Internet News

Google neglecting search

Google Slammed for Tainting Search to Hype Google+ Social Networking, Jared Newman, PCWorld (Jan 27)

Many are unhappy with the way Google wedded Google Plus to its search, and signs that Google boosts its own properties over others. This article summarizes the points.

One expresses it kindly - "Slate's Farhad Manjoo argues that Google shouldn't be combining social network data with generic search results in the first place. "While my friends are thoughtful and knowledgeable people, their views on the tens of thousands of large and small inquiries that I bring to Google every year are almost always irrelevant."

Danny Sullivan has said Google is neglecting its core mission. He cites one example, but there are many more from the last year in which Google has been withdrawing web search features such as the timeline.

of interest: Google has said nothing.

Google drops the ball

Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 26)

Danny Sullivan points to results he got on a search for Santorum, the GOP presidential candidate, as one more example that Google has stopped attending to its knitting - specifically the ranking algorithms. Whatever the reason, Google failed on this search, it's sending users to Bing.

Google's title and snippets

How Classification of Page Elements and Search Results May Influence Alternative Titles and Snippets Displayed in Google, Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea (Jan 26)

For many years Google's snippets were mainly keyword-in-context. Today, Google does more massaging of title and snippet as it tries to make sense of the page and present a better result to the user. A recent patent suggests that Google may be going so far as to "classify" it in order to make decisions on title and snippet.

"The patent provides a very detailed look at how Google might go from classifying queries (using a lookup table, or via some other method) to classifying the different elements of a search result such as a title, snippet, and URL in that result. Those classifications might be weighted somewhat by the position that those pages appear at within search results as well."

From Google's posting - "Google’s generation of page titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user’s query."

Gaming the + in Google Plus

Google Plus Connections Are The New Link, Andrew Shotland, Search Engine Land (Jan 23)

Who really cares that you + a result to get it into your Google Plus? Businesses - local directories and businesses so that they place well in Place Pages.

Will this lead to new ways to game the system? Very likely. "Where Google has frowned on “link schemes” to game rankings, I don’t see how it can control social promotion schemes. If I want to compensate you for connecting with me on G+ and mentioning my service, how can Google tell?"

Google and punctuation marks

Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jan 23)

Google recognizes punctuation - tho that doesn't mean it will return pages with the mark.

+ enter a , and you get pages about the use of the comma
+ enter % and you will get pages that have the word percent - eg percentage of only child families %
+ there isn't any advantage to just entering @ - eg harper @, but @harper has Twitter as the first result.

Google's December Tweaks

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 5)

Google tweaks its algorithms continually. This monthly recap from December mentioned using byline date information - but the example shows that Google is still getting the date wrong.

More promising - "The company says it’s doing a better job of determining where web documents are from, so that its country-restricted search results are more accurate. "

Blog posting lists all 30.

Google's Quality Raters

An Interview With A Google Search Quality Rater, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 20)

It has been known for a long time that Google uses people to "quality rate" search results - and what is learned is fed into changes in the algorithms. Matt McGee interviewed a search quality rater to learn about the hiring process (quite rigorous), and the nature of the work and questions.

Quality raters evaluate the goodness of a set of urls for a query taking into consideration how well the page matches the query and the layout and quality of the page, and, given the user's language and location whether the user would find the page useful.

For example:

Can you share a specific example of one of your recent tasks?

I can’t think of the exact URLs I rated, but the keyword was “Nike Women’s Running Shoes.” It gave me a list of 20 URLs to rate (10 on each side) [Ed. note: he's referring to the "Side-by-Side" tasks mentioned earlier.] and I visited each one in order to determine whether they were vital, useful, relevant, slightly relevant, or useless. With a recognized brand name like that, it wasn’t hard to determine quality. For example, I think the Nike site was one of the options, so that would get a “vital” rating. I remember a couple of sites sold the shoes, so I gave them a “useful” rating and the Wikipedia entry on Nike was giving a rating of “slightly relevant” because I believe not many people searching for Nike Women’s Running Shoes want a history of the company.

Danny Sullivan's recap

FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 17)

This should answer all the questions about personalized search at Google and the new signals that Google is picking up from Google Plus fo ranking results.

Targeting user intent

Rich Snippets & Learning To Love Not Being #1, Bryne Hobart, Search Engine Land (Jan 17)

SEO marketers are very alert to every little change in ranking algorithms at the big search engines.

Ranking stopped being exact word much some time ago. Attention is more on divining the user's intent. The SEO person still needs to use the most appropriate keywords, but understand them in terms of possible user intentions.

Take a query involving a restaurant: a naive ranking might notice that the restaurant has reviews in five different highly-trusted publications, and rank each review ahead of the official site (especially if the site’s in flash).

But an intent-based view would identify several reasons someone might search for a restaurant:

They may be looking for the official site.
They might want to see a menu (so Menupages gets a boost).
They might want to make a reservation (OpenTable gets this one).
They might want to see a review (so it’s a toss-up: Yelp, local news outlets, or some combination thereof).
They might be looking for directions—search engines tend to just use their own map product for this.

Very simple at Duckduckgo

DuckDuckGo Relaunches With New Visual Design, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 14)

Simple doesn't get any better than this. Duckduckgo.com has a plain search box, offers suggestions on the right side, and unadorned results in the centre. Duckduckgo supports some syntax.

Bing and Google tied

Google Fails To Trounce Bing (Again): The Fallacy Of The Superior Search Engine Revisited, Conrad Saam, Search Engine Land (Jan 11)

Conrad Saam tested Google against Bing in a second round of questions. This time he used 100 questions with all personalization turned on. Google and Bing came in tied - both having weaknesses.

+ "neither Google nor Bing has really figured out the people/address side of search"

+ "Bing seemed to heavily favor some weak UGC sites like eHow and a chacha"

+ "in many cases, the content just simply (and surprisingly) didn’t exist on the Web." - they were tough questions.

It's very hard to assess "goodness", and to some degree it is personal. However, it does show that Bing should be considered - especially if you have a beef with Google.

Webmasters of the world unite!

2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 8)

Google and Bing have given webmasters many tools over the past couple of years - analytics, xml sitemaps - but, they have also removed the very important backwards link analysis and keyword referral.

Link analysis is essentially gone - which hurts searchers too. No more backwards link search.

+ "Google .. refuses to show all the links to a particular page, or the words used within those links to describe a page, unless you are the page’s owner."

+ Yahoo closed Yahoo Site Explorer - and there is no equivalent at Bing.

+ Bing does not support the link command. And, not mentioned, it doesn't support inurl either.

+ Google's link command to see what is linked to a page has never been good and is now worse.

+ Thank heavens for the SEOMOZ Open Site Explorer for backlink reports to help in understanding results ranking.

+ Also Blekko - "The Blekko search engine does this, allowing anyone logged in to see the backlinks to a listed page."

+ Google is also withholding from site owners keyword data used by searchers in finding those sites - if the searchers are logged into Google - tho Google gives that data freely to paid advertisers.

Danny Sullivan is asking publishers to pressure Google and Bing to turn this around and provide link and referral data. It's a call to arms.

Search is broken

Google Responds: No,That’s Not How Facebook Deal Went Down (Oh, And I Say: The Search Paradigm Is Broken), by John Battelle (Jan 13)

Has the background on why Google and Facebook don't have a deal (competing social services - one might guess). But nevermind that. The point is - the search paradigm of the last several years has been broken in the drive to personalization.

Says Battelle - "I have a theory as to why all this is happening, and I don’t entirely blame Google. Back when search wasn’t personalized, Google could defensibly say that one service was better than another because it got more traffic, was linked to more (better PageRank), and so on. Back when everyone got the same results and the web was one homogenous glob of HTML, well, you could claim “this is the best result for the general population.” But personalized search has broken that framework ... "

Can't block sites at Google Web Search

Google: Ability To Block Sites From Search Results Will Return, But When?, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jan 13)

Another example of what Google has taken away.

"The ability to block web sites from search results disappeared when Google’s new Search Plus personalized results format launched this week. Blocking was a feature added with great fanfare last year. Google says it will return, but the timing is uncertain."

Bing and Yahoo split market share

Microsoft passes Yahoo to become No. 2 search engine: comScore , Michael Liedtke, AP via Globe and Mail (Jan 12)

No surprise - Bing, according to Comscore figures, has 15.1 % of US search market, beating out Yahoo at 14.5%. Google held its 65.9%.

As this article explains, Microsoft and Yahoo have a 10 year agreement whereby Yahoo uses the Bing database and search technology - getting 88% of the ad revenue from searches at its site, and Microsoft gets billions more of search requests to analyze. Microsoft also took over Yahoo's marketing technology.

Microsoft may be gaining share now, but it is losing money - $ 7 billion since June 2008. And Yahoo may have cut costs but despite its efforts to have some unique features (nice instant search being one) it is losing revenue and seeing its stock price decline further.

IMO - going to be hard to turn this around.

Year end review 2011

Review of 2011 and Trends Watch 2012 , Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 5)

Paula Hane asks what do you remember from 2011?

Before reviewing her answers, let me throw in my one recollection about 2011 regarding web search - Google regressed as a search engine, removing valued search features - especially the timeline - while it rejigged to fit in social search. On a positive note, LinkedIn is becoming a valued current awareness and networking tool, and Blekko holds more promise as an alternative search engine.

For Hane - and many others - it was the year of the ebook. Analyst Michael Wolf forecast that the US ebook marketplace would surpass $5 billion by 2016, up from $2 billion in 2011. But it hasn't been all peace and harmony - "Unfortunately, there was and still is an adversarial atmosphere among libraries, publishers, and aggregators. "

Beyond that there is seismic shift in IT to a new platform - "This new platform will be built on the strength of four foundation technologies: cloud services and cloud enabling technologies; mobile devices, applications, and next-generation broadband networks; big data/analytics; and social technologies."

And on the web - will there be a web? "Forrester Research believes that the world will move away from the web toward the App Internet—powerful local devices (such as an iPad) running programs that transparently link to resources in the cloud".

Onwards.

Google - Search Plus Your World

Google took another giant step into personalizing search results with Search Plus Your World - whereby search results will include personal items from your Google+ account and those of your friends (assuming you have the account), profiles people have set up in Google+, and people and pages that have been set up in Google+ (and are public, one presumes).

For now this will show only with Google.com. You will see the line --
Introducing Search plus Your World. Search the web, your photos, friends' posts, and more. If you don't have a Google+ account you'll be encouraged to upgrade.

Tara Calishain shows each of these with screen shots and comments - Google Launches “Search Plus Your World” (If Your World Is Google+) (Jan 11)

Fine - as far as it goes - which isn't very far since it does not include Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the many other social networks people are using.

Her point -- "My point is that any framework which provides a limited amount of personalized content from a limited number of networks is going to be a disappointment and ultimately fail; a more open framework should be the goal. "

Danny Sullivan provides a history and more detail on the features in Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World” (Jan 10)

He called it the "most radical transformation ever"! Google started personalizing in 2005 by using history and interests for those who opted in. In December 2009, those became default whether you were logged in or not. In February 2011 Google started to show results from Google+.

"With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears."

Essentially, as Danny explains, Google+ Search has become part of universal search.

You can opt out through search settings (under the cog icon in the upper right0, and by using a toggle for on/off for a search..

Some concerns are:

+ privacy - may make private content more visible
+ Google promoting its own world and blocking competitors.

Twitter is especially unhappy. Twitter is "concerned" about Google's latest social search features. in NextWeb quotes Twitter's official statement:

"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. " "Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results."

[Not mentioned though, Google and Twitter relations broke down months ago when they failed to renegotiate the agreement for the real time feed.]

FT discussed these and a third in Google searches to become personalised

+ personalized search will make search engine optimisation techniques less effective for ranking sites more highly in the "organic" results.

Search Plus Your World (in Google) will have consequences.

+ will more people sign up for Google Plus account and move their activity from other social networks? Maybe.

+ will some searchers turn off the personal search under settings and try to carry on with pre-Plus Google?

+ will some reduce use of Google (or even boycott) in favour of Bing - and whatever improved relationship Bing and Facebook have?

+ will Google's energies be entirely consumed with this social search and the legal repercussions to the detriment of web search?

+ will search engine optimization be radically changed as search marketers try to get leverage and connections through private connections?

For now, I'm sceptical that this will actually improve search. I would have kept the two worlds separate - general web vs social web - and had a meta search for the social networks that I belong to. It does not seem that Google is holding to its mission, " to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

Another view of Blekko

Blekko Makes Relevancy Improvements, Adds Bunches of Slashtags, Research Buzz (Dec 26)

Tara Calishain's review of the improvements at Blekko. Captures what I have found also in using slashtags.

"Running a few slashtag searches did show that it was useful at narrowing down results, but the downside is that I’m apparently not very good at guessing slashtags. There is a partial directory available at http://blekko.com/tag/show#tab3. If you want more suggestions you can also enter your search and a forward slash, and Blekko will suggest a variety of slashtags for you. "

Blekko gets major upgrade

blekko: New and Improved Site, Same Mission, blekko blog (Dec 21)

Grand news from Blekko - it now has 500 categories curated by humans selecting best sites - and a new display.

The left side helps users navigate to the collections and any categories that Blekko identfies as appropriate. Enter a destination, and you may see categories for Travel, or Destination. On the right you can get more information about the category (click /history to see the sites included) and the editors.

Also use the suggested queries as you type - they often contain examples of relevant slash tags.

There is something about this that reminds me of the Open Directory Project - probably that editors are building the collections selecting the sites. of course, Blekko is not a directory - its classification is very basic - but its quality depends on those editors.

Hunt around at Blekko - you'll find other attractive features - such as cache and similar. It also has some syntax for limiting search to words in title (intitle:) and domain (site:ca) - though limited use.

Google - stop annoying researchers

Google Drops Scholar From Navigation Bar, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable (Dec 13)

Reports from people who can see the new Google bar (to replace the one they just introduced) indicate that Scholar isn't there. You can bet that wallet and shopping are.

This will probably resolved itself, but in the meantime, Google has annoyed researchers yet again.

Beating down the content farms

Google & Bing Have “Won A Major Victory” Over Content Farms, Study Says, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 16)

Many grumbled about the changes to the ranking algorithms in February to demote content farm materials, but the results are in - and they are good.

"New Scientist asked University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie to study 50 search queries that are “known to be a target of content farmers.” One example query given is “how to train for a marathon.” McCreadie studied those queries in both March and August, and the magazine says “the results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory” against content farms."

a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228436.200-inside-search-engines-war-on-bad-results.html"> Inside search engines' war on bad results , New Scientist (Dec 15)

Of interest: "For example, the traffic flowing from search engines to eHow, a Demand Media site, dropped 20 per cent after the update. Google has also enlisted users to keep up the fight - it says that it now demotes sites that people choose to exclude from search results."

The decline of the organic link

Decline of Organic Links - another great infographic from Aaron Wall at SEOBook - but, oh so discouraging whether you are a searcher or responsible for a website.

There is a lot in this that is very damming of Google's practices. Yes - it has to fight the people who game the system; but no - it shouldn't be favouring its adwords and properties, and very likely the Google engineers have gone too far in penalizing websites for some practices.

Of interest - we think that putting links in postings on Facebook or tweets will help build authority - but most social media sites put the no follow tag around outbound links thereby turning off authority.

Conclusion: "For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals."

SEO Infographic by SEO Book

Google and the Longtail

SEO Book has given us a infographic about changes to Google's search algorithm that have made it less necessary to use "long tail keywords".

The term, long tail, refers to the data being statistically distributed largely in a long narrow band - rather than predominantly in a compressed range. Wikipedia notes that longtail has been popular in retail as the driving concept for selling unique items in low quantities. SRO marketers became skilled in identifying and using the "long tail keywords".

Google today is better at retreiving and ranking these long tail results. This infographic shows the changes in Google's search algorithms that have made this so. It is a fantastic summary.

Infographic by SEO Book

Google's recent updates to search

Another ten of Google’s Search Quality Changes, Bas van den Beld, State of Search (Dec 2)

How did I miss this blog? It is all about search, search marketing, and social media, and is based in the Netherlands. Thanks to Pandia for picking up this posting which summarizes Google's update on changes it made to search in the last month. Google has decided to be more open about this.

Couple of notables:

+ refinements to related query to make the results more "related".

+ more indexing of sites - and maybe this will surface what you didn't see before.

+ more auto-complete predictions

Google Search as a form of AI

Google Director of Research on Search Algorithms & AI, Angela Guess, SemanticWeb (Nov 30)

Google Director of Research Peter Norvig suggest that Google Search is a form of A.I. "If you define A.I. as providing a course of action in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, based on learning from examples, that’s what our search algorithm is all about.”"

Full article is -- Search Algorithms with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig, Stone Temple (Oct 17)

Much is covered in this conversation with Peter Norvig. Topics include:

The basic approach used to build Google Translate
The process Google uses to test and implement algorithm updates
How voice driven search works
The methodology being used for image recognition
How Google views speed in search
How Google views the goals of search overall

Google - another interface change

How to Try Google's New Navigation Menu, Google Operating System (Nov 30)

Brace yourself for another change in Google's interface. Now it intends to hide the navigation system until you mouseover the logo. But what if you don't mouseover? What if it never occurs to you to do that? Who exactly are the Google gnomes designing this interface for? This item shows you how to preview the new interface. But why bring on misery before its time?

Get around personalized results at Google

9 Ways To Depersonalize Your Search Results, Alexander Zagoumenov, Search Engine People (Nov 21)

Google will personalize search results for you whether you are signed in or not. There are a few ways to work around it - as we see in this article. The simplest way is to add "&pws=0" to the search query - but this is onerous. Instead use options in the browser or a special extension.

-

Author Tag connecting Google Plus

Google+ Is Slowly Invading Google’s Main Search Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 25)

Google added an author tag in June which could be used to link an article to a page about the author.

Now -- "When a search result with rel=author appears in Google’s search results, the author’s avatar and the adjacent byline both now link to a new Google search results page that begins with the author’s Google+ profile. "

This looks like a reason for online writers to get that Google + page and use the author tag.

Google Kills Seven More

Google kills off seven more products including Wave, BBC News (Nov 23)

Google announced the end of seven products. The Search Timeline disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Others to go are Wave (email and instant messaging), Knol (the wiki-like product), Bookmarks List (for sharing), Friends Connect, Gears, and a renewable energy project.

If you depended on any of these you'll need to find another service. I stopped trusting Google's support for its products when it dropped Google Notebooks and I eventually turned to Evernote. I'm loathe to adopt any new services from Google because of its long history of dropping them.

No Backwards Link Search

Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down Monday, November 21st, Nov 18, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 18)

Site Explorer - wonderful tool for seeing linkages between sites - gone because Yahoo converted to Bing's databases. Bing webmaster tools don't provide backlinks - and Google was never good at it.

Many Google users are very upset

Google Kills Its Own "Timeline" Feature, Jon Mitchell, Read Write Web (Nov 11)

Yes - Timeline view at Google is really gone. There were many upset users in Google's Web Search forum.

Google, which is getting more and more dismissive of its users, is quoted as suggesting people use "... google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search for graphs of search results over time, " Those tools start at 2004 - it isn't the same at all - and just shows how out of touch Google is with the needs of its professional user base.

The ReadWriteWeb article says that a timeline still exists in Google News. I don't think that is true or it is so well hidden as to be on its way out.

Bias at Google and Bing?

Study: Bing More “Biased” Than Google; Google Not Behaving Anti-Competitively, Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Nov 3)

There were reports earlier that Google gave preference to its own services in search results - but these new studies indicate Google doesn't show bias, although there are signs that Bing does. "So, what conclusions to draw? Wright says that “analysis finds that own-content bias is a relatively infrequent phenomenon”—meaning that although Microsoft appears to favor its own sites more often than Google, it’s not really a major issue, at least in terms of “bias” or “fairness” of search results that the engines present. Reasonable conclusion: Google (and Bing, though less so) really are trying to deliver the best results possible, regardless of whether they come from their own services (local search, product search, etc) or not."

