Internet News

Firefox Market Share

Firefox Market Share Gains Continue - By Enid Burns, ClickZ ( April 26, 2005 )

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates with an 83.7 percent share in April, down 1.78 percent in the three month time period. Firefox more than doubled its reach, hitting the number two spot with a 10.28 percent share of the market, up 6.05 percent from January's measurement of 4.23 percent. "

See chart for the much lower market share figures of the competitors Netscape, AOL, MSN, and Opera.

Google Doing Some RSS

It's not full scale yet, but Google is showing interest in delivering ads to RSS feeds and to making it easier for GMail users to receive RSS. See Google Turns Attention to RSS by Kevin Newcomb | April 28, 2005

""This is gonna be huge," said Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis on his blog. He noted that being able to make money from RSS feeds allows publishers to offer full-text version, instead of just headlines designed to make the reader click through to the site so ads can be shown."

Stuff I've Seen

Search Engine Watch Forums has a threaded discussion about the future of search and indexing as visualized by the Microsoft Research project, Stuff I've Seen (SIS). In particular, it points to a presentation by Susan Dumais delivered to the Infonortics search engine conference.

http://www.infonortics.com/searchengines/sh05/slides/dumais.pdf (April 2005)

Enhancing IE

Make Internet Explorer work for you - By Jason Parker, ZDNet -- three ways to turn Internet Explorer into a better browser.

In Defense of SEO

Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO By Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Apr 27) - a strong defense of the search engine optimizer as a key partner in web page design.

"How can search engines not be considered by designers? More people use search engines than Internet Explorer and Firefox combined, because EVERYONE uses search engines, regardless of their browser. If you haven't constructed your site with search engines in mind, they may not properly index and rank your pages. In other words, you built it -- but no one may come."

Yahoo News - New Version

Yahoo Changes News Site, Adds Features - Reuters via Yahoo News (Apr 27)

"The new version of Yahoo News aims for a "cleaner" and more organized delivery of headlines and news content, Yahoo said.

The redesigned site also includes Yahoo's YQ search technology that enables users to pull up search results related to key phrases or names in stories -- without leaving the page."

Blinkx 3.0

blinkx 3.0 Links Users to World's First Fully Integrated Search Tool - PR Newswire (APr 4)

"With blinkx 3.0 users can, for the first time, view results from the desktop, the Internet, television and the news in a single, combined list."

"Version 3.0 of the software also uses blinkx's Implicit Query (IQ) technology
to link users straight to relevant information from the application where they
are currently working. "

Pretrieve?

Hidden Cost of Free Public Records by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (Apr 27) -- about Pretrieve, a public records meta search service for the US. Recommends consulting with expert public-records searchers.

Overload

PC Users Drowning in Data, Microsoft Says - Ted Bridis, AP in Globe and Mail. (Apr 26)

"Computer storage technology is getting so cheap a person could record every conversation of a lifetime and decades of photographs, but experts must improve search systems so users can make sense of such mind-boggling amounts of information, Microsoft's top research executive said Tuesday."

MSN Clustering

MSN Experimenting With Search Results Clustering - in ResearchBuzz (Apr 27) -- Experiment with clustering is in the sandbox - http://wsm.directtaps.net/default.aspx .

MY Yahoo Search Expanded

Yahoo search tools get personal - BBC News (April 27) - "Yahoo has launched a test version of a series of personal search tools".

My Yahoo Search

+ save pages
+ add notes
+ publish in a blog
+ keep search history
+ use toolbar to save any page
+ use toolbar to search collection

Full review in -- Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Apr 27)

Wi Fi Hotspots

Spotting Hotspots By Jonathan Dube, Poynter Online (Apr 26)

"The rapid proliferation of wireless Internet connection locations around the world is a boon to journalists, who can now easily get online virtually anywhere to file quickly. Here are some sites to help you get connected when you're on the road."

URL Mistypes Dangerous

Scheme preys on people who mistype 'Google.com' by Matt Hines, ZDNet (Apr 27) -- don't type Googkle.com - you could end up with malicious programs on your computer.

"In an advisory, F-Secure strongly advises people not to go to Googkle.com. People who do so will see two pop-ups linked to Web sites that install the Trojan programs. One of the programs is a phishing-style Trojan that attempts to garner individuals' online banking information, while another drops phony antivirus alerts on the victim's desktop that attempt to lure people to other infected Web sites. "

FeedBeep Alerts

Get Notification of RSS Feed Updates With Feedbeep, ResearchBuzz (Apr 20) -- FeedBeep will alert you to changes in RSS feeds you follow - and do so by calling your SMS mobile phone. Service costs money. Web page has some examples of why you would want to do this -- shopping deals, weather, events - but seems to me this would contribute even more to a ragged and far from tranquil life. Still - there could be a need ...

More on Podcasting

Podcasting by Eliot Van Buskirk, MP3 Insider (April 22) -- good primer on podcasting - "Think of podcasts as blogs but with audio instead of text." Mentions some search tools and has information on how you can produce podcasts too.

Growing preference for online news

JupiterResearch Reveals Growing Preference for Online News at the Expense of TV and Newspapers, Business Wire in CBS MarketWatch (April 26)

"JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (JUPM), today reported that the number of online adults who prefer the Internet as their main source of news has grown over 35% in the last four years, at the expense of television and newspapers. Currently, over 26% of online adults prefer the Internet for national and international news, compared to 19% in 2001."

MSN Encarta

Encarta lets everyone be an editor - CNN (April 20) -- Encarta is calling on readers to suggest edits and additions to the Encarta editors who will do the final vetting. This is different from the popular Wikipedia where any registered user can make changes to entries.

""The truth of the matter is, we have 42,000 articles in Encarta and somewhere around 60 million words, so even if I had a staff of 1,000 editors we wouldn't be able to look at all of the content all the time," [Gary] Alt [Encarta's editorial director] said."

You can search Encarta from MSN Search now.

Google Search History

Check Yourself Out on Google in Wired (Apr 20) - suggests that people will be worried about privacy issues in Google's new My Search History service.

"But Li doubts Google's latest feature will have mass appeal. "I don't think this is going to be very important to the average person," Li said. "Most people are kind of paranoid, so they are going to be wondering, 'Why should I give all my information to Google?'""

Market Share Stats

NetRatings Search Popularity Stats For March 2005 & MSN's Share - by Danny Sulllivan, in SEW blog (Apr 22 ) -- MSN had a slight drop to 13.6% and Google a slight increase.

Refers to Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings for March 2005.

Search Landscape Panel

Viewing the Search Landscape - By Andrew Goodman, SearchDay (April 26) - examines variations in market share figures for search engines. Hitwise says Google has 55% of US market and Comscore suggests 36%. Article also touches on demographics of search engine use. Some information about local search and shopping search.

Personalized Search

Search Engines Roll Out New Personalization Options - by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 25) - good review of changes announced by Ask.com, Yahoo, and Google on personalized search.

"First, Ask Jeeves upgraded MyJeeves, its personal search system. New features include new ways to add data, support for images, and more robust information management capabilities. Then, Yahoo! launched a new beta version of its Yahoo! News that has a streamlined design with easier navigation, plus its “My Sources” personalization feature lets users add news from all over the Web to the front page of Yahoo! News via RSS syndication. Also, Google has just introduced My Search History, a new beta application that keeps track of a registered user’s Web searches and pages viewed from search results."

Looking for RSS feeds at Google

Find RSS Feeds in Yahoo and Google by Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Apr 20) - Tara works with syntax to find RSS feeds in Yahoo and Google and is perplexed by what she finds (or doesn't find) at Google. Interesting for techniques she uses.

Kayak for Travel

Travel Site Review: Kayak.com - by Patricia Robertson, Globe and Mail (Apr 20) -- Kayak.com does flights, hotels, and cars.

