Internet News

Is Amazon Smarter?

Amazon is smarter than Google by Marcel van Leeuwen, Yeald (May 30) - Argues that Amazon's personalization is superior to others and in particular Google's.

"Only a handful of companies have managed to create a successful personalization of their engagement with customers. Amazon personal recommendations and individual composition of the ecommerce site remain the classic example. "

"Because Amazon understands the meaning of its information universe and Google does not, Amazon can help users find what they really want."

Ask Jim Lanzone

5 Questions with Jim Lanzone, Senior VP of Search Properties, Ask Jeeves at Search Views (May 31) - Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves talked about

+ how he uses Bloglines for staying on top of news.
+ how Bloglines will take on MyYahoo - "We envision Bloglines as the homepage of the 21st century: 'the Universal Inbox'. With recent rollouts like Weather and Package Tracking, you see it beginning to move beyond news and blogs."
+ some of the 500 feeds he watches
+ Ask Jeeves talking with Mozilla
+ vertical search - says people tend not to select a tab to search - they want fewer options. Hence, AJ developed Web Answers.

London Guide

Navigating London By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (May 31) - Chris Sherman has created a wonderful guide to London, England with maps, planners, public transit.

Ask Jeeves Answers and Zoom

The two new features at Ask Jeeves, Web Answers and Zoom, do NOT show in Firefox but DO in Internet Explorer. For some time I thought that Ask.com had somehow not rolled out the new features to Canada. That wasn't it at all. They have built it with some IE dependent code.

Anyway - for more information about the two new features.

Ask Jeeves Hopes to Zoom Ahead of Competitors by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (May 31)

Who's Zoomin' Who? in Ask Jeeves Blog (May 26) Has screenshots and examples of Zoom.

We're Not Just For Questions Anymore, But Check This Out Ask Jeeves Blog - about the Web Answers. Recipe for the technology is given as, "Take one cup of linguistic processing, add two table-spoons of Teoma special sauce, throw in a search-friendly UI… and we got Web Answers fresh out of the oven. In the coming months, under our tender loving care, we hope to continue to expand its repertoire of knowledge."

Specialization for Commerce

New Search Stars - What's the trend in Web search? Newcomers and search giants cook up specialty services that get you information faster than ever- by Laurianne McLaughlin, PC World (May 31)

One more article saying that search engines are becoming more specialized. Examples given are not entirely new: Become.com for shopping; Answers.com for reference (previously was the less well known Gurunet ); Google Maps for - well maps and directions; MSN Near Me for local search in the US (all the search engines have local search); Yahoo Farechase for travel (which Yahoo bought).

Explains this move by the majors as -- "For search companies, specialization helps sell more advertising and pump up profits. Search services benefit when they can convince an advertiser that the right consumer is reading an ad at the right time--say, while shopping for an MP3 player or planning a vacation."

Phishing for email addresses

Phishers get personal by Joris Evers, CNet news (May 26) - Scammers and phishers have figured out how to confirm email addresses at web sites that use the address for login. Phishing is practice of sending fraudulent emails to encourage the receiver to divulge a bank account or other sensitive information.

"In the technique described in the report, spammers and phishers automatically run thousands of e-mail addresses through Web site registration and password-reminder tools. Because many online businesses return a specific message when an e-mail address is registered with the site, attackers can find out whether that address represents a valid customer."

Some services - eBay is one - no longer use email addresses. There are ways to design the login to a site that protects users. Article has other points about how profilling works and how to foil the phishers.

Yahoo MindSet

Pandia reports in Searchworld that Yahoo is testing new search engine technology that will help to differentiate between searches that are for products versus those for research. Engine is called MindSet. It classifies the first 100 results into commercial or non-commercial (informational). You can adjust the sort by moving a slider.

FAQ explains that the Mindset Demo is "an example of machine learning applied to the problem of text classification. Machine learning and text classification are two different fields of technical research that found common cause about ten years ago with the emergence of the Web."

Andrew Goodman comments on the implications of this for search-engine marketing in Yahoo's Slider Makes Commercial vs. Informational Dichotomy Overt, Traffick (May 28)

He applauds the value for users to work out personal algorithms and points out that it will help to thwart search engine spammers and will complicate the work of search engine optimizers.

"Yahoo's Mindset initiative is a stunning and important contribution to a potentially exciting user experience for searchers. Top marks to Yahoo. We'll be watching for further development by all the top engines."

Netscape 8.0 Clashes with IE

Microsoft advises IE users to uninstall Netscape 8 in ZDNet UK (May 27) - Poor Netscape -- "Microsoft has alerted consumers that Netscape's latest browser appears to break the XML rendering capabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer".

Be A Brilliant Shopper

New comparison shopping engine for the US - Brilliant Shopper - - site is "optimized" for Internet Explorer. Has gift ideas, related products, product reviews (tho hard to find and not necessarily in depth), directory to services that includes Travel. Some results are from merchants and come with prices. Other results come from the Web and may have some information value. Can also click into individual store sites such as Sears or Target. Combination is interesting, but not clear yet if it's effective.

Reviewed by Chris Sherman - A New Shopping Search Player (Apr 25) - says its an aggregator of shopping information. He's "willing to give the company a break, and watch the service as it evolves".

How to do Blogs

Blogs Got Content! [pdf] by Sabrina Pacifici, LLRX (April 24) Excellent presentation about weblogs - general introduction to the topic, how to find them, how to use them, how to start one. Main point - these are knowledge management tools. Has examples. Covers RSS too.

Tour Specialty Search

Gumshoe Librarian 2 - More Sites and Services From Around the Corner and Around the World [ppt] by Barbara Fullerton and Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX (April 2005) - "... virtual journey around the web to view a roster of reliable resources on finding people, corporate data, court rules, forms and dockets, open source journal content, international materials, government documents, health related publications, domain names, fact finders, security related content, and much more."

Public Health Tutorial

New Public Health Information and Data Tutorial Released - National Library of Medicine -- "The National Library of Medicine, in collaboration with the University of Michigan Public Health Library & Informatics Division and Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce, announces the release of the Public Health Information and Data Tutorial. This online tutorial, at http://phpartners.org/tutorial/, is a new tool designed to help the public health workforce effectively locate and use health information."

Firefox Glossary

A Firefox Glossary by Brian King, Firefox Hacks contributor, and coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla, O'Reilly - glossary to terms that Firefox users may find handy. Some of them are tips and will points to hacks from the new book, Firefox Hacks.

Making More with Google Maps

Cool uses of Google Maps in Cyberjournalist (May 19)

Searching US Government

The Government Domain - New Tools For Government Research - By Peggy Garvin, LLRX.com (May 21)

"This column covers two more sites entering the world of search: Elegus.com and Clusty’s Gov+. At the end of the column, I look at a few developments that go beyond search: FirstGov’s RSS directory and the human-powered Government Information Online project."

Amazon's SIPs

Lorcan Dempsey did some exploration of Amazon's display of Statistically Improbable Phrases (distinctive patterns of words in a book) in Amazon: making data work, Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog (May 7) - Finds that the SIPs seem to capture the main arguments or concepts (though with omissions) and do link to an interesting range of other titles. Concludes - "They are making data work hard to good effect."

Amazon describes Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs" as "the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book." (Amazon Help) You can click on a SIP to find other books with that phrase.

The Personalization Trend

From the Stepforth SEO blog some insight into the moves to personalization from Google and Yahoo - Personalize Me - Yahoo and Google Getting to Know You (Apr 27) - following Google's My Search History and Yahoo's My Web.

"Regardless of how consumers personally feel about the concepts of data mining and information personalization, it is now more of a modus operandi than it is a trend in marketing. The major search engines are adopting this method of operation with both Google and Yahoo announcing personalized search features in the past two weeks and MSN presenting information on one they are working on."

Personalization is making more targeted advertising possible from search marketers and advertisers. While there are advantages there, the main motivation could be to anticipate MSN.

"Both Google and Yahoo are responding to a larger long-term threat posed by MSN's long-pending release of their all-encompassing Longhorn operating system."

Google Print Search

Google has finally put up an entry way for searching its print collection at print.google.com.

At the moment it is keyword search and there is no Advanced Search. You can use intitle: for word in a title. To find a specific book, you'll need the title and likely the author's name.

Display has improved some and is certainly better than the limit of three titles when searching through google.com.

The help page explains that "Google Print aims to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish" and that you can proceed to buy the book or "find in a library". Google will be monitoring page views in order to control use. Some pages will be viewable only if you are logged into your Google account. Google will connect the account name with pages viewed but says in the privacy policy that it will not disclose the information to other people or non-afflicated companies.

