Internet News

Browser Add-ons Bonanza

Build the Perfect Browser by Erik Larkin, PC World (Jan 30)

The latest versions of browsers from Microsoft and Firefox are already enhanced with many useful features - tabs, search - but this article shows how we can make them even more useful through add-ons.

"Here are 46 great (and free) add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 that offer safer browsing, easier site sharing, improved searching, faster news gathering, and more. Plus, we offer tips to help you manage add-ons in both apps without bogging down your browser."

Covers:

+ Bookmarks and Searching: Instant Information Access
+ Social Browsing: Share Your Favorite Finds
+ Master IE 7 Add-Ons
+ Firefox Extension Expertise
+ Security: Better Browsing Safety
+ RSS Readers: News Junkie Power-Ups
+ Browser Boosters

ZoomInfo Powersearch

Business Information Search Engine ZoomInfo Unveils PowerSearch 2007, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 30)

ZoomInfo has developed PowerSearch 2007 for conducting research on people, companies, and industries. "Subscription-based pricing starts at $3,950 per user per year."

"More than 1,500 customers currently benefit from the power of ZoomInfo's patented semantic search engine. The search engine continually crawls the Business Web - the millions of corporate Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings and other online sources - then automatically aggregates and organizes the information into easy-to-digest and easy-to-search profiles."

Guide to doing background checks

It's never been easier to be your own detective By Jolayne Houtz, Seattle Times (Jan 30)

Pointers on doing background checks on a person (including yourself) and guide to online tools and resources for doing background searches on a person. Mainly geared to people in Washington state and specifically those public-records sites, but has advice of use to everyone.

Has chart for Washington state on Where to find the information [pdf]

Good tips for using web search engines - Guerrilla snooping

Google's Digitization Work

GOOGLE’S MOON SHOT by JEFFREY TOOBIN "The quest for the universal library", New Yorker (Jan 29)

"Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com."

Recaps Google's interest in digitizing books and making them searchable through Google Books , its progress through partnerships with libraries and publishers, and the vigorous opposition from publishers in Google's digitization of copyrighted books held in libraries.

"The key legal question is whether the courts will allow Google to continue to scan copyrighted material without permission. "

Some figures:

+ WorldCat has 32 million titles from more than 25,000 libraries around the world (though mainly in the US) - "Google aims to scan at least that many".
+ Amazon "has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells".
+ Carnegie Mellon's Universal Library - 1.5 million books.
+ Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries - no figure given

About cost: "Google will not reveal how much it is spending on the books project. In 2005, Microsoft announced that it would spend two and a half million dollars to scan a hundred thousand out-of-copyright books in the collection of the British Library. At this rate, scanning thirty-two million books—the number in WorldCat’s database—would cost Google eight hundred million dollars, a major but hardly extravagant expenditure for a multibillion-dollar corporation."

Selecting Search Terms

Unlocking Keywords to Ensure Effective E-Discovery By Craig Ball, Law Technology News (January 29, 2007)

Author warns that keyword searching isn't enough in legal research: textual information might not be stored as text (image instead), or might be buried deep beyond the reach of the search tool.

Also, one word or one version is not sufficient - consider variants, misspellings, proximity, synonyms and noise words (occur so frequently as to lose usefulness)

Closes with good advice: "Effective keyword searching demands more than many imagine. You don't have to put every synonym and aberrant spelling on your keyword list, but you need to appreciate the limits of text search and balance the risk of missing the mark against the burden of grabbing everything and the kitchen sink. The very best results emerge from an iterative process: revisiting potentially responsive data using refined and expanded search terms."

Mentioned in TVC Alert Jan 30

Stumble Upon Sites

Hit Stumble, have a nice trip by Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Jan 29)

Has the story of Stumbleupon, a social bookmarking service that began in Calgary and is now in Silicon Valley.

"StumbleUpon now has more than six million websites that have been voted upon by users, and has added features including the ability to "stumble" upon pictures and to stumble based on keywords. The latest addition was the ability to stumble upon videos, a la YouTube."

SearchGuy.com Redesign

Searchguy.com is a metasearch engine that uses Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Looksmart. It has similar functionality to Metacrawler or Jux2 in that it can show what a selected engine is missing. There are a few extra tools for News and Product search.

The Premier Meta-Search Engine, SearchGuy.com announces launch of the beta version of its refreshing new design with enhanced features., PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Jan 29)

IE7 Boost to RSS

NewsGator Technologies: Microsoft's Launch of Vista Opens Door for Increased Adoption of RSS Technology Marketwire via Marketwatch (Jan 29)

"RSS Built Into Browsers Will Drive Paradigm Shift of How Online Content Is Delivered and Consumed, According to NewsGator Founder"

"Reinacker [NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker] continued: "The release of Vista and IE 7 will result in a rise in popularity of RSS and the fact that every desktop will now have a reader on it will tend to drive the increase in RSS feeds generated from enterprise systems. As that happens, IT departments will increasingly need to efficiently manage RSS in their organization, centrally administer subscription content and control bandwidth allocation and usage throughout the enterprise.""

100 Alternative Engines

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines by Charles S Knight, Read/Write (Jan 29)

Another list of search engines to use instead of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. It's always fun to try out some new ones. Narrow that list to:

A9 - mix and match vertical search engines.
Exalead - general web search
Dumbfind - creates tags - not always clear as to what it is doing
Factbites - produces answers - good
Gigablast - Gigabits are very useful
Grokker - uses Yahoo - interesting interface for seeing groupings.
Ujiko - learns as you use it - fun from time to time
Zuuala - new metasearch - does not collate results

Wikio Media

News Search + Personalization + Social Media = Wikio, Chris Sherman, Search engine land (Jan 29)

About Wikio , a news aggregator that picks up online news and blog entries. People can tag, personalize, and vote.

"Wikio is a relatively new startup that blends articles from major news web sites and blogs with commentary and tags from Wikio users. It also offers powerful search and customization options that go beyond what you find at most other "media harvesting" sites on the web."

Amazon's Amapedia

Amazon Quietly Launches Amapedia, a Wikipedia For Products, Read/Write Web (Jan 25)

Amapedia "s a community for sharing information about the products you like the most." . Also there is some connection with the ProductWiki.

This looks like a wiki for products rather than an encyclopedia to me, but wikipedia probably carries more weight as a term.

This review says, "Another way to look at this: Amapedia could become the next generation of user reviews. User reviews on websites today are relatively rigid and old fashioned, so Amazon may be thinking that Amapedia will be a new platform for user reviews - it may help remove redundancy in reviews, while offering more completeness."

Is this supposed to compete with the product review sites like Become.com, or Epinions.com?

White Pages Expands

WhitePages.com Expands People Search, Clickz (Jan 24)

" Expanding further from its phone directory roots, WhitePages.com has added third-party results from Web search, public records, and professional profiles, and a fledgling e-mail search product."

Of interest: "The company has also begun indexing e-mail addresses from third-party opt-in lists for a premium service that lets users get in touch via e-mail for a fee, without knowing the destination address. " -- Sounds like the old Infospace email search.

Desktop for Elementary School Students

It's Elementary, My Dear Watson™, SEW Blog (Jan 24)

Bravo Watson! Intellext, the maker of Watson search, and AOL@School have developed a desktop sidebar to help K-12 elementary school students with their homework. More informatiion about the tool from http://www.aolatschool.com/sidebar/. It's free.

