Internet News

No Backwards Link at Live

Microsoft’s Live Search Shutsdown Advanced Search Queries, Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim (Mar 29)

Live Search no longer allows the backwards search - looking for pages that link to a given url. This option still appears in the Advanced Search but it doesn't work - you get a blank page - not even a message. Previously you could also do link: or linkdomain:. Supposedly Microsoft is working at restoring it.

Postscript: April 2 - inurl doesn't work either!

Microsoft must really want to annoy advanced searchers.

Learning About New Search Engines

Keeping an eye on search engine innovation, Pandia (Mar 30)

Directs readers to Charles Knight's column at Read/Write Web about alternative search engines (alternative to Google). Start with his article in March.

Journalism use of Audio slideshows

The Best of Multimedia Photojournalism: The Era of the Ear by Keith Jenkins, Poynter Online (Mar 30)

"Listen to Keith Jenkins and the judges of the Best of Photojournalism's Best of the Web contest discuss audio slideshows, the ethics of using certain kinds of audio and the future of online video."

Wiki for Travel

WikiTravel has destination guides and articles for the traveller. There's a news feed for travel news and trivia. Has content in several languages. One to watch - http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page

IR in Folksonomies - Study

Information Retrieval in Folksonomies: Search and Ranking, by Andreas Hotho, Robert J¨aschke, Christoph Schmitz, Gerd Stumme - Knowledge & Data Engineering Group, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Kassel (2006?)

Abstract. Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. At the moment, however, there exists no foundational research for these systems. We present a formal model and a new search algorithm for folksonomies, called FolkRank, that exploits the structure of the folksonomy. The proposed algorithm is also applied to find communities within the folksonomy and is used to structure search results. All findings are demonstrated on a large scale dataset.

For a very condensed view of the paper, see the short presentation on IR in Folksonomies.

In considering the components of an algorithm for searching folksonomies, this article gives us some pointers on the value of folksonomies and some weaknesses.

+ "... two motivating observations: (a) folksonomies can augment the rigid structure of corporate knowledge management, adding individual statements about resources which can be used for ranking search results, and (b) from this additional structure, recommendations for intranet users can be extracted."

+ "The systems can be distinguished according to what kind of resources are supported. Flickr, for instance, allows the sharing of photos, del.icio.us the sharing of bookmarks, CiteULike3 and Connotea4 the sharing of bibliographic references, and 43Things 5 even the sharing of goals in private life. Our own
upcoming system, called BibSonomy,6 will allow to share simultaneously bookmarks and bibtex entries."

+ Premise to the FolkRank algorithm: "The basic notion is that a resource which is taggedwith important tags by important users becomes important itself. The same holds, symmetrically, for tags and users, thus we have a graph of vertices which are mutually reinforcing each other by spreading their weights."

+ On the influence of number of users: "On the other hand, the results also show that the current size of folksonomies on the web is still prone to being skewed by a relatively small number of perturbations – a single user, at the moment, can influence the emergent understanding of a certain topic in the case that a sufficient number of different points of view for such a topic has not
been collected yet. We expect that similar results could be obtained analysing other folksonomy tools. Furthermore, with the growth of folksonomies on the web, the influence of single users will fade in favor of a common understanding provided by huge numbers of users."

However, it doesn't appear that FolkRank has been turned into a tool we can use to search del.icio.us and the others.

Librarian Central from Google

Google Librarian newsletter announced the Librarian Central blog - http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/ - add it to your newsreader.

Web 2.0 Search Engines

Top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines, OEDB (Feb 2007)

Found through Internet Resources newsletter for March 2007

25 search engines that use some Web 2.0 technology. "Some offer functionality that's slowly making its way into traditional search engines. Others further the attempt to traverse the invisible Web and index other previously unsearchable research sources."

+ Whonu is a service that can pick out the engines to use depending on the need. Judging from the tutorial, it's especially strong in finding things by U.S. zip code. Or ask a question, and be taken to Brainboost. But there is much else - worth watching the 27 minute video.

+ Tagging and mashups - try Similici.us
+ Rich interfaces - mentions Kartoo, Ukiko, Quintura and more
+ Visual search
+ Audio search

Alouette Canada - digitization

Canada's New Government Supports the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Alouette Canada - Open Digitization Initiative -

On March 14, 2007, "the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women, Royal Galipeau, Member of Parliament (Ottawa-Orléans), announced ... new funding of up to $328,600 for the AlouetteCanada Metadata Toolkit, a project of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. This initiative will lead to the development of software and standards to assist organizations in generating metadata for digitized collections. It will foster a level of cohesion and improve functionality within the growing body of digitized content in Canada."

The Business Plan has more details. "AlouetteCanada will aggregate the metadata that points to already digitized content in ways useful for Canadians. Its participants do the work of content creation, create and organize the metadata describing the material and facilitating access to and use of that content in local or regional systems of their own. We will work together to promote awareness of these new and unique resources to local, national and international audiences."

eTools.ch from Europe

A "Swiss Army" Meta Search Engine by Chris Sherman, Searchengineland (Mar 30)

Chris Sherman speaks warmly of this new meta-search engine - eTools.ch . It's unique in that it lets you weight the importance of the source engines - Altavista, Ask, Google, MSN and others. I like it for the way it shows results from each source in the side panel. I would like it more if it had clustering.

"Enter a query and eTools.ch searches the four major search engines (Ask, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo), several European engines (Seekport, Entireweb and Bluewin) and oddly, AltaVista and Lycos, two all-but-forgotten stars of yore. Results display your query terms highlighted in yellow, a preview link, and the source of the result. Each source is linked, allowing you to quickly re-run the search in any of the ten engines queried. By default, results are multi-lingual, but drop-down boxes let you limit results by country or language."

No .xxx Domain

ICANN rejects '.xxx' domain plan by Matt Moore, AP via Globe and Mail (Mar 30)

For the third time, ICANN says NO to .xxx - you'd think people would give up on this.

"Nearly all of the board members who voted against approving the domain said they were concerned about the possibility that ICANN could find itself in the content regulation business if the domain name was approved. Others criticized that, saying ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that, noting that local, state and national laws could be used to decide what is pornographic and what is not."

Software and Service Freebies

101 fantastic freebies by Preston Gralla, ITworldcanada (Mar 28)

"The Internet is stuffed with great downloads and Web sites offering free software and services of every kind. Want to tune up your PC, keep it safe, create graphics, or back up your system with gobs of free storage space? You can find free software and sites to do all that, and plenty more."

This is an excellent list, the product of evaluation and reader response.

+ System utilities
+ Security software
+ Registry cleaner
+ Hardware utility
+ Communications and file sharing
+ Instant messaging, voice and video
+ blogs and news reading
+ Personal Web
+ RSS readers - online, software
+ Desktop search
+ Backup and file synchronization
+ productivity and office aps
+ Music, photos and video
+ Image editing
+ Multimedia Tools and Toys

Desktop Yahoo Widgets

Web-Watching the Widget Way, Reuters via eWeek (Mar 28)

Widgets seem to be everywhere - certainly at Google, Yahoo, and Live. This article promotes Yahoo Widgets - http://widgets.yahoo.com/ .
Definition: "Widgets allow the user to access information by desktop without opening a web browser." [These are the Yahoo widgets. There are other types that fit into a web page, such as a home page.]

Yahoo: "Yahoo recently launched Widgets 4 and has more than 4,300 widgets, many written by third parties but that include company-branded ones.

Implication: "If you have that application running there (on the desktop) all the time, from an advertiser and a brand's perspective, that's obviously an opportunity to connect with their key audiences," said Brody [Paul Brody, VP desktop products, Yahoo]

LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts

LexisNexis, Dow Jones alliance brings current news to Law Firms LexisNexis (Mar 29)

"LexisNexis today announced an alliance with Dow Jones to produce the newest offering law firms can use to stay current on important news affecting their practices.

LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts, powered by Factiva® from Dow Jones, provides to legal professionals continuously updated crucial news, such as mergers and acquisitions, Initial Public Offerings, national litigation and other vital information.",

Phishing UP

ICANN urged to cut phishing trawl with banking domain, By John Leyden, Channel Register (Mar 29)

Some are calling on ICANN to create a new domain for financial institutions to use exclusively - .safe or .sure -

"If ICANN introduced a .safe domain (or .sure or .bank), which could only be used by registered financial institutions, it would allow security providers to create better software to protect the public, according to F-Secure."

This would afford some protection since phishers would be less able (one presumes completely unable) to create a phishing site in that controlled domain.