"While this isn't the most innovative player in on-line travel, it does offer a dizzying array of flights and hotel options through a well-crafted, easy-to-use search engine. Just watch out for pricing in U.S. dollars."

Opera 8

Opera Raises Curtain on New Browser Edition in EWeek (April 19, 2005) -- "The browser is available for free download from the Opera Web site in four languages: English, German, Dutch and Polish. Additional languages will follow. Also on Tuesday, Opera released a beta edition of Version 8 for the Macintosh computer."

This release promised additional security. See review at ZDNet for Opera8.

Opera is also a very good browser, but hasn't caught on fire in North America the way Firefox did.

Whois - Network Solutions

What is Whois? - Tracking who owns a Web site, By Sree Sreenivasan (Apr 21) - information on how to get information about the registration of a site. Recommends the Networks Solutions Enhanced Whois Directory.

Search History at Google

Google travels back in search time 'My Search History' offers view of past searches and results - Tom Sanders , vnunet.com 21 Apr 2005

"Google has added a 'My Search History' feature to its online search engine that allows users to view past searches. The technology also lets them search inside the results to quickly retrieve a page they visited in the past."

Learn more about this and sign up at Google - My Search History.

Full review by Chris Sherman, SearchDay - Google Personalizes the Web (Apr 20)

Of interest -- "As you build a search history, Google begins to cluster results from related queries together, making it easier to find conceptually similar results even if you can't recall the exact search terms you used. "We're running some interesting clustering and related algorithms to understand whether you've searched for topics like this in the past," said Mayer."

Also compares service to A9, Yahoo, Jeeves. Expect more from them soon too.

Short discussion that compares Google's search history to A9 in the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google's Books

Books scanned into virtual library , by Arlette Grouner, IOL (April 18) -- hype report on Google's digitization project - costs, copyright, and operation.

"Some books are already accessible through the Google search engine. If you type in "books about" before your regular search term on Google's main page, several book suggestions will be provided for the topic queried."

+ will be able to view +/- two pages
+ estimated to cost $7 / book
+ revenue will come from related follow-up pages. Half to go to the publisher.

Onfolio 2 - new features

Onfolio Announces General Availability of Onfolio 2.0 - eContent (April 19)

"Onfolio 2.0 is a PC solution built into the browser with integrated tools for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content, and publishing to email, weblogs, and Web sites. "

Levy on Information Overload

Knowing When to Log Off - Wired campuses may be causing 'information overload' - Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education (Aprill 22)

"Mr. Levy [David M Levy], a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, is one of many scholars trying to raise awareness of the negative impact of communication technologies on people's lives and work. They say the quality of research and teaching at colleges is at risk unless scholars develop strategies for better managing information, and for making time for extensive reading and contemplation."

In the spirit of Neil Postman's concern about data smog, this article has many warnings about information overload and examples of people turning off to take a break.

I Wondir

Wondir has been a search place for people to help each other with answers. It also did a form of metasearch. That has changed. Wondir has had a makeover and it is much more a Q&A community.

+ Categories for topical groupings of questions.
+ Alerts to learn when someone has answered your question.
+ Registration - myWOndir (of course)
+ Best of Wondir - to recognize the contributions of members.
+ Question Board - current questions - click on ( responses) to see answers.
+ Can rate answers

John Battelle writes that Wondir is handling 6-7,000 questions a day; up from 2-3,000 in the Fall.

"If [Matt] Koll can manage to get a really useful community working on creating base pairs of questions and answers, he'll have quite a content play on his hand - and that means all sorts of possible business models."

Wondir Launches Revamped Site Searchblog (Apr 18)

Infospace + MSN

MSN has signed an agreement with Infospace to provide search results to the Infospace family of meta-search engines.

"With the signing of this agreement, Infospace is the only metasearch provider to have direct distribution agreements with all four of the leading Web search algorithms -- MSN Search, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves (Teoma)."

Infospace Signs Search Distribution Agreement with MSN - "Infospace to feature MSN Search Results on private-label partner sites, the award-winning Dogpile.com search engine and other branded properties". (April 19) Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch

Using Google Syntax

Google Tutor shows how to use syntax at Google for inurl and intitle along with standard wording to find unprotected multimedia files. Voyeur Heaven: finding interesting video, sound and image files in unprotected directories (April 15)

Paid Search and Click Fraud

Gold Mine Found in Web Searches , by Lisa Baertlein, Reuters via Yahoo News (Apr 18) -- has some figures about paid listings.

+ "Research shows global Web search advertising revenue, which is big business for the two Internet giants, will be almost $8 billion in 2005 -- more than 20 times what it was four years ago."

+ "Global search advertising revenue, which was $369 million in 2001, is expected to hit $7.9 billion this year, according to research from Piper Jaffray & Co."

+ "An estimated 5 percent to 20 percent of clicks are believed to be fraudulent -- the result of people clicking on ads to drive up advertiser costs or to make a profit for Web site publishers who get a cut of revenue."

+ "According to Piper Jaffray, the cost to acquire a customer is about $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Data for television was not included."

Regarding click fraud, Andrew Goodman notes a scandal-mongering mentality in much of the press about click fraud, and presents his own view on working with the advertising programs of Google and Overture.

The Search Advertising Story and the Quest for Balance (Apr 17)

Searching while mobile

A Roundup of Local Mobile Search Tools , By Gary Price, SearchDay (April 18, 2005) - Google, MSN, Yahoo, Infospace, AOL, Maporama and a couple of smaller ones. Gives most space to Yahoo Mobile. All great if you are in the United States. Maporama is global.

Firefox Not a Panacea

Langa Letter: The Pros And Cons Of Firefox , by Fred Langra, Information Week (April 18)

Fred Langra closely examined the conventional view that the Firefox browser is more secure than the Internet Explorer and found it wanting. In fact, Firefox does have flaws and may have more weaknesses than IE from time to time. Open source software is no guarantee against bugs and security holes.

"All software is imperfect, and as more and more users come to employ any given piece of software, more flaws will come to light. At the same time, as more people come to use a given piece of software, that group will become an increasingly interesting target to miscreants, who will actively seek out the exploitable flaws."

Also quotes from a handful of emails from people for whom Firefox didn't work well as a browser.

So - as Langra says, "There are no magic cures, period."

Thanks to PB for this article.

Right on the heels of this comes the warning of Mozilla flaws could allow attacks, data access CNET News.com. Firefox has made the fix in Version 1.0.3

Stepforth for Search Engine News

StepForth Placement Inc produces a weekly newsletter on developments with search engines. It is intended for search engine marketers but will be of interest to Web searchers. Victoria BC firms BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works are involved in StepForth.

StepForth offers a weekly SEO newsletter, a blog, and articles - looks high quality - well written and indepth.

Social Bookmarking ReviewedSocial Bookmarking Tools (I)

Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review Tony Hammond and others, DLib Magazine (April 2005)

"This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. ... A number of such utilities are presented here, together with an emergent new class of tools that caters more to the academic communities and that stores not only user-supplied tags, but also structured citation metadata terms wherever it is possible to glean this information from service providers."

Also discusses "folksonomies" - popular tagging of documents. Views these as "supplemental means to organize information and order search results" and not a "eplacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.".

Maps current social bookmarking tools on a grid and provides a comparison table.

Using Metatags

Do You Still Need Meta Tags? By Paul J. Bruemmer, Pandia (April) - good tips on writing a web page and adding metatags. Covers title, description, keyword, and alt for image.

It's good for searchers to know about these metatags. Title is a key field to search. Description is sometimes given in the results. The one other "tag" that searchers should know about is the anchor text for links - sometimes useful for picking up more relevant sites. At Google this is inanchor or use the Advanced page to look for words in links.

Google Print vis a vis Libraries

The Infinite Library - By Wade Roush, MIT Technology Review (May 2005) -- About Google's project to digitize print collections at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.