Future of Search

Future of Search: The European View, Frank Watson, SEW blog (Jan 24)

Richard Firminger, Director of Northern European Sales for Yahoo Search Marketing sees moves to integrated results from various sources including social search, and natural language search.

"From a single search we will soon be able to receive answers incorporating text (sponsored and algorithmic), video, images and even human knowledge – the latter coming from social search products like Yahoo! Answers, ...."

"Additionally, natural language, or Semantic Search – which enables users to pose queries as a properly phrased question, not with a couple of words – may come to the fore."

MedlinePlus and Vivisimo

Vivísimo to Power Web Searching for NLM Sites by Paula J. Hane, Newbreaks (Jan 29)

National Library of Medicine will be using Vivisimo in its search platform but can't say when. This will include NLM's consumer health Web site, MedlinePlus, but not PubMed.

Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivísimo described it technology - "Vivísimo's clustering technology creates its "categories" on-the-fly from the search results, using terms in the title, snippet, and any other available textual description (including metadata) in the search results themselves." MedlinePlus has been using "controlled vocabulary" for guided navigation. You can compare the two by using the a Vivisimo "concept" site and also MedlinePlus.

"Preliminary looks at Vivísimo's concept demo have provided satisfying results in comparison to the current search capabilities and results presentation at MedlinePlus. Industry expert Janice McCallum, president of GrandView Insight, Inc., really liked Vivísimo's categorized display in the demo. She commented: "Vivísimo presents search results that are easier to interpret because they are displayed in a more visually attractive and meaningful way."

Much as I have always liked Vivisimo's clustering, including the ClusterMed product, I'm not as impressed by the comparison of the "concept" demo vs the existing structured MedlinePlus. Will have to wait and see if the Vivisimo's clustering is used to enhance (preferred) or replace.

Google Books Maps Mashup

Google mashes up books and maps - Book entries may include Google Maps with pins indicating places mentioned in the text, Computerworld (Jan 26)

"Now, book entries in Google's Book Search may include a section called "Places mentioned in this book." The section includes a map from Google Maps with pins indicating places included in the text. Below the map is a list with the name of the places, linked to the pages in which they are mentioned, and an excerpt from the text.

Some books whose entries include this new feature are Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Charles Sanford Terry's Bach: A Biography."

Example - The Travels of Marco Polo - scroll to bottom of page.

Google Bombing - Defused?

Google Kills Bush's Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs, Search Engine Land (Jan 25)

Google has changed the algorithm that allowed Google bombing. First bomb defused was the Bush "miserable failure" - pity.

"A search today now shows the US White House page carrying Bush's name is no longer top listed. Also gone are pages about Michael Moore and former US president Jimmy Carter that were on the first page of results due to Google bombing actions."

Google Video - You Tube

Google Video Search Now Includes YouTube Results, Search Engine Land (Jan 25) - has screenshot - refers to a press release - "Google will keep YouTube as an "independent subsidiary" but will continue to build out features within the YouTube community itself as well as with Google products"

Contextual ads

Mamma.com Announces Partnership with Entrieva Inc. -- "Technology platform will optimize search advertising revenues" -- Marketwatch (Jan 25)

Here's a partnership -- "Entrieva's ClickSense(TM) contextual targeting solution will enable highly relevant search-based text ads to be served on web pages when users type commercially based queries. As the ad achieves a higher degree of contextual relevance, the ads become more valuable to the viewer and perform better for both publishers and advertisers. ... The technology will be implemented on the Mamma.com search engine and will also be integrated into the Copernic Desktop Search software."

People seem to be loosing interest in Desktop search. Will this really work?

Meta book search

BookSearch X3 - a meta search engine that claims to search inside books from Amazon (A9.com), Google.com and MSN Live Search - at the same time

Reviewed in Search Three Book Searches at Once, Researchbuzz (Jan 20)

Google's Custom Search

Google CSE of the Best Reference Sites, Finding Custom Search Engines< Researchbuzz (Jan 21)

+ Recommends a custom search engine (CSE) built to search reference sites -- ALA-RUSA Best Free Reference Web Sites

+ Has a great tip on how to find more (other than by going to Google's list of picks ) -- "The magic search modifier is inurl:cse inurl:coop site:google.com ".

Vista Ready

Vista, Windows new operating system, has arrived. Some articles on what to do and buy.

Microsoft's New Look by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (Jan 24)

Has details on the new interface, the computing power required, possible snags, and generally what to consider.

"Vista is like a new, more expensive car: It looks fabulous and costs a lot more, but there's always the nagging feeling that it's not going to be much different from its predecessor Windows XP."

Tips for buying a computer that will outlast the norm By: Bill O'Brien, ComputerWorld via ITWorldCanada (Jan 11) - excellent, long article on what to look for in a new computer that will really sing and dance with Vista.

"When you stare into your crystal ball trying to divine what hardware to buy this year, you're likely to see something odd. That 800-pound gorilla staring back from inside the globe is nothing less than Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, and it can't help but affect your decision."

The Insider's Guide to Windows Vista by John Clyman, PC Magazine (Dec 20, 2006)

"We've performed extensive, hands-on analysis of Vista and sorted out the claims to help you decide whether, or more realistically when, to make the move—and to show you what you can expect when you do."

Windows Vista A to Z -- Reviews, analyses, how-tos, hot issues and predictions about Microsoft's new OS -- ComputerWorld

Of special interest - Visual Tour: Vista's new UI (October 17, 2006) -- "This article is part 2 of an excerpt from Windows Vista Unveiled, with permission of the Sams Publishing" - lots of screenshots.

Google Images

A Design Change For Google Images, Search engine land (Jan 24) -- changes at Google Images - mainly mouseover image to get properties. Does not show full url until you click on the image. Looks cleaner.

Social Media

Forget ABCs - The Social Media Alphabet Is DNRS, Neil Patel, Searchengineland - Let's Get Social (Jan 23)

Get to know the better tools for social media - "But how many know the important letters of the social media alphabet, D for Digg; N for Netscape; R for Reddit and S for StumbleUpon?"

Where's Newsvine?

IBM and Enterprise 2.0

IBM unveils social networking tools for businesses By: Kathleen Lau, itWorldCanada (Jan 23)

Social networking is about to become legitimate as a business tool for collaborative work. IBM made three product announcements at Lotusphere 2007 in Orlando that pick up aspects of consumer tools for blogging, social networking, conferencing, and video.

"At least one Canadian analyst believes IBM’s announcement heralds a new phase of business-appropriate social networking – one that will spawn a new set of tools and processes."

Music Recommenders

Web 2.0 offers whole new tune, Matthew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Jan 23) "As the Web evolves with more sites and services incorporating the interactivity and community design, the kinds of things available to music fans also evolv."

Describes some services for finding music, often through recommender systems - last.fm, Pandora, Yahoo Launchcast and others.

Hurdles for E-Books

Google Download: No iTunes for Books by Catherine Holahan, Business Week Online (Jan 23)

"The search leader faces big hurdles as it pursues an online e-book service; chief among them, consumers don't want to curl up with a laptop."

"Given that the digital book industry has only existed for several years, it is understandable that it would make up a small percentage of the overall market. However, the book industry is not showing the same rate of digital sales growth as other industries making the transition from physical to digital copies."

Yahoo Troubles

Pain returns for Yahoo, with options running out - Commentary: After being eclipsed on many fronts, going private looks better by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Jan 22)

Yahoo's future not seen as rosy as it was a year ago - "After collapsing 36% last year, Yahoo sports a market valuation of about $39 billion and its stock looks more like that of an old-line media company than a nimble, fast-growing Web dynamo."