Phishing, the act of tricking a person to divulge personal financial information, is huge business and rapidly increasing.

"According to figures from UK banking organisation APACS released earlier this month, online banking fraud losses in the UK alone came to £33.5m in 2006, up from £23.2m in 2005. This 44 per cent year-on-year increase was largely driven by an increase in phishing incidents, which went up from 1,713 in 2005 to 14,156 last year."

Google Magna

Is Google Too Powerful? by Rob Hof and others, BusinessWeek Online (Apr 9)

In 2004 there was a faux documentary video that projected online worlf for information to 2014. The scenarios in EPIC 2014 may be coming true today as Google amasses more influence and reach.

But for now those alternatives, whether they be a struggling Yahoo or Microsoft or the new NBC-News Corp. video network, by all accounts pale next to the Google juggernaut. More than anyone else, Google is defining the new architecture of media and commerce in the digital world. The unruly expanse of the Internet and its opportunities cries out for a map, and that's what Google is building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data. With each new search whose data refine that map, with each new business that links its own digital explorations to the search engine, Google gains more knowledge and more power. As a result, it's in a position not only to define what this new world looks like but also to chart where it goes and even determine which will be the prime destinations and which will become backwaters.

A Better Google Notebook

Google Notebook has been dressed up and moved out of beta. This tool is handy for saving clips from web pages, adding notes, and keeping urls in an online space that can be shared. The recent improvements add formatting options to the full page view of notebook contents, a better looking mini-view of an individual notebook, and more options for organizing and managing clips. For example, you can now move a clip from one folder to another.

See Google Blogscoped (Mar 28) - Google Notebook Redesign.

Google Mobile Search

Google launches new mobile search engine By: Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (Miami Bureau) via ITWorldCanada (28 Mar 2007)

"Launched on Tuesday, http://www.google.com/m?uipref=3 can be accessed from a mobile browser and customized to feature pre-selected weather, news, stocks and movies information, tailored to a specific geographic area."

Video Search Guide

Video Search Engines And Online Video Directories: A Mini-Guide Robin Good (Jan 25, 2007)

Mini-guide to video finding tools: search engines and directories and the kind of content you can expect to find. Also has information on where you can submit videos.

Flash Files Not Really Indexed

Don't Expect A Magic Flash Solution For Search Engines by Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (Mar 27)

Search engines do not index the image content in flash modules - and won't be doing so anytime soon. They can pick up text that is embedded in a Flash movie, but don't count on it. See Does Google index sites that use Macromedia Flash?

Onion News on Video

It takes a comedian by Jack Kapica, Cyberia, Globe and Mail (Mar 27)

The Onion, the wonderful satiric news site and paper, is going to add videos to its salvos.

"The Onion, a satirical fake-news website that has offered up a lot of smirks and giggles if not outright belly laughs, is launching an online version of its pseudo-newspaper format, a news program with an anchor (Michele Ammon, an actress who plays the newsreader Jean Anne Wharton, pictured at left). The Onion News Network will start as two video clips per week, and move on from there."

Start watching now - there are links to videos at http://www.theonion.com/content/

Yahoo Mail - Unlimited Storage

Yahoo! bests Gmail with unlimited storage, by Elinor Mills, Silicon.com (Mar 28)

Unlimited storage for e-mail! That should make packrats of all of us. But people need the space for photos and videos. Yahoo has 250 million users, and is the largest webmail provider in the US and the world. Rollout will begin in May 2007.

"Yahoo! will begin offering unlimited storage for its free web-based email in May. The move makes it the first of the major free email providers to offer unlimited storage but, in all likelihood, it will not be the last.

Yahoo! currently offers 1GB for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service. Google's free Gmail service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free."

Google's Translate

Google seeks world of instant translations by Adam Tanner, Reuters Canada (Mar 27)

Google is aiming to provide instant translations of documents through statistical machine translation. This is done by determining patterns of translation from examples of translations done by humans. Franz Och, from Germany, hads up the Google's translation effort.

" So far, Google is offering its own statistical machine translations of Arabic, Chinese and Russian to and from English at http://www.google.com/language_tools. Third-party software gives access on the site to German and other languages, Och said.

"So far, the focus is let's make it really, really good," Och said. "As part of a general Google philosophy, once it's really useful and it has impact, then there will be found ways how to make money out of it.""

Will it contribute to world understanding and peace?

Google Will "Surface" Information

Google and the deep web by Greg Linden (Mar 23)

Through papers Google has released recently, Greg Linden has gleaned much about Google's intentions on whether to index structured data in order to reach into the "deep web" (aka invisible web).

There is specific mention of the "content that lies hidden behind queryable HTML forms", ie dynamically generated answers. Google sees generating queries on those databases based on the user's key words, and - possibly - anticipating these by "surfacing" information beforehand and adding that to the Google index.

In the followup posting - The end of federated search? (Mar 24) Linden concludes that Google will not do federated search (a meta search of other search engines such as those powering specific databases), but opt for copying what it can.

Federated search would require a "virtual schema" with the domains mapped into a common view. That's not going to happen.

From the quote: "The third limitation is our reliance on structured queries. Since queries on the web are typically sets of keywords, the first step in the reformulation will be to identify the relevant domain(s) of a query and then mapping the keywords in the query to the fields of the virtual schema for that domain. This is a hard problem that we refer to as query routing."

A9.com, as Linden explained, was an attempt at large scale federated searching, and presumably it has failed. And even though its creator, Udi Manher is now with Google, Google seems to prefer the surfacing approach, probably for performance reasons.

What does this mean for searchers? We're not going to see a search service that can automatically direct us to the best resource and then exploit the structure and organization of that resource to deliver answers. We will get clues from Google, but not the in-depth search that is required for digging into the deep web. Searchers - it is still up to you to find the resources and learn how to use them.

Addendum: There is an excellent discussion of federated search and metasearch in the comments to the End of Federated Search

Comments on the value of metasearch (the type that fuses results from different but similar search engines) - "On the other hand, with metasearch, each search engine is working across the same corpus, and the whole point is that duplicate content is a good thing. The more often that independent search engines retrieve the same document, the higher our confidence is that the document is truly relevant."

Quality of Search Results

Google, Yahoo May Not Highlight The Good Stuff, Network World via PCWorld (Mar 26)

"Researchers are trying to figure out how to make more of the good stuff float to the top of Internet search engines and keep more of the bad stuff buried."

Researchers in Australia and in the UK are questioning how well the search engines rank results so that the best material shows first.

At the Queensland University of Technology, Professor Audun Josang recommends more social control - have users rate the quality of the website. [To some extent the social bookmarking sites help in validating sites.]

The article also refers to a study by the Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford - The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise

"One of the researchers' basic observations is that Google and other search engines play a key gatekeeper role and that the Internet isn't just a fair-playing field when it comes to information distribution. They are urging policymakers and educators to pay close attention to this situation and work to make the Web a more useful source of information on important topics. Researchers too need to think about more than just tossing their information onto the Web, but make sure that people will be able to find it."

TV Guide for Video Search

TV Guide to launch video search engine By Gary Gentile, AP via Chicago Tribune (Mar 27)

" Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. will launch a test version next month of an online video search tool that allows viewers to find clips and full episodes of TV shows now being posted on the Web. A formal launch is planned for September. ... it will scour about 60 Web sites from major networks such as ABC and Fox and other video portals such as AOL and Google to find network and original programming produced by major media companies."

ZipLocal in Canada

Rebranded Canadian Local Search Site ZipLocal Launches, Search Engine Land (Mar 26)

ZipLocal does local search for Canada.

From the site - "ZipLocal was formed in 2006 from the merger of Zip411, redToronto, and redMississauga. We are Canada's second largest local directory... with 1.3 million business listings nationwide More than 22 million searches conducted annually Over 1 million average unique users monthly An average 45% growth in traffic, searches, and unique users in the last year alone"

Google CSEs

Getting Link Love From Google Custom Search Engines by Eric Ward, Search engine land (Mar 26)

Advice to webmasters to make sure their site is included in any custom search engine that seems to be specializing on their topic.

Most remarkably there is a directory to Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) - http://www.customsearchguide.com/

Mentions other players in custom search - Rollyo, swicki, Gigablast, and Yahoo Search Builder.

Citizendium Launched

Wikipedia rival makes its debut, CNet News (Mar 26)

Larry Sanger, who worked with Jimmy Wales in creating Wikipedia has done the world a favour by launching a competiting encyclopedic wiki called Citizendium. It promises to have more editorial control to prevent the problems that have infested Wikipedia.