See also New Interface Available: Search Only Material in the Google Print Database by Gary Price, SEW (May 26) - Price has some suggestions for Google.

Kayak through About.com

About.com and Kayak.com Announce Multiyear Travel Search Agreement - About.com Visitors to Benefit From Kayak.com's Comprehensive Travel Inventory - PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch [registration] (May 26)

"Under the agreement, Kayak.com will provide easy access to its innovative travel search engine to visitors to the About.com Travel and Cities and Towns channels. More than 22 million consumers visit About.com each month to access 23 content channels"

Kayak.com is a comparison travel shopping site "created by co-founders of Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity".

About.com has 475 guides to topics across 23 channels. Information is geared to consumer interests.

No evidence of the agreement at About.com at the moment but presumably it will become easier to search for flights and accommodation directly from an About.com travel guide.

A9 and GoFish

GoFish Technologies Multimedia Search Results Now Available on A9.com - Users Can Now Search and Link to GoFish Multimedia Content Directly From A9.com - PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch [registration] (May 26)

"A9.com users can add GoFish to their set of content sources to search by selecting "over 100 more" from the drop-down menu titled "More Choices" on the A9.com homepage and choosing "GoFish Digital Media Search" from the list of options. These users can then receive search results from GoFish and link to a continuously growing index of over 30 million commercially available digital media downloads including music, movies, music videos, ring tones, mobile games, and PC games."

Guide to Medical Literature on the Internet

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet -- 2005 Update By Gloria Miccioli, LLRX.com (May 15) - Excellent guide to medical literature starting with Medline, "National Library of Medicine's electronic index that provides bibliographic references to some 4800 American and foreign biomedical journals. " through PubMed and NLM Gateway. Article also reviews commercial web sites, libraries and non-profit organizations, journals and textbooks, and 4 medical search engines. There is also one weblog mentioned - it aggregates medical blogs (or medblogs) - Medical News Feeds.

Natural Language vs Structured Search

ANALYSIS: The way we navigate data may be changing by David Mort in Research Information (Mar / April 2005)

For many years most trained information professionals preferred a "structured searching model" using controlled vocabularly and boolean constructions. New studies done by IRN Research start to show a shift.

"According to the latest research, 60 per cent of librarians and information specialists still opt for some form of structured search or Boolean search as their preferred search model but a relatively high percentage - 51 per cent - also accept that natural language searching could play a role in many searches. And, this time, almost a quarter of those interviewed - 23 per cent - highlighted natural language searching as their preferred searching choice."

Of course, end users are overwhelmingly in favour of natural language searching, and may turn to structured searches if natural language fails.

Article lists the perceived weaknesses and strengths of natural language searching; basically natural language may bring up irrelevant results, but when there is new terminology involved, natural language may be the only way.

Metadata and OAIster

Search Tools: Looking for Pearls by Katerina Hagerdorn for Research Information (Mar / Apr 2005)

"It can be hard to find all the relevant material online when there is so much available. The OAIster project of the University of Michigan in the USA provides a solution by harvesting the information that is hidden in over 400 institutions around the world. Katerina Hagerdorn, metadata harvesting librarian for the project, describes what this means "

Google's Business Search

Heart Of The Search By Thomas Claburn and Tony Kontzer, Information Week via Internet Week (May 23) - about Google's products for use in businesses.

"The latest addition came last week: Google Desktop Search for Enterprise, software that sits on PCs and comes with security, configuration, and deployment controls that IT administrators can centrally manage. In addition to searching documents and other files on a computer, it can comb through IBM Lotus Notes databases and messages in Microsoft E-mail clients. If linked with a Google appliance, it can simplify search by offering a single interface to do queries of a PC, intranets, and the Web."

More is expected, especially -- "Sue Feldman, VP of content technologies at research firm IDC, expects Google eventually to offer the ability to categorize information, browse files, and hard-wire certain documents to be returned for specific queries."

Yahoo Web Mail and Photos

Yahoo pictures easier photo sharing by Stephanie Olsen, CNet (May 25)

" Yahoo has launched a beta of improvements to its free e-mail service that are designed to let subscribers more easily send and share digital photos, the company said Thursday."

Also - Yahoo Unveils PhotoMail by Libe Goad, PC Magazine.

"Once the feature is fully installed, users will be able to again click the Insert Photos button and a pop-up window will allow the user to search for photos and attach them to the e-mail. When the pictures are attached, they will appear as lower-resolution thumbnails in the body of the e-mail. "

And it's free.

Other announcements: "Yahoo also announced several other changes to its e-mail system. Now, users can add customizable news headlines to their Yahoo Mail Welcome Page. All content will be pulled from Yahoo News and will include the top five headlines from one of the following news categories: Top Stories (the default), World, Sports, Tech, Entertainment or Business."

Ask Jeeves Smarter

Ask Jeeves is returning to its answers roots. It can produce instant answers to longest river, highest mountain, population of canada, and other such questions. These it calls Web Answers. It picks these up from web pages where there are close matches and will have links to the source pages.

It has improved its Related Topics too by employing Teoma's clustering technology to suggest refinements to Zoom - to narrow a search or expand search or to see related names. Ask Jeeves gives beatles, prozac, and Raleigh as three examples.

Zoom isn't showing in Canada yet but the Related Topics is much improved. Enter Ottawa to get one set of suggestions ranging from Ottawa Canada to Ottawa Indians; enter ottawa canada to get topics pertaining to the city. There is some similiarity between the topics at Ask.com and the refinements at Teoma.

Of course there is still the Smart Search for shortcuts to weather, movies, definitions etc.

Ask Jeeves describes these changes at Ask Jeeves Introduces Zoom and Web Answers (May 26)

Ask Jeeves Serves Up New Features in SearchDay (May 26) - More information on Zoom and Web Answers. Also rumour that Ask Jeeves might change its name (after paying millions of dollars to own it!)

Ask Jeeves Expands Related Searches, Seeks Answers by Matt Hicks, EWeek (May 25)

Ask Jeeves revving up search engine by Michael Liedtke, AP via The Desert Sun (May 26)

Of interest: "Through March, Google held a 36.4 percent share of the U.S. search engine market compared to 5.5 percent for Ask Jeeves, according to the research firm comScore Media Metrix. Yahoo Inc. (30.6 percent market share), Microsoft Corp.'s MSN (16.5 percent) and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL (8.9 percent) also outrank Ask Jeeves, according to Media Metrix."

Bittorrent Closed

Feds shut down BitTorrent hub by John Borland, CNet (May 25)

"Federal agents shut down a popular Web site Wednesday that had distributed copyrighted music and movies, including versions of the latest "Star Wars" movie."

Elite Torrent was the hub that was closed for copyright infringement.

Antiphishing protection Firefox

Antiphishing toolbar for Firefox released - CNet (May 25)

"The Netcraft Toolbar blocks phishing Web sites that have been reported by other users. A version of the plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been available since December of last year. More than 7,000 phishing sites have been detected and blocked since then, Netcraft, which is located in Bath, England, said on its Web site on Tuesday."

KelKoo in Europe

Yahoo allows shopping site to be itself By Chris Oakes, International Herald Tribune (May 25) -- Kelkoo has been maintaining a steady course as the big comparison shopping engine for Europe even though it was acquired by Yahoo a year ago. In the next phase, Kelkoo will be adding some Yahoo features like personalizing home pages.

Google and Shopping.com are also expanding into the UK, and Google into France and Germany.

Blog Hype

Once blogs 'change everything,' fascination with them will chill by Kevin Maney, USA Today (May 24) - These are being so hyped one can only figure that the blog bubble will burst soon. Very funny piece that riffs off the Monty Python spam skit.

"Blogs have come on like a cloud of locusts. The blog search engine Technorati says it now tracks more than 10 million blogs. By the time you finish this column, about 300 more will be started.

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that 16% of the U.S. population reads blogs and that 6% of adults have created a blog. "

Yahoo Movie Recommendations

This will keep me coming back to Yahoo. Where music and video and social networking didn't, movie recommendations will. Yahoo Launches Personalized Movie Recommendations By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (May 25)

"Movie recommendations from Yahoo! movies provides personalized recommendations for both current and past films playing in theaters, on TV or on DVD/video. It's easy to use—simply enter your age range and gender (this is optional, but can help focus the recommendations you receive), indicate whether you lean more toward Hollywood-type or independent films, and rate a few movies that you've already seen."

Need an account with Yahoo. Rating movies is easy to do. Recommendations are in the ballpark.