Three cheers for DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo – silly name but a neat little search tool, Karen Blackman's blog (Nov 7)

I love Karen Blackman's opening line - "Fed up with Google ignoring your search terms and giving you something completely different? Confused by irrelevant tweets and postings in your results?"

Yes - though I hadn't noticed tweets.

What should we turn to? Duckduckgo is a simple, little search engine - understands enough to help disambiguate your question but won't clutter your search with words you did not intend. It does not personalize results - it does not save your search history. It has syntax.

Read the article for a preview of other reasons to use Duckduckgo.

Google's web search timeline gone

Surely, I am not the first to discover this. Google removed the web search timeline. I was aghast when it dropped the timeline from news search in mid summer [Google Squared, News Timeline Get Added To Google’s Chopping Block] but the timeline was still a search option in web searching up to a day or two ago. Gone now. This was one of the most useful web search tools ever developed.

Let us list what Google has removed in the last year or so.

+ define - gets definition from a dictionary (who needs that?). It no longer pulls in items from glossaries.

+ the + sign itself - which used to stop Google from pulling in related words that would distort and skew the search results.

+ search visited page (or pages not visited) - useful for people who actually used their search history.

+ easy access to cached - it's no longer with the snippet - have to mouseover to the page preview - if you have the patience.

+ longer snippets - the page preview isn't half as useful as getting longer snippets.

+ realtime search of tweets and other sources - have to go to Topsy.com. What happened to universal search?

+ Google Labs - where Google engineers showcased and tested new products. No products to show off anymore, I guess.

+ Timeline display in news search, as mentioned, although there is some limited selection from time range periods.

+ And now - the Timeline in Google Web Search that could show the development of a topic across decades and pull in results you'd never find from scrolling down pages.

I've probably missed some.

+ (Postscript Nov 11) Wonderwheel to show related searches visually - was useful when first introduced but deteriorated. The idea was excellent, but Google was unable to deliver.

What do we get instead? Social, social, social. I do not care what my friends and colleagues search for or like. Sure, I'm pleased if someone shares a link, but for the research that I need to do, their likes and dislikes are of little to no relevance. I recognize that there is value to following topical groups - Facebook is fine for that. But I don't want the two mixed together.

Information professionals need real search tools - tools that help in seeing the topical breakdown, tools that support refining the search - because - Google - the user could know better than you what words to use and where to look, tools that show the results so that you can make better sense of all that data. Google is stripping all that away, and instead offering Google Plus where you give up your privacy (again), subscribe to "authorities", kibbutz about sharing links and chatter, and generally waste more time.

Google - you are driving me away.

On-Page SEO

4 Graphics to Help Illustrate On-Page SEO, SEOMOZ (Nov 8)

Written for people in the search engine optimization business, but invaluable for the researcher who needs to what search engines look for when ranking.

1. "Nail the title, the headline and make sure the phrase is on the page (and the page is actually on the subject of the keyword) and you've done your job. "

2. User experience with the page matters.

3. Google measures everything - "authentic, editorial, and high quality"

4. "When targeting similar phrases or phrases that can work together and target the same intent for most users, a single page should suffice. When the phrases cannot logically work together in a title/headline or when the intents don't have a high likelihood for overlap, it's time to build different pages and target the keywords separately."

Google's new algorithm update

Brands & News Sites Among Winners From Google’s Freshness Algo Update, Report Says, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 7)

Guess this is good - "Major brands and a variety of news sites — from established outlets to internet-only gossip sites — are among the winners from Google’s recent algorithm update that aimed to reward fresh and more recent content."

News sites benefited (largely - not entirely), but so did celebrities and pizza.

"But it’s odd to see several travel-related brands (Hotels.com, SouthwestVacations.com, NationalCar.com, etc.) and pizza sites (Dominos.com and PapaJohns.com) also getting visibility boosts after the algorithm change."

Google to emphasize recent

Google changes search algorithm, trying to make results more timely, Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Nov 3)

Google will put a priority on deliverying the most recent results on queries where it "senses" that is the searcher's desire.

"The world’s most popular search engine announced on Thursday it will alter some of the algorithms it uses to determine what search results it shows to its users. In a move that affects roughly 35 per cent of all Google searches, the company will now put more emphasis on the most recently-created results – news articles and social media posts that can be just a few minutes old."

Here's a novel idea - let searchers decide whether they want relevance and quality, or recency and quality. We used to be able to use real-time search at Google to get the latest from social media and news. Ah - Google thinks it knows best.

Get with the SEO program

The Goodness in the Evil of SEO: Why Search Engine Optimization Matters to Information Professionals by Erin Rushton, and Susan Funke, Searcher (Nov 2011)

As an information professional, if you are the least responsible for a web site you need to know the basics of search engine optimizaion. This article provides a primer.

"The key to being discovered on search engines is through SEO. Optimization can improve the ranking and visibility of library resources and services. Many libraries, for example, invest time and effort into digitizing books, images, and items from special collections. This material, along with subject guides, finding aids, newsletters, blogs, etc., may be of interest to the public, especially researchers, the media, and potential donors. Improved ROI on the millions spent annually to support the purchase and access to high-quality research databases, journals, and books is another benefit of SEO. These resources are often unknown or overlooked by users who rely solely on search engines for their research. SEO can improve the visibility of these tools and lead to increased usage"

Google better at getting into javascript

Google Can Now Execute AJAX & JavaScript For Indexing, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 1)

Googlebot can index comments in Ajax or Javascript. This is partly done by Google acting as a user and presenting POST commands to pull up the content.

Infographic US search engines

Infographic: The Top Three US Search Engines, Search Engine Land (Oct 31)

Google, Yahoo and Bing make up 95% of US Market Share. Google has 65% and somehow Yahoo has held onto 15.89%. Bing has 13.1% even though Microsoft has so much clout through Windows. But of course we should now be talking Bing-powered search - at 28.99%.

Bing and Firefox

Cats & Dogs Living Together: Bing Promotes Firefox, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 26)

Strange and wonderful things can happen --

"Bing invites people to download a version of “Firefox With Bing” where Bing is used as the default search engine for the Firefox search box and for searches conducted from the “AwesomeBar” address window:"

But we won't see a Bing - Chrome combo - tho I would like to see Chrome be friendlier to other search engines. I know there is this page of instructions for searching in chrome - but a little power search box in the top corner would be much easier.

Google drops another search feature

Google Drops "Not Visited Yet" Search Filter, Barry Schartz, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 28)

One by one Google is removing the search features it introduced about 3 years ago in the left side panel. Now it is no longer possible to easily repeat a search of pages you haven't visited before or have and want to review.

In fact, even though you may be signed into your Google account, it's not obvious how to access your search history - at least in Chrome. Ah, I see, it has been moved to that little cog called Options in the upper right - Web History.

This is no way to treat users.

At Google it's about intention

Google - The Intention Engine, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 25)

Have Google's search results been slipping, and would it be because Google is trying to figure out the searcher's "intention"? Hard to tell, but I do know that its wild deviation from the words that I used annoys me enormously.

Google+ Too Much

How Google is pushing Google+ in your face, State of Search (Oct 24)

Google users are seeing the little box with a + inside everywhere. The plan is to get everyone using Google+

"Everything points in the direction that Google has taken up Plus as being the core of their ‘new way of working’. Google Plus is their “New Pagerank”."

But there is a backlash happening right now with over-personalized search results.

Google drops + operator

Google Removes The + Search Command, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 24)

It's official - the + sign is useless as an operator at Google. I've been noticing that for some time, and Barry Schwarz has confirmed it.

For the last 2 or 3 years, the + has signified "I want this word" - no related words, no variants - this exact word. And as Google did more and more to our queries, I was using + more - until I noticed it didn't work. Instead use quotation marks around the word.

Google said this -- "We’re streamlining the ways you can tell Google to search for the exact keywords you type, whether it’s an exact phrase or a single word, by focusing on the functionality of the quotation marks operator. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"] to get the same results."

Barry Schwartz said, "I am feeling Google removed the plus operator because of Google +, their social network. They do not want Google + confused with the operator, and now typing in + into Google + will auto complete with your friend’s names."

Google has been increasingly cavalier with what it does to search operators and features. They should be more careful - people can search elsewhere.

Internet Librarian 2011

Internet Librarian 2011—Considering the Possibilities by Cindy Shamel, Information Today (OCt 24)

Capsule report from Internet Librarian 2011, Oct 17-19. Lots here for those interested in new learning - largely collaborative and more often involving play. Two keynotes addressed this: John Seeley Brown on Lee Rainie on PEW study into networks and mobile use.

There are some presentations for searchers. Mary Ellen Bates showed" how results at Google and Bing are very skewed to your search history - and ways to get around that. Greg Notess described the new browsers.

" Personalization and geolocation skew search results more and more as search engines strive to deliver targeted advertising. Google’s popularity ranking has given way to search results dependent upon prior search history or browser version. Google looks at what browser you use and operates on the assumption that a lower version means a less sophisticated user."

There were tips on how to use Blekko also.

"Search engine developers from Blekko exhibited at Internet Librarian for the first time. Blekko, discussed by Bates and others, facilitates filtering of search results using the slash tag. Users can create their own slash tags, limiting searches to a customized list of sites, or rely on Blekko created slash tags such as /health; /politics; or /green. Slash tags can also limit by date range e.g., Obama/date=2005-2006 or by third party e.g., /youtube or /flickr"

Presentations are at http://infotoday.com/il2011/Presentations.asp
Also

Where did cache go in Google?

Where Did Cached Pages Go On Google?, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 19)

Google's Instant Preview is the reason you don't see a link for cached or for similar. Have to look in instant preview area - first you have to remember its there and then intentionally scroll over the arrow and wait for the display.

Yahoo now Bing - why bother?

Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea), Search Engine Land (Oct

Yahoo's switch over to Bing's databases is nearly complete - "If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the exception from within Korea, the search results will be powered by Bing. Why not Korea? Because there is a three-way migration for that between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum. They expect this transition to be completed by the end of the year."

This reminds me of how Yahoo swallowed Altavista and Alltheweb - the old interfaces were there for those who couldn't bear to leave them, but results wise they were the same as at Yahoo. It was just a matter of time before they'd be closed. Same holds for Yahoo itself now.

Yahoo now Bing - why bother?

Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing (Except Korea), Search Engine Land (Oct

Yahoo's switch over to Bing's databases is nearly complete - "If you do a search on any Yahoo powered site via your desktop or mobile device, with the exception from within Korea, the search results will be powered by Bing. Why not Korea? Because there is a three-way migration for that between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum. They expect this transition to be completed by the end of the year."

This reminds me of how Yahoo swallowed Altavista and Alltheweb - the old interfaces were there for those who couldn't bear to leave them, but results wise they were the same as at Yahoo. It was just a matter of time before they'd be closed. Same holds for Yahoo itself now.

Google using SSL

Google to begin defaulting logged-in users to secure search, The Next Web (Oct 18)

Signed in Google users will have "secure search and privacy" by being directed to https:// where the SSL protocol is used - basically, Google will encyrpt the search query and results, preventing third parties from seeing and using it. As well Google won't pass on information about your search to the result site you visit.

From the blog post,
"As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users. "

Google's 3rd quarter

Google Earnings: GOOG Made Nearly $10 Billion Revenue For Q3 2011, Nearly $3 Billion Net, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 13)

Google increased revenue again to 9.72 billion in Q3.

More figures in Google Gains as Advertising Demand Helps Sales Top Estimates , Business Week (Oct 14)

Google holds 82% of the search advertising market. That must keep the coffers full.

Related - Report: Paid Search Rebounded In Q3 2011, Search Engine Land.

DuckDuckGo gets money

Google threat? Search engine DuckDuckGo scores funding, Paul Sloan, Webware (Oct 13)

Duxkduckgo has been getting funding - good - we need an alternative - "DuckDuckGo, which promises super-fast search results with far less spam and clutter than you get on the biggies." Call it the little search engine that could.

Sept Search Market Share

comScore Search Data: Google Gains, Yahoo Falls To “Lowest Level Ever” by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 11)

The figures bounce around but Google is back on the upswing with search market share in the US and Yahoo and Bing flat to falling.

Google: 65.3 percent (vs. 64.8 percent in August)
Yahoo: 15.5 percent (16.3 percent in August)
Bing: 14.7 percent (flat vs August)
Ask: 3.0 (flat vs August)
AOL: 1.5 percent (vs. 1.3 in August)

Google Shortcuts

Search faster with Google's built-in shortcuts by Dennis O'Reilly, CNet How To (Oct 4)

This is a very good single page guide to shortcuts. It includes ~ for getting words related to your search term. I would add one more tip - use + in front of a word to get exactly that word. Sometimes you don't want Google taking over looking for words it thinks you want. So if you just want tips - and not tipping, or tip - use +tips.

Google News Ranking Factors

This mix of factors in the algorithms for ranking news stores has a few points in common with search results ranking.

There are two lists.

Top 10 Most Important Google News Ranking Factors

Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors

For positive factors, expertise, authority, uniqueness, social sharing, quality, keywords in headlines, and citation rank.

There is more detail on negative ranking in Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors, Search Engine Land (OCt 3)

Google's share slipping

Compete.com: Google Slowly Losing Market Share, Bing Slowly Gaining, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 29)

Google appears to be slipping in search market share in the US - and Bing is gaining. For search capability Google seems to me to be stronger than Bing, but it is not as lovable as it used to be - and recently has been taking more away from search than it has added (especially real time search).

"According to Compete’s research, Google-powered search (which includes both Google and AOL) had 68.3% of the US market in August, down from 69% in July. Bing-powered search — Bing and Yahoo combined — held 31.7% of the market in August, up from 31% in July."

Google's display shortcuts

Google's New Search Interface Disables Many Shortcuts, Google Operating System, (Sept 23)

Google is constantly tweeking the search results page - it's hard to keep up. I have never been a fan of Google Instant but I might as well give up.

Google has redesigned again - making it "more difficult to use most of the keyboard shortcuts that allowed you to quickly select a result or see a small preview. "

There used to be a magnifying glass icon - who knew what it meant? Now there is a chevron. Whatever - mouseover IT to get preview of target page.

Now, you can use your tab key to move through results on a page one by one - at the end of the page it will progress through the ads. I don't see the advantage, but some searchers will like it.

Bing and Yahoo Flail Around

Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Sep 23)

Catch up on what Bing and Yahoo have been doing to compete with Google, and why Google need not worry. Very sad. Bing and Yahoo just flail about with no good plan - and in Yahoo's case, no meaningful search technology.

Google's Instant Preview

Google Instant Previews Via Mouse Over, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sep 22)

Soon you may see Google's latest improvement to Instant Preview - "The improvement lets you simply hover your mouse over a search result and the preview will automatically show up on the right hand preview column."

Google's algorithm

13,000 Precision Evaluations: Schmidt’s Testimony Reveals How Google Tests Algorithm Changes, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 21)

Eric Schmidt explained to a Senate subcommittee how Google tests its algorithm changes. It's a mix of "human review and internal analysis".

"In 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change."

Social Media gives signals

How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search by Shane Snow, Mashable (Sep 9)

Search engines use what they see happening in social media sites in their ranking algorithms.

"Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results."

Links and mentions in postings are a measure of popularity.

"“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”"

Adaptive Search at Bing

Adapting Search to You, Bing Community (Sep 14)

Bing tries harder to understand your search intent and the meaning of documents using semantic technologies. Mind, Bing learns from you - so you need to be a frequent user for this to work for you.

"As an example, let’s say you’re in the process of planning a vacation – you might decide to search for “Australia”. In this case, you’re most likely to be looking for websites specifically about the country Australia, or information about travel. " -

Then you switch.

"Now suppose, instead, you’re a movie-buff and are trying to decide on a movie to rent for the evening. With this context, the smart technology powering this feature will infer that you’re probably looking for the movie “Australia”, and begin to adapt the search page to your intent by showings results relevant to the movie Australia higher up on the page than they were previously:"

It's called Adaptive Search - and there's a video.

Web Grebber for Analytics

Blekko Launches “Web Grepper” Analytics Tool , WebProNews (Sept 14)

Blekko has something new for the SEO people - an analytics tool called Web Grepper - to search the web for code that doesn't normally get indexed.

"“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”"

Full press release below:

Blekko Launches the First Web Grepper

Blekko Continues Efforts Around Search Transparency and Openness by Opening Up Web Index

Redwood Shores, Calif. – September 14, 2011 – blekko, the spam-fighting search engine, announced today the launch of Web Grepper, a new tool that allows users to go beyond keyword search to also look at coded information embedded in webpages. Web Grepper does this by “grepping” – or searching – lines of code within Web files to identify relevant or matching domains based on specific topics and search terms. In doing so, the tool gives users access this valuable data and furthers the company’s goal of an open and transparent web.

The Web contains an incredible amount of data that keywords can’t access: How many sites have Facebook ‘Like’ or a Google Plus +1 button? How many sites have embedded Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” music video? With Web Grepper, users gain insight into useful, and often unseen, data about websites including advertising, AdWords, back links, cookies, and more information that is embedded within the Web domain’s file. By enabling users to leverage this data, marketers and consumers who are concerned with transparency can access a truly unique competitive analysis tool based on the coded information in blekko’s index.

“With Web Grepper, we’re offering our users unique access to the blekko index and embedded information that cannot be found on other search engines,“ said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko, “This allows users to uncover incredibly useful data that was previously inaccessible through a keyword search.”

blekko users submit questions to Web Grepper that they would like to see “grepped,” and the blekko community then votes each day to determine which of these questions will be analyzed, and have the results ultimately showcased in a report. Marketers can also use Web Grepper as a market analysis tool to see the top results.

To ensure that the Web Grepper is not being used as a hacking tool to obtain personal and private information, blekko will be manually reviewing “greps” and monitoring for malicious data mining behavior, such as collecting credit cards or social security numbers.

About blekko
blekko was founded in 2007 to pursue innovation in search. The company has raised $24 million since its founding in 2007 from US Venture Partners and CMEA Capital, as well as leading angel investors including Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, and Marc Andreessen. blekko has 25 employees, including former Google and Yahoo! Search engineers.

Contact
Samantha Murillo
blekko@sutherlandgold.com
(415) 848-7167

Google's ranking is biased

Seobook by Aaron Wall has some troubling findings about Google's ranking practices.

Google Eats thei Organic Search Results - meaning Google will put its own brands first if it can - might notice that on a book search.

Algorithmic Journalism and the rise of corporate content farms (Sept 12) - while Google was fighting the content farms through the Panda changes, it seems to have boosted "premium publishers", allowing them to pad with links, and it has been showing a preference for brand.

Search US market share 2010-11

One Year Later, Bing-Powered Search Takes 4% Market Share From Google – Hitwise, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 8)

Hitwise measured increases in use of Bing and Yahoo (based on Bing) in the United States over past year of about 6% - 4% of which came from a drop in Google's share of the search market. Bing powered-search was at 28% in August 2011, and Google was 65%.

How Google Treats PDFs

PDFs in Google Search Results, Google Webmaster Central Blog (Sep 1)

Google has indexed "hundreds of millions of PDF files". It doesn't index the images, but it does use the links.

But how does it assign a title?

"A: We use two main elements to determine the title shown: the title metadata within the file, and the anchor text of links pointing to the PDF file. To give our algorithms a strong signal about the proper title to use, we recommend updating both. "

Fighting scrapper sites

Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 26)

"Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page."

How things work in Google Search

Video: How Google Improves Their Search Algorithms, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 25)

4 minute video on how Google improves its web search algorithms, the quality of results and the user interfaces.