"Google will give each participating library a copy of the books it has digitized while keeping another for itself. Initially, Google will use its copy to augment its existing Google Print program, which mixes relevant snippets from recently published books into the usual results returned by its Web search tool. A user who clicks on a Google Print result is presented with an image of the book page containing his or her keyword, along with links to the sites of retailers selling the print version of the book and keyword-related ads sold to the highest bidders through Google’s AdSense program."

But Google isn't the only agent, and it won't necessarily solve the copyright issues. There is also the work of Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive.

"Brewster Kahle, who is often described as an inspiring visionary and sometimes as an impractical idealist, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 under the motto “universal access to human knowledge.” Since then, the archive has preserved more than a petabyte’s worth of Web pages (a peta­byte is a million gigabytes), along with 60,000 digital texts, 21,000 live concert recordings, and 24,000 video files, from feature films to news broadcasts. It’s all free for the taking at www.archive.org, and as you might guess, Kahle argues that all digital library materials should be as freely and openly accessible as physical library materials are now."

Kahle identifies three ways digitization projects have gone - and will again. Corbis style - pay for images; Human Genome - private and public together; and Internet Archive - ALexa agreement that finds a compromise between commercial and non-commercial.

Where will digitization lead" "Mass digitization may eventually force a redefinition of fair use, some librari­ans believe. The more public-domain literature that appears on the Web through Google Print, the greater the likelihood that citi­zens will demand an equitable but low-cost way to view the much larger mass of copyrighted books. "

Print version of article.

Podcasting

From your lips to millions of ears via podcasting by Tessa Wegert, Globe and Mail (Apr 14)

A little of the background to podcasting -- "The concept of podcasting emerged in August of last year, when Adam Curry, a former MTV host turned entrepreneur, and David Winer, the inventor of RSS, launched a media aggregator called iPodder. Mr. Curry then started Daily Source Code, his podcast about Internet technology. Canadian Tod Maffin was among the first to follow suit."

"It's estimated that there are already more than 4,300 different podcasts around the world covering a variety of subjects and the number of listeners is also on the rise. "

There is potential for business too, and certainly for current broadcasters.

"In addition to the CBC, high-profile radio stations such as the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and Boston Public Radio (WGBH Boston) are already making some of their broadcasts available through podcasts. "

Canadian Women in Film

The site - Celebrating Women's Achievements - in Collections Canada has added a segment on Film with biographies of film producers, directors and editors, and one actress - Mary Pickford.

Fine Art Photography

Fine Art Photography on the Web, by Ken Rubino in LinkUp Digital (Apr 15) Has answers for:

" So, what are some true fine art photography Web sites where you may look, appreciate, and perhaps purchase pieces without fear of having them eventually fade?

And what different types of photography are there? Where might you browse and feel comfortable in the knowledge that the photographer is, in fact, a fine art photographer?"

Firefox Gains

Firefox Still Drawing Internet Masses - by Jay Wrolstad, T&P Tech News (Apr 14) -- Has some market share information: "OneStat.com show that Firefox has captured 8.45 percent of global usage, while Internet Explorer has dropped to below 90 percent with a usage share of 87.28 percent, down 1.62 percent since November." ... "Safari browser has moved up from 0.91 percent usage to 1.21 percent since November. Netscape continues to hold a usage share over 1 percent, and Opera stands at 1.09 percent."

We shouldn't forget Opera, also a very viable alternative to IE, as we can see in this letter to the editor at The Virtual Chase which questions if Firefox is better than Opera.

Growth of Personal Media

Big media ain't going anywhere - By Molly Wood, CNET.com (Apr 14) -- Personal media is surging - blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and the traditional media are taking up some of the same tools. New York Times bought About.com, CNET is starting its own podcasts. But personal media won't take over traditional, if for no other reason than people don't have the staying power of organizations. Many interesting bits in this article about the extent of personal media.

"People-powered information is surging, from blogs to podcasts to videocasts to open-source browsers with a million user-created plug-ins to open-access academic journals. "

"Meanwhile, a group called the Participatory Culture Foundation announced this week, a "new platform for Internet television and video." They're building a free, open-source desktop TV application wherein you subscribe to "channels" via RSS and own your own broadcasting by uploading video for free, whenever you want."

Also mentions the video GoogleZon -- "portrays the takeover of traditional media by "participatory journalism," consumer-edited information, and EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct". -- Fascinating.

HighBeam Research for Bloggers

HighBeam Reseach has a new suite of tools to help bloggers. Members of HighBeam Research will be able to add HighBeam articles to their blogs, websites, and email. Share Your Research Using HighBeam Blog Enhancer

Members will also be able to receive RSS feeds on searches and alerts they set up. HighBeam RSS.

See Highbeam Research Press Release (April 14)

Search Algorithms

Search Engine Algorithms & Research By Christine Churchill, SearchDay (April 14) -- a peek into the ways the algorithms work to rank results.

+ Ask Jeeves / Teoma: ""Lahiri confirmed that Ask Jeeves looks at the web as a graph and looks at the link relationships between them, attempting to map clusters of related information. By breaking down the web into different communities of information, Ask Jeeves can rely on the "knowledge" from authorities in each community to better understand a query and present more on-topic results to the searcher. If you have a smaller site, but one that is very relevant within your community, your site may rank higher than some larger sites that provide relevant information but are not part of the community."

+ Co-occurence: identify and use semantic associations between terms.

+ Future: "introduction of probabilistic latent semantic indexing and probabilistic hyper text induced topic search"

blinkx 3.0

blinkx 3.0 - Neil Rubenking, PC Magazine (Apr 12), rated Blinkx 3.0 at 4.5. Said it was good for finding related material and unique in its "indexing video and audio using speech recognition", but the Web search component has only 500 million pages (very small by today's standards), and "Sporadic problems with indexing".

Search Podcasts

Podcasting is getting more attention. These are audio broadcasts distributed through RSS that can be played on an iPod or other digital audio player (including your computer). TVEyes, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts, will be releasing PodScope as tool for searching podcasts.

TVEyes Announces Podscope® - The First Engine to Search Within a Podcast, Press Release (Apr 11)

This could very well be the next wave to take over the Internet, as blogging and RSS have been. More comments by Rita Vine in her entry - Search Engine for Podcasts

For background on podcasting see entry in Wikipedia.

Blog for Librarians

Blogs Without A Library - "blog about what libraries are doing with blogs and rss" - by Amanda Etches-Johnson, a Reference Librarian at Mills Memorial
Library, McMaster University in Ontario.

Virtual Canada

Built for Expo 2005 in Japan, Virtual Canada "connects seven Canadian museums, the Canada pavilion in Japan, and Canadian schools and public users in an international network of virtual landscapes and exploration of themes.

Virtual Canada now available, Globe and Mail (April 12)

Describes Virtual Canada as "An initiative of enormous scale in both the real and virtual realms, the project connects seven Canadian museums, the Canada pavilion in Japan, and Canadian schools and public users in an international network of virtual landscapes and exploration of themes."

Yahoo Labs

Yahoo focuses on research CNet.com (Apr 12) - Competition in the search labs at Google, Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo has hired Usama Fayyad from NASA to head up the Yahoo Research Labs. Of interest, Gary Flake who used to be principal scientist at Yahoo Research Labs has moved to Microsoft.

"Yahoo's lab will be developed into a center for innovation with scientists from all over the world, the company said. The lab will tackle scientific problems in search and information navigation, personalization and mobility, Yahoo said. It also will work on designing algorithms to support new technologies."

Yahoo Next is Yahoo's showcase for new tools.

