles behind the subscription barrier.
October 21, 2004
Obituaries and Records
Ancestry.com has extended its family history records with "more than 6 million pages from over 400 different newspapers across the US, U.K. and Canada dating back to the 1700's. " A subscription to the service also includes the new Obituary Collection with more than 2 million obituaries.
http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/periodicals/news/
Ancestry.com, itself, is a major center for genealogical research in the United States. Searching is free, access to records requires a subscription.
Mentioned in TVC Alert Oct 21
Newcomer search engines
Online Search Universe Is Expanding by Leslie Walker. Washington Post (Oct 21) [requires subscription] -- looks at some of the newcomers of the past couple of months:
- Clusty: a consumer version of Vivisimo (very consumer)
- Snap: incorporates user behaviour into the rankings through click stream analysis (a kind of popularity ranking) and lets users see results by a variety of sorts that are mainly popularity based. Popularity has been done before - remember Direct Hit?
- Copernic Desktop: Copernic offers a desktop search product that is receiving good reviews.
- Info.com - metasearch engine
- Blinkx: another desktop tool. Leslie Walker found it harder to use than Copernic.
October 20, 2004
Google Desktop Examined
Interesting entry about the new Google Desktop tool at the Seattle PI blog -- On Google Desktop Search by Brian Chin (Oct 19) - rounds up the buzz on the release, says the search isn't wonderfully accurate in finding emails, notes how the marketing is integrated.
Matthew Koll on Web Search
A Conversation with Matthew Koll by Gary Price, SearchDay (Oct 18) Matthew Koll, once CEO of Personal Library Software and now of Wondir, spoke to Gary Price about the state of the web search industry. Some comments:
+ Google is in the business of advertising and maybe 50% in information retrieval.
+ Searchers do need specialized tools but " knowing where to look is the first and biggest obstacle to overcome in searching."
+ Future - "voice access and task integration"
October 19, 2004
Dialog Live News
Streaming Live News from Dialog by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 18) " Dialog has begun a personalized news monitoring service, called Dialog Live News, which provides real-time, automated streaming of news reports from 2,300 sources."
List of Info Viz Tools
Searchenginewatch Blog has an entry about info visualization tools on the Web -- A Groxis Update (Oct 19) Most of these (all?) work only with IE 5 or IE 6.
Information Seeking Behaviour
Information Research Volume 10 No 1 October 2004 -- Papers presented at ISIC 2004: the 5th Information Seeking in Context Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 1-3 September, 2004
Has several articles on information seeking behaviour - notably:
" Enthusiastic, realistic and critical: discourses of Internet use in the context of everyday life information seeking"
"Information behaviour that keeps found things found"
" Information behaviour of migrant Hispanic farm workers and their families in the Pacific Northwest"
"Seeking information, seeking connections, seeking meaning: genealogists and family historians"
"'Whoever increases his knowledge merely increases his heartache.' Moral tensions in heart surgery patients' and their spouses' talk about information seeking"
Copernic Desktop WIns
COPERNIC DESKTOP SEARCH AWARDED CNET EDITOR’S CHOICE The Best Gets Better; Copernic Introduces Faster And Easier Version 1.1. Press Release (Oct 18) Describes improvements in Copernic Desktop Search 1.1. Of course it works exclusively with IE and Microsoft products.
HIghBeam adds advertising
HighBeam Research Adds Advertising Revenue, Reaches One Million Member Milestone Business Wire (Oct 18) HighBeam Research will be adding targeted advertising to its service that will include serving up ads on searches done through e-Library. Even those who are paid members will see these. And they will get them in email alerts. Will this increase subscriptions or decrease them?
Info.com is not new
New Metasearch Engine: Info.com Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 19)
New metasearch engine info.com claims to be better, faster, more relevant. But let's see --
+ shows related searches (same as those at Dogpile)
+ searches Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Altavista, Teoma, Fast etc -- hold on - no one has called Alltheweb Fast for a year or so. Also why have Yahoo as well as Altavista, Alltheweb, and Inktomi?
+ has a Refine your Search - the page is exactly the same as Dogpile's Advanced Search.