Google Drops two more services

Google Squared, News Timeline Get Added To Google’s Chopping Block, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 25)

Google retreating on two more services - Google Squared - which was first billed as its response to Wolfram Alpha for data, and the News Timeline! The loss of the news timeline is part of the downgrade of the news archive. This is getting depressing.

Mission Search vs Excavation

Exploring A New Search Landscape, With Microsoft’s Jacquelyn Krones, Greg Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Aug 12)

Jacquelyn Krones, a senior product manager from Microsoft, spoke with Greg Hotchkiss about search behaviours, especially as they differ according to the device we use. Are you on a mission or excavating (exploring)?

“There’s clearly a different profile of these activities on the different platforms. On desktops and laptops, people do all three of the activities – they conduct missions and excavations and explorations.

On their phones we expected to see lots of missions – usually when you use your mobile phone and you’re conducting a search, whatever you’re doing in terms of searching is less important than what’s going on with you in the real world – you’re trying to get somewhere, you’re having a discussion with somebody and you want to look something up quick or you’re trying to make a decision about where to go for dinner.

Google's sitelinks

The evolution of sitelinks: expanded and improved, Inside Search - Google blog (Aug 16)

Google has improved the display of links within a site that show on the results page.

"Sitelinks will now be full-size links with a URL and one line of snippet text—similar to regular results—making it even easier to find the section of the site you want. We’re also increasing the maximum number of sitelinks per query from eight to 12. "

Test it on Art Gallery of Ontario

Loss of Google's Wonder Wheel

The Real Reason Google Wonder Wheel Died: It Was A Pain To Maintain, Gary Price, Search Engine Land (Aug 15)

Gary Price discovered a posting by a Google employee who said the wonder wheel of related searches (now removed) was a headache to maintain.

Yes - and it was also a headache to use. Surely Google could come up with some text analysis that would show related concepts. Yahoo did it - once, Vivisimo had a method, some had star display of concepts. But this feature seems to be dying out.

Google's social search and ranking

Google+ Public Posts Coming To Google’s Social Search Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 12)

"Soon you may start seeing annotations that mention Google’s own social service, and these will come from people in your Google+ circles:"

"Google emphasizes that this only applies to public posts on Google+, and that it’ll only work for you if you’re a Google+ user that’s signed in to your Google account. "

Danny Sullivan had explained earlier How Being “Friends” On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings (July 27)

"Want to rank better on Google? Get people to add you to their Google+ Circles, and that seems to be a potentially huge boost, based on a search I just did."

Brand connections in Google social results coming soon.

Infinite display for Google?

Yes, Google Is Testing Infinite Scroll Web Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)

Google does infinite scroll for images - stands to reason they'll change web results display as well.

DuckDuckGo on Time's list

DuckDuckGo Honored As One TIME’s Top Websites Of 2011; Google+ & Quora, Too, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 16)

Time magazine likes Duck Duck GO -

"It doesn’t involve e-mail, maps, real-time results or social networking. It’s just a simple, straightforward search engine that’s reminiscent of early Google, with a no-nonsense privacy policy (it will not store any information that could tie you to your searches). Best of all, the results are dependably relevant and devoid of spam."

Google testing search interface - again

Confirmed: Google Testing Frames For Search Options & Search Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 19)

"Google has confirmed a new user interface test on the search results page where the left side search filters are in a scrollable frame, and the middle of the search results are in their own scrollable frame"

But being a test, you might not see it. I don't.

Google does some categorization

What Does Google Think Your Site Is About?, Aj Kohn, Blind Five Yearl Old (Aug 15)

It seems to me to still be rudimentary, but Google can use clues to roughly categorize a site - picks out reviews, forums, shopping - especially shopping; and it categorizes queries to bring up local results or topically related results.

Google's news archive less accessible

Is Google News Archive Search’s Home Page Gone Forever?, Gary Price, Search Engine Land (Aug 18)

This could be bad news for researchers. The url for Google's Archive News search is redirecting to the Google home page. Today, it now redirects to the Google News advanced search page.

You can access older stories from the advanced search page by changing the date range - but you aren't encouraged to do so.

Google did suspend its newspaper digitization program earlier in the year.

Gary Price is right - "How About More Heads Up?" Google gives less and less of this - and since it has pulled the news archive search interface, we wonder what they will take down next.

Thankfully Google Web Search still shows the timeline as a search tool - using it will pick up news archive items from earlier years.

About the Panda Update

Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About the Google Panda Update, Neil Patel, Search Engine Land (Aug 18)

Blow by blow account of changes in Google's algorithm from February on.

Of particular interest -- "A new ranking factor – similar to PageRank or meta tag optimization, a site’s “Panda score”, based on the metrics quantified in the update, will influence where new and existing pages fall in the SERPs."

Has advice on how to do well with the new ranking algorithms - mainly content, and build brand awareness with social networking.

Will Bing succeed?

Bing’s Battle With Google: How Long Is “Long Term”?, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Aug 2)

Bing is two years old, has 14.4 of the US search market (although combined with Yahoo it's 31%), and sometimes it has a slight edge over Google (not usually for long). Will this be good enough?

"The current intensity of Bing’s effort in search is paying dividends but not at the level Microsoft needs if it is truly going to challenge Google over the “long term.” The company will need to continue to develop novel tools and features and to build usage in verticals “around” search. Why isn’t Bing News much better than Google News, for example?"

Yahoo goes Bing in Europe

Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 1)

Yahoo changed its US and Canada versions of the search engine to Bing some time ago. Now Europe - for organic results. Not paid search ads - not yet.

Google's Universal Search

What Wins In Google Universal Search? Videos, Images & Google!, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 28)

Universal search is so universal now that we've forgotten that there was a time we had to remember on our own to check images, video, news and other speciality content for a search. What wins? What do we look at most? Images and video - and that's because they show near the top - and because Google gives preference to content from its own domain.

"The reason Google News is not dominating the news category, Searchmetrics says, is because the URLs in the “News for…” are URLs to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other news sites."

Uptodate with Google

Google Friends Newsletter has issued its last message. To get the latest about Google, it recommends:

The Official Google Blog - http://www.googleblog.blogspot.com
Our main blog features the widest range of our biggest news and announcements. Subscribe to our blog posts by email—no more than one per day—by scrolling to the “Subscribe” box on the right-hand side of the blog. You can also subscribe to the blog in an RSS reader, or pick and choose which subject(s) you’d like to get news about by subscribing to a topical label (look on the right-hand side for this list).

Topical blogs - http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/blog-directory.html
Visit our blog directory to find a blog that covers just what you’re interested in, whether it’s Chrome or search, or blogs in additional languages that cover countries around the world.

Twitter - http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/twitter-directory.html
We have a wide variety of Twitter feeds covering many different topics. Visit our Twitter directory and follow the ones that strike your fancy.

Infographic of Blekko

Everyone is crazy for infographics. This one about Blekko is from 14 Facts (& more) about Blekko - Infographic, Cognitive SEO

Original Infographic @ 14 Facts (& more) about Blekko / Provided by cognitiveSEO

Should Microsoft offload Bing?

Bing Becomes a Distraction for Microsoft, By ROBERT CYRAN and MARTIN HUTCHINSON, New York Times (Jul 24)

Here's a suggestion for Microsoft - sell Bing to Facebook.

"Microsoft needs to concentrate on a different kind of search: finding a buyer for Bing, its online search business. Bing is the industry’s distant No. 2 after Google. It has become a distraction for the software giant — one that costs shareholders dearly. The division that houses Bing lost $2.6 billion in the latest fiscal year. Facebook, or even Apple, might make a better home for Bing. A sale would be a boon for Microsoft’s investors. "

Ranking factors

Google's Negative Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard, SEOMOZ (Jul 21)

What practices correlate to poor ranking at Google?

+ Length of domain - it's better to keep it short.
+ Response time - be fast
+ Adsense - too much is not a good thing
+ Number of followed links - doesn't guarantee good ranking - it's the diversity of sites that matters.

Also see Search Engine Ranking for 2011

Google Labs to be closed

Google Labs To Be Closed As Larry Page’s Product Streamlining Continues, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 20)

Google's CEO Larry Page wants to streamline product offerings - so he is closing Google Labs, a playground of innovative products, many of which graduated (because people played) to full products. Seems shortsited to take this away from the fans of new Google toys.

Google's rash of new UIs

A New Look for Google Translate, Google Operating System (July 19)

Google is changing Google Translate too more inline with the Google+ design - it is said. Seems it is spreading.

"After launching a new interface for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and started to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and probably other services."

Search Market Share June 2011

Bing Hits All-Time High Market Share, But Isn’t Taking It From Google, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 13)

Google holds its own for market share while Bing and Yahoo take from AOL and Ask.

June 2011

* Google: 65.5% (essentially unchanged from May)
* Yahoo: 15.9% (essentially unchanged)
* Bing: 14.4% (up from 14.1% in May)

Bing's Finance features - not in Canada

Buy, hold or sell? Bing Finance can help you decide!, Bing Community (July 13)

Bing says it helps you make informed decisions - now in the realm of stocks.

".. we are teaming with leading finance resources including Seeking Alpha, StockTwits.com, TheFlyOnTheWall and Trefis.com to help you make more informed financial decisions. "

But try to find Bing Finance. finance.bing.com doesn't work. You better have the stock exchange symbol at hand - that will refer you to Yahoo Finance. Also - if you are searching for stock information, add the word stock to the search.

Lastly, the features mentioned in this Bing Community blog posting don't come up at all in Toronto. This is why Canadians don't use Bing for finance.

Changes in Google Search Interface

Google Begins Multi-Month User Experience Update, Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Jun 28)

Watch for changes in the Googls search interface over the next few months. Probably everyone has noticed the black menu bar, and maybe the left panel with more white space (and less guidance on tools or sources to consider). They have their reasons.

Panic - Google loses Twitter Feed

You have to wonder who dropped the ball on this. Google's contract with Twitter for realtime feed expired on July 2 and Google was forced to close its realtime search. Here we have the world's foremost search engine losing an important input stream! Google has said it will be temporary, but it has also said that it plans to figure in Google+, its social networking system that is still being tested, into the mix. These comments are coming through other bloggers, such as Danny Sullivan. Google did not post an explanation to its own blog. This seems to be a half-assed, not to mention arrogant, way of going about being a social search engine and will be a serious inconvenience to people who use Google for search. Google should be careful - this is a good enough reason to switch to Bing.

Google Disables Realtime Search Feature, itPopular (Jul 6)

As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jul 4)

"Twitter’s deal appears to be continuing with Bing. I still see search results showing up over there that include Twitter. But Bing’s service never went as far back in time as Google’s.

While Twitter may need Google to continue offering archive search, Google also potentially needs Twitter in another way. Google may have lost some of the data it has recently been using to bring social signals into its results ... "

But this article says Google is still receiving the social signals - but it can't let users search.

Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings, SEOMoz (Jul 5)

"Tweets still help with indexation, although maybe not as fast as they used to. And tweets appear to boost rankings, although the exact degree is unclear."

But Google+ is in the game now too. What is Google doing?

Foodily curates recipes for Blekko

Blekko users looking for recipes will now benefit from recipe sites that have been collected at Foodily.

Foodily may be the largest online recipe network. A small group of food-loving individuals in California created the site and maintain its collection. It is an excellent recipe search engine with a very engaging and attractive display that allows for easily excluding ingredients and filtering on attributes.

Foodily, in its announcement stated that it "now actively curates Blekko search results for recipes ... In order to deliver the best results possible, Foodily creates recipe-related slashtags, including /Recipe, /Baking, /Vegetarian, and /Gluten free."

Thanks to this partnership, the search at Blekko for bumbleberry pie / recipes returns results that includes selections from Foodily. You cna see the entire Foodily contribution at http://blekko.com/user/foodily

Foodily tells its users that it "can’t do all the slashtag curating alone!" - and - " We’re encouraging friends of Foodily to sign up to be editors on Blekko, and work with us to edit slashtags for your favorite kinds of recipes."

Press release - Blekko, Foodily Partner to Clean Up Recipe Search on the Web "Foodily Community of Cooks and Food Lovers to Curate Recipe Slashtag to Weed Out Spam and Bring Highest Quality Content to Top of Search Results " PRWeb (Jun 29)

Authorship markup tag

Google feature now links authors to their content, Lance Whitney, Digital Media (Jun 29)

"Authors and other content creators will now be able to link their stories to their profile pages on Google and other sites, giving them a better chance of showing up by name in search results."

Google's Many Services

Google Launches “What Do You Love” Search, To Find Google Services, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 28)

Google has a universal search across all its services at a new address - wdyl.com - standing for What do you love. Except, searching across all possible kinds of search verticals with one term isn't good searching. We have to think of the purpose and structure of the engine as well as what we hope to fine when constructing a search. I love Oliphant - but the results at wdyl were ridiculous. Another example was elearning - Google did suggest searching news, or looking for books, as well as emailing some about the topic. Main intent is to remind people of the many services that Google offers.

Blekko depends on its users

Blekko Slashes More Spam With “Zorro” Update, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jun 21)

Blekko, the slashtag engine, has made another move to limit spam. It's called Zorro -- "Described as a major release, Zorro includes a new search index and automatic integration of the company’s trademark “slashtags” into top categories. Slashtags allow users to create customized results for any given query or category."

Also - Slash Through Spam With Blekko’s Zorro Update!, Michael Arrington, Techcrunch (Jun 21)

Zorro means more relevant results

"The company has also increased search relevance substantially by auto-including some 1,000 slash tags, up from just a handful previously. That means that for many results you are looking at hand picked sites that are known to have high quality content. Content farms just can’t get through slashtags."

There is also 3 Engine Monte - Be The Mark In Blekko’s 3 Engine Monte - click the 3 monte link to get results in three columns from Bing, Blekko, and Google - click on the column you like best to find the winner.

Google's Panda is a ranking factor to downgrade perveived low quality

Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jun 21)

Danny Sullivan says that, "Panda is a new ranking factor. Panda is not an entirely new overall ranking algorithm that’s employed by Google. "

Bottome line - "Panda is a filter that Google has designed to spot what it believes are low-quality pages. Have too many low-quality pages, and Panda effectively flags your entire site. Being Pandified, Pandification — whatever clever name you want to call it — doesn’t mean that your entire site is out of Google. But it does mean that pages within your site carry a penalty designed to help ensure only the better ones make it into Google’s top results."

Google under FTC Investigation

FAQ: Google vs. the FTC, PCWorld (Jun24)

Google is being investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for anti-competitive practices in search advertising. This FAQ tells us the basics: it's partly search advertising and partly search - "The investigation may look into whether Google's own services get preferential treatment in web searches, thereby giving the company an unfair advantage." The investigation could take a very long time.

Bing gains market share

Bing grabs market share from Google over past year, Lance Whitney, Microsoft (Jun 21)

How is this possible? -- "Looking at the overall search engine market from May 2010 to May 2011, Compete found that Google has lost close to 16 percent of its share, dropping to 63.6 percent from 73.9 percent. At the same time, Microsoft grew its share by 75 percent, jumping to 17 percent from 9.7 percent."

More related searches at Google

Google Expands Use & Display Of Related Searches, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 16)

Watch for new information at the bottom of the Google search results page. These might be used as related searches for your topic. This identifies 3 new types.

+ seattle neighbourhoods - which actually names them. I don't see this in google.com or google.ca.

+ entertainment search - eg mad men - see series of images of the cast

+ artist - eg vincent van gogh - get panel of art images. Probably has to be very famous. Doesn't show for Emily Carr.

Three new search features at Google

Google's New Search Features Put Pressure on Bing, Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld via PCWorld (jun 16)

Google leapt ahead of Bing and Yahoo in new features for search, although two - Instant Pages and Voice Search require the Chrome browser and it will be some time before these are rolled out to all users.

Update: With Instant Pages, Google aims to speed up search process, Computer World (Jun 14)

+ "Instant Pages preloads in Google back-end systems the results Google determines a user is most likely to click on. "

+ "Voice search, in which users speak their query terms, is being rolled out to Chrome desktop browser users, who will see a microphone icon in Google's search box."

+ Search by Image - available now at Google Images. You'll see a camera icon next to Google's search box. "When the icon is clicked, users will be able to enter a photo URL into the search box, or upload an image into it.

Twitter Multilingual Search

2Lingual, which brought us multilingual voice search at Google, offers the same at Twitter using new capabilities of the Chrome browser. Select your language (there are many), speak your words into your microphone, and read the results.

"The search tool utilizes the HTML Speech Input API of the Google Chrome version 11.0.696 browser. It also utilizes the Twitter Search API to make it possible for users to Voice Search the twitterverse in 51 different languages."

I found it worked very well with English (canada), managing to recognize and spell Manitoulin perfectly. French, however , - maybe it was my accent - was not so good, not even with place names.

Try it - twitter Multilingual Search

Saerch Engine Optimization

Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jun 3)

Search Engine Optimization need not be a mystery. Danny Sullivan identifies and explains the components through this infographic and a guide that covers content, html, architecture, links, social ,trust, personalization, violations, and blocking. It is a must read.

Bing dropped "web groups"

Bing seems to have dropped its categorized way of organizing results. It used to be that if you searched on a place name, such as san francisco, there would be an "explore pane" on the left with categories for weather, hotels, restaurants, and in the main pane results from each category were organized as 'web groups". Categories were derived from related searches. This would work on general health inquires too - diabetes - with groupings on symptoms, treatment etc. Gone. Today, we just see "related searches" listed on the left.

On searches for places, Bing does show a box with more information as the first search result but results are not grouped on the page.

Further, bing.com/reference is nowhere to be found. This was Microsoft's version of the Powerset search on Wikipedia. Microsoft bought Powerset for its semantic technology - what happened to that?

Here's a company that spends money on television ads while dumbing down the search tool.

Google Screwed up Define

Something dreadful has happened to define at Google. This was one of its most powerful features - define: would bring back a page of results culled from dictionaries and glossaries on the web and also offered related terms.

Today - and evidentally for the last couple of months - define: doesn't work at all. It picks up a definition from Dictionary.com, and word matches on the term.

Results are better without the colon -- eg define capital. But the display is cluttered and much less relevant. Again it takes from Dictionary.com, if available, a lot of stuff from Wikipedia, some true definitions and others that are simply keyword matching.

Why do these search services abuse their users so? Don't they ever ask or ever test?

Walmart takes on s-commerce with Kosmix

Kosmix, a search engine that used semantic technologies to analyze content from complete range of web sources - especially the social ones, has closed - sold lock, stock and barrel to Wal-Mart. Wal-mart wants into social networking and mobile computing to sell its stuff. Social commerce - it's called - or s-commerce. WalmartLabs - retail + social + mobile.

AdAge Digital explained that --
"Express, JCPenney, Walmart and 1-800 Flowers are just a few of the companies seeing big opportunity in social commerce. Express called s-commerce the "next step in our evolution as a retailer" when it announced earlier this month that its full product assortment would be available on Facebook. And Walmart cited the influence of social networking on shopping habits when it purchased Kosmix, a social-media filter. "

Anand Rajaraman, the founder of Kosmix, who once waxed eloquent about semantic search technologies, has found e-commerce - "That’s why we were so excited when Walmart invited us to share with them our vision for the future of retailing. Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with 10.5 billion customer visits every year to their stores and 1.5 billion online – 1 in 10 customers around the world shop Walmart online, and that proportion is growing".

Indeed -- Goodbye, Kosmix. Hello, @WalmartLabs »

SweetSearch - a search engine for students

Dulcinea Media has taken on an admirable objective - to guide teachers and students - to the "authoritative" sources on the Web through its search engines.