Opinion Blog Aggregators

Human and automated aggregators help make sense of blogosphere by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 5) -- Names and rates blog aggregators that provide a weighted view of the blogs to find themes or patterns. Findory.com gets a very high grade for learning from what you read. There are several politically oriented blogs about blogs. Slate's Today's Blogs is a human-powered blog that picks up major chatter on the blogs.

RocketInfo Desktop

Rocketinfo Launches Rocket Desktop News Search Tool , Business Wire (April 12) -- RocketInfo has released a beta version of desktop news search tool for "always on" news.

"A key feature of the Rocket Desktop is the ability to access content from the dynamic and comprehensive Rocketinfo current news database. The database spans over 16,000 current news sources, including national and city newspapers, specialty publications, newswires, trade journals and interest- and industry-specific websites. These sources are constantly scanned to ensure that Rocket Desktop users can view up-to-the-minute news on any topic. Search results feature targeted contextual ads from Kanoodle."

Download is available from RocketNews. There is no information on system requirements but we can assume it is for Windows.

The application is described in the SEW Blog - Rocket News Releases New Version of Desktop News Search App

Google Print in Canada

Google Print has reached google.ca. Google has officially announced that print books will be among the results when indexed content matches the search terms. This works best if you use the term - books. For example, books romeo daillaire.

Click on the book title to view a page from the book with your search terms. For Genocide and Global Village, Google Print shows pg 77 and you can read from page 75 to 79.

There will also be information "about this book", the table of contents, the index, and the copyright page.

There is a search box to "search within the book". In the above example, we might want to look for mention of Kofi Annan or President Clinton.

Google does keep track of how often you do this and at some number will declare enough and not show the page as I discovered running this search multiple times on Google.com.

Lastly, there are links to online book stores that hold the book.

How does this compare to Amazon? Firstly, don't use Amazon.ca - it doesn't have Amazon's Search Inside The Book. You must use Amazon.com. The first result is Dallaire's own book, Shake Hands with the Devil, followed by another 138 books by other authors. The first 40 I checked showed excerpts and could be searched.

Google Print has a way to go to upset Amazon.com, but it is a start and will be a useful reminder to look beyond the Web.

Some information about Google Print at http://print.google.ca/googleprint/about.html

Yagoohoogle

Yagoohoogle shows results from Google and Yahoo in side-by-side frames. www.yagoohoogled.com. This is being run on a home computer and is not industry strength yet. Donate if you like it.

Inside Yahoo News

Inside Yahoo News: Aggregator brings RSS to the masses, by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 1) -- Glaser visited Yahoo News at their offices in Sunnyvale, Calif, and got a preview of the redesign of the service.

"According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo News is the second most trafficked News & Information site on the Web -- and top Current Events/Global News site -- with 20.8 million unique visitors in February 2005. Over the past two years, the site's traffic has hit peaks and valleys depending on news stories such as U.S. elections and the Southeast Asian tsunami. But generally, traffic has gone from 16-19 million uniques in 2003 to the low 20 millions in 2004, while time spent on the site has gone from the high 20 minutes to low 30s."

Yahoo News was an early adopter of RSS technology, and integrated RSS feeds into My Yahoo and to the mobile version. "Gatz says that Yahoo has more people using RSS than any other service, a number of users that's "in the low millions." He estimates there are 6 million RSS feeds around the Web."

Includes a list of the features to look for in the new Yahoo News, expected in a beta version in late April - tabbed and integrated.

Google Mobile - US and Canada

Google Unveils Mobile Local Search, Reuters via Yahoo News (Apr 12)

For the US and Canada - http://mobile.google.com/local - " Google Local for mobile will enable users to see 10 local search results. The service, which integrates the location of the businesses in search results on a map, also provides addresses, phone numbers and driving directions."

Mentions that Yahoo has a mobile search service too in the US - http://mobile.yahoo.com/. Canadians can get Yahoo mobile through Rogers.

Note: Google Mobile works better if you include a street number; eg 501 queen anne seattle wa. Canadian addresses are through Yellowpages.ca - and at the moment there is a parsing error.

Article in SearchDay -- Google Debuts Local Mobile (Apr 12)

"Although the maps look very similar to those presented with Google Maps and Google Local, you can't drag the mobile maps around the screen. You can change the orientation of the maps, however, using links to shift the map to the north, south, east or west, or to zoom in or out."

"To use the new Google local mobile search, your cell phone must have a browser that supports XHTML, and you must be a subscriber to a service plan that provides internet access. "

My Jeeves Enhanced

Ask Jeeves has added some features to its My Jeeves personal service. People with the Ask Jeeves toolbar for either IE or Firefox can add pages or images as they find them to their personal space. The personal space is easier to organize with hierarchical folders. Also it will be easier to share folders with others.

Good tutorial at http://sp.ask.com/docs/mj/1.1/tour_intro.html

Ask Jeeves Introduces New Features for MyJeeves Personal Search System, PR Newswire (April 11)

Become.com

Become.com Launches Shopping Search Engine by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Apr 11) - Become.com is a new shopping search engine that crawls 40 million web sites in the US.

"The result is a shopping search engine that provides lots of reviews, product details and other helpful information while you're in the research stage, as well as comparison shopping tools and direct links to merchants when you're ready to buy"

However, it is very unstructured and feels like a list of Google results.

Google's Q and A

Google Unveils New Q&A Service by Nicholas G. Tomaiuolo, Information Today Newsbreaks (Apr 11) - Talks with Peter Norvig, Google’s director of search quality about the new Q&A feature to provide answers to questions of fact (who is, what is etc). Some comparison to similarly intentioned services such as Answers.com, Brainboost, and Ask Jeeves.

"Regarding the service’s knowledgebase, Norvig said: “We are not trying to limit the source to [a] single encyclopedia. We are trying to say this is an experiment, and understating as much as we can of the evolving knowledge out on the Web so you’ll see answers from many different places and be able to get answers that you couldn’t find in just an encyclopedia.” Although Google Q&A will be especially adept at finding the kinds of things that appear in almanacs and other reference resources such as facts about countries and important dates, it does not appear to be limited to static information but also includes ephemeral topics such as popular culture."

Podcasting

Podcasting: A Made-to-Order Change for Listeners -- and Perhaps Stations, Too By Marc Fisher, Washington Post (April 10) - Podcasting is the next wave -- "A podcast is a radio show, created by anyone who owns a computer and a microphone, that can be downloaded onto listeners' computers or portable music players." More information about podcasting at www.ipodder.org.

Information Highways Conference 2005

Presentations from the Information Highways Conference 2005 held in Toronto April 6 and 7 are online at http://www.econtentinstitute.org/conference/program.asp. These are directed to econtent processes and systems for organizations: knowledge management, content management, imaging, taxonomies, electronic records, intranets, wireless and mobile.

Your Google Map

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map at engadget (Mar 8) - "This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. " Need a GPS device and digital camera - just to start.

Found by ResearchBuzz who will try it out. Make Your Own Google Maps Mashups

Book Search at Google Print

Getting a list of books at Google and then being able to look at the contents is quite problematic. (And doesn't work at all for Google.ca). Gary Price took a crack at comparing Google Print to Amazon's Search Inside the Book in Searching Books at Google; Comparing Coverage with Amazon's Search Inside the Book Amazon.com was better - which had been my experience too.

Price used the search term books. This is recommended, but sometimes just the title will find the book, as in King Lear.

Yahoo helps Wikipedia

Yahoo Donates Resources to Wikipedia By Matt Hicks, EWeek (April 7, 2005)

Wikipedia might have just got a boost in credibility thanks to Yahoo's no-strings-attached commitment to provide technical and financial backing. Yahoo will also be introducing search shortcuts to the content.

Jimmy Wales, President of Wikimedia Foundation, posted to the Yahoo Search Blog - Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia and Yahoo!. With Yahoo's help, Wikimedia is adding a datacentre in Asia.