This isn't new, it's just a repackaging of the Infospace tools.
Google's Desktop and Security Issues
Google's new PC search tool poses risks by ANICK JESDANUN, AP via Globe and Mail (Oct 19) Google's new desktop search tool raises privacy concerns if installed on a public access computer. Of course, the issue is a general one - policies to prevent unauthorized installation of software installs and to clean out histories of use.
Doing reference at Google
Google, The Great Time Saver by Tara Calishain, b/ITe, SLA (Oct 2004) [pdf file] -- This is mainly a review of using shortcuts and other features at Google to get definitions, translations, US phone numbers, US addresses, and calculations. She mentions Google's local search for the US -- local.google.com. There is also a local search for Canada -- local.google.ca.
Browser Add-ons for researchers
Beef Up Your Browser by Cade Metz, PC Magazine (Oct 19) PC Magazine reviews several browser utilities for Web researchers who use Internet Explorer. These will help in searching for information, saving it, and sharing. Tools mentioned: Amplify (editor's choice), blinkx, enLighter Retriever (editor's choice), Onfolio (editor's choice), Pluck, p-zoom, webgrabbit, and PC Magazine's own Web Historian.
October 18, 2004
Google Desktop and competition
Google Envy Is Fomenting Search Wars By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times via Garden Times (Oct 17) Sees a burst of activity as the fight for search market moves to the desktop search utility. Article doesn't mention Copernic's tool for this. And it also perpetuates the rumour about a Google browser.
Amazon's best sellers
What's Selling, Where -- Amazon's Micro-Bestseller Lists by Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (Oct 17) Amazon will tell you what is selling where. Goodman finds shopping at Amazon a good deal more rewarding than going into a Chapters store in Canada.
October 17, 2004
Web Search Garage - Pandia Review
Web Search Garage - a comprehensive introduction to Internet searching Pandia (Oct 16) Pandia Search has added Tara Calishain' Web Search Garage to its list of recommended books - says that it is " probably the best book on web searching available today" - absolutely.
Stochasto for natural language search
The Answer Search natural language search engine " The Norwegian company Stochasto is getting ready to launch their natural language search engine, Answer Search, in English. " Pandia (Oct 15) - look promising but won't be available until Q1 2005.
MSNBC has RSS
MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops MSNBC.com Adds 'Really Simple Syndication' (RSS) News Feed. PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch (Oct 15) [registration required] MSNBC offers 16 news feeds plus alerts.
Meta description tag
The Meta Description Tag and Search Engines Jill Whalen. ISEDB.com (OCt 14) "The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns."
Author tested the use of meta description tags at Google, Yahoo, Teoma, MSN.
Google - will use a snippet from the meta description tag if the search term is used in the text and in the description tag.
Yahoo - does show the meta description tag on some keyword queries depending on occurrence of words in the text (exact rules are not clear). It will also search on the tap and display the record even if search term appears only in the description tag. And lastly, on a url search it shows the meta description tag if available.
Teoma looks at the meta description but does not necesssarily display.
UK historical directories
Historical directories go online University of Leicester "Amateur historians can now trawl through information dating back to 1750 as local directories from England and Wales go online." Good for genealogy and researching old houses. Go to http://www.historicaldirectories.org/ - be patient - the site is very busy.
October 15, 2004
Yahoo Domain Search Hack
New Yahoo Hack -- Searchroller for Domain Searches Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Oct 13) "Searchroller accepts a list of domains (or folders within domains, like http://www.google.com/adsense/) and rolls them into a bookmarklet that you can use to search that particular set of domains whenever you like."
October 14, 2004
Natural language search at H-Bot
H-Bot is an "automated historical fact finder" developed at Center for History and New Media. It responds to natural language questions. When did Scott go to Antarctica? When did Louis Riel die? (But it can't tell you what Louis Riel did.) Interesting.
Reviewed by Tara Calishain -- H-Bot Answers Historical Questions (Oct 12)
Trends in Business Information Industry
"Trends in business information, provision and use" By Pam Foster, Feature Article in Freepint (Oct 14, 2004) Reviews content in VIP over the summer to identify several trends in the business information industry. Comments on strategic relationships, mentions new products and services such as Find.com, blinkx, and Textonomy.