Health ONline

New report from Pew Internet and American Life on the use of health information online -- Health Report (May 2005)

"Eight in ten internet users have looked online for information on at
least one of 16 health topics, with increased interest in diet, fitness,
drugs, health insurance, experimental treatments, and particular doctors
and hospitals. That translates to about 95 million American adults (18+)
who use the internet to find health information.

Some demographic groups showed notable interest in specific topics - 59%
of online women have read up on nutrition information online, for
example, compared with 43% of online men. Thirty-eight percent of online
parents have checked online for health insurance information, compared
with 26% of internet users who do not have children living at home.
Forty-one percent of internet users with a broadband connection at home
have looked up a particular doctor or hospital, compared with 19% of
internet users with a dial-up connection at home."

CIA World Factbook 2005

CIA World Factbook 2005 Now Available - MultiMedia and Internet Schools (May 13)

"The World Factbook 2005 is now available on the Central Intelligence Agency Web site; access it at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html."

This edition has been updated to Jan 1, 2005 but there will be bi-weekly updates "about the background, geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for all included countries"

Search Clutter

SearchTHIS: Clutter, Relevancy, & Search - by Kevin Ryan, IMediaConnection (May 10) - there is so much going on in search with new services for multimedia, new and varied applications for social groups, and smart answers, (to name a few) that Ryan asks -- "With all of this activity, ... Just how thick with relevant results can a search engine results page become before relevancy gives way to clutter? How will the searching public react to all of these changes? History has taught us that clutter equals disaster in search, and we might just have to take a breath before integrating everything but the kitchen sink into search."

Metadata for Access

Metadata: A Promising Solution by Elizabeth Liddy, Educause (May/June 2005)

Conclusion: "Metadata offers a promising solution to institutional needs for providing improved access to important information contained in a wide range of documents. However, manual metadata assignment, like cataloging, is a labor-intensive and costly function, requiring special knowledge and training. With the ever-increasing quantity of materials requiring such attention, the need for efficient metadata assignment is all the more keenly felt. Interestingly, the resulting tension between “efficient” metadata assignment and “quality” metadata assignment6 may in fact be artificial, given the preliminary evidence that high-quality metadata can be automatically assigned quite efficiently, even if a human reviewer is included in the loop"

BitTorrent Search

BitTorrent creator to launch search engine - Web site would help users track down movie, music files, AP via MSN News (May 23)

BitTorrent, an online file-sharing program, has announced a new web search engine for finding sites that host sites for downloading movies, music and other data. Should be available later this week.

"The program, developed by Cohen in 2001, looks for torrent files — digital markers that it needs to assemble complete files from multiple bits of data obtained from other computer users."

Next for BitTorrent: Search by Kevin Poulsen, Wired News (May 23) - describes the web search will rank based on availability of the file as well as relevance.

Points out that BitTorrent has been associated with online piracy because people use it to get copyright movies. This new engine will attract the attention of publishers.

Growth in Local Search

Local Search Primed for Growth in DM News (May 24)

"Estimates claim that 40 percent of all search queries are for local services or products and 92 percent of local searches convert offline."

" Search engine marketing has grown from a tiny spend in 1999 to $5 billion forecast for this year and nearly $9 billion by 2009, JupiterResearch claims. Search accounts for 36 percent of U.S. online advertising and will grow 24 percent yearly in the next five years."

Several figures and facts on the competition between search engines with local search and the yellow pages.

Bates on Exalead

Introducing a New Web Search Contender by Mary Ellen Bates, SearchDay (May 24) - reviews Exalead, new search engine from France.

"The key factors in evaluating a search engine should include timeliness, ability to handle ambiguity, and plenty of power search tools. Exalead does a great job, at least on two of these three criteria." - it fails on timeliness at the moment because the index hasn't been refreshed since December 2004 - something Bates has been reassured will be remedied.

While I think Exalead is an excellent tool and have called it Altavista Reincarnate, it has some bits that don't work as advertised. The * for truncation seems to only work when the automatic stemming is OFF. NEAR operator for searching for words within 16 words of each other doesn't work reliably with phrases. If you use NEAR, be prepared to use the other boolean operators in the search query. Relevancy of results is fair to middling.

Related terms is possibly the best feature of Exalead - a form of clustering that Exalead does very well.

Also the display aids to have a preview of the site and to bookmark it on the fly.

Great engine - so, if it could only get the indexed refreshed and kept that way, it will be a major contender.

Satellite Views with Maps

MSN Joins Google In Melding Satellite Imagery With Search by Shankar Gupta, Online Media Daily (May 24) - Google and MSN are about to fight the satellite wars, each with satellite imagery tools to enhance "local search".

MSN's product is called Virtual Earth and will be launched in mid-summer.

"The service will also include features such as traffic and weather pattern analysis, which will be overlaid on the satellite images or traditional mapping application. MSN also plans to assist third-party developers who want to see more information overlaid onto the basic mapping and local search application."

MSN Virtual Earth vs. Google Earth, Search Engine Journal (May 24) - describes the Virtual Earth as " a suite of mapping tools that will seek to combine the best elements of satellite mapping with A9’s Yellow Pages local business photography and Yahoo! Maps’ layered results."

Google had announced its Google Earth last week as a software product that combines 3-D map with aerial images and driving directions. 'Google Earth' Ready to Travel the World by Matt Hicks, eWeek (May 20)

+ database will have terrain data such as that from NASA
+ better resolution
+ more locations around the world, European cities and more rural and wilderness areas.

Anti-jetlag diet

What every traveller needs - a diet that fights jet lag. Get yours at http://www.antijetlagdiet.com/. Has many FAQs.

Google Scholar and Libraries

Google Scholar by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (May 10) - comments on Google's announcement that any library that makes its resources available via a link resolver could link its users through Google Scholar to those results.

"What we find an interesting coincidence is that while Google builds this monster database containing "scholarly" info from many disciplines, specialized search tools (what the search industry calls "verticals") are growing very rapidly in both exposure and usage. True, Google Scholar is in many ways a vertical. However, it still doesn't offer the searchability that a specialized database (which libraries have always offered) can provide -- e.g., versus a massive database with little control."

Canadian Landscapes

Canadian Landscapes Photo Collection from Natural Resources Canada, has more than 1000 images and descriptions of Canadian landscapes and landforms. Search by province, landform keyword, or your words.

http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/landscapes/index_e.php

CiteSeer

CiteSeer, a specialized search service about computer science and information technology, has new features. See http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/announcements.html

Copyright and Google Library

Some Publishers Not Happy With Google's Library Digitization Program - by Gary Price, SEW blog (May 23) - could be some horrendous copyright issues arising from the Google Library Print program. Association of University Publishers have said that Google LIbrary "appears to be built on a fundamental violation of the copyright act."

Odds and Ends

RSS, Social Bookmarks And Free Foto Search: The Sunday Sharewood Picnic - Robin Good (May 22) - page of discoveries related to using RSS; social bookmarking with an article and new services; and yotophoto for finding free photos.

Especially recommends 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking from Educause (May 2005)

Google Scholar and Library Access

Innovative to Enhance Library Subscription Access Through Google Scholar - in Newsbreaks (May 23)

"Innovative Interfaces (http://www.iii.com) announced that it has entered into a development partnership with Michigan State University Libraries to allow enhanced access to the Libraries’ subscription resources through Google Scholar. Millennium, Innovative’s integrated library management system, will automatically create the institutional holdings data that will inform Google Scholar of the Libraries’ resources."

NYT TimesSelect

New York Times Content Eases Toward Paid Subscription by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 23) New York Times will be introducing TimeSelect, a for-fee service for access to columnists in The Times and the International Herald Tribune and NYT archives. Price is $49.95 US /year.

"More exclusive content for TimesSelect subscribers includes some unique multimedia features, such as audio and photo essays, video, and podcasts. Advance delivery of articles from the Real Estate, New York Times Magazine, Travel, and Sunday Arts comes to subscribers in the “Ahead of The Times” feature. "

Also press release - The New York Times Announces TimesSelect - New Online Offering to Launch in September

Opera 8.0 Glitches

Opera 8.0 not yet a masterpiece By Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post VIA Seattle Times (May 21) - Finds that Opera 8.0 "presents a considerably simpler facade, scrubbed of much of the old version's encrustation of toolbar icons and menu items.", but there are glitches and difficulties.

Structured Blogging

PubSub Announces Structured Blogging Initiative, EContent (May 20)

"PubSub has announced the launch of Structured Blogging, a foundation that provides a means to include tags in Web pages and blog postings that identify structured data as rich data, rather than simple text." ... "Structured Blogging is very similar to an edit form on a blog; the difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, add links and pictures for reviews."

Netscape 8.0

Netscape offers 'hybrid' browser - BBC News (May 19)

"Netscape 8.0 is described as a "hybrid" browser, allowing users to click between both Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and rival open source web browser Firefox."