Many interesting comments are attached to the Yahoo blog post in praise of Wikipedia and against it.

Gmail's 2 GB

As free storage expands, think outside mailbox, by Charles Bermant, Seattle Times (Apr 9) How would you ever use the 2 GB of space Gmail now offers? Answer: if you use "Web mail as an extension of your home hard drive, a place to park all of your data online". Mentions that Gmail is the "Ginsu knife of Web email services" -- "It includes a message notifier and the embedded Picasa photo-management program (although these features are Windows-only). And a rich formatting feature allows you to get fancy with typestyles, highlights and other textual stimulations."

Google Q and A

Google has added a Q and A feature to provide answers quickly to factual questions - the ready-reference kind of question concerning geography, people (who is), climate. If Google has a straight answer to your query it will show it at the top. For example, who is tommy douglas. Google seems to be building a catalog of web sites it considers reliable for particular purposes, not unlike the basic premise to the "intelligence" at Ask Jeeves.

It knows the population of Canada from the CIA Factbook, but it doesn't have a source for the population of Ottawa.

Sympatico MSN does have the answer obtained from Encarta. MSN has access to something like 1.5 million facts in Encarta, and for a time will likely outperform the new Google venture.

Yahoo uses its encyclopedia for facts, and Ask Jeeves has many "smart answers".

Gary Price gave them all a workout in Google Launches Q&A Service, Answers Directly on Results Pages, SEW Blog (Apr 7)

Also see
Google intros Q&A service "New offering, still in testing, is strong in geography, famous people and physical facts, company claims" By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (April 7)

Newsreader Loyalties

The Need for Feed(s), by John Gartner, Wired (April 7) - Several newspapers will offer their readers their own reader software for RSS feeds in an effort to keep users loyal.

"The Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post and British newspaper the Guardian will soon offer stand-alone newsreader software for reading stories on their own websites and those of their competitors."

They'll be competing with Yahoo --

"Yahoo will soon add newsreader capability to its news page, according to Neil Budde, director of Yahoo News. He said that later this month Yahoo would unveil a beta that enables users to integrate any RSS feed into their news page. "We recognize that adding RSS feeds is a way to expand traffic to the site," Budde said. Yahoo has also begun to add RSS feeds specific to current events, such as the death of the Pope, which integrate content from several publishers."

Video Search

Search Engines Sharpen Focus on Video, by Paul Eng, ABC News (April 7)

"Google announced that it will begin archiving digital video clips from users as part of its Web search service. The company also announced it would work with Current.tv, a TV network being developed by former Vice President Al Gore which will air original videos created by today's young and digital-savvy Net-generation. And in January, the search giant released a test version of Google Video, an online search engine that peruses the closed-captioned text of broadcasted TV shows to find relevant clips to Web queries."

Yahoo Video has had a head start. It "categorizes online clips based on the text that surrounds it".

RSS Feeds at Google

Why Google is Syndication Shy at Micro Persuasian (Apr 6) - Steve Rubel asks why does Google not offer web alert or news alert feeds while Yahoo and MSN do? Perhaps it's because such feeds don't have ads - yet.

View thru Google Maps

Google Sightseeing -- Blog of views of places obtained through the satellite shots available at Google Maps. There is one shot of the Olympic Stadium in Montreal.

Mentioned in ResearchBuzz, A Blog of Interesting Google Maps Pictures (Apr 8)

Firefox Praised

Two new reviews of Firefox:

Mary Ellen Bates -- April 2005: Why I Love Firefox . She says " I could spend all day describing what I love about Firefox, but I'll limit myself to the features that are most relevent to web searchers."

Me too. I wrote about Firefox too -- Firefox: The Searcher's Browser (April 3) -- "The new Firefox browser is not just a browser - it is a productivity tool. Hundreds of bloggers and journalists have written about it and millions of Web surfers have adopted it as their main browser. The people who write about web searching have embraced it."

Google's Changeable Titles

Seroundable.com noticed that Google is Showing Dynamic Titles. That means the title it shows for a page may vary with the search terms you use. The example given was rustybrick. Search for rustybrick alone and get the home page with that as the title. Search for rustybrick web - get another title, in fact the actual title of the page. The first title comes from the entry in the Google Directory for Rustybrick.

Shows that Google is using its directory for something. But what happens if you search for word in title -- intitle:rustybrick? You get neither version, although Rustybrick does show as a Sponsored link.

Semantic Web

The Evolution Of Web Search by David M. Ewalt, Forbes (Apr 6) -- Future of search is in the Semantic Web - tagging and identifying relationships.

"A more familiar example of tagging might be Froogle, Google's comparison shopping service. Retailers who want their Web sites to show up in Froogle searches have to update their product pages with hidden labels on things like price, name and manufacturer. Everyone uses the same tag for price, regardless of what they actually call it, so Google can easily collect product information from thousands of different stores, even if they're in different languages. "

Blogs and Consumer Buzz

Blogs, Boards, and Posts: Capturing Consumer Buzz Online - By Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Apr 7) - reports on a session from the Search Engine Strategies conference, February 28-March 3, 2005, about reaching consumers through blogs.

Interesting bit about what people will get back when searching for a company.

"... when prospects search for your company, the top 10 listings are likely to include:

* 3 listings from consumer posts to blogs, message boards, and opinion sites
* 2 listings from experts
* 2 listings from your own corporate site
* 1 listing from an online publication
* 2 listings from other sources"

Message - marketers should watch blogs.

Some information about

+ Bloglines, "the world's most popular free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content."
+ Blogpulse from Intelleseek, " real-time analysis of online buzz and consumer-generated media."
+ Micropersuasion Blog by Steve Rubel

More Desktop (Sigh)

Find it fast: eight apps that search your hard drive by Robert Vamosi, CNet (March 22, 2005 updated from October 11, 2004)

Reviews Blinkx, Copernic, Google, Hotbot, MSN, Lookout, X1, Yahoo. Has a comparison chart. Gave Copernic the top mark.

Windows desktop search tools By Adam Baratz in Ars Technica. (APril 4)

Says, "The central design problem in these programs isn't finding the best way to catalog your information, but finding out how to let you best traverse it." Reviews Google, Copernic, MSN, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. Article has many screenshots to help describe the tools. Good summary page - picked MSN Toolbar as the one to keep.

MSN Toolbar Suite beta .net (March 2005) - Describes the MSN Toolbar Suite and gives some tips on how to use it. Some comparison to Google

"So how does Microsoft’s effort compare to Google? It’s faster, and you can sort your search results in more ways; by title, author, date, size, type or folder. It doesn’t have the privacy worries that come with Google either, as it doesn’t index your search history. However, on the downside the Toolbar Suite does feel a little as if Microsoft has tried to cram too much into the toolbars, making things a little cluttered, and of course, the engine used for web searches is MSN, not Google – which may be an issue if you’re a Googler."

E-Government

A study from Accenture - Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations - places Canada at the top of a list of 22 countries for e-government service delivery.

Study looked at the e-government services and the experiences and perceptions of the customers. Generally the offerings were found to be well advanced, especially in Canada, but customer satisfaction with delivery less so.

Of interest: "The survey found that while most citizens prefer a number of different methods of communicating with governments, they continue to rely on more traditional, offline channels. Despite the relative Internet-savvy and familiarity with online government in some countries, the telephone continues to be the predominant means citizens use to communicate with government."

Research indicated that online delivery alone is not sufficient for good government. "This year's research shows that governments cannot afford to invest all of their effort and resources in developing the online channel alone to keep pace with citizen demands."

Canada again leads in e-government by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail

E-government still falling short - ITWeb in South Africa

Full report and video presentation is at Accenture - eGovernment Leadership—Realizing the Vision.