The name Dulcinea refers to Don Quixote's quest for Dulcinea, a simple peasant woman whom he saw as a queen. The metaphor of the web as Dulcinea may be appropriate, but so might be the futility. Others have put money and muscle into curating the best of the web - Intute as an academic endeavour in the UK being the best funded - and given up. However, this US company has a strong team of writers, librarians, teachers and business people, and is targeting teachers and students in k-12.

It described its mission as - "Since September 2006, we've been curating content and creating innovative tools to help educators integrate the Internet into their curriculum, and teach students how to use the Internet effectively." (Dulcinea blog)

It has developed two areas for discovery:

+ SweetSearch collection of 40,000 selected web sites. These are collected through recommendations of librarians and teachers on their blogs and social bookmarking sites. The top authorities such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities receive higher rankings.

+ finding Dulcinea - is an information hub to web guides, "on this day", "behind the headlines" compiled and written by the Dulcinea staff.

SweetSearch:

In addition to the sweetsearch.com search engine, there are 6 interfaces to accomodate different types of students and interests.

SweetSearch4Me - searches resources considered appropriate for young learners - engine for elementary school students

SweetSearch2Day - students Learn Something New Every Day - portal style for news and features.

SweetSearch for School Librarians - portal style to help librarians stay tuned in on Twitter, web research, new content, topics, and library advocacy. Much of this content was created for finding Dulcinea and has been tailored to the school librarian.

SweetSites for teachers and students, organized by subject and school level (elementary, middle, high).

SweetSearch Biographies - profiles of 1,000+ people. The range is from Machiavelli to Elvis Prestley - and a strong representation of US movie stars and writers.

SweetSearch Social Studies - guides for teaching social studies using web content.

Searchsweet offers Yolink as an aid to narrowing the search with another term and in getting an expanded view of the search terms on the pages of the results quickly. It also enables you to save the source link with excerpts to a Google doc, web-based email, of a social bookmarking / sharing service.

Finding Dulcinea

Web Guides - these seem to be well done - thorough, well written, unbiased without being compromised by presenting the ludicrous in the name of impartiality. The Global Warming and Climate Change was one that stuck to science.

There is also a Guide to Web Search - a very solid piece of work with many good recommendations for tools - although there are some that I would not include or would describe differently. (Exalead, for example, is not a meta search engine - it has its own index.)

On This Day - news stories from the past - there is an International category.

Beyond the Headlines - Dulcinea staff prepare a background piece on an event with links in narrative context to articles and other resources.

Using Sweetsearch

Judging from the testimonials, educators in the US love it - as they should. Of course, it is US oriented - and I wonder if they gear content directly to US school curriculum.

However, international views and resources can be found. I saw Collections Canada, CBC and some Canadian universities.

The resources are intended for students, but any serious searcher can get good value from SearchSweet.

+ The display has wonderfully long snippets with keywords highlighted in context.

+ There are no ads.

+ There is no spam.

+ There is no Wikipedia (wouldn't meet quality criteria)

+ Word and spelling variants are picked up. Search finds searches, searching; counselling finds counseling and counselling.

+ It shows some signs of handling OR but it throws off the highlighting.

+ My tests show that advanced search syntax will work: quotation marks for "words together", site: to limit to a domain, intitle: for words in a title, - to exclude, inurl: to limit to parts of a url.

+ Sweetsearch gives an option to search Google "with safesearch on". Consequently there are fewer results (difference can be dramatic), and Cached copies are not available.

We have to hope that Dulcinea Media will receive the funding it needs to keep up this amazing accomplishment. "Human powered", as so many others have discovered, doesn't scale well.

Last word to Mark Moran, the CEO of Dulcinea Media on why they use people.

Read More: Why SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students, Dulcinea Blog (Feb 1, 2010)

How Bing ranks results

Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet, Jennifer Horowitz, Search Engine Journal (May 18)

Interesting breakdown of what Bing considers in ranking results.

+ editorial links
+ domain names
+ content
+ site structure and code
+ on-page optimization - especially use title tags and pay attention to h1 tags.

Blekko against the Goliaths

An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search, Damon Darlin, NY Times (May 7)

Google search isn't the darling it once was. It is often criticized for susceptability to the gaming by SEO artists - criticisms that slam the good in SEO, and blame Google for creating the situation of commercializing keywords and link relationships.

Blekko is the alternative. It searches selected sites - not the universe. Volunteers identify sites, rank them, and assign categories. It's a "wikipedia model", said its founder, Rich Skrento.

Users need to learn how to use the /slashtags well to get value from the categorization.

Personalization gone too far

Eli Pariser says to Beware Online "filter bubbles" in his TED talk and in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

Some will recall that in the 1990s there was the idea of the customizable online newspaper - the Daily Me. It was a great idea - save time, read only what you want. There were also the early recommender systems - if you like these books, you will likely enjoy these other books.

At the time, there were warnings that views would become polarized - liberals, conservatives, left, right - all would only read articles through their own lens and be less tolerant or even aware of others.

In the past, people could intentionally change their filters and pick up alternate views. But today, as Eli Pariser shows us, algorithms in Facebook, Google search, Yahoo News - and anything else that tracks what we view and like, and whatever we have revealed about ourselves (age, work, gender etc) - are working hard to give us more of what we seem to like, and none of anything else. The algorithms are the gatekeepers today - from which there will be social and political consequences. Pariser gives one dramatic example of the degree to which Google search results have become personalized. He had two friends search on Egypt - one got information about travel and the country, and the other saw material about the political strife and uprising.

The filters embedded in those algorithms are creating a "filter bubble" around us that is making us oblivious of opposing views or materials. Pariser calls on the "personalizers" to widen the views they provide, and on all of us to be aware that this is happening.

Watch the video below [9.05 min] or at TED -- Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Ask.com - mobile search app

Ask, by any name, is still a search engine, Rafe's Radar, Rafe Needleman (May 19)

Ask.com, which is now Q&A, has a mobile version that Needleman says is on a par with the mobile versions for Google and Bing as a search app - meaning general search of the Web. But it is poor as a "query engine" for finding quality answers to questions. Building up the social circle online to net good answers sounds like a lot of work to me.

"As query engine, though, I find Ask unimpressive, both on the Web and on a mobile device. The quality of answers is not high. To improve answers, users can join networks of people and "follow" friends to see more answers from people they trust. Users can connect their accounts to Facebook or LinkedIn logins to join up with other Askers they know on those networks. But there's not nearly the same sense of conversation or journalism as you get on a the new hot Q&A site Quora."

Zanram for searching for data

Zanran: New Search Engine That Unearths Data In Charts, Graphs & Tables, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (May 12)

Zanran - new search engine that specializes in finding data and statistics in semi-structured data on the web.

"This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts."

From About Us;"The system examines millions of images and decides for each one whether it's a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical content.

The core technology is patented computer vision algorithms that decide whether an image is numerical – and they're accurate (about 98%). But the huge majority of images on the internet are not graphs etc. So even though the accuracy is high, you will still get some non-numerical images.

In comparison, looking for tables is relatively simple. Once we've found a table we then have to decide whether it's essentially numerical - and we have algorithms for that.

Our programmes then take suitable text near that image and build the search engine around that text. At present, we extract tables and images from HTML, PDF and Excel files and will be processing PowerPoint and Word documents in the near future."

In my tests, it did very well on the query - population of toronto - and poorly on population of toronto in 1920. This will be a good search engine to turn to.

Google filters for country and language

How Does Google Know Where You Are?, Andy Atkins-Kruger, Search Engine Land (May 17)

How does Google know where you are? Turns out IP address is not the most important clue.

+ the domain of the Google you are using matters most
+ IP address is used in hyperlocal results
+ language of keywords combined with domain.

Voice Search Tool is Amazing

Google Multilingual Voice Search is marvellous. Every once and awhile something that is better than sliced bread appears. Google Multilingual Voice Search will have you talking to the Google search engine using your Chrome browser.

Select your language, click on the microphone, and speak. You may need to adjust the microphone settings for the Voice Search to recognize your words. I had to increase the volume on mine.

Then speak clearly. Multilingual Search will show your words in the search box and also ask you "did you say any of the following?" in case it misheard - and instead of hair you meant care. Results show with snippet, url, and link for cached version.

Currently the following Speech-to-Text Languages are supported.

Afrikaans
South African Afrikaans
Cantonese
Hong Kong Cantonese
Chinese
Hong Kong Chinese
PRC Chinese
Taiwan Chinese
Czech
Dutch
English
Australian English
Canadian English
British English
Indian English
New Zealand English
South African English
American English
French
Belgian French
Metropolitan French
Swiss French
German
Austrian German
German
Liechtenstein German
Swiss German
Italian
Swiss Italian
Japanese
Korean
South Korean
Mandarin
PRC Mandarin
Taiwanese Mandarin
Polish
Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Turkish
Zulu
South African Zulu

Blekko cares about privacy

Blekko Cuts User Data Retention to 48 Hours With New Opt-Out Privacy Settings, press release (May 12)

Good news for those who use Blekko for web search:

* Personal information (such as IP addresses) will be retained a maximum of 48 hours

* A new HTTPS Preferred® system, which automatically points searchers at HTTPS (secure) websites in many cases

* SuperPrivacy® and NoAds opt-out privacy settings allows users to suppress ads and reduce logging of search keywords.

This will surely attract some users from the other big search engines (Google especially) who keep history for 6 to 18 months. It's an admirable move.

Microsoft's Position with Bing

Can We Please Stop Pretending That Microsoft's Bing Is Doing Well?, Henry Blodget, Business Insider (April 29)

Microsoft spends $3 for every $1 it earns through a query on Bing. It's doing this to gain market share, but does it make good business sense? Henry Blodget says no. Furthermore, in paying so much attention to search, Microsoft has taken its eyes off computing - and specifically Apple.

Bottom Line: "Based on Bing's performance over the past decade, and especially over the past two years, we continue to think it's unlikely that Microsoft's online division will ever make money again."

People who hold Microsoft stock will want to read that article.

Just slashtag it

Slashtag.it: This Is What Google, Bing & Yahoo Should’ve Done To Speed Up Search, Matt Mcgee, Search Engine Land (Apr 25)

Wonder if "slashtag it" will become as common as "just google it". The slashtag is a slash mark followed by a word that represents a group of something - can be search engine, web site, topic for which people have created a collection. So - if you want a chicken recipe for tonight's meal you might search for chicken/recipes.

Blekko is best known for this - and does a very good job at making it easier to search target collections or sites. And, of course, you can create your own slashtags.

There is also Slashtag.it that acts somewhat like a meta-search engine. You can quickly search one engine after another by changing the tag. Example - chicken kiev /b; chicken kiev/g. Slashtag.it will also plug into your browser.

[There is a list of short names for the search engines - duckduckgo is duck. Slashtag.it defaults to Google if it doesn't recognize your tag.]

One advantage to Slashtag.it is that you can also search your evernote collection.

Danny Sullivan added some comments and through the exchange with Matt McGee, we learn:

+ Slashtag.it will search the target site - such as amazon. Blekko searches its own index of pages from Amazon.

+ Danny Sullivan points out that slashtags are similar to search commands - or, to phrase that differently, code words. But - the searcher has to remember thye words.

My problem with either of these is that I don't like having to check what tags exist and then experiment to find it they work for me. Search commands, such as the advanced syntax at Google, do save time - easy to remember and do the job well (intitle, site - are two).

Blekko is more helpful than Slashtag.it in proposing tag filters along with search terms in its auto-suggest list.

Google's intelligent auto-complete

Google Instant’s Autocomplete Now Also Works On Word-By-Word Basis, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 21)

Autocomplete at Google can now rephrase our query. On entering conservation ontario bur - Google proposes ontario conservation bureau. How good is that?

Google is considering the last part of the query and making a leap to present another order.

Auto-suggest is one of the brilliant improvements to search in the last two years, and at Google it just gets better and better. However, getting the query doesn't guarantee good results.

Blekko adds Facebook Integration

Blekko Adds Facebook Comments To Search Results (But Why?), Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 21)

Blekko announced a daring integration of Facebook commentary with search results for people who login to Blekko using their Facebook account. (Blekko Search Gets More Social)
"Now when searching on blekko, the results page will combine the best quality results from the Web with the top related comments that the individual’s friends and social network have posted. Additionally, people who use blekko can choose to add the slashtag “/facebook” to any search query and see all results from their entire Facebook news stream. "

Matt McGee asks Why - and I agree.

"It makes sense to use social signals to influence search results; they can be good indicators of relevance, trust and authority. But it should probably stop there. Social networking is full of noise, and we expect search engines to eliminate noise, not collect it."

If you have a social network that talks about the things and topics you search for, then this union might work for you. But be aware that you will have to grant Blekko the following rights:

+ Access to basic information: Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.

+ Post to my Wall: Blekko Search may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall

+ Access posts in my News Feed

+ Access my data any time: Blekko Search may access my data when I'm not using the application

+ Check-ins: Blekko Search may read my check-ins and friends' check-ins.

+ Access my profile information: Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes and Current City

+ Access my friends' information: Current Cities and Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes

I am not a privacy paranoia person, but that looks too invasive for me.

Postscript: April 22 Just to clarify, this integration is only IF you login with your Facebook account and agree to the Facebook terms. Blekko is not using everything l that Facebook states in those terms. You can still use Blekko very productively without opting for the connection to your Facebook network.

Searchers need street smarts

THE PIPELINE: Trust, Credulity, and Search Engines: Is Google Over?, Internet@Schools (April 21)

There's a lot being written about poorer results at Google. I search every day and have found relevanceat Google getting better, and web page spam on the decline. Content farms didn't bother me because I know which ones to avoid.

However, as this article indicates, there is a lot of chatter about the situation. It is true that spammers are endlessly inventive and search engine optimizers are dogged in working the system to move their sites (whatever quality) to top place.

What can be done? The search engine industry might create solutions. Google has already reworked its algorithms again to identify the better sites (though many have criticized the result).

But the major recommendation for now is that we all become savvier and more alert searchers. Let's just say searchers need more street smarts at identifying unreliable, biased, and puffed up content.

"I’d suggest that what is most important, in the near term, is to build credulity skills in learners and researchers about what’s behind the results they get from web search engines. To do this, we must add a greater dimension to the teaching of searching and information literacies. We must move beyond the teaching of raw searching skills and the retrieval of information, simple content quality evaluations, and the narrowly based search training for media literacy to avoid the dangerous, prurient, and gambling aspects of the web. These skills are important, but there are more fundamental insights that can be gained by understanding the business models behind search engines. Learners and researchers should know and be able to ask themselves who or what chooses to promote that link on the pages of search results they are seeing. Are those links driven by simple mathematical relevancy or a search algorithm? Are special interest groups, political parties, individuals, lobbyists, or commercial advertising interests determining the results searchers are finding?"

Article has good descriptions of content farms, and search engine optimization.

I disagree with a couple of statements at the end.

+ "Google search results have become a spammed and cluttered mess" - no they haven't

+ "In my opinion, blekko, Exalead, and Bing are fine choices for a start." Sure - everyone needs to use a second engine. Bing has a consumer edge - watch the TV ads - and in the classes I teach Google still wins in the relevance contest. Exalead has a small database - and not a very good one in my view - it doesn't screen as well for spam. Blekko takes another tack - of using slashtags which can take new users some time to master. Another second engine to consider is DuckDuckGo - has search aids and good results.

The Bing "advantage"

Bing Director: Google Is Teaching Users Bad Habits , Bianca Bosker, Huffington Post (Apr 12)

Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s search engine Bing, says why searchers should come to Bing.

There would be bias, but he might have point when he blamed Google for teaching searchers bad habits.

"Rather than asking search engines to know what they mean and entering queries in plain English, users have grown accustomed to talking to algorithms in a jumble of nouns and verbs that can read like nonsensical Mad Lib responses and lead to vague results."

Is Bing any better? "Bing’s advantage comes down to its integration with Facebook and its features that aim to more efficiently highlight relevant information, such as showtimes and ticket prices. " ... ""We're the only engine with access to all that great Facebook data so we can bring your friends with you when you search,” Weitz said. “We have built some of the most beautiful experiences for certain queries, things like events, travel, shopping, that are quite unique to us.” "

The Facebook / social argument doesn't work for me - and certainly does not counter the accusation that Google has done searchers a poor turn.

Quixey finds apps

One Search Engine for a Million Apps [INVITES], Mashable (Apr)

Quixey - new search engine for finding apps - in beta but you could ask to try it.

"Tell Quixey what you want to do — see sports scores, edit video, find cheap gas, etc. — and the search engine will return results, ranked by relevance, with all of the web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Firefox, IE and Chrome apps that match your query."

Yahoo to retain search data for 18 months

Yahoo Search Data Retention Goes From 90 Days To 18 Months, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Apr 20)

Hard to believe that this will win Yahoo more search traffic or revenue, but it has reversed itself with this decision to hold onto private data for 18 months. It believes that this will improve ad targetting and personalized services. Google, for example, holds data for 18 months.

"Extending the time that personal search data are retained is unlikely to address the challenge of falling search revenue. However it may help improve display ad targeting and revenues, which have been growing for the company."

Yahoo losing search revenue

The Yahoo Search Revenue Disaster, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (April 20)

Bottom line: "But there’s no doubt that Yahoo’s not in the driver’s seat on search. It’s having to pray that its partner (which is also a chief competitor) will fix things to boost its revenue. If that doesn’t happen, what Microsoft has to pay out seems like pocket change"

Google's Panda Algorithm

Testing Google's Panda algorithm: CNET analysis, Declan McCullagh, Privacy Inc., CNet (April 18)

Google's new ranking algorithms are in effect for all English-language users. As well Google has added user feedback on sites they have blocked.

CNet ran a comparison of results pre and post the change in March.

+ "News sites generally benefited from the changes. "
+ "lowered traffic to sites like AssociatedContent.com, FindArticles.com, and EZineArticles.com" - the so-called content farms. But it also dropped legitimate sites such as British Medical Journal.
+ very top sites are still at the top - Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon.
+ US government sites got a boost
+

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20054797-281.html#ixzz1JucsqhcT

Web search finds content

Search Sends More & Better Traffic To Content Sites Than Social Media, Study Says, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 14)

Oh good - when people want to find content, they really do use search engines or known content sites. Social media is only 11%.

"In looking at traffic from 100 million sessions in the first quarter of this year, Outbrain found that search drove 41% of external traffic, with other content sites (31%), portals (17%) and social media (11%) coming behind."

Bing attracting more searchers

Bing scores 30 percent of all searches in U.S., Digital Media (April 12)

According to Hitwise, Bing is taking a larger piece of US search market share. Google has dropped to 64.4% of searchers in the US in March, and Bing climbed to 30%. Yahoo is hanging on at 15.7%.

Blekko partners for small business slashtag

MerchantCircle 1.6 Million Members to Curate Blekko Small Business Search , PRWeb press release (Apr 6)

The premise is interesting - engage members of a group to look after an area. However, what small business resources would they be choosing? But anything to block the spam is good.

"Blekko and MerchantCircle have teamed up to weed out spam for users searching for small business resources. MerchantCircle’s community of 1.6 million members will help improve small business search results by curating the new slashtag “/smallbusiness” so that it returns results from trusted resources that are free of spam."

Notess reviewed Blekko

blekko: A New Search Approach, Greg Notess, Online (Mar/Apr 2011)

Blekko, the slashtag engine, is certainly an alternative to the all purpose Google and Bing. But it might be an acquired taste - and be more suitable for the special purpose situation.

Greg Notess writes - "Will blekko suddenly become everyone’s first-choice, go-to search engine for popular and obscure topics? No. But for professional searchers, data geeks, and search engine marketers, blekko offers rich sources of data about searching, ranking, and webpages that make it a fascinating destination site. "

Probably true - but slashtags take work - and apart from data geeks, we all prefer "no fuss" searching.