Google Desktop Search
Google Launches Desktop Search - Exclusive Review by Andy Beal, Search Engine Lowdown (Oct 14) - Andy Beal previews the new Google Desktop search. It's for Windows and Internet Explorer - indexes text, word, powerpoint, excel, IE history, AOL instant messenger (why not MSN?), and Outlook mail. Beal has links to other reviews.
Especially -- Google Desktop Search Launched by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay - Sulllivan loved the tool - "Anyone who uses Google will want to install it, if only because it's so easy to do and will likely improve their web searching experience."
October 13, 2004
MSN Entertainment
Microsoft increases entertainment focus AP via Globe Technology (OCt 13) Get ready for Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Google's Intentions
Google's Web 2 Demo and the UI Plunge by John Battelle, SearchBlog (Oct 12) Reports on Google's demos at the Web 2 conference for language translation (seemed powerful), named entities and clustering.
Named entitity extraction: "essentially identifying semantically important concepts and the meaning wrapped around them".
Also predicts that Google will follow Ask Jeeves, A9, and Yahoo in using search history and personal data to filter and rank search results.
Netscape still alive
Netscape: Bowed, but not broken by Paul Festa, CNet (Oct 13) AOL will be releasing a new version of Netscape browser and portal site in December of January. This is good news, but why does AOL persist with the IE browser? The Mozilla band of programmers who have created the Mozilla suite and the Firefox browser sprung from the old Netscape. Will AOL be able to reclaim users who switched to Firefox through a reenergized marketing program?
Too much clutter
Search Engines Need More Accuracy, Less Garbage By Naseem Javed
E-Commerce Times (Oct 13) We've gone too far. Search engines are dealing with billions of pages, going onto trillions. "Most of the information available online is replicated again and again, then twisted, corrupted and re-entered. When one search question retrieves one million answers, the system fails -- results have little or no value." Article was written from the perspective of business wanting their brand to be found.
Yahoo makeover
Yahoo! Aims to Get Personal by Rob Hof, Business Week (Oct 11) "Co-founder Jerry Yang says the site, facing powerful rivals, is stressing features customizable to suit users' individual needs"
"Yahoo will become not simply a place for people to go largely for information but a conduit for services to handle their increasingly digital lives."
October 12, 2004
Preservation of blogs
Blog Today, Gone Tomorrow? Preservation of Weblogs Richard Entlich - Cornell University, RLG DigiNews (Aug 15, 2004) - Importance of blogs and whether their content should be saved.
Net Snippets for researchers
Genie Tyburski recommends NetSnippets as a software tool for capturing, saving, organizing and sharing web research. Manage Your Research with NetSnippets (Oct 12) Standard version costs $79.95 and the Pro is #129.95 - but it captures a variety of formats and helps you create "professional reports". There is a Flash demo.
Yahoo Maps
Letting Maps Lead by Jonathan Dupe. Poynter Online (Oct 12) "Yahoo! Maps' function lets you find businesses near a specific address, and began phoning them." Used Microsoft's Streets & Trips software to zoom in on a location.
Fraud based Web sites
Growing Menace of Fake Sites Dupe Users By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News (Oct 11) -- " Fraud-based Web sites that purport to sell products and services but really only harvest credit card accounts and other personal information are on the upswing, an Internet content management vendor said Monday."
Yahoo's new page
A redesigned home page for Yahoo.com is on the way. See new page at http://www.yahoo.com/upgrade. Note how little space is given to the directory and how much more is given to advertisements and promoting Yahoo's "services". There will be 2 or 3 options for personalizing the page slightly.
Yahoo's new home page gets more simple By Leslie Walker, Washington Post via Oakland Tribune (Oct 11).
Microsoft Comparison Shopping for Windows Users
Microsoft enters comparison shopping market By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor, Tom's Hardware Guide (October 11, 2004)
Is this a scoop or what? Tom's Hardware Guide beat others to announcing Microsoft's new comparison shopper for Windows users -- WindowsmarketPlace.com - opening in your browser today (Tuesday). It says that "the (preview) site currently lists about 46,000 hardware and 87,500 software products". One thing - you'll know whether the products are compatible with Windows XP.