MSN IM as a billboard

New Version of MSN Messenger Released by Allison LiAprnn, AP via Yahoo News (April 6)

" The newest version of MSN Messenger instant messaging product, released late Wednesday, allows consumers to download free backgrounds, pictures and other content tied to specific ad campaigns. The hope is that users will then share those downloads with other consumers — providing another boost to advertisers, who pay Microsoft for the privilege."

Scrapbook for Firefox

Scrapbook is a hot new extension for Firefox. With Scrapbook you can save Web pages, in part or in full, and also include linked files. Then you can organize, search and edit the collection much as you would bookmarks.

Recommended by Thomas J Fitsgerald, New York Times, in Add-On Allows Firefox Browser Users to Maintain an Archive of Web Pages (Apr 7)

"The archived pages can be organized in folders, viewed offline and edited with tools that may be useful to researchers, like a yellow highlighter and an in-line commenter for adding notes to selected areas. The pages are saved in HTML format; they retain links and other qualities of Web pages."

Dictionaries

Fascinating and thorough reviews of two major online dictionaries at Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, April 2005 issue. They were the Farlex Free Dictionary and Webster's Online Dictionary, Rosetta Edition

The Free Dictionary website says it has "English, Medical, Legal, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one!"

Evaluating a Website

Quality assuring health information resources - By Carolyn Eager, Tips Article in Freepint (April 5) - - Presents "a list of the kind of issues you will need to consider when assessing health information websites. The list is
easily adaptable to suit other subject areas." Provides URLs on a few websites that discuss quality. Note that one of them is the set of guidelines used by the excellent BIOME.

Blinkx 3.0 (Beta)

Blinkx Integrated Search Tool Turns Three by Kirk L. Kroeker, NewsFactor, Yahoo News (Apr 5)

" In addition to integrated search functionality, Blinkx 3.0 introduces several other new features, including a new look, a built-in document preview feature that supports more than 200 file formats, and the capability of indexing local Lotus Notes content."

Go to http://www.blinkx.com/overview.php. Requires Windows 2000 or XP. There's a beta version for the Mac.

SearchEngineGuide

Jennifer Laycock, once of About.com, has her own site at Search Engine Guide. The Guide has sections with news about search engines, search engine marketing, topical directory to search engines, and a list of books and services.

Click Fraud

Google and Yahoo! accused of click fraud collusion By ElectricNews.Net (Apr 6) -- Lawsuit in the United States charging that Google and Yahoo have been colluding to overcharge for click throughs on pay-per-click ads.

"Led by an Arkansas company called Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, the plaintiffs want the lawsuit certified as a class action. They allege that the defendants, which include Google, Yahoo!, FindWhat, Ask Jeeves, America Online and Look Smart, improperly charged advertisers for incidents "click fraud"."

Advertisers pay for each click. Click fraud is the practice of clicking repeatedly on ads to run up the bill of a competitor or other disliked company. Search engines try to control it but do they control it enough?

Background Checks

More from Genie Tyburski on How to Conduct a Background Check (Part 2), The Virtual Chase (April) -- Describes the process and the tools one might use in investigating people who are dealing with a lot of money. There are hundreds of databases investigators in the US might use. Article closes with mention of the Web search engine -- "Lawyer X recommends these search tools [Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Gigablast] over other public Web search engines because they have unique databases. Descriptive terms useful in narrowing the results of a query include words that describe the person's profession, business affiliations, hobbies, interests, places of work or residence."

Copernic Desktop

Copernic updates Desktop Search, Globe and Mail Technology (APril 5) -- Announces Copernic Desktop Search version 1.5.

"The final release of CDS 1.5 features smarter CPU resource usage, improved Mozilla Thunderbird support, broader metadata indexing and support for Netscape 8. The key features introduced in the beta version of CDS 1.5 were Thunderbird and Eudora e-mail search, indexing of network drives, improved multimedia metadata indexing, usability improvements, and a new API for adding custom file indexers."

See http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search.

So why is Copernic Desktop 1.5 on my computer jammed at a particular email? Why did it take days to even get to that point? Why won't CDS shutdown normally when Windows 2000 does? Why is there no help line?

Whitepages.com

MSN Replaces InfoSpace With WhitePages.com by Shankar Gupta, Online Media Daily ( Apr 4, 2005 ) -- MSN.com switched from Infospace to Whitepages.com for phone and address listings. MSN.ca and AOL.ca were already using whitepages.

Presentations from CIL 2005

Presentations for several of the sessions at the Computers in Libraries Conference in March are available online at http://www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/

+ Tips for Keeping Up: Expert Panel with Gary Price and Genie Tyburski
+ Tech Forum 2005: Looking at dead and emerging technologies - several panelists
+ LISNews — Collaborative Blogging by Blake Carver
+ Search Engine Update - Chris Sherman
+ Specialty Engines - Raul Valdes-Perez on Vivisimo, Jefferey LaPlante on Xrefer
+ Graphical Data Visualization - Michael Sauers
+ A Dozen Search Engine “Shortcuts” by Ran Hock
+ Five Ways to Make Search Smarter - Chris Farnum from ProQuest.
+ Ten Hot News Sites - Ran Hock
+ Favelets & Bookmarklets Cybertour - Michael Sauers
+ Link Checking: A Better Way to Search the Web - Paul Barron

Search Engines for Kids

Playing with Kids' Search Engines by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (April 6) -- reviews filtering options at search engines and announces some new entries to Kids Search Engines.

Canadian Geographic Atlas Online

Free online atlas of Canada launched at CBC News (April 5) -- The Royal Canadian Geographical Society with the help of Government of Canada, TD Bank Financial Group and Microsoft Canada have put up an interactive atlas of Canada -- http://canadiangeographic.ca/atlas/. Explore by theme or region, do quizzes and games, or explore the maps. Warning: the maps are extermely slow to load. They do support searching for a place name and have a "zoom slider tool".

More information about the contributions of the sponsors in the Canada News Wire news release Putting Canada on the Online Map: Geography Leaders Launch First Interactive, Web-based Canadian Atlas (April 5)

" "The Internet and online research have become essential parts of today's
learning experience," said Beth Dye, Chair of the Canadian Council for
Geographic Education. "The Canadian Atlas Online will encourage students to
learn more about the country they live in and foster a greater understanding
of the geographical differences that exist in Canada from coast to coast.""

Bates for Directories

Search-engine savvy librarian shares some of her expertise By Pam Mellskog, The Daily Times-Call (April 4) - In this profile and interview, Mary Ellen Bates strongly endorses using directories and specialty search engines.

Tim Bray

A Conversation with Tim Bray in ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 1 - February 2005 -- "Searching for ways to tame the world’s vast stores of information".

Tim Bray, co-founder of Open Text, is director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems. In this interview he talks about his work with the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) project at Waterloo University, Open Text, use of SGML and development of XML and RDF.

Privacy in Search

What Search Sites Know About You by Joanna Glasner, Wired (Apr 5) -- Search engine track what people search. Most of the time you're anonymous to them, but privacy advocates are concerned about personal registration and tracking cookies. Article mentions Google (often critisized), Yahoo (personal registration), and MSN. Not a peep about A9 which probably collects more than any other search engine.

Google Satellite Maps

Get a satellite view of your neighbourhood through Google Maps. Google has added the high tech capabilities of Keyhole's technologies to its interactive map service. This is in test. It covers all major cities in the United States and Canada, and many smaller ones. Images may be anywhere from 2 to 3 months old to 2 to 3 years (reported in SearchDay).

To use it, search for a location. You'll see the flat map with Google's balloons. In the top right corner, there may be a link for Satellite. Click on it to get an aerial view of the area. Zoom in and out or move in all directions to see the area. For those worried about the privacy aspect, even on maximum zoom you can only faintly pick out the houses and get an idea of the terrain.

Once you have satellite working, your next search will also be in that mode. Click on Map to get back to the usual grid.