Can get browser at http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/

The new Netscape browser: Does it stand a chance? Pandia Search ( May 21) - If Netscape is to stand a chance it would have to have something unique - but it doesn't really according to this reviews. "There are some good ideas in this browser, though and it has a good looking and uncluttered user interface and features that makes life easier for those of us who live in our lives online."

Not likely to budge Firefox users, or loyal Opera ones, and remaining IE users won't be in a rush. Maybe the few remaining Netscape users will stay with Netscape thanks to this new version.

Google Portal?

Google Allows Users to Add Home Page Tools By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP via Yahoo News (May 19) - Personalize your page at Google using this new offering from Google Labs -- http://www.google.com/ig. Has Gmail, News from selected sources, Weather. Stocks, Wired News, Word of the Day. But this aimed at US - Canadians can't even get the weather.

"Displaying a potpourri of information on the home page marks a significant change for Google, which has always greeted its visitors with little more than a box to process a search request, along with a few tabs to navigate to other features, such as news and shopping."

Google, My Google by Bambi Francisco, CBS Marketwatch (May 20)

"By letting consumers organize their Google services, the more insight Google has on consumers' preferences. Theoretically, consumers can then be targeted better by Google's 150,000 advertisers."

Google Launches Personalized Home Page by Danny Sullivan, Searchday (May 20) -- says Google has been portal-like for sometime. "The new personalized home page is merely a visible acknowledgement of this." Describes the features of the My Google.

Do you Google?, by Alorie Gilbert, CNet (May 21) -- Many feel that Google intends to become a bonafide portal. Has some figures --

"Yahoo is the biggest of the Web portals, with nearly 115 million unique visitors to the site in April, according to ComScore Media Metrix. It's followed by Microsoft's MSN and America Online. Google comes in fourth with 78 million unique visitors last month, but leads in search queries and ad click-throughs.

Google Business Desktop

Google launches Desktop Search for business users , CoolTech Zone (May 19) - some details on Google's tools for the enterprise. The business desktop will have " central control of user features and preferences, the ability to encrypt user data, searching index files and easy deployment on local Intranet within the company’s infrastructure.

Portal Spam at Google

Rita Vine feels that Google is being bamboozled and gives as an example the results for the search "rita vine" sitelines. Be Careful What You Google For and specifically the 19th page where there are phony sites who just list many other sites or have short articles in order to get traffic. I've noticed an increase in that too and hope Google figures out a way to suppress them. But I don't think it is all bad. One of the links on that page is by David Mattison, an archivist in British Columbia, who recommends Rita's site. However, most on the 19th page are supplemental results - not as useful and not vetted. The practice of superficial linking is called portal spam.

Inxight Gets Tech from Intelliseek

Inxight Acquires Federated Search and Alert Technology Assets From Intelliseek PR Newswire via Marketwatch [subscription] (May 17) - Inxight announced at the Enterprise Search Summit that it "has completed its purchase of the federated search and alert technology product line, formerly called Enterprise Discovery Suite, from Intelliseek, Inc. The product line has been renamed Inxight SmartDiscovery(R) Awareness Server." Press release describes the features.

What will Intelliseek do now? Intelliseek Sells Enterprise Discovery Suite Product Line to Inxight PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch -- "Intelliseek Inc.'s award-winning Enterprise Discovery Suite product line has been acquired by Inxight of Sunnyvale, Calif., in a move that allows Intelliseek to focus its efforts on marketing intelligence and buzz measurement for major corporate clients and brands."

They are going to concentrate on market intelligence and build on the success of Blogpulse. "Intelliseek's goal is to be the undisputed leader in measuring and analyzing what we refer to as 'consumer-generated media (CGM),'" said Intelliseek CEO Mike Nazzaro."

Avoid Rejection in Attaching Files to Email

Sending Large Files Without Mucking up the Works - by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp Digital (May 2005) - some advice on what to think about and how to do it. Yousendit, Dropload, and Streamload all sound good. Sometimes we need these.

Changes at A9

A9 has become easier to use with the just released beta version. Rather than being presented with a set of columns for the vertical searches (web, books, images etc), the searcher gets a page for entering the search and selecting the columns at one time. This makes it much better for searching only Books, as an example.

+ It's also much easier to add more custom columns, now listed under More Choices.
+ Your personal tools are placed in tabs for History, Bookmarks, Diary, and Discover.
+ Page loads seem faster.
+ Once you click Yellow Pages a separate local-search box shows at the top of the page.

All in all, a wonderful improvement.

A9 describes these new features and changes (May 17)

Further down the page, note the changes in handling history. You can turn "save search history" off in the A9 toolbar to prevent recording to your personal history, but the information about the sites you visit is still transmitted to A9 (but not with your name). This makes it possible for you to still get site info as well as use the diary and bookmarks on the toolbar.

Regarding the Book Search, you must be signed into your Amazon account to search inside a book, otherwise you may only look inside.

Internet for Health

Internet users, heal thyself -
The Pew Internet & American Life Project says more people are searching for medical information - Orlando Sentinel (May 18)

"Ninety-five million American adults -- about 80 percent of Internet users -- have searched for health information on the Internet, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Most -- 66 percent -- are looking for information about a specific disease or medical problem, but 51 percent said they were looking for ways to stay healthy, researching diet, nutrition or vitamin information."

Has some tips about the type of health site to seek out.

Full report at Health Information Online, Pew Internet and American Life

Yahoo IM to get VoIP

Yahoo! to push VoIP 'killer app' with IM update - by Stephanie Olsen, Silicon.com (May 18) - Yahoo will be adding voice over internet (VoIP) to its instant messenger with features like click-to-call and voicemail. AOL, the number one IM chat service, is also looking to integrate voice and video for mobile communications.

"Yahoo!, whose number two instant chat service has an estimated 65 million users, will offer a free update to Yahoo! Messenger during its test phase. In addition to letting people send standard instant text messages, the new version is designed to make it easy to call friends free via computer, send a short text message to a mobile device, share photos or post content to a personal web log."

Firefox Hacks

Supercharging Firefox - by Chris Sherman, Searchday (May 18) - oh boy, more things we can do with Firefox thanks to a new book from O'Reilly called Firefox Hacks by Nigel McFarlane. Sherman says, "All of these hacks are easy and straightforward to implement. But the book also has lots of useful information for the serious web designer or programmer."

Newsgator - FeedDemon

NewsGator Technologies Acquires FeedDemon - EContent (May 17)

"NewsGator also announced that FeedDemon will integrate with the NewsGator Online synchronization platform and be available as part of all of NewsGator's paid subscriptions."

Will Information Stay Free?

Information wants to be free -- but it isn't , by Bill Virgin, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (May 17)

Predicts the demise of free information on the Internet because advertisers will realize that people are ignoring their ads on the Web.

"The advertising model upon which so many Internet and media businesses are based today constitutes a house of cards, awaiting merely a puff of breath or the flick of a finger to cause it to collapse. In 10 years -- maybe less -- the notion of free content underwritten by advertising revenue will have been swept away by something else."

Cites as an example free television vs premium channels and the dependence on subscriptions to cable to see anything. Also radio; also cellphone.

Title tags

Terrific Title Tag Tips by Erik Dafforn, HighRankings.com (May 11) in advising people in the practice of title tags on documents reveals some details about search engine practices.

+ Google truncates title at around 64 characters and indicates the remainder with elipsis ....
+ MSN might be around 69
+ Yahoo is longer at 90, but "... sometimes uses its own directory to generate results data" - that might explain results that appear with no matching words.

Good advice in the article about use and placement of phrases.

Yahoo Shortcuts

Yahoo! Shortcuts: Find It Fast, at Yahoo Blog (May 12) Tips and examples about using Yahoo SHortcuts from Adam Durfee, Product Manager at Yahoo! Search.

Tag-based communities

Powerbloggers turning to tags, by Alexandra Samuel, The Star (May 16)

How the tagging at del.icio.us as an online social bookmarking service has spread across the Internet.

"Schachter's vision of tagging as a method for collaboration has quickly spread across the Internet, as both websites and Web users embrace tags as a tool for working better together. Marnie Webb of CompuMentor, a non-profit, San Francisco-based provider of technology assistance for community-based organizations and schools, has convinced colleagues to use the "nptech" tag as a way of sharing information about the use of technology by non-profits."

Mentions tagging being adopted at Technorati, a search service for weblogs.

Blogs for Business

Blogs: Hip and Hazardous, by Dana Flavelle, Toronto Star (May 10)

This article has a blog quality to it as Flavelle journalizes findings about weblogs obtained through searching the Web, interviewing the analysts, and reading the blogs.