Dates on the Web
Problems With Searching By Date by Gary Price. Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 12) Dates shown for web pages in search engine results have been fraught with problems for years. Is this the date the page was spidered, or last updated? And if updated was that a significant update or just the copyright? While dates on Web pages are completely unreliable, those in the news databases are properly time stamped. The problem with news services like Google and Yahoo is that their archives are only for 30 days. Price looks at all the aspects.
Price refers to an article in First Monday -- Internet time and the reliability of search engines by Paul Wouters and others. They found that search engines are continuously reconstructing themselves - deleting pages, respidering, changing dates, not to mention destroying indexes as Yahoo did to Altavista - impair the value of the Web for social science research.
"The past in the Internet is constantly overwritten by search engines. This affects the numbers of results as well as the actual Web pages that the search engines retrieve. The present, from where the data is collected, affects search results considerably. Search engines not only lose information quantitatively, but they also erase the structure entailed in the relationships between words in the titles of the Web pages."
"In short, search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record or for research that aims to analyze the structure of information at a particular moment in history. Only those Web pages that contain the date of the publishing document in question (for example, in various Web archives and citation index databases), can be used for this purpose"
Researchers should use the more stable and controlled online databases from publishers - usually available through the library.
Blog Searches
Blog Search Engines Search Engine Journal (Oct 7) Has a list of "top blog search engines".
October 11, 2004
Open WorldCat Expanding
All of OCLC’s WorldCat Heading Toward the Open Web by Barbara Quint, Information Today (Oct 11) OCLC "has decided to open the entire collection of 53.3 million items connected to 928.6 million library holdings for “harvesting” by Google and Yahoo! Search." Apparently people are finding results at Google and Yahoo that direct them to a library for books. There were 3 million clicks from Yahoo and Google in September alone. The pilot project has included holdings from 12,000 libraries. The Open WorldCat content will be expanded to include the whole WorldCat collections.
Also see Gary Price and Steve Cohen for comments and recommendations - OCLC Opens Up the Complete WorldCat Database to Web Engines and Other Partners (Oct 11)
Google Print
Google Print Expands Access to Books with Digitization Offer to All Publishers by Barbara Quint, Information Today (Oct 11) Notes that Google has agreements with " Penguin, Wiley, Hyperion, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, Princeton, Scholastic, Springer, Houghton Mifflin, Thomson Delmar, Blackwell, Perseus, and others."
Searching for books is working now. Try -- books on shakespeare.
anacubis desktop
anacubis Desktop 3.0 Tackles Information Overload by Paula Hane, Information Today (Oct 11) "Using a visual interface, the product supports the complete information research and analysis workflow, including gathering from multiple internal and external sources, processing, managing, analyzing, and communicating. New features with this launch include a new wizard-driven interface, database importing, categorization, summarization, and image support." See demos at http://www.anacubis.com/
Google bombs
SEMPO: Can't Get No Respect by Andrew Goodman. Traffick (Oct 10) What comes up in the top 10 at Google for coke, bush, kerry, and sempo? SEMPO, incidentally, is parody site about search engine marketing.
Web 2.0 Conference
Farewell, Web 1.0! We Hardly Knew Ye "Web 1.0 was making the Net for people. Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers" By Steven Levy
Newsweek (Oct 18) Changes are expected for the Web - it may become even more interconnected. "In Web 2.0, news items, blog entries, financial results and images are no longer locked on virtual pages, but easily detachable." The leading example of this today is the flurry of RSS feeds lifting and moving content with abandon.
October 10, 2004
AOL Browser
AOL prepares its own browser By Jim Hu, CNET News.com (Oct 8) What's wrong with AOL? It owns Netscape and yet intends to release a stand-alone browser based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer? This article attempts to explain.
October 08, 2004
When Will Google Cluster?