It lost to Google on search and now is seen as faltering on content. But the greatest threat seems to be traffic going to MySpace.

" Wall Street and other observers believed that even if Yahoo couldn't win in search, at least its massive breadth in properties would make it the go-to place once marketers put their brand dollars to work.

Today, however, that dominance in media is questionable.

Google, through the YouTube acquisition and its MySpace relationships, has a lot of display-advertising inventory at its disposal. "

New WebMD Health Portal

WebMD Announces Next-Generation Consumer Health Portal PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jan 22) -- WebMD

WebMD announced "the next generation of its leading consumer health information portal, together with free, widespread access to its WebMD Personal Health Record. The new portal will enrich the user experience for the more than 35 million people who turn to the WebMD Health network each month. A preview of the new site can be accessed on the homepage of WebMD.com or at www.pv.webmd.com ."

Farecast Fare Guard

Farecast Offers Insurance Policy on Airfares, Searchengineland (Jan 22)

"Travel search engine Farecast officially launched its Fare Guard service, protecting flyers from volatile airfare prices. The service allows travelers to basically purchase an insurance policy on a flight for $10 ($3 until February 1), thus locking in the published rate."

Operates in the US.

Save to Furl

Looksmart made some changes to FURL for creating or using topics when adding pages and bookmarks - see Save to Furl - Help. - Create topics (rather than folders) and add keywords (rather than tags).

Existing topics are listed horizontally rather than in a dropdown box. If Furl is looking to catch up to any of the other social bookmarking centers - del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, or even MyWeb 2.0 - this won't do it. They need to work on the My Archive and the search function.

Reference on the Web

Best Free Reference Web Sites 2006 - Eighth Annual List -- "This is an annual series initiated under the auspices of the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of ALA to recognize outstanding reference sites on the World Wide Web"

+ The only news site to get on this list was BBC.com.

+ Merriam-Webster Online is the dictionary of choice.

+ Metacritic is the movie entry - excellent source of review.

+ WebMD Health and National Institutes of Health were selected for health (quite the endorsement for WebMD)

+ E-How will explain how to do anything.

Otherwise selections were reference on US-specific topics.

Podcast Roundup

Resources of the Week: For Your Listening Pleasure, Shirl Kennedy, Resourceshelf (Jan 4) -- podcast roundup.

Multimedia Search

Search Every Word Spoken in a Video: From YouTube to the PBS NewsHour, ResourceShelf (Jan 5)

Podzinger has transcript searching. Also mentions TV-Eyes and some other tools for video or audio transcript searching.

Search Bar

Fast and Easy: Add Just About Any Search Engine to Your Firefox Search Bar, No Coding Skills Required, ResourceShelf (Jan 7)

Firefox and Opera users can easily add a search engine to their search toolbar.

eSnips MicroPortals

Save It! eSnips Officially Releases Subject-based MicroPortals, Resourceshelf (Jan 8)

eSnips is still alive and better. As Resourceshelf points out, Mary Ellen Bates said very nice things about eSnips as a tool for researhers for saving and sharing material. Now it supports more extensive online community sharing. "Look for links to eSnips MicroPortals/Community links in the upper right side of the eSnips homepage as well near the top of the page."

Avian Flu

Avian Influenza Resources created by Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan.

The list goes to a set of del.icio.us links created by the Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan. Wonderful use of del.icio.us.

Internet Archive's Books

Libraries Continue Adding Material to The Internet Archive, More than 100K Books Now Available on IA Site, Resourceshelf (Jan 10)

2006 in Review

Info Today’s Paula Hane’s Year in Review Article: Wrapping Up 2006; Looking Ahead by Gary Price, Resourceshelf (Jan 10)

Gary riffs off Paula Hane's year-end article to talk about web 2.0, answer services, mobile and multimedia.

Web of Science Review

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf (Jan 2007) reviews ISI's Web of Science in a very detailed report.

"ISI has kept adding new content and software features through regular updates. The latest services clustering of results set by several criteria, the instant calculation and superbly informative and compact visualization of new citation measures, such as the sum of times a paper was cited (including and excluding self-citation, the average citations per item, the Hirsch-index, the almost instant display of charts for the distribution of articles and citations per year by authors, journals, organizations or topic, the exporting of these details into a spreadsheet format, or downloading to a free Web version of EndNote, represent more than a series of evolutionary steps."

Jacso attributes much of this improvement to competition from Scopus and Google Scholar.

Vivisimo and NLM

Vivisimo Clustering Technology Coming to National Library of Medicine and MedlinePlus, Resourceshelf (Jan 18)

Omnidrive - ONline Storage

The Virtual Desktop Takes Step Forward with Zoho and OmniDrive Partnership, ResourceShelf (Jan 21)

"Zoho has partnered with OmniDrive, a web-based/remote storage service. ... Omnidrive not only provides web-accessible, remote storage, but also offers you to stream files, share, publish, and much more. "

Damage from Online Marketing

Law Professor Predicts Wikipedia’s Demise, Thomas Claburn, Information Week (Dec 5, 2006)

Will Wikipedia be "crushed under the weight of an automated assault by marketers and others seeking online traffic"?

"As marketers turn to automated tools to alter Wikipedia entries in order to generate online traffic, the professor predicts Wikipedians will burn out trying to keep entries clean. "

Google Librarian Blog

Search Engine Land commented on Google's launch of the Librarian Central Blog and makes some astute observations.

Google Librarian Central: Talking At Librarians, Search Engine Land (Jan 19)

Not surprisingly, it's directed to librarians in the US (hence ALA conferences), and it seems more intent on delivering information than inviting comment.

On Jan 21 - Ben Bunnell, Library Partnerships Manager posted a summary of his talk at ALA Midwinter - Greetings from ALA - essentially a guide to using Google tools - Google Co-op, Book Search, Scholar, Google Earth. Could be a couple of nuggets on using Book Search and Scholar.

Europe-Targeted Search Services

Checking Out Allcheckin Travel Search, Search Engine Land (Jan 19)

Two Europe-targeted travel search services: Allcheckin - meta-search travel engine with many options, and Opodo - for UK travellers. Considers Allcheckin a good "backup" to Expedia.uk.

UK PubMed Central - New

UK PubMed Central Launched, Newbreaks (Jan 22)

"Based on a model currently used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), UK PubMed Central (UKPMC; www.ukpmc.ac.uk) has launched to provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences."

CSA Illustrata Natural Sciences

Searching Scholarly Tables, Figures, Graphs, and Illustrations with CSA Illustrata by Marydee Ojala, Newbreaks (Jan 22)

"CSA Illustrata is a new resource from CSA (www.csa.com) that provides deep indexing to the tabular and other graphic information published within scholarly articles. Running on the CSA Illumina platform, CSA Illustrata allows researchers to explicitly search for information presented in tables, charts, graphs, maps, photographs, and other figures. Users can view the full object (including all caption and label text), save marked results, and import the illustrations into presentations, lectures, or research."

CSA Illustrata indexes the information content of tables, charts, figures of scholarly articles and enables searchers to locate the articles and related figures easily. They call it "deep indexing" - it includes picking up terms related to the table, variables, text that references the figure. As well figures are indexed by subject, geography, taxonomy, statistical terms.