Search Engines In Europe

5 Google alternatives in Europe, State of Search (Mar 29)

Europe is almost like Canada - Google isn't just the prime search engine, it is almost the only one. However, this page lists five others Europeans can check - the first is Bing in the UK and France. Heh - same deal in Canada - check Bing. Except Europe has a 4 others depending on your language or country.

How to block sites in Google

Google now allows account holders to block domains from search results - but I suspect this is only for users in the United States since I don't see this with my Toronto IP address.

How to permanently block sites from Google search, by Sharon Vaknin, Cnet TV Blog (March 25)

CNET TV has a short video on how to block sites from Google search results - mainly the much despised content farms. Can only do while in Google account. Also mentions using the minus sign to exclude a site - it says use -amazon.com (as an example - poor amazon is always the example) - but using -site:amazon.com is much better.

Other instructions are at Finally: Google Let’s You Block Content Farms And Spam Sites On , techie Buzz (Mar 10)

If you like the idea and you use Chrome, you can install the extension for Personal Blocklist from the Google WebStore.

Yahoo's Search Direct

The bloggers in the United States are atwitter with Yahoo's new Search Direct. According to the welcoming screen at search.yahoo.com it's still in beta, which may mean more to come (or not).

Interface is quite attractive . From page shows trending topics - today was influenced by news of Elizabeth Taylor's death. [Screenshot below]

As you type, suggested terms (auto-suggest) appear, along with three top sites or possibly the answer you seek. These change as you type more - until the point where Yahoo has nothing to suggest.

It's Yahoo's answer to Google's Instant Search - and I prefer it - would rather have the changing results limited to the one box than have the entire page flickering.

It replaces the Yahoo-Search-Assist aid that used to show related searches and concepts - a feature that hasn't worked since Yahoo moved to the Bing database. But Yahoo has retained "Also Try" which could lead to other good suggestions, and it lists the major sites on the topic in the left sidebar.

Danny Sullivan did a Head-To-Head: Yahoo Search Direct Vs. Google Instant - Google won that competition but Yahoo put in a respectable showing.

Yahoo is touting this as a move to show answers not links. Everyone in the business seems to push that line - and it's never true. Yahoo claims to be on the right track. Yahoo told Greg Sterling that "about 50 percent of the top queries on the web there is a “definite answer” and that Yahoo will strive to provide that within Search Direct."

Whether or not Yahoo achieves that, we can grant that it is doing something interesting, and is not the Micro-hoo lame duck it seemed after the merger.

Points to note about Search Direct:

+ this is a smaller index
+ updated every 5 to 10 minutes - good for weather
+ has 15 categories at present: news, sports, movies, weather, local, celebrities - and planning many more.
+ uses a Yahoo algorithm (not Bing)

Canadians - we won't see it at Yahoo Canada until later this year.

See:

Yahoo Search Direct Takes On Google Instant By Providing Answers In The Search Box, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Mar 23)

Yahoo Reveals Secrets Of “Search Direct” Alogrithm, Greg Sterling

What to Hate, Like, Love about Google

25 Things I Hate About Google, Revisited 5 Years Later, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (March 19)

Are there aspects about Google that bug you? They might be on Danny Sullivan's list of likes and hates. He reviews his list of 5 years ago and finds that about 50% of the 25 items have been fixed. Others still need attention.

Some of these searchers will know very well.

+ Hate: Web Search Counts That Make No Sense - no improvement whatsoever - and likely worse.

+ Hate: Google Keeps Serving Up Sites You’ve Seen - yep

+ LOVE: Related Searches Everywhere - Danny Sullivan thinks this is an improvement - I don't. They only show at the bottom of the page for single terms searches, and if Instant is Off. Wonder Wheel has improved in the last few months but is still limited to "related searches" - not related topics. However, it is possible that Google.com in the United States. However, the auto-suggest tool is excellent as an aid to refining a search.

+ LIKE: Country-Specific Results On Google.com - I'm not sure I like this but localization in search results is the norm now - and it might be impossible to get around it.

+ HATE: You Cache Pages - interesting - Sullivan disagrees with caching pages. Copyright issues.

What do you look at on the search results page?

Bing vs Google: an eyetracking study: more staring at Google (and organic search beats paid), Bas van den Beld, State of Search (Mar 16)

User Centric did some eyetracking research into the behaviour of searchers at Google and Bing, and concluded there was very little difference in what searchers looked at - they gave a quick glance at ads on the top, tended to ignore ads on right, also ignored left panel with search aids, and almost completely missed any mouseover previews.

+ Sponsored ads on top - best place - 90% look at them though not for long. "At Google they look for 2.8 seconds per search task, on Bing 1.9 seconds"

+ Sponsored results on right - "Only 28% of people searching on Google looked at the paid results. On Bing that number was even lower: 21%."

+ Organic search results - All searchers looked at these. "People spent 14.7 seconds looking at the Google results and 10.7 seconds at Bing."

+ Left pane - after all the work Google did on that, "Only 17%-18% of the participants actually looked at the left pane, let alone use it."

+ On-hover flyouts - Bing had them at the time of this survey - and only 25% ever looked at them and sometimes it was by accident. 67% had never noticed them at all.

Google's Ranking Algorithms

Google May Lower Rankings of Keyword Domains, Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Watch (March 16)

Chatter about likely changes Google will make to is ranking algorithms continue - as the response to the big Panda update dies down. Next in line - maybe - will be dampening the inflluence of keywords in a domain name. This isn't as easy as it might seem - because keywords can be the company name.

Of interest - "Both Eric Enge, president, Stone Temple Consulting and Ray "Catfish" Comstock, senior search strategist, BusinessOnline, think the whole problem is an artifact of the weight given to anchor text. Part of the value of having a keyword-focused domain is that you get keyword focused anchor text every time someone uses your URL to link to your site. "

It is not going to be an easy nut to crack - and each action has a reaction. This article is a good starting point for learning more about what happened through Panda and what more Google is considering.

All in all - ranking has become a very complicated matter.

It's a Brand World

Google's Matt Cutts Talks Down Keyword Domain Names, Aaron Wall, SEO Book (Mar 11)

If I'm understanding this properly - Google used to highlight brands in search results and over time placed more emphasis on "brand and domain authority". That led to the "content farm problem". To counter that, Google has "dialed up brands". It is also taking more signals from social media - "A lot of those types of signals are going to end up favoring established brands which have large labor forces & offline marketing + distribution channels"

New situation for SEO: "Classical SEO signals (on-page optimization, link anchor text, domain names, etc.) have value up until a point, but if Google is going to keep mixing in more and more signals from other data sources then the value of any single signal drops."

Message is be brandable.

Blekko attacks ad spam

Blekko Nukes 1.1 Million Domains in Its Index, Search Engine Journal (Mar 10)

Blekko attacks sites that show signs of ad spamming directly.

"There are two parts of the algorithm’s strategy. The first is to examine the source of advertisements on the page, looking out for “self service advertising networks” that are popular amongst spammers. Second, if the user is utilizing these self-service networks, Blekko checks the correlation of keywords on the page with the advertisements. Sites that seem to be spamming to drive traffic for that ad content will be knocked out of Blekko’s index entirely."

Blocking results in Google

New: Google Lets You Block Any Site From Search Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 10)

Google has introduce to US users an ability to block a site from results.

"When you do a search in Google, the search results will show a new link near the “Cache” link when you click a result and then return to Google. The link that Google adds to the search results reads “Block all example.com results.” Clicking on that will allow you to block the site from showing up in the Google results."

Bing will be html5 ready - but will your browser?

Bing cooking up instant search, HTML5 features, Josh Lowensohn, Microsoft - CNET (Mar 7)

"According to blog Winrumors, which was tipped off to a preview program Microsoft is running, the company is planning to roll out a special version of Bing for users with HTML5-compatible browsers. Those users will get a few extra flourishes like instant results as they type queries, as well as animations and transitions between pages."

Preview link http://www.bing.com/peek wasn't working on March 7.

Wonder how well your browser handles html5? Try this test site - http://html5test.com/. Chrome soars, Firefox is so so, IE 8 is very low.

Fighting web spam

Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories , Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 8)

Capsule account of what Google has been doing to reduce low quality content in search results without throwing baby out with the bathwater (as they may have done); plus how competitor Blekko deals with spa; and now Chrome too with an extension to block sites.

This is going to be a long, likely never ending, process.

Blekko tools for publishers

Blekko Offers New Linkroll Widget & More Publisher Tools, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 4)

Publishers might be interested in adding Blekko's new Live Link Roll to show inbound links.

Blekko also offers "an embeddable search box that lets site owners offer general Blekko search, or a “slashed” Blekko search on their websites. " Searchers might find that feature helpful at a specialty site.

Results from Google's algorithm changes

Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Feb 26)

eHow is owned by Demand Media - and it is considered to be a content farm of light and shallow articles that have been written to address queries at search engines.

It was believed that Google would be harder on content farms with the recent changes to the algorithm. But "Two studies show eHow actually gained. I’m still crunching through some of the figures, but the biggest “content farm” type brand that seems to have suffered are Associated Content."

Article has a table of the domains that lost most visability. I'm sorry to see suite101.com - it used to be good - and I used to find material at articlesbase.com - and findarticles.com has been essential for finding free version of artilces in print magazines. Slideshare is on the list compiled by Sistrix as a loser too.

Danny Sullivan just reports what others are finding as losers and a few winners in the ranking changes. He hasn't said that every solution creates a new problem - I'm saying that.

Duck Duck Go and the Zero Click

DuckDuckGo Adds Yelp, The Free Dictionary To Search Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 1)

Duck Duck Go will be a bit better in answering questions with this addition.

"DuckDuckGo has added two new content providers to its “zero-click” search results: local business listings from Yelp and definitions from The Free Dictionary. "

Bing Shopping understands price constraints

Bing Shopping Incorporates Natural Language Search, Pamela Parker, Search Engine Land (Mar 1)

Claiming natural language search is a bit of a stretch here - it's more like recognizing a few code words - for example - cashmere sweaters under $100. So far Microsoft can only recognize price constraints.

Google changed its algorithms

Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update, Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (feb 24)

Google says that its latest changes to the ranking algorithm will impact 11.8% of search results. This, it is hoped, will lower the scraper sites adn content farms that turn up.

"We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites."

Content farms have become a big problem - low quality content on popular topics. Danny Sullivan defines it as

"By the way, my own definition of a content farm that I’ve been working on is like this:

* Looks to see what are popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics)
* Generates content specifically tailored to those searches
* Usually spends very little time and or money, even perhaps as little as possible, to generate that content
"

Dealing with search spam

What Does Blekko’s Spam Clock Really Say About Google Spam?, Jessica Lee, Bruce Clay (Feb 21)

Spam and more spam. Blekko has the clock to show the growth, and Google fights it with changes to its algorithms almost monthly. But is Google winning or losing?

From the article:

"I talked with Bradley Leese, senior SEO analyst here at Bruce Clay, Inc., who offered an interesting perspective on the relationship between Google’s algorithm updates and spam in the results.

“Every time Google makes a change to its algorithm, spam rises to the top. Every update in the past 10 years has shown this same trend. There’s no reason to think that spammy sites that may be showing in results right now isn’t part of this recurring trend.”"

The new Chrome extension for blocking sites will help Google get more clues. Meantime, Blekko presents itself as the spam-avoiding search engine because of its active user base.

Of interest: "“Who’s left as competition to Google?,” asks Bradley. “Yahoo recently announced it would become more of a publication-based website, Bing is losing money and Ask, poor Ask.com.”"

Google and the title tag

Evidence that Google is Ignoring the Title Tag, SEO Blog (Feb 17)

David Malmborg writes - "I have noticed (more then once and with multiple websites) that Google is NOT displaying the title tag in the SERPs. They are ignoring the page title and providing their own title that they may deem to be more relevant."

Postscript Feb 22 - Is Google Ignoring The HTML Title Tag More Often?, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 21)

More reports that Google is ignoring the title tag on the page and creating its own to use in search results.

Google's Social Search - the next round

Social links get higher billing in Google, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Feb 17)

Google aches to get into the social space Facebook has. But will Google users adopt Google's social tools in sufficient numbers to make the new social search features it is introducing pay off?

"Now those results [shared links in Twitter, for example] will appear interspersed with regular search results when you're signed into Google and someone on a social network that you have connected to your Google profile shares a link, with a note under the result telling you who shared the link and where. Twitter seems to be the big winner here, but any account linked to one's Google profile can be featured in results.

Those results won't be displayed to all searchers: you'll see individual results when signed into Google based off of friends and connections within the Google world (Gmail, Chat, Google Buzz) who publicly share sites through those services or externally linked services like Twitter or LinkedIn. Google's also making it possible for users to privately link accounts to their Google Profiles."

General idea is good, but Google users will have to use even more Google tools (chat, email) and build up their account profiles. Sounds like work.

Also: More explanation and illustration from Matt McGee -- Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like.

Specifically discusses the situation with Facebook:

"However, Google doesn’t receive Facebook data that happens on personal Facebook walls in the way that Bing has been getting from Facebook since late 2009 (if that wall data is shared by their owners with “everyone”). Google also doesn’t appear to have access to non-Facebook pages that people may “Like” across the web."

Postscript: An Update to Google Social Search, Google Blog (Feb 17) - Google's description and video.

Stack Overflow Curates for Blekko

Blekko seems to be actively seeking curators to select and maintain the sites listed in Blekko's (topical) slashtags. Blekko and Stack Overflow have announced that the Stack Overflow community of programmers will help curate the tech slashtags. This posting about Blekko and Stack Overflow lists those slashtags.

Full announcement was:

Blekko Taps Stack Overflow Community to Curate Programming, Tech Slashtags

Hand-Picked Programming Professionals and Enthusiasts Edit Slashtags, Creating Relevant and Credible Search Verticals With Zero Spam

Redwood Shores, CA— February 15, 2010 – Blekko, the new search engine that is using human curation to eliminate spam from search results, today announced its partnership with Stack Overflow, a programming Q&A site built by programmers for programmers.

Blekko has tapped the Stack Overflow community to help improve and maintain programming-related slashtags, curating the very best programming search verticals. Stack Overflow has quickly risen to become the pre-eminent programmer community on the Web and will now help Blekko return only the most relevant programming search results.

Additionally, Blekko has chosen Jeff Atwood, CTO of Stack Overflow and founder of Coding Horror to be editor of such programming-related slashtags. The Stack Overflow logo will appear on each search page where slashtags have been edited by Atwood and team.

“At Blekko, we pride ourselves in returning the very best results in specific verticals by eliminating spam,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “We turned to the experts at Stack Overflow to help us edit all of these tags and curate the best programming search verticals out there.”

Blekko launched in November promising to create a new kind of search experience that would enlist human editors in its effort to eliminate spam and personalize search. Slashtags -- the magic behind Blekko’s search -- are curated sets of web sites organized around a particular topic as broad as health, money, and autos, and as narrow as gluten-free, college football, and the Grateful Dead.

“Stack Overflow is designed to provide programmers with the best, fastest answers from their peers,” said Jeff Atwood, CTO of Stack Overflow. “We’re collaboratively built and maintained by people who write code because they love it and are thrilled to share this knowledge with Blekko’s community by offering up our most trusted contributors to curate only the best results.”

About Blekko
Blekko was founded in 2007 to pursue innovation in search. The company has raised $24 million since its founding in 2007 from US Venture Partners and CMEA Capital, as well as leading angel investors including Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, and Marc Andreessen. Blekko has 25 employees, including former Google and Yahoo! Search engineers.

About Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is the anchor site in the Stack Exchange network of community curated, freely editable Q&A sites. Founded in 2008 by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, Stack Overflow is now one of the largest programmer communities in the world, and it is regularly branching into new Q&A site topics every month through the open, democratic site proposal process at http://area51.stackexchange.com.

Personalized Google Search Isn't

Study Asks, Can You Trust Google’s Personalized Search Results?, by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land ( Feb 14, 2011)

Study into quality of search results done by Martin Feuz and Matthew Fuller of University of London and Felix Stalder of Zurich University of the Arts has some shocking results.

" Despite personalized results, for most people search quality has been declining, results are less personal, reflecting more of a standardized Google-centric view than ever before, and that personalized search serves the interests of advertisers more than searchers—even when looking at organic results and excluding paid AdWords listings on a search result page."

The researchers created three personas based on famous philosophers in each of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and then tested three hypotheses.

"The researchers conclude that personalization is “both taking place to a surprising extent but with relatively trivial results, most likely reflecting that we are in the early stages of the process.” They also note that doing this type of research is difficult due to the dynamism with Google as it constantly changes its algorithms, together with the very nature of personalization itself making it difficult to establish any meaningful universal baselines"

How big is Google?

The Massive Size Of Google (Infographic), An Jay, Smashing Apps (Feb 6)

This HUGE infographic is about the size of Google - lots of data here

+ 1.5 billion images
+ Google aiming at indexing 100 petabytes of information - soon
+ operating income of $8.3 billion
+ and so much more

Personalized - the new normal

Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Feb 10)

Search engines have been "personalizing" results for some time, it's just becoming more obvious.

Bing may be more overt at it now.

+ Where you are - country has made a difference for some time. Now, if you are in the United States, where exactly will matter.

+ Search history - they have said this for some time - now Bing says they use "past searches to reshape results for about 30% of queries that are “navigational” in nature, where a searcher is trying to find a specific web site." But Bing does tell you with a notice - "search history has changed the ranking of these results".

Google, Sullivan points out, has been doing both for some time. I know - just searched on movies at Google and immediately got movie times in Toronto.

When search history is used, Google notifies the user with "view customizations" (not that I've ever noticed it.)

As Danny Sullivan has been saying for some time, "personalization is the new normal".

Google Instant with Search Operators

Google Operators In Instant, Profiles In Navigation & AdWords URL On Description Line, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 11)

Hurrah - "(1) Google Instant Works For Search Operators: As reported at Google Operating System blog, if you begin to type in a search operator into Google’s search box, Google Instant will kick in."

US Search Market Share Dec 2010

Bing Search Volume Up 29% In 2010, Google Up 13%, comScore Says, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 8)

Bing picked up some searchers. In December 2010, Google's US share was 66.6%, and Microsoft's 12. Everyone else is slipping.

Blekko growing

Blekko: Actually We Have A Million Slashtags, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 7)

Blekko has announced that its users have created over 110,000 slash tags. In January there were 30 million queries. Not bad for a new engine.

Bing vs Google CTD

Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Feb 4)

More on the Google - Bing dispute about whether Bing modifies its search results to be like Google's - current interpretation is that Internet Explorer can record every search a user does and every link clicked on (and this itself is scary) and in aggregate use the surfstream as a "search signal" to feed into Bing's ranking of search results.

"Both Google and Bing agree that in some unique cases, the surfstream that Bing collects can cause Bing to reflect the same or oddly similar results to Google. Google considers this copying. Bing doesn’t — and thinks it’s so rare that Google is overblowing things with its accusations of copying

Indeed, Google’s own test also proves what Bing’s saying — that the surfstream is a weak signal. In a worse case situation, where Google was providing the sole signal to Bing for about 100 nonsensical terms, Bing used the signal only about 9% of the time."

Danny Sullivan sees this as a dispute between the earnest engineers at the two companies:

"... Google does see evidence that Bing is learning ways to improve its results especially for unusual queries and spelling corrections where it says huge amounts of engineering time are spent getting the right answers."

Vs "For Bing, the opposite. The signal comes from searches across the web, not just from Google — and is so little is used that it’s not a big deal."

This much seems clear - Bing's algorithms use the surfstream more. This surely is a sophistication of the ranking by clicks of olden days.

What's this mean to searchers? There is stiff competition between Google and Bing. Hopefully, it will lead to better results from both.