Google Sets Sights on Clustering, Translation By Matt Hicks, EWeek (
October 7, 2004) - Finally, the improvement we've all been waiting for. Google previewed work in clustering entities and words at the Web 2.0 conference. Unfortunately a beta version is not available yet.
Blog search at IceRocket
IceRocket Adds Blog Search to New Features Search Engine Journal (Oct 7) IceRocket, a meta search engine, will search blogs from a database of RSS feeds from blogs only
Cell Phone lookup
Google will be introducing a short message system (Google SMS) to cell phone users in the United States for looking up information through text messages. What is Google SMS? Will be useful for addresses, prices, definitions.
Google Helps Detective
Google Used to Identify 1993 Victim AP via Las Vegas Sun (Oct 8) Article is short on details, but Detective Pat Ditter of the Washington State Patrol managed to get a lead on an unidentified accident victim of 11 years ago by scouring Google.
October 07, 2004
Browser Applications
Piggyback developers in a bind over IE By Paul Festa CNET News.com (October 7, 2004) - "... vendors of third-party browser applications that piggyback on the Microsoft browser are concerned that IE's widely noted stagnation may be proving as much a liability as an opportunity. The reason: Frustration with IE may be driving potential users to alternative browsers, especially the Mozilla Foundation's open source browser, Firefox."
Gigablast at 650 million pages
Gigablast, Inc. Search Engine Experiences Continued Rapid Growth PR Newswire (Oct 7)
Clush for clusters
Clush is a new engine that will dynamically cluster search results. From the About page, "Clush produces clustered search results from millions of WebPages giving the user dynamically categorized data that cannot be duplicated by static or human edited directories."
Clush is building its own database, now at millions of page, by spidering. It also has a paid-inclusion program.
Aim seems to be to lead the searcher through an ever more-detailed hierarchy of terms - where the hierarchy is dynamically generated at each selection. It can identify for a concept: things that have this concept in common, types of things in this concept, parts of, and relative to.
See this breakdown for trees.
This engine works best with one word or at most two. If you are interested in espaliering a fig tree, start with espalier. For espalier it offers a further breakdown of trellis, lattice, framework. I chose framework and ended up in the Microsoft.net Framework Community where I seriously doubt espaliering every comes up! However, in a separate box it does show that espalier has fruit trees in common. Clicking on fruit trees will find lots of nurseries.
Clush sees the technology being used for corporate or consumer applications. Likely Clush will perform better with a more defined domain. At the moment Vivisimo keeps the crown as the best clustering search engine.
However, while Clush is hopeless as a web search engine, it is very interesting as technology for extracting concepts on the fly from a body of documents.
Search Startups Target Clustering By Matt Hicks, eWEEK - Ziff Davis (October 4, 2004)
Clush Offers Option for Meaning-Based Search Tara Calishain (Oct 5) - gives it a more positive review. It reminds her of the old concept-based search of Oingo. She also found the relevancy of results "disappointing".
October 06, 2004
A9 and Privacy Concerns
Amazon.com's A9 Adventure, By Alan Chapell, Chapell & Associates, IMedia Connection (Wednesday, October 06, 2004) Ask why there hasn't been an uproar about A9's use of search history and purchases to personalize search. Chapell says they launched it well.
Google Print
Google Print Opens Widely To Publishers By Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (October 6, 2004)
Google has been collecting book titles and abstracts for a year and many wondered if it was taking on Amazon. It might not be so much book selling as living up to its mission to index the world's content. The current announcement is mainly to promote Google print to the publishers.
More information at http://print.google.com/
Also see Tara Calishain's comments -- Google Print, Google Print, Argh Argh Argh (Oct 6). Google should listen to her. The book collection of digitized print is no longer part of the main database and can not be easily searched. Instead, matching books will come up in own box. Also, she asks - why not start with current digital books?
I've tried a few queries at Google for "books about pets", money, health - all popular topics - no hits. Evidently not available in my area yet.
The old trick of site:print.google.com pets only finds hits from magazine records, which Google appears to have left in the main database.
Google is getting sloppy in its implementations and forgetting to think about the searcher first. And if Google annoys the ultimate customer, why would a publisher add its books to the Google collection when it could go with Amazon which already has a search solution?