The first CSA database to benefit from this is Natural Sciences which holds over 880 journals. I saw Illustrata in demo at the ALA Mid-Winter Exhibit Hall - brilliant! Search the Published works or Tables and Figures - browsing and assessing the Published Works is enhanced by the presence of the tables and figures.

For trial access and more information go to http://info.csa.com/csaillustrata/

Fate of Thomson Business Intelligence

Thomson Business Intelligence Dismantling by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 22)

"Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI; www.thomsonbusinessintelligence.com), created from a 2005 reorganization of assets previously assigned to Dialog and reporting—somewhat oddly—to Thomson Legal & Regulatory (www.thomson.com/solutions/legal), has begun dismantling its operations and disposing of its products."

Scenarios - Search in 2015

The search engine scene in 2015, Pandia (Jan 2007)

Fascinating three-part look to the future by the creators of Pandia, Per and Susanne Koch.

Pandia makes some predictions for change in search in 2007 with longer term consequences: text search (still the way), Microsoft vs Yahoo, personalized search, social search (teenagers will move to 3D virtual worlds and abandon the web), and Office online.

Part 2 Search 2015: When media equals the Internet looks at TV, radio, books - Internet is everywhere.

Part 3 Does Google Image Search threaten our civil rights? uses an interview format to look at the "civil rights implications of advanced image search" where the advanced capabilities can analyze the image itself and a society where cameras and image editors are ubiquitous.

One-Word Search Queries

Most people use 2 word phrases in search engines according to RankStat.com (Jan 19, 2007)

New figures from One-Stat on how many words people use in search queries.

1 word - 13.48
2 words - 28.38
3 words - 27.15
4 words - 16.42

But in July 2006 1 word was 11.43% and 2 to 4 words were very similar to December figures.

1 word - 11.43
2 words - 28.91
3 words - 27.85
4 words - 17.11

Searcher habits have probably stabilized. There are situations where 1 word is all that a searcher needs, and in others it's not a bad opening move since several search engines (Ask, Live, Yahoo are examples) are good at offering suggestions for refinement.

Less people use 1 word phrase in search engines according to OneStat.com (July 24, 2006)

Search Scent in Web Design

Search Scent in the Search Engines by Kevin Lee, Clickz (Jan 19)

Searchers will be interested in what's on the minds of search-engine marketers to improve the searcher's experience (and sell the product). PARC scientists posited the idea of that Web users pick up an "information scent" when navigating between sites; Lee converts that idea to a "search scent" that searchers have for a particular piece of information, a scent that advertisers and site designers can plant.

"Search scent is an extension of the information scent concept, initially developed by scientists at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Information scent centers on the how users navigate the Web, both within sites and from one site to the next while pursuing information on a specific topic. The research illustrates that humans forage for information on the Internet in much the same way animals follow scent and visual cues to find food. Scent is essentially an application of user interface optimization best practices, and search scent is a specific niche based on the fact searchers are even more wedded to a particular information-gathering mission than surfers or casual browsers."

Revolution Health - Web 2.0

AOL co-founder Case opens online health site, Reuters via Yahoo (Jan 22)

"AOL co-founder Steve Case launched a health Web site on Monday that will offer free and paid services including social networking tools for sharing information on doctors, insurance and other health topics."

Revolution Health is to be an "online location for resources on health conditions and healthy living topics combined with community and social networking features". Subscription to premium services will be $100 / Year.

Also - Revolution Health Launches Psych Central News, (Jan 22) - This review raises questions about the ratings of drugs at the new health site.

Google Health URL trumped by Steve Case? by Donna Bogatin, ZDNet

Notes that "While RevolutionHealth packages and promotes itself as a “friends and family” health community, it is building a robust health care provisioning infrastructure platform which will be available to consumers as a “premium” health services membership on an annual fee basis."

Weblogs in the Law Office

The Blog - Another Tool in Your Arsenal By Janet Peros, LLRX.com (Jan 15)

"Both information service departments (libraries) and marketing and business development departments in law firms are extensively employing blogs as a vehicle of communication both within the firm and between the firm and its clients. Often used as an alternative to email updates and newsletters, blogs are usually simpler and quicker to update and provide an online archive of searchable information."

Social Networks Reveal Personal Information

The Impact of Social Networking Tools and Guidelines to Use Them By LaJean Humphries, LLRX.com (Jan 15)

Key question -- "Why should the law librarian care about these social networking sites?" Answer -- due dilligence -- " There have been dozens of articles in recent months about employers using social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook to find personal information about job candidates including drinking habits, nudity, general sleaziness, and criminal behavior ranging from shoplifting to violent assaults. " Also -- " Litigation firm investigators are using social networking sites to find information about parties to litigation, witnesses, and even opposing counsel. "

So - all you social networking people - be careful about what you say in your "personal" space and watch what others in your "social network" say about you.

Competitive Intelligence Resources

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide By Sabrina I. Pacifici and Donna Cavallini. LLRX.com (Jan 17 2007) -- revised version of excellent resource guide to search tools, news sources and articles, RSS feeds, tracking tools, and pathfinders.

Articles from E-LIS

Search Articles from E-LIS, SEO by the SEA (Jan 18)

Lists some articles from E-Prints in Library and Information Science about Google Scholar and search behaviour (separate topics).

Of particular interest - White, Bruce (2006) Examining the claims of Google Scholar as a serious information source. New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal 50(1):pp. 11-24.

"This article summarises the debate and then critically examines Google Scholar through a number of practical examples concluding that in terms of its coverage and functionality it outperforms traditional databases in locating a major portion of the available information."

Yahoo Personal Finance

Yahoo to add personal finance content to site -- The Wall Street Journal, among others to provide stories -- Marketwatch (Jan 19)

Yahoo Finance will cover "money matters" also under Personal Finance.

" Among the content on the new section, which will mostly be provided by other sources, will be tips and tools for household budgeting, tax planning, careers, real estate and debt management, the AP said. The content providers will include The Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool, Consumer Reports and CNNMoney.com."

Ask X is Clean

Ask Me about Ask X, Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Info (Jan 2007)

Mary Ellen Bates is switching from Google to the beta interface for Ask - Ask X at www.ask.com/?ax=5 - she likes the "clean, uncluttered format".

Google's Librarian Central

Librarian Central is Google's blog to deliver tips, news and updates to librarians. Pick up the newsletter, tools, stories and videos here too.

Mapshark

Mapshark: A Search Engine For Mashups, Search Engine Land (Jan 17)

Phillip Lenssen gets credit for finding Mapshark, a Custom Search Engine built using Google, to discover mashups. "Search online maps in over 600 websites".

IceRocket for Blog Search

IceRocket and Some New (?) Popularity Features, ResearchBuzz (Jan 8)

Tara Calishain prefers IceRocket for blog searching because it is splog free. Now it has some other features - like hottest movies.

Is Yahoo de-portalizing?

Yahoo's Acquisition Pattern: Smart and Cheap by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web (Jan 16)

According to this article Yahoo is de-portalizing. It has acquired many companies since 2005. Most know about Flickr and del.icio.us but there is also blo.gs, uncomiing.org for meetings, konfabulator for widgets on a desktop (how many people really do this?), jumpcut - video. But Yahoo is slow to integrate these.

UK Government Web and Statute Law

U.K. streamlines e-gov access bY Brian Robinson, FCW.com (Jan 12)

British government is rationalizing and consolidating its web sites.