At present it has 1,100 articles. The real names of the editors are shown on the CZ Editors Page .

Semantic Search at Hakia

Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies, by Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web (Mar 23)

Hakia CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek Pulatkonak spoke about the new "meaning based" search engine in this interview --

"Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. Riza and Melek told me that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis - search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant. "

They are calling this semantic search - but not the Tim Berner-Lee's idea of semantic with an ontology - rather this is to be a semantic structure determined from the language people use.

Join Congoo News Circles

Congoo News Circles Adds the Glue by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 26)

"Congoo offers compelling premium content along with aggregated content from around the Web. It recently introduced Congoo News (http://news.congoo.com), which provides categorized access to more than 25,000 free news sources and 300 premium sources. With the addition of the just-announced News Circles feature, Congoo now also offers a compelling social networking and communication platform that adds the "glue" to the service."

Hane gives us a very big tip -- "Here's a tip I discovered in an unofficial blog about Google: Most of the content from Google News Archives (http://news.google.com) requires subscriptions. A good way to get free access to some of the archives is to install the Congoo toolbar."

The Congoo News Circle is really a breeze to set up. Here's mind for now http://www.congoo.com/websearchguide

SiteAdvisor Protects

Free Security Tool Attracts 38 Million Downloads, by Darren Pauli, PCWorld via Yahoo News (Mar 26)

SiteAdvisor from McAfee is being adopted by millions for protection against a variety of dangers on the web. It works with the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

"It applies 320 million daily potential risk ratings to Web sites for search results, browsing and e-transactions, and is based on scanning results for spyware, adware, exploits, excessive pop-ups and spam. "

It's free - download from http://www.siteadvisor.com/

Direction of Custom Search

Custom Search Engines Could Replace Web Directories, Google Operating System (Feb 19)

Proposed that custom search engines that individuals build on a topic could serve the purpose directories used to meet.

Yahoo Shortcuts

March 2007 InfoTip: Yahoo's Personalized Shortcuts by Mary Ellen Bates (Mar)

Use Yahoo's shortcuts or create your own - gives examples of ones Bates has created for herself.

Writing for the Web

What is the Future of Text Online? by Guillermo E Franco, Poynteronline (Mar 23)

According to Chris Nodder, a colleague of usability guru Jakob Nielsen, text as content still matters on Web pages and it should be presented in the inverted-pyramid style (conclusion first) and well chunked.

Also, people read in the f-shaped pattern - two scans across the page and then down the left side.

Video and audio are good and we're learning more about how to use them well. Video may become important for mobile phone, and audio for getting information through podcasts.

NBC and News Corp Video Distribution

NBC, News Corp. team up to squelch YouTube fire by Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail (Mar 23)

The main story:

Fox owner News Corp., which also owns the popular social networking website MySpace, is partnering with rival network NBC Universal to spawn a competitor to YouTube, the video-posting site that's risen to online dominance in less than two years.

The deal also involves Web giants MSN, AOL and Yahoo as distribution portals for the content and is both defensive and opportunistic for the networks.

The reason is that "broadband is officially the new cable".

But in Canada, we probably won't be able to view these programs because networks have bought the rights to the programs such as 24 and Desperate Housewives.

"The impact on Canada is uncertain for now," Mr. Yigit said. "Chances are the NBC and Fox broadband destination will be geo-blocked. In other words, limited or no access from Canada."

....

In the absence of content deals in Canada, analysts predict audiences here will be driven increasingly to watch pirated copies of shows on YouTube, or by downloading them through other sites. A similar situation is playing out in Europe, Mr. McQuivey said.

But will this really hurt YouTube? Probably not - it gets 130 million visitors a month and the populace rules.

Will ICANN approve .XXX?

Virtual red-light district facing new vote, by Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe and Mail (Mar 23)

ICANN, the body that approves new domain names, is considering xxx again for the red-light district on the Internet. There don't seem to be many who want it.

+ porn sites think it would be easier for the government to "ghettoize" them.
+ Free Speech Coalition would rather have a kids-friendly domain.
+ Filters for .xxx won't really block access to determined kids.
+ Religious groups says it will legitimize adult sites. BTW - "more than a third of U.S. Internet users visit each month, according to comScore Media Metrix. The Web site measurement firm said 4 per cent of all Web traffic and 2 per cent of all time spent Web surfing involved an adult site."

ICM Registry Inc is the proposing company. "The startup, founded and funded by four entrepreneurs with backgrounds in domain names and U.K. Internet companies, plans to charge $60 (U.S.) to register a name — 10 times the fees for .com. Ten dollars of it would go to a companion non-profit group that would set policies for .xxx use and recommend business practices for fighting child pornography and promoting child safety."

Lycos Jubii

Lycos Europe Rebranding As Jubii in US SEW Blog (Mar

This is bizarre. Lycos Inc, which started in the U.S., is now owned by a Korean media company who will continue to use the name. But Lycos Europe (Lycos had long ago been bought by a Spanish company), can't use the name Lycos in the U.S. and will call itself Jubii.

Who cares, who uses it?

So I went to check - Lycos.com won't work - it drops to Lycos Canada - lycos.ca. This site is loaded with movie trailers and links to Canada's main cities. The city guides are so-so. The Toronto one needs a spell check - it has the Art Gellery of Ontario. Under top restaurants, there is the Sassafraz Restaurant, an eatery that burned down in December. Mostly this is a commercial site for selling product and services.

Jubii does exist - and bears some resemblance to what I remember Lycos.com to be - except that it has completely converted to being social community.

Microsoft Search Problems

Where Is Microsoft Search? "Its stumbles on the Web could open the door for rivals to come after its core business", BusinessWeek Online (Apr 2)

Microsoft has search problems. Will it affect its overall business?

"In February, 2005, Microsoft's MSN Search accounted for nearly 14% of all Web searches, compared with a 46% share for search leader Google, according to research firm Nielsen//NetRatings. Just two years later, Microsoft's rebranded Windows Live Search has a 9.6% share, compared with Google's nearly 56%. That amounts to nearly 300 million lost searches per month. The sense that Microsoft is slipping was reinforced with a recent shuffling of top executives."

Search Engine Market Share

comScore: Slight Google Rise, Status Quo With Rest In February 2007, Search Engine Land (Mar 23)

More stats - Google rising, others (Live, AOL, Ask, Yahoo) fairly stable.

News Corp - NBC online video

YouTube May Have Met Its Match "The News Corp.-NBC online video service could be a worthy rival to Google's popular site—for viewers and content partners alike" by Catherine Holahan, Business Week Online (Mar 23)

News Corp.-NBC video-sharing service takes on YouTube.

"The deal lets Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), and Time Warner's (TWX) AOL—Google's biggest rivals in search—all broadcast clips and full episodes of popular TV shows from two of the most widely watched networks on TV: NBC and News Corp.'s Fox. The parties will divvy up advertising revenue while their customers get online access to such shows as 24, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, and My Name Is Earl."

Exalead Exposed (Somewhat)

Q&A With François Bourdoncle, CEO Of Exalead by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Mar 21)

Exalead is a search engine developed in France and marketed in the U.S. It has more international content and it has many features others don't for syntax and query construction. Here Chris Sherman interviews the CEO. Some key points - I've paraphrased the questions and most answers.

+ Changes in search? People are storing input and findings.

+ Are users using the features? Yes - especially the thumbnail images.

+ Is using Open Directory Project worthwhile now that most see it as being among the walking dead on the Web? The categories at ODP are still useful and better than the auto-classification technology used.

+ If you were to use tags, how would you remove the noise? Answer: "tags offer an interesting trade-off between ease-of-use vs. efficiency for finding relevant information" - which didn't really answer the question.

+ Does the advanced search drive up cost? NO

+ Does Exalead personalize results? Can personalize the home page, but the real answer will be part of new search 2.0 features in the future (no date given).

+ What is Exalead's involvement in the European search project Quaero? The project is not well understood but it won't affect Exalead.

Thank you Chris Sherman and Francois Bourdoncle.

Prefound is Back

PreFound Relaunches, Tries To Rise Above Social Search Din, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Mar 21)

Prefound, a social bookmarking / search tool, has re-emerged with a new interface and possibly more community. I think the previous version was more like building mini-guides or directories on topics. This one hopes that people add to many groups including whatever they set up for themselves. Also you can personalize by outlining your interests. Wikipedia turns up too in the search results.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land wrote, "Social engines are seeking to bring people back into search, in one sense, to create more structure around results. And in many cases, assuming enough participation, engines such as PreFound are indeed going to be more efficient than using "traditional" Web search. But participation is the core challenge."