"Business has a lot to learn about blogging and the sooner the better. Customers are using blogs to sing praises — and air complaints. Employees are using blogs to complain about workplace conditions. Competitors are using blogs to circumvent mainstream media and get unfiltered messages out to the marketplace."

MSN Desktop for IE

Microsoft launches desktop search tool - Reuters via Yahoo News (May 12) MSN desktop search (http://desktop.msn.com) is out of beta. Windows IE users will be interested. It can be "accessed from the Internet Explorer Web browser, the Outlook e-mail and contacts program or from the Windows desktop." ... "Using add-ins, users can also search more than 200 different file types, including Excel, PowerPoint, MP3, GIF and JPG files. PDF documents can be searched by the tool by downloading software components from Adobe Systems Inc. ."

Also see MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search Officially Launches, By Chris Sherman, Searchday (May 16) - finds many improvements including the ability to specify which items should be indexed and where the index file will be stored. You can change your default web search engine to something other than MSN Search.

"Overall, the final release of the MSN Toolbar Suite is a significant improvement over the beta versions I tested. The product remains heavily Microsoft-centric, however, and is best suited to those who are regular users of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer"

Desktop Search Engine Comparison

Desktop Search Engines: Which is Best? By Nigel McFarlane, Informit.com (May 12)

Extensive article about Desktop Search Engines that reviews Ask Jeeves, Autofocus (has graphics), Copernic, Google, Hotbot, MSN Toolbar Suite, Yahoo. Has several tables comparing capabilities and features.

+ recommends running only one. They will conflict.
+ compares file formats - look for the Ns - tools that don't do rtf or pdf are weak. For browser web history, Google will also handle Mozilla now. But web history means titles of pages, not the cache (according to my experience with Copernic).
+ shows platforms and browsers
+ notes on controlling the search process especially on the controls that the engines don't offer. Engines seem weak in this area.
+ rights to privacy - not really clear whether one is better than others.
+ performance comparison

Thanks to Peter for this.

Online Video Search

Yahoo! fudges video search - By Faultline (May 11) - explains some the current workings of Yahoo video. "On Yahoo!, the snippets of video that are indexed are all very short and all of them so far appear to be indexed, based on what the video is called or how it is described." - and sees a future with much more where people can find genuine film.

Webby Awards 2005

The Best of the Web - Nominees and Winners of the 2005 Webby Awards - has two winners per category, one from the editorial board, and the other from the people.

The Webby Lifetime Achievement Award went to former US Vice President Al Gore for support provided for the development of the Internet.

Webby Person of the Year to Craig Newmark of craigslist - that wonderful way to do yard sales online in your own city.

The Webby Breakout of the Year Award to Flickr for providing tools for people to organize and share photos.

But there is much for across 60+ categories - something for every interest.

Among the Canadian picks this year there was only Bell Canada Enterprises, People's Voice for Investor Relations.

Google does text messaging

Google Acquires Mobile Social-Networking Company Dodgeball.com - in InternetWeek.com (May 12) - "Google Inc. has bought Dodgeball.com , a social-networking startup that helps people find and talk to each other through mobile text messaging."

"Allen Weiner, analyst for market researcher Gartner Inc., said the acquisition reflects the trend among all the major Internet portals, Google, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and America Online Inc., toward technology platforms that may one day integrate several forms of communication, including instant messaging, e-mail and Internet telephony."

Also Google Buys Into Ad-Supported Mobile Networking in ClickZ News (May 12) - of course, it's to deliver more advertising - "Google has acquired mobile social networking firm dodgeball.com in a move that could help the search player deliver location-based advertising on cell phones. "

ZabaSearch Alarm

Zabasearch.com has caused quite the flap online because it makes it even easier to look up public information about people in the United States. You can get address and satellite photo, telephone, birth date (not necessarily correct from what I've seen), and, for a fee, access to a "background" check. It's a "dossier" on a person. One person said it was "Google on steriods". This has set off some alarm bells.

Can We Stop Zabasearch -- and Similar Personal Information Search Engines?: When Data Democratization Verges on Privacy Invasion By ANITA RAMASASTRY, Findlaw's Write (May 12)

"In this column, I will address several questions: Why Is Zabasearch currently legal in the United States? And should it remain legal? Or should legislatures and courts prevent such records (or at least some types of personal data) from being searchable online?"

Competitor's Website

"Analysing corporate websites for competitive intelligence" By Arthur Weiss, Freepint, (May 5) - feature article on how to get the most out of your examination of a competitor's website.

"You need to look at it in its entirety, searching for things that are below the surface, while focusing on your own strategic and organizational needs."

Bloglines for RSS feeds

Feed Simple By Robert MacMillan, Washington Post [subscription] (May 11) - Clear article on RSS - what it is and how to use it. Author uses Bloglines and loves it. Does mention some of the other easier ways to collect and read RSS feeds such as My Yahoo page, and built-in capabilities of Mozilla and Safari browsers.

Corporate Governance

News from Shirl Kennedy at Resourceshelf about corporate governance resources. "Resource of the Week is a new feature offered by Yahoo! Finance: corporate governance ratings from Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc. The ratings -- available for more than 7,500 publicly traded companies around the world (including 5,500 U.S. companies) -- are now part of the <b>company profiles on Yahoo! Finance. "

Dogpile Redesign

Dogpile has taken a leaf from the Jux2.com metasearcher and will let you compare results across engines. Click on buttons for Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves to get columns containing the first 10 or so results. You can highlight results found only at that engine. This shows the low overlap in results - at least if looking at the first 10 to 20 - and may reassure the searcher that it was a good thing to run the search at Dogpile.

Engines listed are Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Overture, Looksmart, and About, but MSN will surely be added. MSN has entered into agreement with Infospace, who owns Dogpile, to deliver search results.

More about Dogpile metasearch.

Dogpile Redesign Emphasizes Metasearch by Christine Blank, DMNews (May 12)

Also Dogpile Enhances Meta Search, Offers Comparison Tools By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (May 12) -- Mentions a Missing Pieces Tool that shows graphically the results from Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and colour codes for found only on one, on two, or on all three. This is done in flash. It's effective for showing the distinctive results, tho I wouldn't want to use it as a regular interface.

Sherman wrote, "The missing pieces tool combines the best features of jux2 (winner of the Search Engine Watch 2004 best meta search engine award) and the thumbshots ranking tool. Together with Dogpile search results, the missing pieces tool offers a great, easy way to explore search engine overlap."

AOL AIM has EMail

AOL Offers Free E-Mail, Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe Technology (May 12) -- AOL Instant Messenger users can get a free email account from AOL with 2 GB of storage and no expiration of messages. But there will be ads.

"In the United States, AOL lost more than 500,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2005 and about five million since its peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.

Card said he doubts AOL will market the AIM mail service heavily to its existing paid subscribers. Rather, he said, AIM mail is a way to keep AIM users from leaving the AIM environment — and its ads — to use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail"

Of interest: "According to comScore Media Metrix, AIM is the most popular IM service in the United States, with 21.7-million active users. Yahoo has 19.3-million and MSN 14.8-million."

Searching for source

Thinking About Where Information Lives - by Rita Vine, Sitelines (May 12) - searchers will think to search by topic, but will they consider source and know how to find it?

"For example, if you're looking for trends in soft drink consumption in Europe, and you think about type rather than topic, you might think about finding associations that are concerned with the topic, or journal articles on the topic, or government starter sites that link to European industry information."

Google Scholar Expanded

Google Scholar - Direct Links to Articles: Google Scholar is Now Open to All Libraries - Resourceshelf.com (May 10)

Google has made it possible for all libraries who use a link resolver to tie their collections to Google Scholar. It has also increased the number of journals and books it can link to through collaboration with link resolver vendors. This will help the libraries too.

Gary Price still prefers the specialized database -- "However, it still doesn't offer the searchability that a specialized database (which libraries have always offered) can provide -- e.g., versus a massive database with little control."

Who will be the next Google?

Will Snap.com Be the Next Google? "Will the brainchild of Idealab founder and search pioneer Bill Gross become the new search king? " By Frank Pellegrini . (May 3)

Snap.com is a kind of recommender system. "The technology, licensed from X-1, is supposed to learn as it goes along, aggregating data on sites' "satisfaction rating" (based on collective usage of that site after surfers have found it) and "user intentions," by licensing anonymous data feeds from third-party Internet service providers."

Go on to read:

Will Answers.com Be the Next Google? - a reference machine for definitions and answers.

Will Clusty.com Be the Next Google? - a meta-search engine from Vivisimo that clusters results.