"Of the 951 Web sites, hosted by 16 departments, reviewed so far, U.K. officials have decided to close 551 and to keep only 26. They will decide the future of the remaining 374 by June."

Most will be concentrated in DirectGov and Business Link.

Also - Free To Access UK Statute Law Database Launched, Managing Information News (Jan 16)

Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) announced the availability of The Statute Law Database to provide "an authoritative and easy-to-use historical database of UK statute law".

"The database offers users a range of advanced search and navigation functions across over 30,000 items of UK primary and secondary legislation. The database contains primary legislation that was in force at 1 February 1991 and primary and secondary legislation that has been produced since that date."

Centiare Directory for Business

Move Over Yellow Pages, Here Comes Centiare, Media Orchard (Dec 28, 2006)

Has great things to say about Centiare, an online reference directory to industry and businesses built through wiki software and individual contributions. It's still very small. Too early to say whether this will fly.

Faganfinder update

Michael Fagan Updates Image Search Portion of FaganFinder, ResourceShelf (Jan 15)

Michael Fagan has been updating at the image search section of his excellent mega-directory of search tools - FaganFinder.

Metaglossary

Metaglossary is a new resource to use to get definitions from the Web - somewhat like define: at Google. It claims 2 million terms, phrases, and acronyms.

Reviewed in MetaGlossary - Two Million Terms, Phrases And Acronyms, Search Engine Land (Jan 16)

Wikiseek Search

Wikiseek: Leveraging Wikipedia For Web Search, Poorly, Search Engine Land (Jan 16)

Wikiseek is supposed to crawl content referred to by Wikipedia. Has possibilities as yet another version of vertical, but these test show you'll get better results staying with Google.

Auto-corrections

Disclosing When Queries Are Autocorrected Search Engine Land (Jan 16)

Search engines that automatically correct your spelling are ok as long as they tell you they have done it and how to override it. Google doesn't seem to do that, although Yahoo does. Entry also explains auto-stemming at Google.

New THOMAS from LOC

Library of Congress Unveils Beta of New THOMAS Newsbreaks (Jan 15)

"The Library of Congress has released a new beta version of THOMAS, its Web site that provides access to federal legislation and related documents ( http://thomas.loc.gov/beta )."

ContentAgenda for the Information Industry

An Infotainment News Portal: ContentAgenda.com from Reed Business Information by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 15)

"Reed Business Information (www.reedbusiness.com) has initiated a beta service called ContentAgenda (www.contentagenda.com) that can help eliminate some of the time spent immersed in news flows. The site combines news aggregation, commentary from industry experts, original reporting, and user-generated content from blogspace features. Another Reed Elsevier Group company, LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com), supplies ContentAgenda's news aggregation with items extracted from about 4,000 to 5,000 sources via the LexisNexis Publisher service. Editors at ContentAgenda evaluate the news flow and blog submissions, as well as moderate discussions."

Search Statistics December 2006

Search Engine Rankings in the U.S. for December, 2006 by Enid Burns, Clickz (Jan 16)

comScore results for December show a 1 % increase in searches in the US in December over November (now 6.7 billion searches in a month). This is 30% over December 2005.

"The search engine with the largest share of searches in December was Google (47.3 percent) with a total 3.2 billion search queries. Yahoo sites were in second place at 28.5 percent, which equaled 1.9 billion searches. The two companies experienced an increase in share size of 0.4 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively."

MSN, Ask, and AOL all slipped slightly.

Search Results Page

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites, Search Engine Land (Jan 15)

Danny Sullivan picked out more interesting findings from a small eye tracking study Microsoft conducted into what people look at on a search results page.

"Among the findings is that search marketers may need to be more concerned about getting into the top five rather than the top ten, if they want to be seen. In addition, search engines might want to seriously experiment more with adding "official site" links at the top of their pages and possibly enlarge the size of listing descriptions or "snippets" to help searches find what they are looking for."

Detailed posting on the findings and Sullivan's thoughts on ways search engines might improve navigational (short snippets) and informational queries (longer ones).

Full report - Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types Edward Cutrell; Zhiwei Guan (January 2007)

About Wikia and Wikis

It's a Wiki World by Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Jan 12)

Describes Jimmy Wales' new project - Wikia - software and online space for creating wikis.

"Wikia is a separate, for-profit venture that sells Google ads down the sides of its pages. ... Instead, prospective wiki owners need to apply, and demonstrate an idea that Wikia deems likely to attract enough volunteer writers and editors to succeed as a living website. ... Wikis are the ultimate in communal creation, excelling in projects that draw a little bit of information from a lot of people."

Gives as an example of a people-powered wiki - LyricWiki.org - "a source where anyone can go to get reliable lyrics for any song from any artist without being hammered by invasive ads."

Google's Related Searches

More Spotting Google's Related Searches At Bottom Of Page, Search engine land (Jan 15)

Describes the occasional appearance at Google of related searches at the bottom of search results pages.

Findory.com Fading Away

Greg Linden Mothballs Findory, Searchengineland (Jan 15)

I was wondering why my daily email from Findory.com of news headlines was more and more off-topic. According to this entry, Greg Linden, the creator has mothballed it - Findory Rides into the Sunset. This was a personalized news service that sort-of learned from what you like. But suddenly it stopped learning or started to forget.

From Linden's post -- "Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had."

Guess I'll unsubscribe. Pity.

Manage E-Mail

E-ddicted to e-mail? Tips for fighting disempowering e-mail habits By: Kathleen Lau, ITWorldCanada.com (15 Jan 2007)

Presents a five-step E-mail self-management program. "She [Marsha Egan] says her program is designed to eliminate these disempowering e-mail habits, and make people more productive".

1. Check email
2. Clear the inbox each time.
3. Use 2-minute rule. Deal with the message in 2 minutes or move the message to a special folder.
4. Set up action folders.
5. Get new email periodically - every two hours, rather than automatically.

Egan has a 12-step program to reduce email addiction.

Berkowitz moves to Microsoft

Why Ask.com's CEO left to join Microsoft By Elise Ackerman, Mercury News (Jan 14)

Here's a shocking bit of news. Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com, has joined Microsoft.

"Berkowitz spoke with the Mercury News about why he agreed to become the senior vice president of Microsoft's online business group and how he plans to pull off the biggest turnaround of his career. What follows is an edited transcript."

Immediate priorities at Microsoft will be to "increase the engagement of the MSN user" and to "develop a Live services strategy that people can understand".

Social Media for Search

2007 The year of search engines and social media, Pandia (Jan 7)

"We are certain that social media marketing — the use of Web 2.0 sites and services — will become an important part of search as well as search engine marketing in 2007."

Of interest: "Social media are also important for web search because some social media sites and tools, like bookmarking sites, swickies and Rollyo, create vertical, topic oriented selections of the web. These kinds of “web extracts” are becoming more and more important as the web grows bigger and more diverse."

Sophisticated Multimedia Search

Are there search engines for image, sound or movie content?, Pandia (Jan 12) -- a few search engines to use for more sophisticated search of images and sounds.

Eye-tracking at Microsoft

Eye Tracking in MSN Search, Search Engine Land (Jan 12)

Microsoft may be using eye-tracking methods to assess effectiveness of snippets for results. "Adding information to result snippets significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks."

Live Search is going to have to do more than this to improve its worth as a search engine.