Getting that participation is key. But whose participation, with what interests, with what commitment? Are all the social bookmarking services competing for the same market? I bet they are. Is that market expanding? Probably but they might not be sharing, just using. Would niche social bookmarking communities be better? Thenacademics could be in their own world (according to the discipline), and students (according to their major) in another, and professionals in theirs (according to their profession). Maybe someone should create a social bookmarking world that supports specialized communities.

More local search

Piper Jaffray Expert Says Local Search is set for a Boom by Matthew Nelson, CLickz (Mar 20)

Safa Rashtchy, Sr. research analyst, at Piper Jaffray, said that "Local search is the second most popular activity other than e-mail. You will have more and more focus on local search, whether it's information or product searches that are happening….The adoption of local search by both local and search advertisers will see an increase."

He also sees a move away from portals to search but I think he means for buying products.

"The navigation method from portals is changing from portals to search,” he said. “People are saying 'we know what we want, help us to find where it is and don't tell us what we want to buy.’” Rashtchy continued, "The trigger point [for local search] is likely to be when you have a large number of major merchants that have their inventory easily available online. I thought we might see something by now, but nothing significant has happened yet, but once we see a good part of inventory easily accessible online, we will see a shift."

News Media Podcasts

News Podcasts: What Do You Listen To? by Amy Gahran, Poynteronline (Mar 22)

Gahran subscribes to more than 60 podcasts many of which are produced by news media. She lists several with the Onion Radio News being her favourite.

In Canada, CBC produces several news podcasts - see http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/. TV Ontario creates a podcast of the nightly The Agenda program.

Yahoo oneSearch for the Phone

Yahoo Expands Mobile Search - Now, anyone with a Web-enabled phone can access Yahoo's oneSearch for results by category. - Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Mar 21)

Category appears to mean organizing content into City Guide, news, web, products, weather, traffic - very practical.

Screen shots and description at Yahoo's Mobile Web page.

Limited to the U.S. at present -- "With the launch on Tuesday, 85 percent of mobile phones on the market can use the service, Yahoo said. OneSearch is initially available to users in the U.S. and Yahoo plans to roll it out in additional languages and countries in the coming months."

Canadians should watch for announcements at http://ca.mobile.yahoo.com/

Travel Planning Online

Five reasons people shy away from online travel booking By: Denise Dubie, ITWorldCanada (Mar 21)

"Forrester Research found that in the light of recent survey data those who book travel continue to resist the Web as their main resource for making reservations. The research firm polled about 5,330 North American consumers in the last quarter of 2006 to determine exactly what prevents them from putting their faith in online travel sites. To start, the top-three most common reasons for those who book travel not to stay online to make reservations include concern over credit-card security, Web-site performance issues and limits on the actions they could take online."

Yes - absolutely - but dealing with phone-menu systems and long waits for an "available operator" isn't much better.

Sending Large Files

Another Tool to Share Large Files: senduit; What’s a tumblelog?, Resourceshelf (mar 1) - mentions two tools for sending large files: podmailer, senduit

Browser Add-ons

A Helpful Harvest of Web Browser Add-Ons and Other Tools, ResourceShelf (Mar 5)

Builds on an article in PC World on add-ons for the IE and Firefox browser - noting favourites and why.

Earlier recommended e-Snips -- eSnips Increases Free Storage Space to 5GB, Previously 1GB (Mar 4)

"While we like (and use) several remote storage services, eSnips is quickly moving to the top of the list. For those who give seminars about search and web tools, it’s very easy to use and registration takes all of ten seconds."

Exalead Update

Exalead: Crawling Faster and Adding Shortcuts to Your Personalized Exalead Homepage Made Easier, ResourceShelf (Mar 7)

Finds that Exalead is recrawling pages more frequently, and it's easier to add a shortcut to the front "personal" page.

And today (Mar 21) it has a very colourful and cheery banner to mark first day of spring.

Virtual Trip to the Caribbean

New online exhibition opens up 300 years of Caribbean history, National Archives (UK)

"Caribbean Histories Revealed, a new online exhibition from The National Archives, launches on Tuesday 6 March. The exhibition traces the history of the British Caribbean through Colonial Office records from the 17th century to 1926. From maps and photographs, to letters and petitions, it brings to life over 300 years of life in the Caribbean."

Visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/caribbeanhistory/

Has a very good map too.

Guides from Intute

New “Best of the Web” Booklets From Intute, Intute (Mar 8)

Intute in the UK has published 9 "best of the Web" subject booklets. "The booklets provide a selection of some of the most useful Internet resources for students, lecturers and researchers working in the subject field. For those interested in exploring the wider Web, they point to the free Internet search and training services offered by Intute."

Will tend to be aimed at users in the UK but will cover international resources.

Site24X7 for Website Monitoring

Site24×7.com: Excellent Web-Based Web Site Monitoring Tool Leaves Beta, ResourceShelf (Mar 9)

Recommends Site 24X7 from Zoho for monitoring web sites. Can monitor 2 sites for free, and more for a modest charge .

Digitization Projects

A Handful of Digitization Projects Profiled in NY Times; Plus a ResourceShelf Guide to a Few Other Digitization Projects, Resourceshelf (Mar 12)

There are numerous digitization projects - many are listed in this posting.

IMDb for TV

Quickly Find TV Listings by Actor or Program Using the Internet Movie Database, ResourceShelf (Mar 13)

"Although the name is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) it’s also an excellent source television information. In fact, this section, IMDbTV is devoted to television listings (national or for your specific area), TV news, rankings, message boards and more."

Mobile with Yahoo or Ask

Yahoo Releases oneSearch for Mobile and Another Look at Ask.com Mobile, ResourceShelf (Mar 20)

Search Agent Allth.at

Allth.at looks like a search engine but it's really a search agent that will keep searching on your behalf. Cool tool - searches several engines (you can add more), search can be refined (focus on, filter out), and saved, and you can be alerted of new results through email or by subscribing to a RSS feed to Google Reader, Yahoo page and others. I found that although I could add Ask.com and Exalead, they didn't return results. There are three groupings for the meta-search: Web, SHopping, and News - each with a small selection of services.

Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App by Richard MacManus, Read/WriteWeb (Mar 20)

"It's a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It's similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct 'future search' engine that I was a fan of. "

Google Plus Box

More than meets the eye, GoogleBlog (Mar 20)

Google will show a Plus Box when it has more information on a topic. For now, it will show up for stock information and maps. "You can find a plus box next to the home pages of companies listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Clicking the plus box icon for any of these companies displays the latest stock price, chart, and company information."

More Vertical Search

"Moving Up: Vertical Search Proliferates" by Tim Houghton, Freepint (Mar 22)

Has a good definition of vertical search - "So a vertical search engine is trying to solve a different, more specific problem than a generalist one, focusing on the needs of a specific market segment, user group or alternatively a highly specific dataset."

Gives a few examples in --
+ consumer search
+ professional needs; eg SearchMedica for general medical practitioner, Northern Light for searching tailored to an enterprise.

Predicts - "I think they [major search engines] will develop vertical offerings in the larger consumer niches, as indeed they are already doing. But skills like the ability to support complex structured searching, taxonomies, access to databases and complex data visualisation tools all have a healthy future for those services targeted at information professionals."

Book Review: Google and the Myth

"Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe" - book by Jean-Noel Jeanneney and reviewed by Matt Chapuran in Freepint (Mar 22)

"In the slim volume 'Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge', Jean-Noel Jeanneney - himself the president of the Bibliotheque nationale de France - frames a cogent, if oftentimes overtly and overly political, argument that entrusting the literary treasures of the world to an American for- profit corporation has a number of pitfalls and could be considered a dereliction of duty by the world's libraries charged with the preservation of books."

Researching the European Union

"Finding Facts: The European Union after 50 Years" by Adrian Janes, Freepint (Mar 20)

"This article attempts to sketch some of the background to the EU's development, point out the functions of some of the key institutions and above all indicate useful sources of information."

Market Share Feb 2007

Nielsen/NetRatings Announces February U.S. Search Share Rankings (Mar 20)

February data from Nielsen/NetRatings on U.S. internet search market.

+ Google: 55.8% of US searches. Year over year growth of 40.3%
+ Yahoo 20.7%; YOY 12%
+ MSN 9.6% YOY 9.1%
+ AOL 5.1% YOY -6.1%
+ ASK 2.0% YOY 2.7%
+ Dogpile 0.4% YOY -2.4%

3.6 billion search queries were run at Google in February.