What will this mean for Mapquest, owned by Time Warner, or the extensive work done at A9 to provide photos of buildings in 10 major US cities as an aid in local search?

Google Feature Incorporates Satellite Maps by Michael Liedtke, AP via Yahoo News(Apr 5)

Google's reason? -- " Google believes most people will like the convenience of generating a satellite image with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The company envisions people using the service as a way to scout a hotel's proximity to the beach for a possible vacation or size up the neighborhood where an apartment is for rent."

Google Debuts Satellite Images By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (April 5, 2005) -- also mentions other satellite imagery projects.

Beautiful Semi! Steps to Rennie Park, shops, schools! (Apr 4) - Andrew Goodman says about Google Maps, "As with all things search, it promises to shine a bright light on things that were once the province of obsfuscators and smooth talkers. " He's right - cottagers will love it to show off their land. I can't find my cottage, but I can find the small town of Oliphant on the Bruce Peninsula.

Gale's Goliath

Thomson Gale Quietly Rolls Out New Business Service - by Paula J. Hane. Newsbreaks (April 5) -- Paula Hane found Goliath, a new service from Thomson, by following a lead from FindArticles which now points to several premium content services.

Goliath, (http://goliath.ecnext.com/), from Thomson Gale, has business and industry news, management articles, corporate information on over 450,000 public and private companies, and contact information. Access is by subscription but there is also pay-per-view.

Article reveals some of the intricate web of relationships in the business of premium content.

Film Blog

Love film? Ain't It Cool News, a blog by Harry Knowles, watches the news and does reviews. New York Times noticed him -- Anticoolnews.com is cool in blogsphere -- New York Times via Globe and Mail. (Apr 4)

Desktop Roundup

Search add-ons perform unevenly By ROB PEGORARO / The Washington Post via delawareonline.com (April 5) -- reviews the capabilities of six desktop search products: Ask Jeeves, Blinkx, Copernic, Google, MSN and Yahoo. Covers what they can find, how to use and what they show. Finds Google "the best of the bunch" - not exactly a strong endorsement, and says that MSN was easy to use and Yahoo too bloated.

Quibble - says Blinkx is the only one to do Eudora email. But Copernic Desktop 1.5 will too, in a fashion. Also mentions that some will do Web history but doesn't mention that Copernic, as an example, only indexes the title of the page in cache, not the content.

A well organized report - could help you decide to try Google or MSN, or encourage you to wait until Microsoft adds the search function to Windows.

Firefox extension for pop-ups

Firefox improves pop-up ad blocking - By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet (UK) (April 4, 2005) - Firefox has added a new extension called PopupsDie to block the pop-ups that are generated by flash and java. This is a beta patch - still in test.

Yahoo Entertainment

Yahoo raises eyebrows with Hollywood push, "Web portal moving into 'micropublishing' of user content" from AP via MSNBC (APril 3) -- Analysts see a shift at Yahoo to being a distributor of Internet programming. It is doing some webcasting, has behind-the-scenes information on shows, and it bought Flickr for online photo albums. It's too early to say if Yahoo is headed to becoming a full online producer, but it does seem to have a strong interest in entertainment

"Yahoo says it is in the earliest stages of developing its entertainment strategy and therefore declined to make an executive available to discuss it with The Associated Press. But the company has made it clear that one of Braun’s mandates is to find new ways for Yahoo’s music, games, news, sports, kids and other divisions to draw more visitors."

Internet Access for Canada's Remote Regions

Rural, remote high-speed Internet back on front burner - by Simon Tuck, Globe and Mail (April 4) -- Maybe Ottawa will take up providing high-speed Internet access to remote parts of Canada as part of its review of the telecommunications sectora and in an effort to improve lagging productivity.

"The apparent comeback of high-speed access -- or broadband -- for remote communities as an important issue follows more than three years in the political wilderness. Compared by proponents to the expansion of roads and rail lines in previous generations, high-speed Internet was first espoused as a federal priority about five years ago by former industry minister John Manley."

Also -- "If Ottawa decides to resume its commitment to high-speed services to remote communities, the primary question would then be how to do the job, industry officials said. Internet services can be delivered through telephone or cable lines, wireless technology, satellites, or some combination."

Pandia's Search Engine Detective

Pandia has a new tool for people wanting to check what has been said about search engines at all the main commentary sites. It's Search Engine Detective. The page also lists the search-engine oriented sites and blogs that Pandia considers the best.

Pay for News

Dow Jones Executive Foresees More Paid Web Sites - by Martha Graybow, Reuters (Mar 29) -- Gordon Crovitz, president of electronic publishing at Dow Jones, sees publishers charging for online access to articles published in print. It points to the Wall Street Journal Online version with 700,000 subscribers at $79 / year (or $39 if subscribe to the paper).

Dow Jones, itself, provides the free Marketwatch and, mercifully, has no plans to change that. "Crovitz said Marketwatch is expected to remain free because it is an Internet-only publication that does not compete with a print version of itself."

No mention of the Globe and Mail practice of restricted access to online content: making some articles available only to online subscribers at time of publication, and all others locked in for-fee archives after 7 days.

All4One Very Good

Metasearch engine All4One looks quite promising. It has 8 engines including Yahoo and its two offspring, Altavista and Alltheweb, Hotbot and Netscape presumably with Google content, and MSN and Wisenut - not a pay-per-click on the list. It presents a summary of results by engine immediately. There is a panel of "grouped results" where the topics seem to be determined from frequently used words on the pages. Results show the source search engine and you can select the engines you want to use. In all, has all the main criteria I look for in evaluating a metasearch engine. One major shortcoming though is it does not have a help page or an about page.

What To Use When

Phil Bradley has a revised guide to what search engine to use when. Many people have done up similar tips but this set is up-to-date and fairly thorough.

Finding information: search engines (Updated March 11, 2005)

Mentioned in Internet Resources Newsletter - April 2005

Metasearch Filters Out Noise?

Meta-search: More heads better than one? - By Raul Valdes-Perez, ZDNet News (Mar 31) -- Vivisimo CEO of Vivisimo, Raul Valdes-Perez, takes issue with the recommendation of librarians at the University of California Berkeley NOT to use meta-search engines. He points out that meta-searchers can help reduce noise, similar to the averaging of noisy signals done by electrical engineers to reveal the "noise-free signal".

1) "Web crawlers today are harmed by the noise of blog cross-linking, link-bombing or Google-bombing, and commercial efforts to skew PageRank scores".

2) "Since Web noise affects regular search engines in different ways, meta-search filters noise by averaging the votes of the underlying engines, revealing the consensus best results."

Worth considering.

Forbes' Best of the Web

Forbes' editors keep a list of the tools and sites they think are the most interesting and useful at http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/main.jhtml. They cover topics like Collecting, Education, Health, Management, Travel. Get leads here you wouldn't get elsewhere.

Future of Search

Search For Tomorrow - by Thomas Claburn, Information Week (Mar 28) -- "Google may lead in Web searches, but investment in emerging technologies will open up new ways of searching digital information. Part 3 in the series The Future Of Software"

This is the future: "Google may have the market lead looking for Web pages, but fast-growing business and government investment in emerging IT areas such as Internet phone calls, electronic medical records, and anti-terrorism technology is driving demand for new ways of searching digital information. The goal is to extract information from databases, Web pages, documents, or audio and video clips automatically; recognize the names of people, places, organizations, dates, and dollar amounts; and find the relationships among them. Mining sounds and images for meaning is also important as companies expand call centers and switch to Internet-based phone calls and as the government pours money into IT for intelligence and homeland security."

Google's Prefetch

Google enhances search for Firefox users -- Ingrid Marson, CNET News.com (Mar 31) -- Google is making use of a preloaded link feature supported by Firefox and Mozilla to preload the first result (the I'm feeling lucky one) into the browser cache. Not everyone is crazy about this idea. It could mean saving to your cache pages you don't want.