The Search Voice

Has Bing been modifying its ranking algorithms to emulate the results Google produces on a query? Danny Sullivan reports on tests Google has done that seem to prove this. Get the details from Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.

"Google’s test suggests that when Bing has many of the traditional signals, as is likely for popular search topics, it relies mostly on those. But in cases where Bing has fewer trustworthy signals, such as “long tail” searches that bring up fewer matches, then Bing might lean more on how Google ranks pages for those searches."

It's done by tracking what we look at - a built-in feature to the IE browser - it isn't personal but it is connected to search terms. The Bing bar collects information too. So does Google through its toolbar and Chrome browser, but, it claims that none of that information is used to improve search rankings.

The sorry part of this, Sullivan notes, is that Bing has weakened its "search voice" by trying to tune its results to be like Google's.

Microsoft admits using the customer data but sees nothing wrong in this. Matt McGee wrote Bing Admits Using Customer Search Data, Says Google Pulled ‘Spy-Novelesque Stunt’.

We as searchers will have to look further to find other search voices - to Duckduckgo and Blekko.

Blocking Low Quality Content

Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Not Live Yet, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 1)

Coming to Google soon but not here yet. "New algorithm that went live last week is related to blocking low quality content scraper sites and not content farms."

Blekko, spam, and context filtering

Search Startup Bans Content Farms, But is That What People Really Want?, Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb (Feb 1)

Blekko is the search startup, and one of its promises is to reduce web spam. It has done that by inviting users to mark domains they consider to be content farms - sites that publish low quality content as bait for delivering ads. But, as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, one person's spam might be another person's answer. Blekko published the top 20 list of banned domains - I was surprised to see ehow.com (often has good how-to information), 123people.com (people finder), thefreedictionary.com (oh no - I have that as a browser search tool), answerbag.com (though I grant the answers are weak). This is a dangerous imposition of individual assessments on other people's use.

Kirkpatrick gives us the best way to use Blekko - "But I don't use it for "spam control." The determination of whether something is spam or not is really about context. I use Blekko for other types of context filtering. The ability to set up custom lists of domains not to exclude, but to limit a search to, is what's most useful for me about Blekko. "

DuckDuckGo on Privacy

Upstart DuckDuckGo Challenges Google With Strong Privacy, Cool Tools & Quackpot Name, Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Jan 26)

Chris Sherman provides a detailed look at DuckDuckGo's features, history, capabilities, and its strong privacy policies. It does have some "seriously cool features" in look and handling - along with very relevant results. Further, you can be confident that DuckDuckGo is not tracking or giving to others what you search for or click on. DuckDuckGo might become a serious competitor to Google's web search.

Google Fights Spam

Google Says Search Quality Improved With New Spam Detection, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jan 21)

Google has adopted a new "document level classifier" to filter out on-page spam.

"The redesigned document-level classifier will specifically make it harder for on-page spam to impact Google’s search index. Matt Cutts explained, “the new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.” In addition, Google also has “radically improved” their methods of detecting hacked sites and they are “evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content,” said Cutts."

Examining relevancy of results

Study: Google “Favors” Itself Only 19% Of The Time, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 19)

Clearly differing interpretations of data. Ben Edelman examined search results and concluded that Google favours itself. Danny Sullivan looked at the same data and finds the opposite.

Of value are Danny's assertion that search results do differ between engines and do so because they have different algorithms and different indexes.

We also learn that Bing and Google assess clickthrough in ranking results - in Google's case it's part of the personalization of results.

Google vs Bing in small study

Google vs. Bing: The Fallacy Of The Superior Search Engine, Conrad Saam, Search Engine Land (Jan 12)

Is Google the best? Saam ran his own test of 20 questions and scored the answers from Google and Bing. Bing came out higher by a small but significant margin. .

Disable Google Instant and Google Suggest

How To Permanently Disable Google Instant & Google Suggest, Ann Smarty, Make Use Of (Dec 18)

If you really don't like Google Instant or Suggest, follow Ann Smarty's instructions to permanently disable them.

Search since 2000

The Decade in Search, by Rudd Hein, Search Engine People (Dec 21)

Ten years ago we had about 10 major search engines and 3 or 4 big directories. Today we have two engines (Google and Bing), several QnA (Ask is probably the best), and one crumbling directory (Dmoz). In the early years Yahoo soared, plateaued, and then began its decline in 2008. Video took hold mainly with YouTube and all those pet videos. And social grew and grew.

Yahoo in trouble

Yahoo! stumbles and other search engine news, Pandia (Dec 19)

Yahoo had some other announcements I missed - it is closing Yahoo Bookmarks, and ending user uploads to Yahoo Video.

Conclusion: "There is no doubt about it: Yahoo! is in serious trouble." I think we're watching the collapse of a major company, and so far there is no sign of other companies picking up the pieces.

Play games at Bing

Playable social games come to Bing's search results, Josh Lowensohn, CNet News (Dec 17)

Enter the name of the game Crowdstar as a search term at Bing and you'll be able to play the game directly from the search results page. Bing does have a games site - this saves gamers the "trouble" of going of entering the url or the name in the address bar.

This new twist puts the social games front and center

"The first social title to be offered with this functionality is Happy Island from social gaming company Crowdstar. When a Bing user searches for the game in Bing, the full playable title will show up as an embedded result on the top of the page using technology from Sibblingz. Users can then play through the first few levels before being asked to log-in with their Facebook credentials."

This tells us some things about Bing - using games as a way of getting into every day life of the demographic that plays games online - probably on a mobile device; and very intent on being there for social.

Google's compromised site warning

Google Adds Site Hacked Notifications To Search Results, Search Engine Land (Dec 17)

Google will warn if it believes a site has been hacked by showing the message, "This site may be compromised".

Yahoo Closing Services

Yahoo is finally closing Altavista and Alltheweb - good - they had lost their function several years ago when Yahoo built its own search. Now Yahoo doesn't have a database, so why keep these two rusting hulks?

It is closing Yahoo Buzz - ah well - there are lots of trends-based products around today.

But this rumour about closing delicious is worrisome. Later statements from Yahoo indicate that it will look for a buyert (especially since there was such an outcry at the leak about shutting it down). But, how much will delicious users trust it now - or any of the social bookmarking services?

Confirmed: Yahoo Closing Buzz, Traffic APIs – Maybe Delicious & AltaVista, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 16)

But on a brighter note, maybe not - maybe Yahoo will find a buyer. Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 17)

20 Different Search Engines

20 search engines that do something different, Jamie Middleton, Techradar (Dec 6)

These 20 engines are a mixed bag - several of them are for mobile applications.

Ask.com has answers

Latest Ask.com revamp all about answers, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Dec 13)

46% of searches at Ask.com are in the form of a question, and 58% of the time Ask can give a direct answer. I know - I tried several search engines to find out how much US postage is for a letter to the UK before I got to Ask - Ask had the answer at the top.

This article tells us more about Ask's strategy to become THE QnA engine. There is competition - Yahoo has Answers, Answers.com has answers, Facebook will answer questions.

"Leeds [Doug Leeds, president of Ask.com ] believed Ask.com was spending too much time trying to rank answers--a very challenging search science problem--as opposed to figuring which answer most accurately addressed the query and providing a list of search results in cases where it couldn't find an answer that met that threshold. Slowly but surely, Ask is expanding a community of users (currently about 20 percent of the site's visitors are invited to sign up) who will to provide answers to questions about subject matters in which they are interested."

Blekko's technology

The Secrets Behind Blekko's Search Technology, Pete Warden, ReadWriteWeb (Dec 10)

Describes the technology underlying the new Blekko and gives us some interesting figures:

+ "They're crawling over 200 million pages a day, with 3 billion in total. The refresh frequency ranges from minutes for popular news site front pages, up to 14 days for the least-visited sites."

+ /tag - "This shows a selection of Blekko's top search results as they're crawled by the system. You can sit there refreshing the page, and as Blekko crawls the Web new pages will appear."

More in the article.

Reading Levels at Google

Google Lets You Dumb Down Your Search Results With “Reading Level” Filter, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Dec 10)

Don't want scholastic results? Dumb down your results from the Advanced Search page to be basic.

"The feature lets you filter or annotate the search results by reading level. The reading levels include basic, intermediate and advanced. You can either have Google label or annotate the results with those labels, only show basic results, only show intermediate results or only show advanced results."

Of course, this can help in reverse to require only 'advanced results', which presumably will be determined by domain and type of resource (example journal sources).

Swingly to the rescue

In the last few months the semantic search engines seemed to be waning. Lexxe went off the air (but it is re-making itself). Factbites isn't as good as it used to be in finding answers, and Hakia has been overtaken in semantic understanding by Google and Bing. To this situation, we welcome , Swingly.
It calls itself a web scale answer engine - wants to find short, straight-to-the- point answers to your questions - presuming those questions are ones that have factual answers.

"Instead of relying on humans to ask (and answer) questions, Swingly uses automated systems (based on natural language processing) in order to convert Web documents into question-answer pairs ..."

Like Ask.com it works with question-and-answer pairs drawing on WIkipedia, FreeBase, and other QnA services (which I presume would include Ask).

It has the answer for this question about Canadian Agnes Macphail and many other references. Note also the capsule biographical information and the related topics.

Swingly struck out completely on who was Canada's third prime minister, or when was Robert Borden prime minister of Canada. But - we know these engines build up their databases based on frequently asked questions, not the obscure ones.

How will we use it? Quick look up of words perhaps - does a very good job with acetabulum; sports information or events - grey cup 2010, people - karen kain, and some history - what did magellan discover.

Swingly shows matching entries as you type to help you pick the right meaning
or context.

Read more about in in the Zwingly blog. Get your beta account at http://beta.swingly.com.

Similar at Blekko and DuckDuckGo

Blekko and DuckDuckGo offer searchers "similar sites" thanks to their use of technology from new tech startup SimilarGroup.

To see the option at Blekko, click on prefs - then check similar. Search results will show similar as a result-link-tool for each result.

Google also offers a link for similar - its results have greatly improved in the last 2 years. But Blekko is very strong - and perhaps a bit better because Blekko can detect the topic and refine with a slash tag. For example - recovery from hip surgery - is automatically adjusted to search within health.

DuckDuckGo has a link to "similar sites" for each result and will display just a few results as small thumbnails - very attractive and more economical.

Extract from SimilarGroup's press release is below:

SimilarGroup Plays Part in Blekko’s Search Revolution -- Web sensing technology now powering Blekko’s and DuckDuckGo’s search engine results

Tel-Aviv, Israel – November 25, 2010 – SimilarGroup is a startup company founded in 2007 whose homegrown technology improves web navigation by allowing users to find, share, rank and review websites. One of SimilarGroup’s most popular products is SimilarWeb, a browser add-on which provides, among other things, a list of sites similar to the one being viewed. This technology is now being used by Blekko, the new search engine creating all the latest buzz because of its ability to enable users to tailor their search queries.

Launched at the start of November, Blekko has generated much excitement by introducing a system of searching known as “slashtags” to optimize search results. According to TechCrunch, Blekko just hit 1 million searches per day with 30,000 slashtags created in its first week. Blekko utilizes SimilarGroup’s technology to power their “/similar” slashtag, which enables people to search for sites similar to the one being viewed. For example, the search “cnn /similar” will yield news sites such as BBC, Fox News, etc. These results are generated by SimilarGroup’s web sensing technology called SimilarWeb, which is also being used by other new search engines such as duckduckgo.com.

SimilarWeb can be set within Blekko’s preferences so that the user does not have to manually input the similar slashtag before each search. Simply click the Blekko prefs option, check the ‘Similar’ box, and Blekko will generate the slashtag itself. Clicking on the “similar” option shown underneath the search result will provide the user with twenty similar sites."

It’s even easier with DuckDuckGo. The “Similar Sites” option is provided along with the search result. Clicking on it will present the user with 5 similar sites.

SimilarGroup analyzes websites based on a range of different aspects, such as user ratings, browsing trends, tag analysis, hyperlink structure, semantic analysis, and automated background research. Its algorithms mine all this data to produce a list of the most relevant websites to a given query. The company has mapped over 20 million sites so far, with tens of thousands of new sites being indexed daily. ..."

Browser Extension

SimilarGroup offers a browser extension, Similar Web, for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

Press release:

"In addition to the similar sites feature, SimilarWeb includes other powerful features as:

· TopSite offers users the best sites on a chosen subject or category.

· ShareSites allows users to easily share selected sites with one another.

· Related Articles provides users with articles related to a visited site.

· Buzz offers the latest web comments on given sites.

· Reviews allows users to read or write instant reviews on the site currently being viewed.

· Rating allows users to rate sites and see others’ ratings.

These features are intended to align with SimilarGroup’s mission to provide access to high-quality, relevant web content with greater socialization and interactivity. "

See review at SimilarGroup: Find similar sites with this handy Blekko-style extension, TheNextWeb (Dec 8)

If this intrigues you, follow the blog at http://blog.similargroup.com/

Google's Future as an Answer Machine

Google the Answer Engine, Micheal Gray, Graywolf's SEO Blog (Dec 7)

Search scene has moved into social media and mobile devices. Micheal Gray predicts that Google will turn itself into an answer machine that will be tuned to responding to voice and being ready with the answer - rather than delivering a lot of web pages. When there are web pages, Google will favour its own.

That's the prediction. For you and your website chew on this - "The days of being a pure affiliate and building sites without any thought to branding are coming to a close. They will never disappear completely, but there will be less of them. The purely keyword-based traffic without a hint of branding is going to become more competitive and, in some cases, you will be competing with Google itself or with Google owned properties like Boutiques.com. "

Maybe AOL-Yahoo

AOL Scheming To Sell Itself To Yahoo?, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Dec 6)

Interesting line -- "This morning brings another report of AOL M&A machinations involving ways to merge with or be acquired by Yahoo, now that both sites have very similar missions and strategies. They’re in a way like the Ford and Chevy of the internet these days: workmanlike but not very glamorous. Maybe that’s unfair to Ford."

One difference - AOL uses Google for search, and Yahoo uses Bing. How would the two companies ever sort that out?

DecorMyEyes scandal

In A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web (Nov 26) New York Times scooped the story of how DecorMyEyes was pumped up in Google web search results through negative criticism from very angry customers. Since then there has been much slamming of Google - and much analysis. Expect change soon.

Is rudeness the key to Google search success? , Amber MacArthur, Globe and Mail (Nov 29)

Amber MacArthur says that the gaming won't work - why rely on Google when you can ask your friends in Facebook?

What Google's Search Change Means For Your Website, Katherine Noyes, PCWorld (Dec 2)

There was a weakness in Google's algorithm. Google's team has plugged the hole with a method that "detects merchants that provide "an extremely poor user experience" and then assigns them lower rankings." That probably means assessing the tone of user comments.

"A much more logical approach, then, would be simply to include the overall nature of those ratings as one of the many factors used to create Google's ranking results. I'm betting that's what Google now does."

But, maybe the root cause was the New York Times itself accidentally giving authority to DecorMyEyes.

Author gives advice - stick to the basics - and stay away from negative tactics.

Five most important factors for ranking are:

1. Keyword-focused anchor text from external links.

2. External link popularity.

3. A diversity of link sources.

4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag.

5. The trustworthiness of the domain based on its "link distance" from trusted domains.

Postscript: The Decor My Eyes Fiasco & Local Reviews Tactics, Chris Silver Smith, Search Engine Land (Dec 6)

Has advice for everyone considering the "effect of online reviews and ratings upon your rankings in local search and regular keyword search results"

Twitter and Facebook matter

What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 1)

These is some evidence to suggest that Bing and Google use information from Twitter about links and the "authority" of the person making those tweets to rank web search results - and they also pick up information from Facebook at least for display.

"Both Google and Bing tell me that who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet.

When it comes to Facebook, Bing says it doesn’t try to calculate someone’s authority. Google says it does, in some limited cases. However, I’m double-checking on this, as I think that might not be correct."

Yahoo still cares about search

Where Is Search Going: Yahoo’s Sashi Seth, Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Nov 26)

There's the idea that now that Yahoo is leaving crawling and indexing to Bing, it can concentrate on improving the interface. I am not yet convinced it will succeed at that - since the improvements it introduced over the years are gone. However, here is another report on what we might look for.

Quoting Shashi Seth, Senior VP of Search Products at Yahoo:

"I think our mission is to rethink and reimagine search entirely. Given this relationship with Microsoft, we are shifting our focus from the very traditional indexing, crawling, and ranking to what we define as the next generation or the new face of search. That includes new ways to search for information, new ways for information to be brought to the user, new sources of data, and so on. Search as we know it is going to change significantly."

Yahoo is striving as hard as anyone to figure out the intent of the user. Yahoo is using synonyms too to rewrite the query.

Also of interest, this prediction - "Number one, I believe that in five years or so, mobile search will have overtaken desktop search"

Google Instant Preview and Google Tags

Google Instant Previews: Murder in the SERP, Sean James, Bruce Clay Inc (Nov 23)

Google's Instant Previews of web pages that are now available from the search results page are shaking up the SEO and web design business.

One important finding is that click throughs are better.

"... it looks as though Previews is improving click-through rates directly from the SERP. In fact, recent testing by Google shows Previews makes searchers 5 percent more likely to be satisfied with the results they click."

This will surely affect design of web pages - Google has advice on that. And, according to Sean James, it may lessen the use of metatags.

Mostly, Instant Preview will help users judge the relevancy of the page - and not get caught up in spam.

Local search is changing too through the use of Google tags, "a paid service that attaches a coupon to your site in the SERP."

Blekko and DuckDuckGo Partner

Blekko, the slash tag search engine, and Duck Duck Go, with semantic understanding, have initiated a reciprocal arrangement for showing results.

From Blekko.

"Blekko will now power DuckDuckGo’s search results for the following categories of searches: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels (Blekko’s initial categories which are automatically applying its slashtags). Users will also be able to utilize Blekko’s unique /date functionality. "

It's not entirely clear how this works or whether it is working, but on this search for recipes we do see a way to restrict the search.

From Blekko

"In addition, Blekko users will have access to DuckDuckGo’s “Zero-click Info” on a site by site basis. Zero-click Info helps users find the most relevant info on sites and search terms without having to click on search results and can be accessed on Blekko by clicking the “info” button in the second line of each of search result."

The info "button" can tell you more about the site. Often this is taken from Wikipedia. I rather doubt that people will take the trouble to click on the little links that Blekko provides.

See Blekko & DuckDuckGo Partner On Search Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 23)

Google may show several results from a domain

Google Showing More Results Per Domain For More Queries, Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Nov 17)

Depending on Google's understanding of search intent, Google may show more results from a particular domain in a nicely organized block of information. It no longer restricts itself to one main and one indented result.

"“As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.”"

Yahoo will go instant too

Google Instant, Meet Yahoo Instant – Er, Yahoo Rich Search Assist, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Nov 17)

Amazingly, Yahoo continues to improve user experience in search although it will take a lot to counteract that hit it took in converting to the Microsoft database. It plans to go instant - now being tested with select users.

Blekko for SEO

The Blekko SEO Guide You’ve Been Waiting To Read, WeBuildPages (

It's not that Blekko of searchtag fame is a searcher's dream, but it is getting some traction judging from this article of the value of Blekko's search features for SEO people. Of interest to searchers, it will give inbound links, site comparison, pages indexed by Blekko (only 3 billion at present).

More resources in the article.

Google drops features for organic, adds for ads

Google Removes 3 Advanced Search Options, Google Operating System (Nov 15)

Sometimes I despair - what are the designers of search engines thinking?

Google Operating System has spotted three changes to search options at Google.

1) Page previews gone - as we noted earlier - replaced somewhat by the Instant Preview (click on magnifying glass to see image of page) - but we lost the detailed snippet.