Ask.com is not growing as quickly as it had hoped. MSN is hanging on. AOL is in a down spiral. Dogpile - it's slipping but it may hold on forever - people must like the name.

Web Malware

Web Travels Become Increasingly Dangerous, TVC Alert (Mar 16)

Warning about websites with malware and reminder on importance of being vigilant about keeping anti-virus and everything else uptodate - and to use it.

News Wikis?

Where Are the News Org Wikis? by Amy Gahran, Poynter Online (Mar 20)

Gahran is looking for wikis being used by journalists and news organizations.

"Personally, I think there are many ways that wikis could enhance journalism, and I'd like to see more experimentation on this front. Most notably, wikis can transcend the short attention span and fragmented view of issues and events inherent in traditional story-format reporting. With a wiki, no topic ever really "scrolls off the home page." Wiki pages are forever active -- even if they lie fallow for long stretches of time. And interested people can continue to watch and edit these pages indefinitely"

One example is a wiki being run for the town of Brattleboro - the Brattleboro Community Brain Trust.

Google Personal Themes

Google adds more pizzaz to Web site with decorative themes, AP via SiliconValley.com (Mar 19)

"Sprucing up its famously plain Web site, Google Inc. is offering a new option that plants its Internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather."

Some screen shots here - Google home pages get more personal, CNet News (Mar 19)

More illustrations and some explanation at Dynamic themes available for your Google Personalized Home Page.

If you have a personal Google homepage, you'll see the option to Select theme in the upper right immediately. If you don't, check if you have other gadgets that are customizing the look of your page - such as bgcolor - remove them and refresh the page.

You can set the theme to change with time of day (sunset and sunrise). Announcements say it will change with the weather too. We'll see if it knows Toronto, Ontario - it may be restricted to the United States and its zip codes.

Google supports tabs now too - very useful for managing content better -such as news on one page, gadgets on another, and the Google Reader on another. (Not that I'll take the time to do that.)

Postscript: Mar 20 late at night - theme has disappeared. Was it removed or is this the night version for Toronto?

Search Engine Land says Google is just going with the crowd - Google Offers 'Themes' For Personalized Homepage - after AOL, MyYahoo, and NetVibes all adopting new features. (The new My Yahoo doesn't work in Canada either.)

Postscript: Mar 21 - I have this figured out. The new themes will not show on My Google Canada - http://www.google.ca/ig?hl=en - but they will show on the .com version - http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en. Solution - change your MyGoogle bookmark or link to the .com address - you'll still get any Canadian news and weather content you set up.

Google Extras

5 Google Tips To Improve Your Search Experience by Alexander Wolf, Information Week (Mar 17)

"Want an RSS feed of all Britney, all the time, or 3-D modeling software? Beyond basic search and apps like Google Earth, here are some little-known tips to enhance your online experience, including a free way to generate Sidebar Gadgets for Windows Vista. "

These are really extras rather than tips or search aids. Many will want to head straight for Ensure Privacy For Google Searches.

Canpages takes on YPG for Phone Directories

Take on an elephant without getting trampled by Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail (Mar 19)

Canadians who use phone directories and yellow pages have a new service to use - Canpages. The Yellow Pages Group (YPG), which seemed to hold a monopoly after buying SuperPages 2 years ago, finally has some competition.

"Though Canpages owns 70 directories in five provinces and territories, the company is focusing most of its expansion efforts this year on YPG's biggest markets, where the margins are biggest, Mr. Vincent says.

Yellow Canpages books are hitting doorsteps in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton and will be published in Toronto starting in the fall. After that, Ottawa and Montreal "are on the map," Mr. Vincent said. By the end of 2007, the company expects to have 5.5 million of its own books in the market."

But who uses books? "Starting last summer, Montreal-based YPG undertook a major revamp of its website, adding search tools and bolstered maps. Canpages has done the same, with each company touting different bells and whistles to find a local bakery or drycleaner."

Canpages added a service for mobile users. "Canpages has started a mobile search tool for cellphones in the Vancouver area. Callers can text a shortened version of a company's name, followed by a period and a few letters of the city, to phone number 604411."

Canpages uses Google Maps - the display is excellent, but it doesn't have the distance search - a shortcoming. And it's not possible to browse the categories - another lack.

YPG does show the categories and has "by proximity" search.

Windows Live Not Winning Fans

Microsoft sucks’, says top blogger, Sunday Times (Mar 18)

Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft, responded to claims by Microsoft at a summit of developers that it would win at search with -- “The words are empty,” Scoble responded. “Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s ‘in it to win’, then I don’t get it.”

Also - "LiveSide, a website that tracks the development of Windows Live, is among those who are unimpressed. “Windows Live isn’t making much of a dent in the marketplace,” it says on its Our View page. “It’s a nontopic. Market research shows Live Search to be losing share if anything, and certainly not gaining."

Treatment of new sites by search engines

How Long Does it Take a New Site to Rank in the Search Engines? by Eric Enge, SEW blog (Mar 13)

Enge watched how long it took to get a site about an American folksong into the top 10. "It took Yahoo and MSN only 19 days to do so. As of today, Google still has not done so (the 3/5/7 ranking was #30)."

"From this data, it looks like Yahoo and MSN are much faster to accept what their crawler finds (in terms of content and links) at face value. Google is much slower to do so. This is consistent with the general industry belief that Google puts more weight on temporal factors, and needs to build trust in a site before giving it higher rankings."

Privacy Issues and Google

Google to anonymize search data, Pandia (Mar 15)

That Google keeps the data at all is because it wants to personalize results, cut the spammers out, and comply with some government regulations. But Google is also trying to address privacy concerns with its announcement to anonymize data at 18 months to 24 months and design in some privacy protections.

"According to Reuters Google also says it will be taking additional steps to design privacy protections into Google products. The Google Talk instant message system will for instance get an “off the record” feature that will disable the automatic archiving of conversations."

At the Globe and Mail, readers are putting in their 2 cents worth of comments regarding Google's announcement to "tighten privacy measures" - they say don't use Google at all, use Clusty.

A search examined

'Murder,' She Googled Linda Rosencrance, Computerworld via PC World. (Mar 17)

"Google search history is evidence in trial of New Jersey woman accused of murdering her husband."

Examples given in this trial show some good search techniques.

"Melanie McGuire, 33, also did searches on Google and MSN for "undetectable poisons," "fatal digoxin levels," "instant poisons," "toxic insulin levels," "how to purchase guns illegally," how to find chloroform," "fatal insulin doses," "poisoning deaths," "where to purchase guns illegally," "gun laws in PA," "how to purchase guns in PA," and "where to purchase guns without a permit," according to Seymour's court testimony. The testimony can be viewed in this video clip from Court TV."

"how to" is a excellent stock-term phrase to use, and there are many good work combinations - "toxic insulin levels", "instant poisons".

The searches could be improved by using the state name - Pennsylvannia, searching the state site, and using other terms for guns. Eg - site:state.pa.us intitle:firearms

As to privacy, McGuire's activities were found out through the examination of the hard drive - and not from any logs provided by Google or MSN.

More about the use of the computer files in this article - Murder trial logs into files on computer, Home News Tribune Online (Mar 14)

"[Jennifer] Seymour explained to the jury how digital investigators can trace activity on a computer, including information the user has deleted, and information that identifies topics which have been searched.

She testified that she isolated searches conducted in the weeks leading up to the murder, and found the activity on inquiring about poisons, gun laws and ways to commit murder and suicide."

The lesson: make sure you use a very good computer file shredder if you really don't want to leave a trail.

There's how much data?

Wading through the backwash of digital data by Dan McLean, Globe and Mail (Mar 15)

There's how much digital data? Dan McLean pulled some information from an IDC white paper.

"In an attempt to quantify the volume, the researchers suggest defining a byte of digital data as one character on a page. They reckon there was enough digital data in 2006 to theoretically fill 12 separate stacks of novels, each of which would extend the 93 million miles from the Earth to the sun. By 2010, the accumulation of digital data would further extend these 12 stacks of books to reach from the sun to Pluto and back."

+ estimates that electronic business information accounts for about 25 per cent of the world's digital data - the remainder is music, videos, digital television signals and pictures.

+ By 2010, business portion will grow to 30 per cent

+ "E-mail alone accounts for about 3 per cent of digital data or six exabytes (one exabyte being a million million megabytes)".

Here's the clincher - "The IDC report makes the point that in 2007 the volume of information created and replicated will, in fact, surpass the storage capacity available to keep it. Storage media are expected to grow 35 per cent annually from 2006 to 2010. Unfortunately, the volume of digital information created and replicated is expected to increase by 57 per cent a year during this same forecast period."