Snap for searching
New Snap site thinks outside the search box By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (Oct 5) Snap.com helps users refine their query.
"It's also one of the first search engines to harness data on "user intentions," extrapolating meaning from words typed into a search box. It's done so by licensing data feeds from third-party Internet service providers, which have tracked, anonymously, what people do after they've typed in a specific search terms. It uses this special sauce, a data feed of more than a terabyte, to compute the relevancy of certain searches and resort results."
Can sort results by popularity or satisfaction from the Snap Network of users either as Web popularity or plain. The difference between the two is not clear. Can sort by domain also.
Can filter results by additional search terms while saving the original set.
Can filter on the popularity / satisfaction columns to see only those above or equal to a ranking.
Snap is using Looksmart and Gigablast for its databases but may be developing its own crawl.
See Searching's a Snap at TVC Alert.
Canada411 better
Canada411 finally has reverse lookup for phone numbers. Find-a-person lookup will also handle partial names.
"The new searches are the result of a partnership between YPG and W3 Data Inc., a provider of on-line directory assistance services and operator of the WhitePages.com Network. W3 Data Inc. will also be hosting and providing operational support for the "Find a Person" look-up."
Yellow Pages improves search Globe and Mail Update (Oct 5)
More on MyYahoo Search
Yahoo starts custom search "Service saves user's bookmarks in online space" By Michael Bazeley. Mercury News (Oct 5) - About Yahoo's MyYahoo Search in beta -- http://next.yahoo.com. Says that " the features of Personal Search will probably be merged into the MyYahoo service, which allows users to create personalized news and information pages." Reviews other developments and directions for personalization of web searching.
Blinkx Interview
Bambi Francisco at CBS Marketwatch interviewed Kathy Rittweger, co-founder of Blinkx. The interview is available in video.
Searching without keywords
"Kathy Rittweger, co-founder of Blinkx, explains the start-up's search technology that scours e-mails, hard drives and the Internet for relevant information without keywords."
Blinkx is desktop software that will search desktop and web for documents and multimedia files related to your current task. No need to use keywords. Blinkx watches what you read and will automatically do the gathering - when you request. Rittweger gives the example of receiving an email in which a friend asks about the Napa Valley in California and being able to quickly locate other documents and pictures on her computer as well as tourism sites from the web.
Interview was done just a couple of weeks prior to Blinkx launching version 2.0.
Also see Personalizing search - column by Francisco (Oct 5)
Insider Pages
Idealab chief stakes out new direction in search By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com (Oct 5) Bill Gross, the man who founded GoTo.com - later Overture, is CEO of Idealab and has another new idea. This one is to combine yellow pages with social networking. People will get together to recommend local shops and service. It's called Insider Pages. The Beta is up and works for Los Angeles.
October 05, 2004
Looking for Facts
The future of facts by Mark Ward, BBC News (Oct 4) Looks for search engines that will give answers. Mentions Ask Jeeves UK because of its smart search. Also 82ask - good for mobile phones. And does some advance advertising for Kozoru, still in development.
Web as world network
Next big thing: The Web as your servant By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY (Oct 1) -- Predicts that the Web will evolve into a huge network itself of various and varied applications - a "world network".
"The Web, though, is becoming the first piece of the bigger network as it meshes with new technologies that started from disparate corners of the industry — such as Wi-Fi wireless broadband connections, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and radio frequency identification tags (RFID)."
Hold onto seat belts if only half of what is imagined comes true.
Proximity search for Yahoo
Tara Calishain has created a Yahoo hack to search for words near each other. YNAPS -- Yahoo Non-API Proximity Search ResearchBuzz (Oct 5)
Preview of MSN Search
Everybody keeps waiting for a new MSN Search. A second preview version is now available at http://techpreview.search.msn.com/. Said to have 5 billion pages. Will show two results for a site - main and secondary. Use "see more results" for more. Has cached version. Does not show date or size.
MSN Search Preview Back Online by Gary Price. Search Engine Watch (Oct 4)
Personal Search
Personal search: New Web services remember what you're looking for By Jefferson Graham / USA TODAY (Oct 5) Short article about the developments in personal search at Ask Jeeves, A9, and Google. Missed the latest at MyYahoo by a day.