2 & 3) Can't remove shopping sites from results - or limit to only shopping. That was a useful feature when looking for information on products. Several search engines had experimented with weighting results to commercial or non-commercial - Bing when it was Live had such a feature. Google's was good but now it is gone.

BTW - look at the Ads - they have changed too.

1) faintly marked - this from the company that made such a big deal years ago about being up front about what was sponsored. Shame.

2) There is a new "show all advertiser info" - you'll see ratings and reviews. Shows very well on digital camera reviews. OK - remember Google makes over 95% of its revenue from ads.

Google can index text and links in a flash file

Google Can Index “Almost Any Text” In A Flash (SWF) File, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 12)

Google has said it is "able to index and understand “almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site.” - means text and links.

Google page previews might drive design

How to design for Google Instant Preview, Creative Bits, (Nov 9)

The new Google page preview will have web designers redoing sites so they show better in the image of the page. Ivan at Creative Bits has picked out several design elements already.

Blekko - too early to say

New Search Engine Blekko Invites You to Slash the Web, Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Nov 11)

Marydee Ojala, premier searcher, gives a very mixed review of Blekko - "the slash the web" engine, so called because people can create sets of sites and name them with a slashtag (/ followed by tag word).

The slashtags /blogs, /techblogs, and /forums, worked for Marydee Ojala - many others didn't.

We get to the telling assessment - "My biggest problem with Blekko searches is the relevancy of results. Some searches turn up remarkably relevant results, while others are far shy of the mark. Until Blekko can reliably and constantly return relevant results, even the slashtag concept won’t be enough to sustain it in the highly competitive search engine world."

Ojala points to Rollyo and Google Custom Search as being based on the same idea where users create groups and share. Rollyo is probably a closer likeness - and though it contines and was brilliant in the beginning, it quickly became cluttered with junk. For Rollyo that was ok since users probably stuck with their own creations. But Blekko aims to be a real Search Engine.

Google Page Previews

Google has finally added page previews. Look for the magnifying glass icon beside search results and roll your mouse over it. The page preview will emerge - somewhat similar to how Bing's preview works. This replaces the Page Previews that used to be under More Search Tools in the left panel.

Google promotes the benefits and shows a short screencast at Instant Previews.

Being able to preview a page helps in assessing whether to click through. Other search engines have had versions of this and Bing, in particular, has had a nice implementation of it since its launch.

If you aren't seeing the icon in your part of the world, you can get a sense of it from Google's instant preview page.

Research Buzz has a short description in Google Adds Instant Previews (FINALLY)

Danny Sulivan shows details with screenshots in Google Launches Instant Previews - He summarized - "Google suggests that Instant Previews will make it easier to spot if a page contains a table, chart or picture you might be after, and says those using it will be 5% happier with their results. I agree. It should be a useful feature for many searchers in these or other cases. There have been plenty of times when a short preview would have given me a better idea if a site might be worthwhile to visit or not"

ResourceShelf gives some history and lists some other preview tools you can use - "Google Launches Instant Previews" But Don't Forget CoolPreviews (Nov 9)

Ask leaving search

IAC bows to Google, kills search at Ask.com, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Nov 7)

The shoe finally dropped. Ask will no longer use the search technology that was developed on the Teoma base, and instead will outsource it from an unknown provider. Instead it aims to have the best Q&A service on the Web.

""Today's move is a reflection of our shift in strategy to focus on delivering the best Q&A service on the Web and in developing technologies that provide answers to the millions of questions asked by our users every day," the company said. "Ask has been very vocal that this is our heritage and it's why our users come to us time and time again.""

And then there were two - just Google and Bing.

Bing loses money

Microsoft Records Their Q1 2010 Earnings, Bing Takes Loss Again, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 28)

Microsoft made more money this year - up 25% in revenue; but Bing took a loss.

"How about Bing? Well, Bing is part of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which took an operating loss of $560 million. That is much higher from the previous year, where they took a loss of $477 million"

Related Searches at Google

Google’s “Related Searches” Now Include Brands, Types, and Stores in Results, by Yvonne Bell, Search Engine Journal (Nov 2)

Google is doing something to related searches, it seems. This post tell us that, "Over the past few months Google has been testing out 3 new categories in “related searches”: brands, stores, and types."

Maybe this is why Google seems to have completely abandoned related searches in web search, and why the WonderWheel is now a total bust.

Google Instant not changing how users search

A Month Later, Instant is Having No Impact on Searcher Behavior, Nathan Safran, Conductor (Nov 1)

"By now, after looking at chart after chart of visitor metrics that appear nearly identical from one period to the next you are probably getting the sense that little has changed after Google rolled out Instant with much fanfare a little more than a month ago. The traffic data suggests searchers are searching the same way they always have and, with a month of getting used to Instant already behind them theres nothing that indicates that will change any time soon."

The new Blekko

Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 31)

Detailed review that will make you even more intrigued.

"One of the most encouraging things about Blekko is that it brings back a much needed alternative “search voice” into the space. Every search engine has its own “voice,” its own particular set of results that comes from the unique mixture of pages that it collects and the recipe — called the search algorithm — that it uses to rank and display its estimate of the best pages in response to particular searches."

Blekko - hybrid

Blekko Joins the Search Engine Wars, ResearchBuzz (Nov 2)

Tara Calishain provides extensive description of the new Blekko. She describes it as "The whole engine is like a hybrid of crowdsourcing, searchable subject indexes, and the ocean of data more appropriate to a full-text search engine (Blekko’s first search index is the product of a 3-billion page crawl.) There’s some hint of a clustering search engine in there too…"

I can't wait to test this properly as well, but my first look at it is positive as well.

Google Trends

A day seen through Google searches, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Nov 2)

Google trends? How good, how useful?

"Google has recently started to promote this list more prominently than in the past, with a weekly Google Beat YouTube series and frequent references to trending topics on its official blog. But how does something become a trend on Google? We spent yesterday monitoring the U.S. version of Google Trends, several major network television shows, and the discussion boards of the day to try to figure out what sparks a trend big enough for Google to notice."

Blecko - new idea for search

Blekko launches the biased search engine, Rafe Needleman, Rafe's Radar (Oct 31)

Provides a list of search engines that have already wrecked - "Previous wrecks include Cuil, Hakia, Powerset (wrapped into Bing), Clusty, and RedZ--each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. And some still plod along in the breakdown lane, while the real traffic blasts past them."

The surprise on that list is Hakia - still there, but perhaps Needleman agrees with me, not even a second choice today.

Blecko does something diffferent.

"... this search engine keeps lists of categorized sites that can be applied to queries. For example, if you're searching for medical information, your query can either automatically or manually be restricted to just sites that are actual, bona fide sources, not just spam farms. Blekko has seven main categories (health, automotive, lyrics, colleges, personal finance, recipes, and hotels), and users can also create their own. If you search for "cure for headaches," for example, Blekko gives you a good set of results from WebMD, the NIH, etc. Google's results, in comparison, are less focused. However, that's a query that Blekko provided to me. On some others (try, "Boxer's fracture"), I found Blekko no better than Google."

Sounds promising - will post more when I test it.

Google Related Searches and Wonderwheel

You can't trust Google (or any of the search engines) to keep a good tool, nor can you trust them to give to non-US countries the features they have in the US.

Today, in revisiting Google's Wonder Wheel I discovered several things.

1) Wonder Wheel is using Flash - and until I reinstalled Flash I could not see it in Internet Explorer 8, but it was fine in Firefox and Chrome.

2) The display on Wonder Wheel at google.ca is different (and inferior) to the one at google.com. Google.com has more sprays of possibilities for the simple search plastic waste oceans.

Google.ca

Google.com

3) Google.ca does not show Related Searches as a choice in the left panel, and google.com does.

4) Neither Google.com or Google.ca will show related searches at the bottom of the page for plastic waste oceans but will for plastic waste. Why - when Google.com will show related searches if we click on the option?

5) Instant On does not interfere with any of this.

Related searches are only occasionally useful, being, as they are, based on what other people are searching for in the current period. Related searches today will be different to those a month earlier.

Canadian users don't have a choice. Google.ca is the better choice for selecting on Canadian results even without limiting to Pages in Canada. But we are being short changed by Google.

Possibly (this is only a guess) Google does related searches based on the searches in that country - and Canadians aren't searching for plastic waste in oceans as much as people in the US are (though that has seeminly dropped from last spring also). And if that is the case, it shows that, as presently constructed, related searches and the Wonder Wheel aren't worth our time.

Google's ranking factors

Google: Different Algorithms Can Apply To Different Sites At Different Times, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 26)

It's not that Google uses 200 factors to rank results, it's that it uses 200 for a specific search. Overall, according to Bruce Clay (paraphrased), Google could be using 1000s of factors in its ranking algorithms.

Quoted from Google Webmaster - "Various parts of our algorithms can apply to sites at different times, depending on what our algorithms find. While we initially rolled out this change earlier this year, the web changes, sites change, and with that, our algorithms will continually adapt to the current state on the web, on those sites. "

Bing, btw, has said it uses 1000 factors.

Does age of domain matter?

How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking? , Matt Cutts, YouTube (Oct 26)

Matt tells us how Google figures out age on domain - it's mainly from when Google first knew of it or crawled it - and not the WHOIS data. That said, age doesn't matter much in the ranking - don't worry about it.

Mentioned the dates on the search result display but wasn't clear whether they were first crawled dates or updated dates.

Repeated that the qualilty of content and "the links that you get as a result of the quality of your content".

Udi Manber head of Google Search

Meet Google's New Search Boss: Udi Manber, Jay Yarow, Business Insider (Oct 22)

Udi Manber replaces Marissa Mayer as head of Google Search. If that name is familiar, it's probably because you used to follow Amazon's effort to get into search with A9 - a fairly decent meta search engine that was also connected to Alexa. Andbefore that he was chief scientist at Yahoo.

Now, after 4 years at Google he is head of search.

One quote should give us a sense of his position on search.

"Search has always been about people. It's not an abstract thing. It's not a formula. It's about getting people what they need. The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from your friends are better signals, stronger signals. On the other hand, many searches are long-tail kinds of searches. If you're looking for what movies to see tonight, your friend can probably give you the best information. If you're looking for the address of the business, the Web as a whole can give you better information. If you're looking for something obscure about anything, again the web can give you much better information. It depends on the type of search you do—and how to take all those signals and put them together."

I'm not sure about checking with friends on movies. I'd rather check Rotten Tomatoes.

Google Can't Count

Why Google Can’t Count Results Properly, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 21)

Finally the answer to a question that is more important than "what is life?" Specifically, why does A B -C have more results than A B? (Google doesn't count other combinations well either - especially the OR but that will be for another day.) The answer to A B -C is, according to Matt Cutts, because "The query [A B -C] causes us to go deeper through our posting lists looking for matches, which can lead to more accurate (and larger) results estimates. Other things can cause us to go deeper in finding matches, such as clicking deeper in search results. Results estimates can also vary based on which data centers or indices your query hits, as well as what language you’re searching in"

Danny Sullivan translates and expands.

Yahoo's integrated display

Yahoo Adds Search Features, ResearchBuzz (Oct 11)

Maybe Yahoo isn't leaving web search to others entirely - after all it still needs to direct people to the content it buys.

Tara Calishain describes her search for Engelbert Humperdinck (showing that she and I share a generation though not a taste in singers). She concluded - "Nothing Yahoo did in these upgrades is going to set the world on fire, but it’s a pleasant organization of information. I like the way the audio was integrated into the search results page but that makes me just want to see more. "

Sounds like Yahoo is packaging information probably drawing on what they have (videos, audio,) - it is going to be consumer driven, but as Calishain noted she also "got tabbed pages for people like Andre Agassi and Steve Ballmer".

But she did not get one on Bill Gates. That is one of the problems with the consumer driven search service - you can't count on it to deliver the package of information on the topic you want. There are no editors who establish a list of who's who to be covered.

There are some aspects that remind me of Ask's smart answers with package of leads to use on topics. Ask had help from editors - and then moved onto another model.

Time will tell - and quickly so. Yahoo said it will be rolling out this enhancement to countries outside the US in 2011.

Search Engine US Market Share

Bing-Hoo Not Yet Gaining On Google, Hitwise Says, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 8)

Hitwise figures for September 2010 show Google still well in the lead with 72% of US search market. Bing and Yahoo are still slipping. Ask is holding its own at 2.4% - amazing.

Yahoo's distinctive display

Yahoo Makes Its Search Results More Visual , Joseph Tartakoff, paidContent (Oct 7)

Yahoo hasn't completely given up on search with its conversion to the Bing database. It has been redesigning the display of results - as can been seen in this video on the latest changes.

The example shows results for searching on a movie to get summary, trailer, tweets, and connection to Netflix - all in a package - and then more about finding entertainment.

This "packaging" is seen on Yahoo Canada too - without the Netflix.

That's fine for the consumer searcher, what about something more serious? Because of the new news component that shows, a Yahoo search presents well for United Nations. - as one example.

Pandia reviews this new display too, describing it as an accordion module - Yahoo adds new display module to search results.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land showed the accordion module and the enhancements to image search - Yahoo Rolling out new "accordion" search and other features.

"Image pages get a new more visually engaging and “immersive” environment. Yahoo is putting more slideshows (from Flickr and other Yahoo sites) in image search results that then lead to pages that look like this:" - screenshot of very colourful page.

Google with Page Previews?

Google testing previews of pages in search results, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Oct 6)

Might see Google doing page previews soon for results. Can do this today using options, but this would be automatic. Sounds like another feature being copied from Bing.

Who uses Click Through Rate?

Bing Uses Click Through Rate In Ranking Algorithm, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

CTR - click through rate - Bing uses it (results that don't get clicked drop in the rankings over time); Google doesn't.

BingX Trends Closed

Official: Bing xRank Is Dead, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 1)

Bing quit doing trends - it closed BingX. I guess that hands the market to Google Trends.

Google vs Bing

Bing vs. Google: The Web Search Wars Heat Up , Jared Newman, PCWorld (Sept 29)

Are we really facing a Google - Bing showdown? Comparison is on basic search, images, news, travel, maps, events, shopping, mobile, social search, and features. it doesn't compare on advanced search.

Your assessment will depend on which of these categories matter to you.

Google Instant Comes to Canada

Google Instant has come to google.ca. As you type, Google shows suggestions and results. This does not happen in Advanced Search.

There are some side-effects. This turns off my Firefox code to number the results, and it cancels the setting for 30 results on a page.

I liked the old way. Google Instant seems like a gimmick to me.

The problem with automated search suggestions

Google Will Appeal French Libel Ruling on Search Suggestions, Peter Sayer, IDG News via PC World (Sep 27)

Google Suggest (aka autocomplete) got Google into trouble in France in a case that could happen anywhere.

"Until recently, if anyone searched for Mr. X's given name and the first few letters of his family name, Google would complete his name and suggest a number of suggested additional search terms, including "rape", "rapist", "satanist," "sentenced" and "prison," the court document noted."

Google says the suggestion are drawn from what people search on, but the French court stated that "algorithms or software begin in the human mind before they are implemented ...".

Turning off Google Personalized Results

How To Disable Google’s Personalization Of Search Results, Ann Smarty, MakeUseOf (Sep 18)

Sometimes you may not want your search history and bookmarks to influence your search results at Google - you want a fresh look or you are analyzing placement of certain websites.

Ann Smarty shows how to disable Google's personalization. The Google methods are a bit cumbersome. Easiest is probably to use the Firefox add-on Google Global (Course, it means you have to use the Firefox browser.)

"If you don’t want to mess around with Google settings (if you don’t want to disable and remove your search history, for example) but at the same time you do not appreciate Google’s personalization of your search results, use this FireFox addon called Google Global."

Yahoo's immersiveness

Yahoo Previews “Rich, Immersive” Search Experience, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 16)

Yahoo had a Product Runway event to show its "“rich, immersive” search results in the news and entertainment niches." Matt McGee reports that they used Lady Gaga as their search example.

"The new search experience includes a content box above the organic results with vertical content tabs for news, events, albums, images, video, and Twitter. There also appears to be a list of related entertainers atop the content box."

The webcast in which Blake Irving of Yahoo speaks and does the demo is at http://ycorpblog.com/2010/09/16/productrunway/.

Lady Gaga? I think that's exactly the point.

Google Weights in Favour of Big Companies

Big brands dominate Google search results, Pandia (Sept 18)

This doesn't look good --

Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News found that Google, “Instead of allowing each company to have only two possible listings they can now have up to ten! Google has shown in the past that they favor brands but to give up every listing above the fold to one is a huge step.”

This is fine if your only meaning for the word target is the American retail company, and your only intention is to shop. On the other hand - and in defense of Google, if the only keyword entered is target, lit's likely that the searcher really does want the store.

There is a difference in results between the US google.com and google.ca . At Google.com the first four results today) are from the target.com domain, followed by one Wikipedia article on the company and the Target facebook sites.
Google.ca has only the main Target site and the Wikipedia entry (indicating that at least Google knows Target is not in Canada).

But, back to Pandia's point - this weighting of the big retail firms at the top may crowd out smaller businesses - thus making the work of SEO people even harder.

It also concludes with "The main problem, though, is that searchers do not benefit from this strong focus on enterprise and shopping related search results."

Trends - fewer players

In the next few months, I predict more closures and amalgamations that show an 'oligopolization' of the web - if not full monopolization of sectors. Two stories from the last few days show this as well underway:

+ Bing rising in market share, and Yahoo dropping
+ Ask closing Bloglines

Bing Surpasses Yahoo to Become Number 2 Search Engine, According to Nielsen, Yvonne Bell, Search Engine Journal (Sept 14)

"According to a Nielsen report released today, Bing has surpassed Yahoo to become the number 2 search engine in the U.S. for the first time ever. While Google still holds steady at first position accounting for about 65% of search engine activity, Microsoft’s Bing jumped from 10.7% to 13.9% and Yahoo fell from 14.6% to about 12.1%."

Bing jumped because Yahoo gave up search (or essentially so - they use Bing's database and Yahoo has dropped its search syntax.)

Bloglines Update, Ask Blog (Sept 10)

Ask is closing Bloglines, a service for finding blogs and using its RSS aggregator. RSS seems to be under stress at present thanks to Twitter, but this is also about Google Reader having the market share. The stated reason is -- "Our focus here at Ask is on building out our Q&A offering." . Ask promises a "blend of technology and human insight with the new Q&A experience on Ask.com"

Cuil No Longer

From Cuil to Frozen: The "Google-Killer" Eats Its Own Medicine, David Murphy, PC World (Sept 18)

Word is that Cuil.com has gone "dark". The site no longer comes up. Cuil suffered some hubris when it lauched 3 or 4 years ago and said it was THE Google killer. It was no where near that, but it did have some interesting features. Its categorization made it good for general queries. It had a mapline. It would search social networks. It had some smart capabilities.

But we see from this article, it was running at less than 200,000 visitors a month. And it failed to arouse interest in its latest effort with Cpedia to "to automatically generate full articles instead of search results for a given topic." That was a stretch - it had to be a lot better than it was to pull people away from the tried and true.

Search Engines in Europe

Multinational Search - Alternatives To Google In Europe, Bas van den Beld, Search Engine Watch (Sep 14)

Google does dominate in Europe. MSN and Yahoo lost their edge ages ago. This article does list some other, very regional engines.

"Despite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and for search marketers they’re worth looking at. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives."

A Variety Pack of Search Engines

9 Awesome Search Engines That Aren’t Named Google, by Kipp Bodnar, Hubspot Blog (Sep 9)

These are special purpose search engines - and some are more service than engine.

+ Hunch - requires that you login with Twitter or Facebook (and you agree that it can watch what happens in either place) - then it gets to know you more through questions with the promise of being able to give you good answers to your questions about life (or roughly that).

+ Yelp - local search for services - very popular. There is a Yelp.ca.