MSN Virtual Earth

More Geo Info from Virtual Earth, Search Engine Showdown (Jan 10)

"Microsoft announces that they will be updating the aerial imagery in Live Local. Over 400,000 square miles of U.S. aerial imagery are supposed to "enhanced with high-resolution coverage.""

Google Earth

Google Earth 4 Released out of Beta by Nathan Weinberg, Inside Google (Jan 11)

"Google has taken version 4 of Google Earth out of beta, making it the default install of Google’s wildly-renowned globe mapping software."

Zuula Meta Search

Zuula is a new meta-search engine for web, news, images, and blogs. For the Web, it searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Gigablast, and Exalead, but it does not collate results; results are presented for each engine through tabs.

See review at Zuuala Meta Search Engine Search Engine Land (Jan 11)

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams examine how mass collaboration will change the economy and business enterprise in their new book Wikinomics.

The Globe and Mail had a seven-part series (Dec 2006). Start with Part 1: Peer Pioneers -- A new world: Get your mass collaboration road map set - this is Part 7 but it has links to the first 6.

"Forget everything you know about the way we do business. Mass collaboration is revolutionizing the corporation, the economy, and nearly every aspect of management. In this seven-part series, co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, due out Jan. 2, explain new business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust."

Yahoo Local Content

Social Features Key to Yahoo Local By Kevin Newcomb, SearchDay (Jan 11)

"Last month, Yahoo added another user-generated content feature to Local, Consumer Submit. That feature allows users to add or edit a business listing, updating contact information, store hours, or identifying businesses that are no longer open. The modifications do not change the listing permanently, but appear as notes that can be reviewed by others, who can agree or disagree and build a consensus on the accuracy of the information."

Ask.com's Plans

Jim Lanzone’s vision for Ask.com: ‘Real Deal’ Interview Donna Bogatin, ZDNet (Jan 10)

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, sees the mix of the IAC companies with Ask as the ingredients for the "best local search product online."

"We have 30 million users in the U.S., we are the fourth ranked search site in the U.S. You can be fourth in search and still be much larger than people are in many other categories. AskCity was built primarily because local is a top five category in search and it makes up a big proportion of the billions of searches we get every year. We are simply trying to do a better job of helping people find what they are looking for, that is the primary reason AskCity was built."

AskX website is a testing area for new features and shows up randomly as a choice for users to tyr. "Ideally, the best things that are on AskX will migrate to Ask.com for the everyday user. AskX will remain for us as a sandbox to help experiment with new experiences. The Ask.com interface could potentially change, even our home page will potentially evolve over time."

Save Power

Is a vampire lurking in your house? by Cynthia Ross Cravit, 50 Plus (2006)

Home electronics can continue to waste power even when turned off. They don't go fully off - there are clock displays and battery rechargers and other features that draw power. This article points to resources for taking charge including a similar article at Grinning Planet on Vampire Power.

Recommends "using a “smart” power strip (Wattstopper Plug Load Control and Smart Strip Power Strip, to name a few) that automatically cuts power when your devices are off".

Yahoo Go 2.0 for Search on the Road

Yahoo Adds Web Search to Mobile Suite by Marc Ferranti and Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World (Jan 8)

"Yahoo Go 2.0 beta includes a new search app designed for mobile devices."

Of interest -- "A key feature of Yahoo Go 2.0 is oneSearch, a new search engine designed specifically for mobile devices that, instead of returning a list of Web sites, provides facts related to the query term, according to Boerries. For example, if a user enters the name of a sports team, oneSearch will display relevant game scores, team information, photos, news articles and the like."

Friending

Friends, Friendsters and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites by Danah Boyd, First Monday (Dec 2006)

From the abstract: "By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture of the sites. I will argue that Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally. In turn, this provides individuals with a contextual frame through which they can properly socialize with other participants. Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological affordances. I will argue that the established Friending norms evolved out of a need to resolve the social tensions that emerged due to technological limitations. At the same time, I will argue that Friending supports pre-existing social norms yet because the architecture of social network sites is fundamentally different than the architecture of unmediated social spaces, these sites introduce an environment that is quite unlike that with which we are accustomed."

Net Neutrality in Canada

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada, Feb 6, 2007 (7 pm) in Ottawa Public Library Auditorium to be moderated by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Panelists will be:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking

Announcement on the CLA List included a list of other resources.

Battle over 'net neutrality' arrives in Canada
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2006/11/02/tech-neutrality.html

The Telecom Policy Review: The Rest of the Story
http://michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1181&Itemid=85

The Alternative Telecommunications Policy Forum
http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/alttelecompolicyforum.ca/

Net Neutrality in Canada
http://www.neutrality.ca/

Video of the event will be available later.

See CLA posting for details.

Get Cranky

New Social Search Engine Targets Boomers , Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Jan 9)

"Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd launched last year by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, has launched a new Web search engine [ Cranky ] that will apply user behavior from its network to sort search results."

One of the top 10 searches at Cranky in 2006 was elderhostel. Cranky gets results from Ask.com.

More Predictions 2007

The future of the Internet - Commentary: Big media is not king, but video will be by Bambi Francesco, Marketwatch (Jan 9)

"Here are two predictions: On the Internet, a walled-garden approach, like Disney.com, will be a tough sell, and big media content won't be king (maybe queen or jack). Open platforms and video are king on the Internet. "

Article has some other predictions to tease us.

Content trends 2007

Themes for 2007 by Barry Graubart in Content Matters (Jan 4) - names 8 areas for growth or decline. Growth: widgets, RSS, integrated blogging tools, web advertising, and vertical search. Decline: usage of MySpace, newspaper readership. Also predicts further consolidation in the content industry - will AOL or Yahoo be acquired? Barry Graubart is Vice President, Product management for Alacra, a leading content technology company - chances are he has an insight track on this.

ChaCha Growing

Search Engine ChaCha Announces $6 Million Round, Searchengineland (Jan 8)

The "people powered search" service, ChaCha , just got more funding. ChaCha has guides who will answer questions for free - ChaCha pays them. The site has grown considerably in number of guides and content.

Press Releases

MSN's Live Search News giveth and AOL News taketh away, SEW Blog (Jan 4)

"According to a report from Outsell, press releases have become the top news source of knowledge workers. Outsell called this an “eye-popping shift in most-used information types.”"

Live Search just added press releases to its News, and AOL removed them.

Trends 2006 and 2007

Wrapping Up 2006; Looking Ahead by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 8)

"In our world, information providers tried to "kick it up a notch" to stay relevant for Google-influenced users—many of the vendors rolled out platform upgrades and embraced newer technologies, often through partnerships. Traditional media providers struggled to maintain audiences. Companies merged, acquired competitors, divested nonessential units, and reorganized. Librarians worked to reach users outside library environments, using tools such as Open WorldCat and Second Life. Librarians took up a number of causes: supporting the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) libraries, which have started to close; supporting open access to federally funded research; and backing the Net Neutrality movement. Digitization projects from Google and members of the Open Content Alliance marched forward. Copyright issues remained unsettled."

Through all of this it was the "world of 2.0" - web 2.0, library 2.0, enterprise 2.0.

For trends, Hane picks growth in video, blogs, and mashups. Also 2006 saw many new search engines and many new services / products from Google.

For 2007 watch for more collaboration through wikis, mobile computing, widgets, the "Google effect", and more Internet participation.

Hane points to several other pages of predictions and year-end analyses.