Geo-Google Threat
The Geo-Google Threat, 2004 Research and Markets (May 2004) -- abstract from a market research report that examines local paid advertising and the power of the text ad.
Buying keywords
News expands paid-search terms Commentary: It's searched, therefore it's worth money by Bambi Francisco. CBS Marketwatch [requires subscription] (Oct 5) -- Marketers have been bidding up keywords from the news, lawyers have been buying the word vioxx. "At last check, that keyword Vioxx is attracting swarms of lawyers and driving the word up to $11.88 on Yahoo's Overture network." Paid search, the pay-per-click type, accounts for 40% of online advertising now. Concludes -- "Indeed, news has and will increasingly ignite advertisements as more people use the Web to get news and information and as marketers take advantage of the real-time nature to capture the big spike in traffic news events create."
Dialog Live News
Dialog Launches Dialog Live News EContent (Oct 5) -- "Dialog Live News, a new personalized news monitoring service that offers automated streaming of real-time news reports"
RSS and Atom Feeds Wildly Popular
Should All Sites Syndicate? by Zachary Rodgers, Clickz News (October 4, 2004) Yahoo by introducing the RSS news reader to its MyYahoo has boosted online syndication. Will every site produce a feed? Is "the adoption of this technology ... outpacing the emergence of business models to support it."
MyYahoo Awesome
Registered and logged-in Yahoo users may try out a new personalized search service from Yahoo. Go to next.yahoo.com to participate in the beta test. You might also see the link to the new service at the bottom of the search results page or at the top of your MyYahoo page.
[Correction Oct 6 - Canadian Yahoo subscribers can use the MyYahoo Search. I said yesterday it was restricted to US subscribers.]
The new MyYahoo Search lets you save a result to My Web with or without a note or if needed, block a url. On the MyWeb page you can categorize the result into a folder that you have set up. Results can be sorted by title, date, url, and how you found it (ie the original query). Results can also be shared - presumably with others in your group. Lastly, you can search these saved results from MyWeb or the main search page - but the search is only on title and description although full page searching is promised for later.
You can add any page to your MyWeb page using Yahoo's bookmarklet - add this to the Links bar of IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Safari browsers.
Only a short time ago Yahoo! introduced a new version of MyYahoo. In addition to the usual Mail, Movies, Maps, Photos, Stocks and Sports, you can add RSS feeds of any type along with any web page and, if the site offers it, do so easily by clicking on a MyYahoo button. Yahoo offers a starter list of the best from the Web. Results on the MyWeb page can also be added to the MyYahoo page.
Build several pages, each targeted to an interest - entertainment (put Launch music on this page!), finance, technology, etc. Might want one just for news headlines and another for RSS feeds.
You can connect the MyWeb page from MyYahoo Search to the MyYahoo Front Page to watch for changes in the saved pages. However, MyYahoo Search is not well integrated to MyYahoo yet.
In a word, this is awesome. MyYahoo Canada subscribers can subscribe to RSS feeds and manage several pages, but the MyYahoo in Beta is not available.
My Yahoo! Search Beta Debuts By Pamela Parker , ClickZ News
(October 5, 2004 )
Yahoo Introduces Personal Search By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Oct 5) Concludes by saying "that's nice" but he'll continue "daily use of personal web managers like search engine independent, industrial strength Furl."
MyYahoo Search - information page at Yahoo.
October 04, 2004
Yahoo Local
Yahoo has launched an improved local search -- local.yahoo.com. It's very nice. It clusters results. For fence makers it shows Fences and Gates, Handy Person Services, Home and Garden - and several more. Changing the distance is a drop-down box. Results have description with web site link. Searchers are asked to rate the site. There is a separate link for viewing results on a map where there are more controls for zooming in. Some business information comes from InfoUSA.
Not available for Canada. The Yahoo.ca site uses yellow pages from Superpages.ca.