Registered users at Fortune have voted 42.4% for Snap.com. Only 2.4% of them think as I do that none of these three will be the next Google.

AI in Search

If Search Engines Could Read Your Mind by Chris Sherman, Searchday (May 11) - Artificial Intelligence is almost here for search. Sherman tips us off to 20Q.net, a program that asks 20 questions about an object you think of and can often guess the object. It's based on neural networking as Sherman explains.

"To a certain degree, search engines already employ similar systems. Just as 20Q.net starts out with broad questions (is it animal, mineral, or vegetable) to "prune the tree" of possible branches, search engines do the same thing with the few clues offered by your search terms, eliminating thousands or millions of possibilities before even considering possible matches."

Yahoo Music

I want my Yahoo music - Commentary: Cheap rental is the way to go by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch [subscription] (May 11)

Will the new subscription-based Yahoo Music for cheap downloads take off? Francisco doesn't know but she does say - "There's no doubt Yahoo's move is a serious development in digital music. The company has been successful at getting people to subscribe to its services. It has 8.9 million subscribers for its mail, dating and broadband access services."

Google News Patent Scary

Google News plans threaten indy sites - posting to Journalism.co.uk (May 11)

"New Scientist last week reported that Google has applied for a patent for a new version of Google News. The current news tool lists search results by date and relevance, but the new system would be built around a database of news sources with 'credibility' scores calculated on story length, volume of web traffic and number of reporters and international bureaus. Scores will then be used to rank the search results from individual news organisations."

Such a rating system would hurt the small and independent news service.

Trends in Information Management

Outsell (market analytics for the information industry) has released two trend reports; one, concerning information seeking behaviour; and the other, Google impact.

HotTopics: 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among
Information Consumers
[http://content.outsellinc.com/coms2/summary_0245-1981_ITM]

"Comparing the new research with results from 2001 shows a number of remarkable trends: today's users are backing off a bit from self-service models and relying more on information intermediaries; users of all kinds are increasingly interested in competitive information; the time users spend gathering information has increased from 8 to 11 hours per average workweek, and that "gathering time" has also increased in relation to the time spent analyzing and applying it. Another change in this period is a strong consolidation of search engine preferences around Google, compared to the six search engines that reached reasonable numbers in 2001. Discretionary spending for content is also down among end users, a trend that puts fee-based commercial vendors at risk compared to ad-based ones"

TrendAlert: Google's Impact On Libraries
[http://content.outsellinc.com/coms2/summary_0245-1941_ITM]

"Google is no longer merely a search engine for the masses - it's increasingly building on its irresistible simplicity and wild popularity to address deeper and broader information requirements across specific user populations. Google's rapid developments within the library space over the past six months have sent tremors through the information management (IM) community."

Translation Tools

Translation Tools by Jonathan Dube, Poynter Online (May 10) - some tools for translating pages - mentions Dictionary.com, and AltaVista's Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/), but Google also offers translation (http://www.google.com/language_tools). They all use Systran. Babelfish.org has a list of several translation sites.

Europe Print

Escargot? Oui. Google? Sacre Bleu - by Bruce Gain, Wired (May 11) - more about Europe's stand with France to digitize their own collections rather than let Google do it. Says ..."there is more to this than an anti-U.S. reflex. At its heart, the library face-off highlights a mix of anxieties -- from historical influence to commerce to technology -- exacerbated by fears that search engines are poised to become the great new gatekeepers of culture."

Firefox Growth Slows

Firefox growth rate slips again by Paul Festa, Silicon.com (May 11) - WebSideStory has Firefox at 6.8% marketshare and IE at 88.9%. Firefox's growth has slowed and people question whether it will make it to 10% this year.

"The slackening of Firefox's growth could mean that the browser has converted a substantial proportion of its natural constituency, thought to be early adopters and the technically savvy. It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer."

Firefox is much easier to use than IE. It may be a matter of finding ways to reach the average user who doesn't follow weblogs and PC tech magazines.

Grokker searches Yahoo for free

A new way to search the Web - Groxis will begin offering visual maps - by John Markoff, New York Times via Monterey Herald (May 9)

Groxis, known for the Grokker software for displaying search results in graphical orbs, now searches Yahoo and does so on the web, free thanks to advertising.

"Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers. Today, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at www.groxis.com."

Grokker, like Kartoo is fun to try out, but using it for search must be an acquired taste.

This will be tougher competition for the other visualization searcher - Kartoo.

Wikipedia's Traffic Up

Wikipedia's Popularity and Traffic Soar by Enid Burns, CLickz (May 10) Hitwise finds that Wikipedia is receiving the second highest traffic for a reference site. Dictionary.com comes first with 4.46 % market share, and Wikipedia at 3.84%.

"Wikipedia contains 536,246 ongoing articles spanning 1,540,695 pages, all maintained by the site's users. Hitwise found Wikipedia's audience evenly split between male and females. Young adults age 18 to 24 are 50 percent more likely to visit the site."

Google Web Accelerator

Pandia has something on the Google Web Accelerator too. (May 2005) - How they do it and why. Is a bit suspicious of worth and motives. "Google won't tell, of course, but it is a good guess that the company will use the service to map surfer habits."

Webby Awards 2005

Get in touch with the weird and wonderful in web sites. Webby Awards are the expression of the critics and the public. This time Webby covers automative, banking (Ing Direct is the people's choice), best practices (Google - this is a category!), weblog (Boing Boing), employment (CIA - I kid you not), Financial services (Fortune), News (BBC News from the critics and the people). See all the others at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php. CBC made it as a nominee for Broadband. I don't see RocketNews here either. Canadians either aren't nominating their sites or voting. Regardless, check the list - might be some winners that will make the difference for you.

Search Engine Popularity in Canada

MSN Search Share Anyone's Guess By Sean Michael Kerner, Internet News ( May 5, 2005) - Report on Canadian searchers at the Search Engine Conference in Toronto -- "Google holds the top spot in Canada with 6.5 million users with MSN at number two with 2.1 million users. Yahoo! Canada holds the third spot at 1.2 million users."

Not mentioned - this all has to do with Bell Sympatico and Rogers. Why can't they write stories with any understanding of Canada?

Shopping Canada

Andrew Goodman has news about two new comparison shopping engines for Canadians.

ShopToIt.ca - Calgary based, bilingual listings, similar to Shopping.com and PriceGrabber in the US. Full launch will be July 1.

A Froogle Canada (URL to be determined) in about a month. "Google's sales force in Canada already works with larger retailers, and will have relatively little trouble adding them to the Froogle platform. It may take some time, however, for many smaller retailers to cotton onto the value of using shopping search engines to drive traffic."

Tales from SES North, Vol. 1: Shop to It Stands on Guard for the True North Strong and Free at Traffick.com (May 6)

Toronto Blogs

Some blogs around and about Toronto.

Reading Toronto - a city is a book with 100,000 million poems. This is a "forum for innovative design and culture in the city". James Adams in the article At last a blog for design works (Globe and Mail, May 7) said, "Reading Toronto made its bow on March 30, courtesy of the Design Exchange and Digifest, "Canada's annual showcase of digital culture," with Robert Ouellette as its producer and editor" ... "determined to make Reading Toronto "the sort of place where you can find a rather complex essay on, say, bricks or a tribute to the bartender at the Drake Hotel.""

There were a few others mentioned in a post to the SLA Toronto listserv are:

Torontoist - About Toronto and what happens in it. Has categories for arts and events, city, sports.

BlogTO - with sections on Arts, Eating, Fashion, Film, Music, Podcasts - more.

Art is Everywhere - a photo blog.

Europe and Google Print

Europeans to counter Google print project, by Elaine Ganley, AP via Globe and Mail (May 9) --

"For Europeans, the fear is that the continent's contribution to the pillars of recorded knowledge will be crushed by a profit-oriented California company — and may end up presenting a U.S.-centric version of the world's literary legacy."

Six countries in Europe have proposed a "European digital library". "Failing to digitalize — declared the heads of state in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary in an appeal to the European Union — is to risk that "this heritage could, tomorrow, not fill its just place in the future geography of knowledge.""

Is this the "first culture war in cyberspace", as Pierre Buhler, an associate professor at the prestigious National Foundation of Political Science, said?

Also The Register - Europe uniting against Schmidt's Google print project (May 2)

Google Web Accelerator

Google's Accelerator Breaks Web Apps, Security - By Matt Hicks, EWeek (May 6) - trouble already with the Google Web Accelerator for preloading web pages. "Users of some smaller Web forum sites have complained in online postings that they began receiving Web pages which displayed other people's user names after downloading Web Accelerator." That problem was due to cache-control headers and it's fixable, but some other people had problems in loading pages. Web Accelerator may be a good idea, but would be better to wait until other people find the bugs.