Implications of a Participatory Internet

Time's choice could prove inspired by Michael Geist, The Star (Jan 8)

Time magazine's selection of Internet participants as the "person of the year" has made Geist ask about the reaction of Canadian government leaders and policy makers to the development of a participatory Internet and user-generated content. He suggests that "the role of government will be to support the enormous economic and cultural potential of user-generated content, while avoiding steps that might impede its growth. It can do so by focusing on the three "C's" – connectivity, content and copyright."

Teens use Social Network Spaces

The Kids are all right by Martha Irvine, AP via Globe and Mail (Jan 8)

Kids are socializing big time through social networks - especially teenage girls.

"The Pew survey, released Sunday, found that 70 per cent of teen girls, ages 15 to 17, had profiles on social networking sites, compared with 57 per cent of boys in that age bracket."

Articles summarizes findings from the latest PEW report - Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview

Web Services for Everyday

The Web's Most Useful Sites by Ryan Singel, PC World (Dec 22, 2006)

Web services for doing more and more online abound. PC World lists "next-generation services can help with everything from wrangling passwords to throwing a party".

+ Word Processors - Google Docs and Spreadsheets and the Zoho product line assists in document sharing and collaborative work.

+ Bookmark Managers - del.icio.us won out over Ma.gnolia and StumbleUpon. Furl.net lost - too drab, they said.

+ Password Managers - Password Safe, but don't use it for anything sensitive.

+ Instant Messengers - not Yahoo or AIM or MSN/Live, but Meebo -- "lets you sign into AIM, Google's GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger simultaneously. "

+ User Review Sites - Yelp seems to have nice features. Also mentions Yahoo Local and CitySearch which I have used and can be useful. But these are for US users.

+ Answer Sites - Yahoo Answers, of course.

+ Event Calendars - Upcoming.org really does have events from around the world including Canada (Toronto, Vancouver). Select Metros and enter the city name.

+ To-Do Lists - Rememberthemilk will keep the calendar and send reminders. Sign me up.

+ Video Aggregation - VideoSift was chosen for "community submissions and voting"

+ Web Operating Systems - "A Web OS, paired with a PC's ability to install specialized programs locally, may well be computing's future." - Not really ready for primetime yet.

+ Online Maps - Google Maps was picked over Yahoo, Ask, and Live. MapQuest trailed badly (but it is the most popular). Good comparison chart for the 5 services.

+ Widgets for desktops - there are hundreds of these that can be attached to personal portal pages. PC World mentions several but omits all the Firefox extensions which are widget-like.

+ Mashups - combine data from 2 or 3 sources, such as real estate with maps. Mashups are always fun.

Image Search Optimization

Optimizing Images for Search Engines By Grant Crowell, SearchDay (Dec 28, 2006)

People are paying attention to making their images easier to find. A panel discussion at the Search Engine Strategies Conference revealed that image search "is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL."

Google Images holds largest market share - 72% according to Hitwise.

Image search optimization is important to promote products. "The panelists agreed that image search optimization is a necessity for merchants to incorporate into their marketing plans. "Shoppers are visual. They simply need to see what they're buying," said Evans. She also said she regarded image optimization as "the next frontier of search for merchants.""

A lot of search engines

Top 100+ Search Engines by John Batelle - tag cloud of search engines compiled by Charles Knight. It's not easy to read but does have variety (web, meta, real-estate, audio video, blog, social bookmarking) and will show engines you've never heard of.

Vertical Search

Are Vertical Search Engines the Answer to Relevance? By Eric Enge, SearchDay (Jan 3)

Article Provides a fairly good introductory description of vertical search (search engines that specialize in a subject area for a target population). It was written for the search engine marketer who may want to place ads in vertical search engines that match with their business.

Aviva Directory

The Aviva Web Directory, Pandia (Jan 1)

Aviva is yet another place to add your website and be listed. Of course, it costs money.

"Three types of listings are offered - featured, regular and reciprocal. For regular listings, you receive an additional three links to your website. If you purchase a featured listing, you receive premium placement in the directory, the ability to be more flexible with the title used for your website, and an additional five links to your website."

Leave it to Vista

Is desktop search over? by Greg Linden (Dec 28)

Good question - Windows Vista is said to be remarkably good at searching the desktop. "Now that Microsoft has fixed desktop search, they will integrate search throughout Windows and Windows applications. The easiest and most obvious option for searching will be the search box sitting right in front of you. That box will be powered not by Google or Yahoo, but by Microsoft."

Podcasting Primer

Podcasting Adds to the Media Mix by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp Digital (Jan 2007)

Primer on podcasting for people who want to tune in or produce their own podcasts.

"Podcasting is the recording and broadcasting of audio, typically verbal rather than musical, for playback. It is often done through a portable digital media player such as an iPod. The content can also be video or other multimedia files, and players can also be notebook or desktop personal computers."

Connecting social networks

Taking Charge of Content by Peggy Anne Salz, E-Content (Dec 2006)

Social networks may encourage interaction but only among members. Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics wants to connect the networks.

"Designed from the ground up to unleash users and their content, the company aims to interconnect the world's social networks and ultimately create a meshed universe of infinite social networks. Canter envisions as many networks as there are people, to match each individual's multi-faceted personal and professional personae."

Library Web 2.0

Building a Library Web Site on the Pillars of Web 2.0 by Karen A. Coombs. Computers in Libraries (Jan 2007)

Identifies six pillars of Web 2.0 that could be used for rebuilding a library Web site.

1. Radical decentralization
2. Small pieces loosely joined
3. Perpetual beta
4. Remixable content
5. User as contributor
6. Rich user experience

Yahoo Toolbar and Bookmarks

Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks by Chris Sherman, Clickz (Dec 27)

"Yahoo recently released a new version of its toolbar with a powerful new bookmarking feature that integrates seamlessly with Yahoo Web search, and features a "radical" new user interface."

Bookmarking is private, supports folders and tagging, and has a keyword search. Get the new toolbar at toolbar.yahoo.com. Appears to be for Internet Explorer.

Addendum: If you have been using Yahoo MyWeb and want to work with the new bookmarks version, go to beta.bookmarks.yahoo.com. Yahoo automatically moves your saved pages on MyWeb to the new Yahoo! Bookmarks and puts everything into the Uncategorized folder. Fortunately, those bookmarks can still be viewed in MyWeb.

Firefox users will need to add a bookmarklet to the browser links bar to add bookmarks easily - the Yahoo toolbar doesn't have the feature.

Wish: Like many others, I wish Yahoo would integrate all these different services - Bookmarks, MyWeb with social bookmarking, and del.icio.us.
There is more information in the Yahoo Search Blog -- Better Bookmarks, Better Toolbar (Oct 24, 2006)

Digg Podcasting

Digg Adds Podcasts, VC Funding by Amy Gahran, Poynter Online (Dec 29)

"On Dec. 18, Podcasting News gave an overview of Digg's new features. The one which caught my attention is this: "Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes."" See Digg's Podcasting page.

Wikia for Search

Something Wiki Is Coming to the Web Search Market, Noah Cohen, New York Times (Jan 1)

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia has an idea for improving search -- "Wikiasari for now, was announced in December by Wikia, a for-profit company co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the former options trader who has been the public face of Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, a wiki search engine would be based on the idea that volunteers can do the work of paid specialists — in the case of search engines, the work of sophisticated computers that evaluate Web sites for relevance using secret criteria."