Yahoo Local is also reviewed in Yahoo Local Officially Launches in SearchDay (Oct 4) Notes that Yahoo Local is using two relevance ranking algorithms depending on whether the search was for a specific business or a category. Local search will replace Yellow Pages on the home page, though there will still be a link.
RedInfo mines discussion groups
www.redball.info: A Unique Search Engine Goes Online PRNewswire via Yahoo (Oct 1) Redball.info, based in Austria, intends to index newsgroups, mailing lists, newsletters and forums. There will be versions for German, English, French, and Italian. BUT - won't be ready until November or later.
Gurunet for Macs
Charles Moore Reviews The GuruNet Answer Engine And GuruNet Client for Mac OS X Beta 0.9.16 AppleLinks (Oct 1) The very popular GuruNet client for doing ready reference online is now available for Mac OS X. This article - after a long preamble that covers the history of web searching - describes the features of GuruNet as an answer engine very well. On the whole, he finds it a useful tool. However using the Mac OS client was not a smooth ride. People are advised to use the Web interface and wait for the production version of the client.
October 03, 2004
Blogdigger
Blogdigger has several tools for the RSS news feed fan" create a RSS feed for a search, create a group of RSS sources and receive them as one feed, get all posts that link to a url.
October 02, 2004
Executive editor chooses Firefox
Why I dumped Internet Explorer By Charles Cooper, CNet News (October 1, 2004) Charles Cooper, the executive editor of commentary at CNET News.com, has fallen in love with the Firefox browser.
Yahoo Mail the best
Hotmail Losing Steam Arik Hesseldahl, Forbes (Oct 1) Advises against using Hotmail and calls it a "sub-par product". Of Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo Mail, Hesseldahl prefers Yahoo!'s paid service. $20 buys 2 GB of storage, support for POP3 access, automatic forwarding of mail, and a search facility.
October 01, 2004
Chasing Travel Prices
Chasing The Travel-Search Rainbow By Erin Joyce, Internetnews.com (Sept 29) The Web is getting crowded with travel sites. Article mentions several travel sites that look for best prices including Yahoo's FareChase.
Findory for Personalized News
Good Things Come in Small Packages, or, Findory Gets Personal
by Gary Price, Searcher (Oct 2004) Profiles Glen Lindon and Findory News, a personalized news service he created.
Newsgator
NewsGator Announces Three Partnerships to Drive RSS Platform & Adoption EContent (Oct 1) "NewsGator customers can now synchronize their online subscription information with FeedDemon, they can enjoy a wider range of search content in their custom search feeds, and they will experience a tighter integration with weblog platforms."
Dealing with information overload
Information overload, retrieval strategies and Internet user empowerment By Christopher Carlson. E-prints in Library and Information Science ( ) -- Finds that "Initial user benefits from search engine technology have been critically degraded over time by the rapid increase of Internet pages. Traditional retrieval strategies therefore yield increasingly poor results due to a dramatic increase in ballast in the results. Search engine users thus increasingly experience information overload."
Mentioned at Sitelines.
Infoviz tools
Infoviz for Info Pros: Information Visualization Software Tools by Judith Gelertner, Searcher. October 2004 - in depth article on three software tools that present information visually - KartOO, Grokker, and anacubis. Refers to the tools as infoviz.
Northern Light Back
Northern Light Releases New Version of its Business Research Engine
Adds current news and Search Alerts and is now available to individual subscribers PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch (Sep 30) -- The new Northern Light Business Research Engine is at www.nlresearch.com . Content includes 20 million pages from 16,000 editorially selected sites, 1,400 trade journals, and current news from 70 sources. Individuals may subscribe at $50 / month for unlimited search, retrieval, and alerts.
Clusty cuts information overload
New Company Starts Up a Challenge to Google By JOHN MARKOFF. New York Times via CBS Marketwatch (Sept 30) -- Vivisimo hopes to make money from its new consumer metasearch engine named Clusty through advertising. Vivisimo's co-founder and chief executive, Raul Valdes-Perez says Clusty will help deal with information overload. Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington is quoted as saying ""The competition has shifted from crawling the Web and returning an answer quickly, "to adding value to the information that has been retrieved."