How on earth are we going to deal with this?

"Too much digital information creates the problem of organizing it in a way that makes it useful. Many businesses have more digital data than they can intelligently work with and often can't extract what they need when they need it or create business intelligence from it."

Web Tools for SOHO

21 essential Web tools by Ian Portsmouth, Jim McElgunn, Kim Shiffman and Kara Aaserud, PROFIT (Mar) - collaborate, share, phone, protect files, keep appointments - lots of stuff for SOHO and larger.

Gary Price on Ask.com

Q&A With Ask.com's Gary Price by Eric Enge, SearchDay (Mar 15)

Gary Price talks about what he does at Ask.com - "I would say three different roles. One is outreach, talking to media people like you, but even more specifically outreach to the K-12 education community, and to the library community. " ... " "in-reach," and product development at Ask. For example, coming up with ways to help utilize some of the library world's content, and just letting people know what libraries have to offer, and how can we work together with libraries."

And he describes the elements of the main features that make Ask.com a great search engine for the average (not advanced) searcher: smart answers, maps, image search, disambiguation.

Wik.is

Wik.is is a new service for groups to share content and create - plans, projects, stories, archives, memories - anything. Do this with friends, family, colleagues, students, clubs. A small annual fee buys privacy. The Wikis can be private too.

Search to see some examples. Travel will find the Victoria-BC-based Athlone Travel wiki - a good example of how the wiki can be used.

Wiki central, KMWorld (Mar 14)

"Wik.is launches with 42,000 existing Wikis from users worldwide. Within minutes, MindTouch says, new and current community members can create, edit, share, store and search documents, e-mails, images and files through an intuitive and graphical interface. It functions and looks like a slimmed-down Word processor inside of a Web browser, claims Mindtouch."

Google's Filetype and Inurl

Google's filetype: Fixed by Greg Notess, Searchengineshowdown (Mar 9)

Can use filetype: at Google with and without terms. Why want to do a filetype:pdf alone? To get a count, but Greg says the counts are poor.

Not mentioned - you might want to combine filetype:pdf with a site or domain command.

Of interest - "Any URL that has a dot followed by something else can be found." Keep in mind that doesn't necessarily mean the domain. Eg this search for .bmp which has much different results from inurl:bmp

Google Privacy Policy

Google to make search logs anonymous by Stephen Lawson, ComputerWorld (Mar 14)

"Until now, the dominant search company has indefinitely retained a log of every search, with identifiers that can associate it with a particular computer. The new policy, to be implemented within the next year, is intended to better protect users' privacy, two executives wrote in a Google Blog entry posted Wednesday."

Also see Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices, Google Blog

Google's Web Search Direction

Interview with Google's Matt Cutts about Next-Generation Search by Richard MacManus, Read/WriteWeb (Mar 13)

Another interview with Google's Matt Cutt about Google's plan for search - mainly personalization and some mention of SearchMash (Google's supposed testing ground). Also video search - of course.

Flight Sites to go

Picked up some flight sites from The Waiting Game by Douglas McArthur, Globe and Mail Travel (Mar 14).

Flightstats.com - check historical data for airlines, flights, airports. Also has information on flights in progress. Much more - travel deals, fares, advisories.

For real-time tracking of flights in the US and Canada can also use:

- FlightArrivals- also has airport status for US airports.
- FlightView - map view of departure status of US airports.
- Flytecomm - there is mobile device service too.

Niche Social Networks

Social Networking Goes Niche, Catherine Holan, BusinessWeek Online (Mar 14)

"MySpace and Friendster’s runaway popularity and exposure have helped spawn an array of targeted networking sites. Advertisers are noticing."

Too much partying going on at MySpace. People are splitting away to their own niche networks.

"Williamson cites Fuzzster, a social network for pet lovers; Yub.com, a site for shopaholics; Model Mayhem, a network for models and photographers; and Mog, a network for music lovers, as just some of the networks now catering to specific interests. Other sites target demographics believed to be left out of the Friendsters of the world. Gather.com, for example, targets older users, more likely to listen to National Public Radio than hip hop. Chat rooms are focused on particular topics such as wine or politics "

Fuzzster for pet lovers? Who knew? It's adorable.

Wikiseek - Search Wikipedia

WikiSeek Launches Community Edited Search Engine, TechCrunch (Mar 13)

"WikiSeek search engine shows results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. The new community edited search engine, which they stress is experimental only at this stage, can be found at community.wikiseek.com and the results can be edited by anyone."

Columns at Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land seems to add a column a week, or even a day. Today's announcement is for Paid Search, - which "will focus on issues and tactics for marketers using sponsored search listings". Andrew Goodman of Traffick.com is kicking off.

Yesterday it was Locals Only - "covering local search, mapping, online yellow pages and other sites that help searchers pinpoint real-world merchants, service providers and other location-based entities" - with Greg Sterling and others.

How many more are there? Danny Sullivan says there will be site navigation soon , but for now use the "By Category drop-down box at the bottom of each page in the site or in the right-hand navigation" and look for labels like 100% Organic. Clicking on Columns will bring up a list of all the annoucements - ten so far.

Danny Sullivan and friends have attracted a lot of columnists. Search Engine Land is going gangbusters.

Product Research at Wize

Wize Up For Better Product Reviews by Chris Sherman, Search engine land (Mar 13)

Favourable review of Wize for consumers to use for researching products. "Wize has aggregated more than 1.2 million reviews, from both experts and users, drawn from more than 6,300 web sites that feature reviews."

You can also use the comparison shopping search engines to get reviews - Become.com or Yahoo shopping - or the the consumer review sites - Epinions, ConsumerSearch and ConsumerReview.com.

Date Search

Restricting Search Results to a Date Range, Google Operating System (March 11)

Refresher on why dates are poor in Google Web Search but good for blogs, news, books, and groups.

Search results in search results

Google Warning Against Letting Your Search Results Get Indexed, Danny Sullivan, Search engine land (Mar 12)

Doesn't it bug you when you get a link at Google that goes to another set of search results and especially when they don't match your terms well? Danny Sullivan includes some examples to which I can add one.

Search for executive correspondence management system at Google, and you may find this item in the top 10 results.

Click through into Tech Republic and a page of search results that are about information management - executive is no where to be found.

Sullivan tell us that Google has a new guideline to webmasters that may stop this -- "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." But that is much easier written than done - as Danny points out in detail.

I, for one, hope they figure it out.

Divvio Personal

Weaving The Web To Your Taste "Hossein Eslambolchi's service will scour the Net for the media you want", BusinessWeek Online (Mar 19)

"On Mar. 13, Eslambolchi's 10-person start-up, Divvio Inc., will turn on a service that automatically finds audio, video, and, eventually, text, on your favorite subjects. Then it weaves these clips together to create personalized multimedia channels that are updated each time you sign on. A channel on the New York Yankees might start with spring training highlights, followed by videotaped interviews and blog postings."

Divvio will start with 750,000 sites and may "hit the mark" only 10% of the time in the beginning. Eventually, through personalization, it will improve to 60% (it is hoped).

Blogging Software

To begin, type headline here "It's never been easier to call yourself a blogger" Globe and Mail (Mar )

Points out that the easiest way to start blogging is in MySpace or Facebook, but for more control recommends Wordpress.

"The more recent updates to Wordpress, which is continually rolling out improvements, allow bloggers to easily add features — known as "widgets" — to their blogs, including lists of the most-read and most commented-on posts on your blog, tiny music players, video clips, an instant messenger tool that works through the Web browser, a series of your Flickr photos, and so on. Like most other blog tools, you can also add a calendar, a link to the archives of your blog (your previous posts), and the "feed" from various Web services such as del.icio.us."

Of course there is also Google's Blogger.com and SixApart's Typepad, LiveJournal and the new Vox.

Wikia Open Source Search

Wikia Plans Open-Source Search "An open-source search engine from Wikipedia creator is planned for launch at the end of the year." by Martyn Williams, IDG News Service via PCWOrld (Mar 9)

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc." Really?

Personalization at Search Engines

The Pros and Cons of Personalized Search, Gord Hotchkiss, Search engine land (Mar 9)

Hotchkiss reviews responses he got from two articles on personalization of services at Google. The "push back" must have been ferocious, because Hotchkiss goes on to present a lovely explanation of how a search engine with personalized features could help us construct "semantic maps" for our queries.