Tech Stories

The Digital Download - Ten Must-Read Tech Stories, by Penelope Patsuris, Forbes (May 6) -- This is a weekly feature and available through RSS from Forbes. Stories are picked up from Wired, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and many others. Very eclectic on technology, especially the Internet.

Forbes also has an alerting system for members called Attaché.

Research Management Tools

Search Snippets - Create Your Own Internet Archive - by Genie Tyburski, Law Office Computing (May 2005) - recommends using Onfolio and NetSnippets for managing information found on the Web. She uses both - "Both Onfolio and NetSnippets also offer researchers convenient, essential utilities unavailable in many browsers. They save time and frustration by maintaining a record and index of captured Web pages. They facilitate finding what you stored by making the archive searchable."

Personalized Search - Yahoo and Google

Personalization: Google's Search History vs. Yahoo's MyWeb -
By Lars Våge, Pandia Post (May 5) -- compares the two services and seems to favour Yahoo's My Web for the extras like comments and sharing.

Opera Reviewed

New Opera browser short on basics - in One News (May 5)

"Opera's new web browser responds to commands you speak into a microphone. It rearranges pages to fit narrower windows. It adds a security bar to help reduce the risk of fraud. All impressive features.

But when it comes to the basics, too many web sites simply don't work as well with Opera when compared with rival browsers from Microsoft Corp and the Mozilla Foundation. "

Music Search Engine - Yahoo

Yahoo developing an audio search engine - by Stephanie Olsen, CNet (May 5)

Yahoo "plans to introduce the music search engine within the next couple of months, according to a source familiar with the service. The specialty engine will let people search on an artist's name, for example, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music."

Yahoo Video Search

Yahoo! Search Goes Primetime with Comprehensive Video on the Web - "New Partnerships with Buena Vista Pictures, CBS News, Discovery Communications, MTV, Reuters, Scripps Networks, VH1 and More Make Yahoo! Video Search The First Place To Go For Online Video", Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch [requires registration] (May 5)

"Yahoo! Video Search provides consumers with a comprehensive source for video on the Web," said John Thrall, head of media search engineering, Yahoo! Search. "Our powerful media crawling, extraction, and ranking technology as well as our broad relationships with content partners enable Yahoo! Video Search to provide users with the leading online video search experience."

Google Print Search

Came across a sneaky way to search Google Print from After Hours in the Law Library - Google Print (April 27)

"The beta print search page isn't linked as of this post, but try this search for books on legal research: http://print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=legal+research&btnG=Search"

Modify the search parameters contained in [q=legal+research] for your terms. For example: q=internet+research

Google Web Accelerator

Google tool to speed Web surfing - By Matt Hines, CNET News.com (May 8) -- Google has a new tool for broadband users to speed the download of web pages called Web Accelerator.

"Web Accelerator works by sending URL requests through company servers designated specifically for speeding site downloads. The application also can compress site data before sending it to computers."

"The system stores copies of sites frequently accessed by individual PCs and automatically retrieves new data from those pages, so that a Web browser needs to process only updates to those sites when asked to load them." ...

More details in the article.

How We Search For Products

There have been several studies and articles about how searchers search for products.

Anne Kennedy, guest writer at Searchday, reports on What Clicks with Web Searchers (May 3) and summarizes findings from recent studies.

"Some of the surprising, almost counter-intuitive findings from this research: Most people begin shopping searches using generic searches long before they get down to brands. Most click on one of the top three listings, if one interests them. Most—more than half—click on the first paid search result. People also take their time shopping, as long as several weeks in many cases. And no big surprise: searchers continue to prefer Google, though Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves are gaining share."

Online not the place for the Road less Travelled - By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide - May 03, 2005 - distinguishes between the familiar and the new. As searchers we go to the online properties we know such as the popular travel services at Expedia and Travelocity. When we don't know, we turn to search engines.

..."we turn to a general search engine to help quickly identify new landmarks to help navigate this unfamiliar territory. As soon as we can, we try to find vertical reference sites in the market we’re researching, because we know they’re built to provide richer content and more searching functionality for that particular product than a general, one size fits all search engine. We use the navigator to find the reference landmark."

Infonortics Search Engine Meeting 2005

Presentations from the 2005 Search Engine Meeting are Now Available Online - listing of presentations from the Infonortics Search Engine Conference held in April 2005. This is always an excellent conference with analysis and a view to the future. Gary Price has picked out the presentation most on search. Full listing is at Search Engine Meeting 2005.

New York Times Book Review Archive

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf for May reviews the New York Times Book Review Archive

Gives an overview of online publications that carry book reviews as the prelude to this examination of the New York Times Book Review Archive.

"There are more than 16,000 full-text reviews in the free subset of the NYBTR archive from 1996 onward. (It seems to be more like 1997 onward, but in the search pull-down menu the first year is 1996). The rich collection is very well complemented by sumptuous first chapters from hundreds of books, and these are also free."

Find that it isn't easy to search. Adding metadata and title indexes would "enhance" the product.

Onfolio 2 - New features

New version of Onfolio, the "PC application for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content and publishing to email, weblogs and web sites." Onfolio 2.0 has a built-in RSS Feed Reader, works with Firefox as well as IE, workgroup collaboration, complete website capture, document search. See What's New.

More Book Searching

Going Under Cover with Book Search Tools - by Gary Price, Searchday (May 4) - Gary some tips on searching Google Print and Amazon's Search Inside the Book. To these Gary adds some full-text book text search services.

Video Hubs

Search engines, startup media sites dream of becoming video hubs - by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 26)

There may be a grassroots media movement taking place that will encourage everyman to create and share videos. Mentions OurMedia, for open source for personal media based somewhat on the Wikipedia model. Also Open Media Network "backed by Netscape veterans Mike Homer and Marc Andreessen".

Google has invited people to submit videos to them at Google Video. Yahoo and Singingfish are well advanced in their video offerings.

Some comments about this in the Search Engine Journal - Video Search, Media, and New Google Partners

RocketNews Annual Report

Rocketinfo Inc. Outlines Corporate Strategy for 2005 in Business Wire (May 3) via Marketwatch [requires registration]

RocketNews reports on its successes in this press release as part of its annual review. The release provides a useful summary account of features and content of their news products.

+ advertising in RocketInfo through Kanoodle
+ better "content scraping and indexing technology"
+ learning system for tailoring news
+ the free "RocketNews portal now retains search history and allows full personalization and allows users to obtain current news from over 100,000 business news content sources (including 16,000+ global information sources and 80,000+ RSS/Atom news feeds and Weblog Sources)."
+ "over 37,000 registered users now use our RSS products to create personalized search based news feeds"
+ "database includes all of the world's leading news outlets including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, the New York Times, BBC as well as content from specialized content providers such as trade journals, industry portals, government filings, specialty magazines and the world's most popular and dynamic weblogs."
+ free Rocket Desktop Search tool - create and save searches to run on last week or month.
+ planning an alerting service.

Spyware Hot

Spying on the spyware makers - By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com (May 4, 2005)

Interview with Ben Edelman, spyware expert. Edelman is a law student at Harvard University who has done battle with Gator on behalf of the Washington Post.

There are some very startling statements. Edelman says, "There's just a huge amount of money changing hands here. The biggest, richest American companies are buying advertising through spyware. The biggest, richest venture capital firms are investing in those who make this kind of unwanted software. That's names like American Express, Sprint PCS, Disney, Expedia, Guy Kawasaki's firm."

Expedia belongs to IAC, and IAC also owns Ask Jeeves which is also in hot water and which Edelman comments on in this interview. "The core problem is Ask Jeeves' installation practices. Sometimes their software gets installed without any notice or consent at all through security hole exploits."

There's more.

To protect your computer from spyware, see the articles about antispyware software in PC Magazine. Antispyware (Feb 2, 2005) Editor's Choice was Spy Sweeper 3.5 - has a 30 day trial, very easy to use.

Personal Google v Yahoo

Yahoo! vs. Google Personalization: Leaning Toward Yahoo! - in Unofficial Google Weblog (Apr 29) - Prefer's Yahoo's MyWeb to Google's My Search History mainly because of control. Have to manually turn off Google, whereas can select Yahoo when wanted.

Yahoo 360

Yahoo Blogging Service Boosts Content in PC World via Yahoo News (May 2)

"Yahoo plans to add the capability to import content, such as photos and music, from non-Yahoo applications to its new Yahoo 360 social networking and blogging service, according to an executive of the company." ... "Yahoo 360 will be made widely available to the public in the next few weeks, at which time the capability to share non-Yahoo content will also be included, Brody says."