Also reviewed in BusinessWeek -- Crowd Wisdom vs. Google's Geniusby Catherine Holahan (Dec 27, 2006) --

"Though the Wikiasari project is scheduled to debut in the first quarter of next year, Wales suspects it will take roughly three years of user input before it has enough information to become a real competitor to the top search engines."

Wikia is Growing - Is Anyone Paying Attention? by Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch (Jan 3)

"According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically."

People who write about search engines

In the First Week of New Year’s, My SearchDay Gave to Me: By Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Jan 2)

Lists speakers, bloggers, and journalists who are knowledgeable and perhaps influential on web search.

Online Video 2006

Long Live the Net Video Revolution -- Vlogging, citizen journalism, and other facets of the online video phenomenon will shine on in the New Year -- by Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek Online (Jan 2)

"More than 79% of U.S. broadband Internet users watched video in 2006, according to a September eMarketer study. Roughly 32% of all U.S. Internet users said they watched more online video in '06 vs. a year earlier."

Blog Search Engines

The State of Blog Search Engines: Depressing, ResearchBuzz (Dec 30 2006)

Google Blog Search may be the most popular blog search engine but Tara Calishain finds it clogged with spam. She says that there isn't a perfect blog searcher, though she looks to IceRocket and to Blogdigger.

CHIRP for Bird Lovers

Library of Bird and Animal Sounds Available, ResearchBuzz (Jan 3)

"CHIRP! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library’s Web site is now making available over 65,000 sound clips and about 18,000 video clips of birds and animals. You can get your squawk on at http://www.animalbehaviorarchive.org ."

Sidestep's Cruise Vertical

SideStep to Launch Travel Search Industry's First Cruise Vertical, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 4)

"SideStep, the Internet's leading travel search company, today announced the upcoming launch of its Cruise vertical, the company's latest category expansion. The new Cruise search, which will be available this month, will enable SideStep users to research and book all major cruise destinations -- including the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Alaska, The Bahamas and Europe -- and will include useful information such as ship details, ship reviews and star ratings, and photos and tours, as well as detailed information regarding staterooms, public areas and deck plans."

Citation Analysis

Meho, Lokman I. (2007) The rise and rise of citation analysis. -- E-print from Library and Information Science

"With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, the author describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a historical background of citation analysis, ISI's citation databases, and the impact factor. Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Web of Science and other more recent citation data sources (e.g., Scopus and Google Scholar), the impact of the Web on citation analysis, and the emergence of new citation-based research assessment measures (e.g., h-index). Argues that the use of multiple Web-based citation tools allows more accurate visualizations of scholarly communication networks. Also argues that publishing a journal article is now only the first step in disseminating one's work."

Mentioned in The rise and rise of citation analysis, ResourceShelf (Jan 3)

Google Patent Search Flawed

Google Tackles Patent Searching by Robert E. Buntrock, Newsbreaks (Jan 2)

Members of the listservs, CHMINF-L for chemical information and PIUG (Patent Information Users Group), are noting many errors in the new Google Patent Search (beta) product.

"Several comments and gripes have already been reported by subscribers to the lists cited above (archives are accessible at http://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/chminf-l.html and at http://piug.org/list.html). Retrieval counts for various searches (such as keyword, inventor, assignee, etc.) show that GPS often underperforms other compendia of U.S. patents. OCR errors are fairly common in GPS, which can be quite damaging to retrieval even if they are rare on a percentage basis."

Google Didn't Have It

Overlap Showdown: Only at 1 of 6, Search engine showdown (Dec 28)

Greg Notess searched for an AIM screen name and received the result from only one engine from this list: Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo! Google didn't have it and he notes that other tests he has done have shown some weakness in Google. Presentation is done as a short audio video screencast stored at YouTube.

Google Link Command

A Google Link Command that Returns Perfect Data, SEOMoz Blog (Jan 4)

Link command has never worked properly in Google Web search, but it appears to be good in blog search.

SEO Blogs

Search Engine Journal's 2006 Blog Awards Announces Winners, Searchengineland (Jan 5)

Lists the best of blogs that relate to search engine marketing. Best search blog was Matt Cutts' Gadgets, Google and SEO - has tips and tricks and good technical stuff. But for Search Engine news go to Search Engine Watch blog, Search Engine Roundtable , and, one of my favourites, Google Blogscoped.

Fast Forward 2007 Blog

Fast Forward Blog- A hosted discussion on Enterprise 2.0 -- companion to conference on FastForward 07 -- "The blog's focus, like the conference's: Enterprise 2.0 and how today's companies and individuals are harnessing technology to collaborate, innovate, manage knowledge and much more."

Heirs to Google Answers

"Google Answers is Dead! Long Live Google Answers!" By David Sarokin, Freepint (Dec 2006)

Reflections on the usefulness of Google Answers and reasons for its demise by someone who was one of the researchers. Why did Google not promote GA even as it became clear from the success of Yahoo Answers that people are flocking to these services? YA is free, and GA was not - but people will pay when getting the answer matters.

Mentions some other services to turn too including the Sarokin's XooxleAnswers.

Google's Other Offerings

Beyond Search: Google Specialty Services by
Dennis O'Reilly, PC World (Thursday, December 28, 2006)

Reviews several services from Google:

+ Alerts - web, blogs, news, groups, all
+ Catalogs - from stores. Can look at them, but have to phone to order.
+ Custom Search Engine - build your own or use one built by someone else
+ Specialized Searches - US Government etc.
+ Web Accelerator for broadband users

Raising Revenue

Google makes 20 cents per search? by Greg Linden, Geeking with Greg (Dec 27)

Google may be making $.20 per search while Yahoo received $.10 to $.11 per search in 2006. Data comes from article in Business Week, Why Yahoo's Panama Won't Be Enough.

That article looks at ways Yahoo might match Google. It can't rely on search-related text ads which comprise only 46% of the online advertising market. "Yahoo has to wring more money from all of its available inventory. That means attracting advertisers to the social-networking and user-generated content that has ballooned on Yahoo's site, in some cases growing faster than Yahoo's premium properties and creating tons more inventory on which Yahoo can serve ads."

Mentions competiting ad models and services: TACODA (behavioral targeting) and Quigo (branded sites).

Google Predictions 2007

Google Predictions, 2007 by Garett Rogers, ZDNet (Dec 23) -- picks up some clues on what Google will do in 2007 - a fewer new products, maybe web storage, a medical scrapbook, Google Checkbook takes on Paypal globally, perhaps Google TV.

Search Stories 2006

The Year in Search 2006 by Chris Winfield , 10e20 (Dec 20)

"2006 was a year that saw the definition of search expand. Search to me has become an all-encompassing word. Search is information. Search is media. Search is social interaction. Search is life."

Andrew Goodman and Cory responded in Traffick.com with Monster Chiller Horror Post - See Occam's Razor Slash Chris! - they trimmed the list considerably.

QnA ratings

Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked, Searchengineland (Dec 28)

Summarizes rankings from MIT Technology Review of some question-and-answer services. Yahoo Answers received the highest score in the Slashdot study of 11 out of 12, well ahead of Microsoft's Live QnA (7 points) or Wondir (4). Article is interesting for the examples of questions and answers.

Yahoo Answers also has the highest market share according to Hitwise (96%)!

Google's IE7

Google releases customized version of IE 7 By: Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service (New York Bureau) (18 Dec 2006) via itWorldCanada.

"Google Inc. has released a customized version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) browser in which Google, not Windows Live Search, is the default search engine."

Get the version from http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie7/ - requires Windows XP.