Google's Results Prefetching describes the feature and gives instructions for turning it off.

OA for Scholarly Information

Open Access or Differential Pricing for Journals: The Road Best Traveled? -- by David Stern, Online (Mar/Apr 2005) -- Finds serious problems with the concept of Open Access publishing model for journals.

" Open access journals do not provide a significant solution to current scholarly information distribution concerns. While OA publication may seem like a great idea at first, there are reasons why OA for journal articles is not the right approach to distributing scholarly information."

UW Research 101

Excellent online interactive tutorial to build research skills. Done by the University of Washington Libraries - Research 101.

Blingo Google

Blingo Officially Launches New Search Engine; Thousands Nationwide Have Won Prizes in Beta Period -- Business Wire, Mar 30.

Blingo is a new search engine powered by Google. Here's the zinger - it gives prizes. It has a friends, viral marketing thing too.

"Visitors to the Blingo website search for words or phrases, just like on other popular search engines, but at Blingo each search is also a chance to instantly win prizes. This month, Blingo prizes include Apple iPods, Amazon gift certificates, TiVo DVRs with a year subscription, Blockbuster subscriptions, or free movie tickets."

At the moment, only Web search. Images and News "coming soon".

Mamma Buying Copernic

Mamma.com Inc. Issues Update on Plan to Acquire Copernic Technologies Inc. - CCN Matthews via Investors.com (Mar 31) -- "Mamma.com Inc., (the "Company"), (MAMA) today stated that negotiations to acquire Copernic Technologies Inc. are ongoing and that the process of due diligence is nearing completion. "

These two companies both began in the Province Quebec and still have offices there.

Search Engine Watch Awards

5th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards - by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch (Mar 31)

There are some upsets in the list of awards this year from Search Engine Watch. The biggest is that Yahoo received the premier award of Outstanding Search Service. Mind, Google received 76% of the votes cast, while Yahoo received only 17%, but the SEW editors decided Yahoo had gone the extra mile to provide better search and that Google had become lax, especially in not maintaining Google Images.

Best Meta-Search went to the comparison searcher Jux2.com. It only searches three engines but they are Yahoo, Google, and Ask Jeeves. And Dogpile got second place based on votes. Neither would have been my pick. Clusty, from Vivisimo, got 14% of the votes, and Jux2 only 2%.

It's good that the editors are honest, but what's the point of getting people to vote if the selections are going to overturned?

Voters picked Google News as the best news search engine and Yahoo News as second place. (Guess Agence France Presse didn't weigh in.) There was an honourable mention to MSN Newsbot - some people must like it - maybe the US version. The Canadian MSN Newsbot is very thin.

Bloglines is the best blog/feed search engine - a new category in the awards. Feedster and Technorati are good too.

Best image search engine to Yahoo (deserved) and then to Google (maybe not deserved).

There doesn't seem to have been an overwhelming pick for best feature. Clusty's clustering got most mentions. Some liked the MSN Search Builder (gulp), Ask Jeeves binoculars (handy), look ahead at Surfwax and Google Suggest.

Specialty search brought attention to Librarians' Index on the Internet and to Google Scholar and Scirus, but mainly people liked the local search at Google and Yahoo.

Fascinating read that gives us pointers on engines to try and features to use. Thanks to Search Engine Watch for doing this annual review.

Yahoo! Canada Music

Yahoo! Music Canada Goes Live - Globe and Mail (March 31)

"Yahoo! Music, Canada provides music fans with a wide range of audio and video music and music-related editorial content free of charge to Yahoo! Canada registered users. Users can visit http://music.yahoo.ca to register or sign-in with their Yahoo! ID. From there music fans can begin to customize their music experience."

This works with Internet Explorer, not Firefox or other "netscape-based" browser. Also - turn off those popup blockers.

The main advantage of Canadians using this version rather than the US Yahoo Launchcast is that Yahoo! Canada subscribers might rate the music and videos differently. Can't imagine that there would be any difference in the music and video collections. However, the front pages for the US and Canada versions will target their audiences through different news, features, and advertisements.

More Musings About Ask Jeeves

Barry Diller's Search for Meaning... - By Dominic Basulto, Tech Central Station (Mar 31) -- Did Barry Diller have IAC/InterActiveCorp buy Ask Jeeves because he was looking for "search synergies"? Basulto says there must have been something much bigger on his mind, possibly related to media.

"If all goes according to plan, Diller's $1.85 billion bid for Ask Jeeves could transform industries like entertainment or travel, create new interactive opportunities for reaching users through search and, most importantly, create shareholder value for IAC investors."

Looksmart Verticals

LookSmart Starts 5 Vertical Engines - Christine Blank, DMNews.com (Mar 31) - Looksmart, long associated with its subject directory, is branching out to providing search engines to particular demographics.

"The San Francisco company's new search sites are: teenja.com, a "homework helper" site for teens; gradewinner.com for tweens; 24hourscholar.com for college students; parentsurf.com for all family matters; and gobelle.com, designed for moms on the go."

These are mini-portals where you can search articles from FindArticles.com, search the web (which will also pick up articles from FindArticles), or browse topics from the directory. Furl.net users can save pages to their personal account. Each of the services has an editor who will highlight content. Seems like a good idea.

Bilingual Search

Babelplex takes advantage of Google's multilingual content and translation capabilities to submit searches in two languages at once.

Enter an English language query and have Babelplex convert that to simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian. Portuguese or Spanish.
May also start with a French query and translate to English or German; or German to French or English. There are a few other combinations.

The latest at Babelplex is that you can plug the bilingual search into 24 national versions of the Google search engines including Google Argentina, Australia, België, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Deutschland, España, France, India, Italia, Luxemburg, México, New Zealand, Österreich, Portugal, Schweiz, Singapore, U.K., U.S.

For Canadians this means they can search Google Canada in English with translation to French or vice versa. Results display in two scrollable panels.

However, as far as I can see, you can't limit the search to "Pages from Canada".

It would also be helpful to know the second language well enough to vet the translation. However, on short phrases it's probably adequate. Worked for "climate change" pleistocene = pléistocène "de changement de climat"

Email for Business

Write better e-mail - By Deena Waisberg, ProfitGuide.com (March 2005) -- "PROFIT asked communications expert Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts, author of Strategic Business Letters and E-mail, to reveal five qualities of effective e-mail." - boils down to five S's.

+ Subject line - make it meaningful and stick to one topic
+ Simple formatting
+ Specific - conclude with a call to do something specific
+ Signature - it's your calling card
+ Spelling - along with grammar, vocabulary, and salutations

There's also an article about business email etiquette by Reid Goldsborough in LinkUp DIgital (March 15) -- Keeping E-Mail in Top Form. Goldsborough talked with several heavy email users, several of whom are writers. Advice was to avoid being too informal in salutations, check spelling, be careful in quoting message (prefers snippets first followed by your comments), and use a closing.

Gmail

Google Doubles E-Mail Space - AP via Yahoo News (April 1) -- says that Google is doubling space for Gmail users to 2 gigabytes. But GMail is still available to people by invitation.

"Just last week, Yahoo Inc. said it would offer 1 gigabyte of storage to users of its free service. When Google introduced Gmail, Yahoo was providing just 4 megabytes of storage. Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail now offers 250 megabytes, up from 2 megabytes at Gmail's launch. "

BlogPulse 2.0

BlogPulse, a service from Intelliseek for watching what is happening in the blogosphere, just got bigger. It follows 9.5 million blogs and has a 6-month archive. Graph occurrence of terms in weblogs using the BlogPulse trend tool.

Track Blogosphere Buzz with New and Improved BlogPulse 2.0 in SEW Blog (March 20)