Blogging Growing

Blogs Continue to Gain Traction by Enid Burns, ClickZ (May 3)

"A quarter of all Internet users say they read blogs, and 9 percent say they've created one, according to an update to the "State of Blogging" report published by Pew Internet & American Life Project in January." .. "Compared to other forms of media, Pew said blog readership equals 40 percent the talk radio audience, and 20 percent of the newspaper-reading population."

Pew / Internet - State of Blogging

Pre-coordinate vs Post-coordinate

I Column Like I CM:Metadata--Think outside the docs! by Bob Doyle, eContent (May 3)

Post-coordinate searching is punching keywords in and hoping the search engine matches on the right documents. Pre-coordinate searching is using indexing and classifying tools to find documents that are about your words. Post-coordinate is much less expensive. Should companies invest in pre-coordinate indexing by adding metadata and developing taxonomies?

"Metadata lets intelligent computer programs find the meaning of your content, beyond that discoverable by examining the documents themselves. Librarians called it the machine-readable catalog (MARC). Tim Berners-Lee calls it the Semantic Web. The question being asked by the financial types is when will commonly available Web tools exploit that extra meaning to deliver better information to your audience?"

Author recommends adding metadata but has some provisos.

Ask Jeeves and Adware

Intermix is just the start - Commentary: Ramifications of adware suit are broad by Bambi Francisco, (May 3) Marketwatch [requires free registration]

Likened the hawkers that greet cruise ships to live popups - exactly so.

Definition of adware: "adware is software that's mysteriously installed on computers without user consent. It can track user activity and serve up advertisements related to that activity. It's typically bundled with applications, like screensavers, or music file-sharing applications or when people mistype URLs."

There may be some suits against adware companies in the United States. Notes that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has sued Intermix Media Inc.

Of particular interest are Francisco's comments about Ask Jeeves -- "Ask Jeeves is particularly worth noting since there have been a number of independent sources alleging that Ask Jeeves uses distributors of spyware." -- This explains why SpySweeper picked up ask.com cookies on my computer. Ask Jeeves itself may not be doing anything wrong but the advertisers it accepts may be.

Danny Sullivan picked up the story in Ask Jeeves Accused Of Pushing Spyware SEW Blog (May 2) and asked AsK Jeeves, who denied the accusations. John Park, senior vice president for desktop products at Ask Jeeves, said that Ask Jeeves was no longer " flagged by Microsoft or any of the other products that are mentioned below". But, as I mentioned, the latest SpySweeper still thinks it's adware.

Desktop Search Study

Pandia Search Engine News summarized the findings from the UW E-Business Consortium “Benchmark Study of Desktop Search Tools” in Copernic Desktop Search wins benchmark study.

"The study evaluated each application along six attributes: usability, versatility, accuracy, efficiency, security, and enterprise readiness." Copernic won as overall best desktop tool. BUT, "the analysis reveals that while the desktop search tools show great promise for significant productivity gains, the technology is still immature due to a lack of security and overall manageability."

Travel Plans

Making Travel Plans - The Best Sites for Research and Reservations - by Roberta Roberti, LinkUp Digital (May 2) - Four starting points for researching a destination (TripAdvisor is one), and several services for doing the booking.

Search Inside Books

Searching Books Between the Covers By Greg R. Notess, Online (May 2005) -- about the book search offered by Amazon's Search Inside the Book and Google's Google Print.

" Beyond quotation searching, book searches can be used to verify citations, especially for chapter titles, and to look at the actual copyright page of a book. Other applications include checking for plagiarism, hunting for intellectual property violations, and tracking mentions of trademarks and business names in both fiction and nonfiction books. For distance reference service, it lets both user and librarian look at the same page of a book while discussing it over the phone. For the reader who only remembers a character’s name but not the title or author, the book databases offer a new source in which to dig. Other uses likely abound, but we need to start considering what possibilities these databases offer, especially as they grow."

Has tips on search strategies, and comments on differences in access and scope.

Q&A at Wondir

Wondir Launches Volunteer Virtual Reference Service by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 2) - About Wondir's live Q&A service -- "Using a combination of search engine, instant messaging, and other technologies, it aims to allow “answer-full” volunteers to provide personal responses to queries and to generate automatic links to appropriate Web sites and news articles."

Matthew Koll, the CEO and founder of Wondir does have credentials. He also founded Personal Library Software and was CTO at America Online.

Search Engine Mission Statements

John Battelle compares the mission statements of Yahoo and Google in Missions and Visions (Apr 28) - Yahoo has been drafting a new statement -- "To enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge." Google's is "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible".

Yahoo is attending more to media -- "mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search."

Microsoft and Search

The story of what it takes to build a search engine is told in this article in the Seattle Times (May 2) - Microsoft Learns to Crawl by Kim Peterson.

Bill Gates admits that Microsoft misjudged the importance of Web searching as a money maker. Microsoft worked on many other kinds of new products, completely missing the money-making capabilities of search. They began to tackle this in 2002 and now have 500 engineers and marketers.

Article notes that MSN Search hasn't "caused a vast market shift". Microsoft is somewhat encouraged though in a slight increase in usage figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, where markets hare went from 12.8% to 13.6%, January to March 2005.

The connection to Encarta may be its best feature. Gates had once talked about "information at your fingertips". Encarta is it and it's finally free. But will it draw searchers from Yahoo and Google?

The MSN search engine might be a stopgap until Microsoft can get search embedded in the next operating system code-named Longhorn. Of interest though -- "Wilcox and other analysts say that doesn't guarantee Microsoft an advantage over its rivals. Longhorn will search the Web, but Microsoft had to postpone plans to include an even more powerful feature that searches inside a computer. MSN has had to fill that void with its own limited desktop search system."

We learn more about Longhorn's search capabilities in PC World -- Will Longhorn Try to Rival Google? "Upcoming OS is less focused on search, more focused on helping users locate files, exec says." by Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service (Apr 29)

Longhorn will be more about giving users ways to organize their information according to this article.

"In Longhorn, Microsoft is "moving away from search" and concentrating on how people organize and find documents, says Brad Goldberg, general manager of Windows Client Business Group." ... "Goldberg says he believes that the way in which people gather information will change, and users will spend less time searching the Web. Instead, they will use tools like RSS feeds and XML to have information they want pushed to them, he says."

"Microsoft has been working on making data stored on PCs easier to find by offering Longhorn features such as virtual folders and keywords, Goldberg says. Users will be able to create virtual folders based on keywords, allowing them to drop in related documents saved in various places on their computers."

That sounds like the user will have to think about organizing information and setting up personal information systems. Not very likely.

For a preview of Longhorn see this review in PC World - We Take Longhorn for a Test Drive - "After examining the alpha version of Microsoft's new OS, we like what we see" (April 29)

Gift Recommendation Engines

Chris Sherman has some shopping-recommendation sites for people needing ideas for mother's day gifts. In Searching for a Mother's Day Gift (May 2) he describes Yahoo's Gift Finder.. Answer questions about age, relationship, lifestyle to get a list of categories and products.

Google's Search History

Google Search Adds History Feature by Jay Lyman, ECommerce Times (Apr 21)

Article has comments from Susan Feldman of IDC. She referred to the personal search as "search in context" and said she thought it "may help users get better results". "However, she also pointed out some issues with the beta service, including the difficulty of dealing with people's different modes -- professional, hobby, family, or other."

There are privacy issues. Google addresses these somewhat by providing users the ability to manage the history and remove records. Users have the option to conduct searches while not logged in to the service.

Google Blogscoped blog says that the privacy issues are not new with My Search History. In Search History Privacy (Apr 29) we learn that Google has been able to connect searches to individual GMail users - but that doesn't mean Google makes these connections unless required for legal investigations.

Concludes: "So does My Search History really change any privacy issue? No. The only thing different now is that the user can see what Google could always see as well. And of course, the incentive on the user’s side to login has increased, so chances are Google can track even those who never log in to any other Google service like Gmail."

Digitizing Euro Library

Dustup over Google's agreement with US libraries to digitize their collections. Nineteen European libraries, organized by the French, are going to do the same on their own according to Europe rallies against Google library [AFP - April 28]

See Danny Sullivan's comments in European Libraries Back Alternative To Google Library Project, SEW Blog (Apr 29)

Findory - New Look

Findory, the personalized news service with articles from news and blog sources, has undergone a redesign. Statistics about your use of Findory are in the top bar to the right. A right panel lists favourites and recent sources.

Meantime the number of Findory users has been growing exponentially. See Findory Announces Exponential Growth , PR Newswire (Apr 26)