"While there are some users who feel comfortable with putting the time in to refine their query and help the engine with the task of disambiguating intent, the majority of us don't want to make that big an investment. The tool has to be much simpler and quicker to use. So that brings us back to the question, how do engines disambiguating intent without us giving it any more information to work with at the point of query? This is where personalization comes in. "

Hotchkiss suggests that perhaps the problem isn't that the search engines are treading carefully, but that they are treading too carefully. I agree - let's get on with it.

New MyYahoo.com

Revamped MyYahoo Launches Amid Intensifying Competition, Search engine land (Mar 9)

The new MyYahoo launched ahead of schedule. Read about it and also about the competition.

The page that shows at http://my.yahoo.com/ is a great improvement in appearance. However, for Canadians, once you sign in it's the same old boring display.

Travel Web Sites

Online finds help save time before travel by James Gilden, Orlando Sentinel (Mar 11)

Selected web sites for travelers who are looking for couches (couchsurfing.com), thinking about cruises and looking for reviews (cruisecritic.com), wanting to make the world better through volunteer help (idealist.org), wondering about rights (mytravelrights.com), looking for a train seat in Europe (seat61.com), or just browsing for a travel portal (Johnnyjet.com). And then there are those looking for bathrooms (Thebathroomdiaries.com).

Yahoo Social Answers

Yahoo Tests Social Network Component for Answers by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Mar 8)

"On Thursday, Yahoo Answers Network debuted as a beta service designed to let the 90 million users of this question-and-answer search engine create "personal networks" with each other. They can also invite acquaintances who don't use Yahoo Answers to join their network."

Details at Yahoo Blog.

MyYahoo Personal Page

My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover, Read/Write Web (Mar 8)

Yahoo is revamping MyYahoo personal page into something more "web 2.0" and presumably competitive with Windows Live. Sounds like it's going to look much better - but this is early beta still and only a few invited users will see it.

"Certainly, the first thing I noticed about the new beta My Yahoo was that it had some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two."

AskCity Maps

Ask City's Shape Search Tool For Local Search Results, Search engine land (Mar 8)

Map local search results for businesses and services through Askcity.com - but only in the United States.

Censorship at Google

Google Censorship FAQ, Google Blogscoped (Mar 2)

"For the scope of this FAQ I’ll define censorship as missing results which are filtered for reasons of politics or regulations, not because they’re spam, non-family friendly, or copyright-infringements (though your mileage may vary)."

What Google censors is partly dependent on country. In Germany, Nazi websites are removed; in the United States, child pornography; in China, a huge amount.

Sometimes you'll see a disclosure statement at the bottom; for example, "“In compliance with local laws and policies, some search results are not showing.”"

Information Literacy

Information Navigation 101 - "New programs teach undergraduates how to use the Internet and the online card catalog in search of the best sources - By ANDREA L. FOSTER, The Chronicle (Mar 9)

Information literacy is a survival skill for students. This really isn't about how to use boolean (or shouldn't be); it's knowing what resources to use and how to evaluate web sites. More broadly it is coming to mean "how well students' use technology to find, organize, and communicate information. "

"The explosion of electronic information is fueling students' confusion, librarians say. In 1996 there were 10,000 scholarly databases online; now they exceed 18,000. The Web is teeming with more than 100 million sites, up from 18,000 in 1995. Google and Microsoft recently began archiving books and scholarly journals and making them available via their search engines. And two online, academic-oriented encyclopedias, Citizendium and Scholarpedia, are starting up, inspired by the success of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Students are drowning in information."

Essjay Scandal at Wikipedia

Wikipedia ire turns against ex-editor by Noah Cohen, International Herald Tribune (Mar 6)

Essjay, an editor at Wikipedia who worked on thousands of entries, is not the "professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law" he claimed to be, but a "24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and who lives outside Louisville".

His true identity came to light through an addendum to an article in the New Yorker, and then all hell broke loose. Initially Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, supported him as did some Wikipedians, but most users called for his resignation - which he did.

In user-talk at Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales has put forth a proposal for better vetting of credentials. User Talk: Jimbo Wales - essentially that "people who are willing to verify their real name and credentials are allowed a special notification. "Verified Credentials". "

Google Desktop 5

Version 5 Of Google Desktop Released, Searchengineland (Mar 7)

For people who like a desktop search product, Google Desktop has moved to version 5. It comes with more gadgets.

Superpages with Maps

SuperPages Upgrades Mapping With Virtual Earth, Searchengineland (Mar 7)

More use of Microsoft's Virtual Earth for local search purposes. Google and Yahoo Maps should watch out. Ths time Superpages shows businesses on a map. But of course, Superpages.com is just for business in the United States.

Business Information Trends

"Business Information Trends: The Times They Are a-Changin'", by Pam Foster, Freepint (Mar )

Examines changes at Thomson in the break up of their Business Intelligence services, and at Factiva, now owned 100% by Dow Jones. But most interestingly also talks about Second Life - the virtual world - where companies are setting up presences.

"The number of organisations involved in Second Life grows each day and currently includes Reuters, Talis, IBM, Nissan, Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, Sun Microsystems, Adidas, Toyota, American Apparel, MTV, US Centers for Disease Control, the State Library of Kansas and many others. For some, the benefits are in marketing, while others benefit from the ability to collaborate. IBM has 1,000 of its senior executives involved and is using Second Life as a mentoring community. The company has built a connection environment, a social- networking tool, where avatars profile themselves, then meet in Second Life."

Also comments on the strengths of traditional media for news, and the threats posed by digital.

SearchforVideo Adds Newsweek

SearchforVideo.com Adds Newsweek.com Content to Search Index, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 7)

"Searchforvideo.com users can now search and find video from Newsweek.com. Newsweek offers comprehensive coverage of world events with a global network of correspondents, reporters and editors covering national and international affairs, business, science and technology, society and the arts and entertainment."

Firefox Extensions

20 must-have Firefox extensions "These plug-ins give you souped-up functionality, better look and feel, and streamlined development tasks. And some are just plain cool." by Peter Smith, ComputerWorld (Mar 7)

If you can get past the ads, this article has some good recommendations for enhancing the Firefox browser in the areas of:

* Tools for taming the Web: eg Stumbleupon
* Visual improvements: eg Colorful Tabs
* Matters of convenience: eg Google Browser Sync
* Information gatherers: eg Answers.com 1CLicki
* Web developer essentials

Several of these will appeal mostly to web developers.

Coming Ubiquity of Social Networks

Social Networking’s Next Phase by Brad Stone, New York Times (March 3)

Cisco just entered the social networking arena by buying Tribe.net and Five Across. "But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks."

Will social networks be as ubiquitous as web sites? Marc Andresson, founder of Netscape, must think so. He has just started Ning.com. "“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”"

Cisco does think that mainstream consumers will spend time in these networks. "After the Five Across acquisition, Mr. Scheinman [of Cisco] said in an interview that Americans were quickly changing their media consumption habits. He said his new group would let Cisco help its media customers, like TV networks and cable companies, develop their sites and move more of their content onto the Web."

One big challenge is to persuade people to deal with the registration routines in these communities. "To solve the problem, several firms are pushing a standard called OpenID, which would let users sign on and easily transfer profile information among social sites."

Search Industry and Media

Piper Jaffray Maps Out Where the Search Industry is Headed By Greg Jarboe, Searchday (Mar 6)

Jarboe picked out 6 of the 12 main points made in a 425 page report from Piper Jaffray about the search industry.

#5: "The Golden Search. Search is the second most commonly used application on the Web with 550 million searches daily in the United States, and search marketing is a $15.8 billion global industry growing to $44.5 billion over the next five years. Piper Jaffray believes the five key trends in the search industry are: 1) Search is the new portal; 2) Search is becoming a branding tool; 3) Google's dominance is increasing; 4) Local search remains a looming opportunity; and 5) New search technologies are likely to expand the field."

ReleMed for PubMed

New Search Engine for Finding Articles in PubMed, ResearchBuzz (Mar 5)

"There’s a new search engine from the University of Virginia School of Medicine that searches PubMed for medical literature by assigning relevance to results in addition to just looking for keywords. ReleMed, as the engine is called, is available at http://www.relemed.com/ ."

Do-it-yourself Virtual Earth Maps

The 10 Minute Map, Windows Live Virtual Earth Blog (Mar 5)

Instructions on how to create a "dynamic map with a custom data layer on your website" and then to "make real-time updates to the data layer by simply editing your Collection at Live maps".

Pandia's Search Engine Detective

Pandia Offers Custom Search For Search Information, Chris Sherman, Search engine land (March 5)

Bet many people wish they had done what Pandia has just done - creating a custom search engine about search engines. It's called Search Engine Detective and it searches "search engine blogs and sites". Be sure to distinguish between Pandia alone and Pandia Search in Search which offers choices of top 25 sites vs all of the "best" sites.

Jobs Indeed Through ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo and Indeed Announce Strategic Relationship -- Indeed.com's Comprehensive Job Search Enhances ZoomInfo Users' Ability to Manage Their Careers on ZoomInfo.com -- Business Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 5)

"ZoomInfo(TM) and Indeed(TM) today announced plans to integrate Indeed.com's job search into ZoomInfo's business information search engine, allowing the more than four million unique monthly visitors to ZoomInfo.com to benefit from the Web's most comprehensive search engine for jobs. An initial version of this capability is available today, with more extensive integration expected in the coming months. ZoomInfo.com's business users will be able to search for jobs based on their location and industries of interest, research industries and companies, manage their personal digital brand, and connect with potential employers."

Celebs on Yahoo Answers

John McCain and Hillary Clinton post on Yahoo Answers, SEW blog (Mar 1)

Really! "The presidential candidates join a list of more than 70 prominent figures that include Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, Bono, and Donald Trump who have posted questions around globally-pressing issues for the collective knowledge of the Yahoo Answers community to help solve. They see Yahoo's audience as a great way to build awareness for the causes that matter to them most."

Keesing's World News Archive

Keesing's World News Archive Puts Web 2.0 into Practice by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Mar 5)

Keesing's World News Archive (www.keesings.com) is a new online archive of historical reporting over the past 75 years. "... its editors select the most historically significant political, social, and economic events, extract critical information from worldwide news sources, and write concise reports. These reports exist for the record, stripping bias away and correcting errors in the original press reports."

There are Web2.0 elements for subscribers to this service, tagging articles being one.

Searching is free. This is an OR engine - it will find pages that have any of the words, but you can limit the search by date range. And it will cluster results to make locating the right group easier.

It did a good job on the Halifax explosion - finding an article on the damage in October 1045 from that explosion in Halifax harbour - and grouping it into the 1 item cluster - disasters.

It costs to read. There is an option to buy access for the day (just $7.95 US)

Some articles on current events are available for free under Breaking History and give an idea of the high quality of the entries.

Google News Algorithm

NewsKnife has detected a significant change at Google News in sources that show up in the top 50 results. This could be a change in Google News' algorithm or just a fluke. Howerver, whereas top listings were from sources like Houston Chronicle, International Herald Tribune, or Fox News, in the last few months Newsknife has seen many more from Euronews.net, Newsweek, and Playfuls.com (which isn't a news site).

See Google News algorithm watch - update as at March 1, 2007

Answer Tips

Answers.com’s AnswerTips Ready to Bubble Up on Web Sites and Blogs by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Feb 26)

AnswerTips has been adopted by several web sites already, including CBSNews.com - double click on a word you don't know and get a definition or description in a popup.

"As to the advantage of offering this free service, Bailey said that it fits Answers.com's strategy of "leveraging content we already have. AnswerTips has two primary purposes; [the] first [is] to spread the word on Answers.com with good branding and exposure. Second, we anticipate that once we give people the snippet of information for a short answer, they will want more and click on the ‘More' button that takes them to our site. Right now we have no advertising in AnswerTips, except on the CBS site with an ad on the bottom, but we may have advertising in the future.""

Ask - New Smart Answers

March Smart Answers, Ask.com Blog (Mar 1)

What a good idea - a list of new smart answers from Ask.com. From important dates for March there is this one on Daylight Savings Time with information on the new start date March 11.

Canadians will get their answer at Daylight Saving Time in Canada.

Google News GEO Search

Why Are Google News Searches Not Geo Specific? Search Engine Roundtable (Mar 2)

How tailored is Google News? The front page of Google News Canada will be different from one for the UK - different selection of stories and, to some degree, sources. There is overlap.

To get articles from publishers in a particular country, the article recommends using location -- location:uk. For Canada, use location:canada. Location:ca will pick up articles from California.

BBC on YouTube

Google's YouTube To Showcase BBC Content On Three New Channels, Searchengineland (Mar 2)

BBC will be directing some content to YouTube - trailers, archival clips, and news.

The end of universal search results

Google's Matt Cutts on Personalization and the Future of SEO by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Mar 2)

This is an analysis with excerpts of the transcript of the interview with Matt Cutts of Google about personalization and its impact on search engine marketing.

Cutts is very clear that the direction in search is personalization and that SEOs will have to adapt by thinking about the users more than the search engine -- "Personalization is one of those things where if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for."

Localization of results is already taking place. Searchers in Canada will get different results than those in the US or in the UK - and, unlike personalization, they can't turn off the localization. We should expect more change here, it seems, such that results will be localized to the city.

Hotchkiss boiled down what personalization will mean to SEO to -- "a lot of SEOs are almost more engineers right now, where they're looking at the algorithm and trying to figure out how to best it. You're asking them to become a lot of things, more marketing, PR, content developers, and know more about the user, more about user behavior online. "

Message to searchers - you're seeing the "end of the universal or monolithic search result" - and that includes the ads.

iPOD for Education

The iPod widens its audience in school by Michael E. Ross, MSNBC (Feb 26)

The MP3 player is becoming accepted as a learning tool - teachers, students, and companies are creating content.

"More than 70 million iPods have been sold since they were introduced by Apple more than five years ago. Now, with the MP3 player's foothold in academia, universities and companies are quickly expanding the amount of study materials students can use with them."

More Health Search

A Checkup of Online Health Sites by Paula J. Hane, ITI Newslink (Mar 1)

Many new health portals and resources have come to the Web.

"EverydayHealth.com came out of its beta version. Healthline.com launched a new Symptom Search feature. A startup from Steve Case, Revolution Health, is providing previews of its new site. TauMed is a recently launched search engine and health portal. (Disclaimer—I have not done extensive testing on these sites so I can't provide recommendations or comparisons.)"

Not to forget old favourites, Hane reminds us a few of the well established resoures: U.S. National Institutes of Health (http://health.nih.gov), MedlinePlus from the National Library of Medicine (www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus), the MayoClinic.com site, and WebMD.

Your Online ID

Questions About Online Identity by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUP Digital (Mar 2007)

Should you have an alias when you go online or is it ok to use your real name? Depends. And these days you might also want to doctor up a photo to go with your alias.

Wireless Internet Access

Pew Research: Wireless Internet Grows by Greg Sterling, Searchengineland (Feb 26)

Presents and comments on the top-level findings from Pew Internet Project about wireless Internet access .

From the Pew announcement: "The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a report that 34% of internet users have logged onto the internet using a wireless connection either around the house, at their workplace, or some place else. The report profiles these wireless users and describes their
intensive use of the internet, especially in exchanging emails and getting news online."

SearchTheWeb2 for the Long Tail

SearchTheWeb2 is a new 'alternative" search service based in Calgary Alberta. It identifies the common and not so common word combinations that occur in results for the query. On a graph the most common (or popular) are in the 'head', and the less common in the 'long tail'. SearchTheWeb2 is doing the clustering of results that Google has been slow to adopt.

It uses Google's web database, and somewhat responds to syntax such as intitle:, site:, and - for exclude. The syntax will control the search results but not the suggestions in "refine your search". For the query portugal -spain, the suggestions are loaded with spain combinations.

The "refine your search" suggestions are new queries rather than a refinement or narrowing of the first set of results. Also, they may not necessarily have the key concept. For the query - dyslexia in adults - the long tail has the phrase - symptoms in adults - but those are not related to dyslexia. The pivotal word was adults, not dyslexia and adults. This isn't a criticism - just a warning that the suggestions are based on a query that looked for ANY of the words.

SearchTheWeb2 has regional versions that use the corresponding Google Search Engine - US, Canada, UK, Australia.

There is some tracking of what people search for - either information or services - and these are summarized on separate pages to show the most 'popular' categories.

There is a social networking component as well with a live map showing who is on where. The community is through mybloglog.com.

The blog for Search The Web 2.0 reports on developments for SearchTheWeb2.0 and more generally the state of search especially as it relates to "long tail".

For example - statistics about search queries always show that the majority of queries are 1 to 3 words. This is exactly the reason a long-tail engine can be useful. SearchTheWeb2.0 points out, "The reasons of why we do a search with 2 to 3 keyword queries are that we’re properly lazy and don’t know the long tail for search. To use 4 or more words you need the long tail of these keywords. Search The Web 2.0 is just designed to do that."

This is one to watch and work with.