+ Flickr - images

+ Searchtastic - search tweets - shows user and tweet - picks up historical.

+ Collecta - real-time search - can select on type

+ Clipblast - YouTube video search

+ Pipl - good people search engine

+ Simply Hired - job search - even in Canada

+ Wolfram Alpha - numbers and computations - and more - read the WA blog.

Google Instant Search

Google Brews A Cup of Instant Search, EContent (Sep 9)

Google.com shows search results as you type now - not just search suggestions, but the results themselves. Think it took this idea from LeapFish. This does not appear to be happening at google.ca.

ResearchBuzz has many helpful comments and tips - Google Instant: Breaking It, Gaming It, and The Future

Tara Calishain tells us how to turn it off - apparently many have been unhappy with the change.

"You can stop Google doing that by putting a + in front of a query as you begin to type. If you do that, Google will refresh its results to ONLY what you’re looking for, and not what Google THINKS you’re looking for"

The instant search doesn't work well with syntax either, she noted. Making me hope that Google adds a preferences option for users to turn off instant search.

Tara has some other tips about repeating words and using * - be sure to read.

Added Sept 10 - Google Instant: Pros and Cons, John P Mello, PC World (Sept 9)

Identifies 3 pros but 5 cons - it will be as people make of it. I'm not convinced the instant display saves time - it might even slow down your review of results. It could make the work of SEO marketers even more difficult for targeting keywords.

Google Indexing SVG Files

SVG Files and Documents Are Now Indexed by Google, Yvonne Bell, Search Engine Journal (Sept 2)

"Google has announced that they are now going to be indexing SVG documents and files. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an XML-based graphics format specifically for vector graphic, both dynamic and static and graphics can be made and edited in any text editor since they are XML files."

Google Beat

The Google Search Trend Video Channel, Pandia (Sept 5)

It's not enough that Google has trends and zeitgeist, it now does a video, called Google Beat, on YouTube with the week’s most popular search queries in the United States. Supposedly this is another resource of "search information [that] can be used to understand social, cultural and economic trends."

Google engineers work on algorithms

The human process behind Google's algorithm, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Sept 7)

Humans work behind the algorithms to make Google search perform. Matt Cutts has been quoted often as sayting that Google engineers change core system algorithms daily.

"In many ways, this is a natural evolution of Google's quest to organize information. The Web changes quickly and dramatically, and a Google search recipe left unaltered would quickly grow stale and choked with spam. Yet the constant tweaks show that the internal debates conducted by a relatively small number of people can have a significant impact on the way the Internet is presented to millions."

Yahoo Geographically Tuned Search Suggestions

Yahoo Has Geographically-Sensitive Search Suggestions, ResearchBuzz (Sept 6)

Yahoo announced that it will propose search suggestions that are most relevant to where you are, but ResearchBuzz had limited success.

I tried airport, and saw Pearson International Airport - good. Employment insurance shows canada and ontario - also good. But municipal shows municipality of clarington - where's that? I'm in Toronto.

Google's rich snippets

Google Adds Breadcrumb Support To Rich Snippets & Improves Testing Tool, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 3)

Google snippets may get better as webmasters make use of new functionality through "rich snippets"

Swingly for facts

Meet Swingly, a Q&A tool powered by robots, Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (Aug 16)

Another approach to Q and A - have robots collect the answers from websites.

"Swingly is a machine-generated answer engine that contains somewhere around 100 billion to 150 billion question and answer pairs."

"But machines aren't perfect, which is why Swingly takes a hybrid approach to improve its answers. If someone is searching for an answer, and they know more than the system, or discover a better answer from one of its links, there are ways to suggest changes to the results."

Ranking algorithms work on "trust" and timeliness of results.

Also -Swingly: New Search Engine Reveals Just The Facts, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)

"Swingly performs best when you search for facts — like Who, What, and When. It seems to do okay with some Where questions, but not with others. "

Swingly is in private beta - must login and request an invite code.

Lycos sold (again)

Lycos is alive, acquired for $36 million, The Digital Home (Aug 16)

Lycos, one of the early search engine and originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, has a new owner.

"Daum Communications, a Korean-based search company, announced that it has sold off Lycos for $36 million to Ybrant Digital, an India-based digital marketing company."

Search Market Share July 2010

Search Engine Market Share Steady In July: Hitwise, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 18)

Hitwise figures for search engine market share in July 2010 shows very little change. Google still holds 71% in the US

Yahoo loses link and linkdomain operators

6 Ways to Replace Yahoo's Link & Linkdomain Search Commands, SEOMoz (Aug 24)

Now that Yahoo is using the Bing database, it must use the search syntax that Bing supports. Yahoo had a rich syntax, and Bing does not. For example, link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results. Nor will inurl: People who must have these can turn to specialty tools described on this page. SEOMoz has Linkscape at Open Site Explorer.

We can still use Yahoo Site Explorer but it now requires that you enter through your Yahoo login.

Internet Search Changing

The Future of Internet Search, Esther Dyson, Project Syndicate (Aug 19)

There has been a shift in web search - there is more attention to "structure" says Esther Dyson. We might also say more understanding of context.

"Now, however, something is happening to fix this, and it’s not just a prettier background. It’s structure – the same sort of context the old Yahoo! catalogue supplied, but this time automatically generated and deeper – and across more than just a few categories such as sports and travel."

Yahoo moves to Bing database

Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform, Yahoo Search Blog (Aug 24)

Yahoo search is not using Bing's web index for organic search.

"Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come."

New search engine - NowRelevant

New Search Engine Promises Relevance, Now , Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (Aug 19)

"The new search engine, NowRelevant.com, says that it will find, “everything about your subject for the past two weeks.” The name promises relevance, but what does that even mean? Information science researchers have been trying to understand it for over fifty years, and it’s become clear that relevance is in the eye of the beholder. Some beholders may love NowRelevant.com—others may not."

The search interface and results page are very sparse - and there are no advertisements. The search is slow - this is beta version. Hard to know if results are more relevant.

NowRelevant does not state how it selects for within 14 days. As we know, date on webpages is very unreliable.

From the About Page.

"NowRelevant.com allows users of its PPC campaigns to access the wealth of its resources dating back chronologically to exactly 14 days from the time of their search. This enables both the viewers of search results as well as PPC advertisers to target their PPC campaigns to a specific set of keyword phrases that are bound to receive public attention no matter what, enabling advertisers to compete better on NowRelevant.com with a much lower advertiser competition ratio than found on any other search engine."

Trending on Yahoo

More Search-Powered Features on Yahoo!, Yahoo Blog (Aug 6)

I think this is called repurposing content. Yahoo will add related web searches to its News search.

"With this module, we’ve begun adding related search content below news stories – we call these modules “Infinite Browse” internally. We are currently only testing this module with a fraction of visitors, so if you can’t find it on Yahoo! News yet, stay tuned."

There will be trending topics too. Where are there NOT trending topics these days.

Google looking at "named entities"

Google and Metaweb: Named Entities and Mashup Search Results?, Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea (Aug 5)

A patent submission sheds some light on what Google may have been thinking when it bought Metaweb, the creator of the Freebase.

"Google’s new patent application identifies references to specific people or places or things, referred to in the document as “named entities,” when they appear in queries, expands the amount of information that it might lookup to include concepts, or aspects related to those named entities. It might do this by looking at what a knowledge base such as Wikipedia or Freebase might contain about those entities. It would also look at previous queries that searchers submitted to Google that include the named entities to broaden the information returned to a searcher."

This may move Google into categorizing results.

Ask QnA

A soft spot for the Ask search engine, Pandia (Jul)

Pandia reviews the rise of Ask.com as a question answering, natural language search engine, and then describes the shortcomings of its new incarnation as a Q and A. The changes sound very much like a decline.

Malware in search results

Study Calls Google ‘King Of Malware’, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 30)

"Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. That’s one of the findings in the Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security Report ..."

There is something to be said to avoid searching on a current "hot topic" - or at least to being very careful. Pay close attention to the domain - watch for junk in the url, and to the snippet - look for ones that have good sentences and make sense.

Best use of Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha: Simple and Not So Simple Computations in One Click, by Africa S Hands, FUMSI (Jul)

Information professional Africa Hands provides a very full review of Wolfram Alpha, describing its scope and ways to use it.

"The data in Wolfram|Alpha is organised so that it may be used in computations, not just searched and found. Wolfram|Alpha is a powerful warehouse of knowledge that makes data useful through its computational abilities. Wolfram|Alpha produces more than the end result; it gives historical data, tables, timelines and charts to make sense of the data. As a computation engine, it answers specific questions about objective facts rather than general information queries, and produces results only about publicly available information."

This is a very specialized tool - can't just throw keywords at it - but for those who persist it has value, as the writer points out, for the everyday user and the librarian or researcher.

"It offers the everyday web user access to quantitative, peer-reviewed data in a format not available by general purpose search engines. For researchers and librarians, Wolfram|Alpha is a valuable ready-reference tool providing high-level sources for additional information."

Web report

Google Web Report: Average Page Size 320 KB, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 12)

Numbers about pages - average web page is 320 kb, 10% os the 4.2 billion pages that Google analyzed it deemed "top sites".

Bing feeding Yahoo

Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 15)

Yahoo has started including Bing search results on its search page - organic and sponsored. It may switch over completely in August or September.

"Yahoo played up the importance of this change saying that according to comScore, Bing will ultimately power 30% of the search queries globally on both paid and organic search."

Ask.com Loses Executive VP of Search

Ask.com’s Founder Of Search Technology Leaves: Apostolos Gerasoulis, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 8)

Much is read into announcements of lead people leaving organizations - or being snapped up by another. This one - in which the founder of Ask's original search technology then known as Teoma leaves the company - tolls some bad bells for Ask.com. Apostolos Gerasoulis will reappear somewhere - search has probably not lost him, but we, as users, might have lost Ask.

Ranking in search results made personal

The un-Googling of Mick Gzowski , Mick Gzowski, Globe and Mail (Jun 25)

True story - Mick Gzowski, son of Peter, was the much criticized videographer that recorded Stephane Dion's statement about a coalition while he was still leader of the Liberal Party. All of this will come up pretty quickly in a search for Mick at any search engine. Can he do things to change that? Making such a shift is what SEO is about and what he has written about in this article.

Some other search engines

The 5 Most Advanced Search Engines On The Web, Tina, Make Use Of (Jun 22)

Always interesting to see picks for best. The adjective "advanced" is a stretch but you will get some variety here. Google, 2 image search engines, Duck Duck Go (worth trying - will help in identifying concepts), Complete Planet (I don't think so).

New look and new content at Bing

Bing Has A New Look, Now Hosts Deep Content In Search Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 23)

Some redesign at Bing.

+ quick tabs (when they show) have been moved from left rail to centre space below the search box - to be called the Answer Bar.

+ changes to search results in the verticals - Autos, Finance, and Health.

+ more content on finance. On a company you might see Balance sheet, Income statement, and Cash flow .

+ Health will have "authoritative Twitter updates" (sic) - they will show with the Instant Answer for medical conditions

Google's Mayday

Was The Google Mayday Update A Complete Failure Then?, Michael VanDeMar, Smackdown (Jun 11)

Google announced some algorithm changes called Mayday that were intended to “make long tail results more useful” (said Matt Cutts, who also encouraged webmaster to add high quality, unique content). Whether it worked it not, we don't know - but there is room for improvement judging from the ranking that pages from Mahalo (seen to be ripping off content from others) receive.

Lesson for searchers is to exclude Mahalo.

Bing vs Google

Bing Earned Itself A Place In Safari, Manan Kakkar, TNW Microsoft via the Next Web (June 13)

Manan Kakkar decided to keep Bing as the default search engine after a week of use, finding that it did better on some types of queries - and displays related terms better.

No question about related terms - Google hides its related searches at the bottom or in the wonder wheel, and Bing places them in the upper left.

The test question were very general: Arthritis, Larry King, Martin Luther King, Porsche 911 Turbo.

Bing's clustering shows well on the arthritis search - something that Google could learn from. Generally speaking, Bing does have a nice display.

BUT on Martin Luther King, Bing ranked the white supremist site, "A true historical examination" in second spot, right after Wikipedia. What kind of authority assessment is that? Google places it at 8th spot with Wikipedia also in first place. We know Google has a weakness for Wikipedia - we can adjust our eyes to skip over that.

For my shopping search - panasonic lumix dmc-zs7 - Google started with 8 results from review sources, and the official panasonic site as 9th. Bing had two suspicious domains in the top 10 - panasoniclumixdmc-zs7.com/ and panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs7.com - that looked very similar - close to spam. At Google I can select More Shopping Sites, and can limit to Discussions.

My pick - still Google.

Search Market Share Figures Unreliable

Time To End The Bullshit Search Engine Share Figures? by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jun 11)

Microsoft and Yahoo have been gaming search queries for years to boost their market share standing - mainly by making it seem users have run additional searches. Who knows - maybe Google has too - and it all evens out.

Google's Home Page

Google adds random photos as search background, CP in Toronto Star (June 10)

There are reports that Google is more like Bing in showing photographs on the home page. This is to encourage people to upload their own photos to personalize their space. I saw the a National Geographic photo come up on a friends' computer - I can't get it on my own.

Postscript (Jun 11) - Google pulled the background images - Google kills background images on home page

Exalead Acquired by Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes Acquires Exalead press release, Exalead (June 9)

Exalead, the search company we know from its web search engine, has been bought by Dassault Systèmes.

About Exalead - "Every month, over 100 million people rely on Exalead for information search, access and reporting, including people in companies like Sanofi-Aventis and World Bank for business use, and Friendster, Lagardère Active and ViaMichelin for contextual consumer search. Exalead provides the industry's only platform designed from the ground up to apply advanced semantic processing to Web-scale data volumes and usage. Exalead brings unique scalability, agility and usability to industries such as Banking, Retail, Publishing, Business Services, Life Sciences and Consumer Services where an easy access to information is essential."

Future directon: ""Everyone is looking for simplicity with intuitive applications ("life-like") which value the rich information available inside and outside companies. With Exalead and its partners, we can provide a new class of search-based applications for collaborative communities." "

SortFix Redesign

SortFix has a visual interface to help users construct queries by putting words into baskets. This is a redesign that includes more engines and a more serious look (no cartoon figures).

SortFix will suggest some "power words", which you may drag to the basket for Add-to-search or Remove. A dictionary box will look up the meaning.

There are algorithms in the background to propose these power words. From the About page - "by scanning and examining the results, it reveals the significant keywords and terms that will help you to define a better question." The effectiveness of this search engine hinges on those power words. They perform a function similar to clusters at iSeek or Yippy (Clusty). I'm not sure they do as well - it depends on how "intelligent" the semantic analysis is.

Search engine choices include Google, Twitter, Bing, YouTube, and images (unspecified source)

The FAQ tells us a bit about how to use the baskets and power words. Unfortunately, it does not answer it's own question on the possibility of removing good results when using Remove. This is the danger in making Remove such a large part of the search approach.

Results can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, or shared through Google Buzz.

I suspect SortFix will appeal mostly to the younger set - especially judging from the demo which is a bit looney tunes. Being able to move the words into and out of boxes to construct the search is a very strong feature - and does encourage longer queries. The power words, however, are not really being pulled from the underlying concepts - they seem mainly to be prominent words on a selected set of results rather than a way to disambiguate results according to meaning. I also question the prominence given to Remove - there are better techniques for refining a search.

How long can the title tag be?

How many page title characters does Google index?, David Naylor, (June 3)

The asnwer is Google is now indexing 213 characters in the title tag.

Out of this comes the recommendation to:

First block – under 70 characters, headline keywords, branding and call to action, seen by real people “Bear Snacks for Hungry Grizzlies – great deals from Bearsnacks Ltd”

Second block – second-tier keywords, heavy hints to Google
“Food for Bears, Bear Feed, Snacks for Bears”

Third block – long tail extras, possible matches
“My bear is hungry, what do I feed my bear, what do bears eat”

Lets hope this doesn't lead to a lot of keyword stuffing into titles that won't show on the search results page.

Personalizing the Home Page of your search engine

Google Home Page: Now Featuring Your Pictures, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jun 2)

Would you like your own photo on the Google search page? It will be possible to upload the one you want in the next few weeks (US first, other countries later). Danny Sullivan suggests that this is in imitation of Bing (except that Bing's photos are stupendous and have hot spots), and Bing imitated Ask (referring to that business of skins.) It's all in the name of personalizing the interface to your particular preferences. I did desktop - that's enough.

Dates on search results still poor

Google’s broken date recognition, Beantin webbkommunication (May 28)

Good thing someone is looking at dates. Google went to great effort to offer search refinement by date, but the dates it uses are still very inaccurate.

Google has algorithms for picking up clues about date published. Some say it gives extra weight to dates in titles and main headings. This report shows that it gets confused and that it might be using the date it re-indexed the page.

Can Exalead Search Compete

Are We Seeing the Beginning of a Comeback for Exalead in the General Web Search Space?, Resource Shelf (May 28)

ResourceShelf has noticed some improvements in Exalead. This is a search technology company based in France. It made quite a splash 5 years ago or so with the public search service, which information professionals (including myself) extolled because of its strong syntax. Exalead even redid the interface a couple of times. But the database became very stale and has been for at least the past year, and it was clear longer that Exalead was not as good as others in blocking spam.

Is it worth our attention now? ResourceShelf has found freshness to be better and identifies some good features.

I have always liked the choices in the right rail to help searchers refine results, and the advanced search is in easy-to-understand words rather than boxes on a complex form. Exalead has also added "related searches".

On the negative:

+ The thumbnails annoy me - they are too small to help one assess the target site and take up space.

+ There are more ads than there used to be.

+ The database is either still too small or not fresh. On a search on semantic search technologies, a topic that people write about weekly, I would expect something more than a blog entry from Ask.com dated Jan 1, 2009.

On balance - Exalead will have to do much more to get information professionals back.

Personalized Results Almost Unavoidable

Does Turning Off Personalized Results In Google Really Work?, Search Engine Roundtable (May 26)

Does adding &pws=0 to the end of the search URLat Google turn off personalized results? Hard to say. Course, you can also log out of your Google account, clear browser history. But Google has many other clues it can use - your bookmarks, your location, IP address. It's been found that we leave a lot of fingerprints through our browser. See Turning off Personalization... Can Anyone Prove it Works? at Webmasterworld.

Related Questions at Ask.com

Ask Introduces Related Questions, ResearchBuzz (May 25)

Tara Calishain is right - the new related questions at Ask.com are "downright weird".

Ask appears to be using its Q&A base to generate these.

On my question - who found the northwest passage - Ask presented -

Who Discovered the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the Mississippi River
Who Was the First to Search the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the St Lawrence River
Did Lewis and Clark Find the Northwest Passage
Who Searched for the Northwest Passage

I don't see the connection between northwest passage and Mississippi, but there was one with the St Lawrence since Jacques Cartier did think the river, which he "discovered", would ultimately lead to China.

The related question - Who Discovered the St Lawrence River - came from answers.ask.com.

The Lewis and Clark related question came from something in wiki.answers.com. One of President Jefferson's objectives for the expedition was to have them find a water passage to the Pacific.

Specificity, in my view, doesn't really improve on the second level. For Did Lewis and Clark Find the Northwest Passage, we get --

Who Discovered the Northwest Passage
Who Found the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the Pacific Ocean
What Did Lewis and Clark Discover
What Animals Did Lewis and Clark Find
What Plants Did Lewis and Clark Discover

But mostly, these related questions don't strike me as effective discovery tools - the connections are often tenuous and remote - there because some words happened to be on the same page and not because the page was about the topic of search interest. Ask is also drawing on phrasing in Q&A services, not the best source of information.

Encrypted search at Google

Google Launches Encrypted Web Search, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 21)

As privacy is being violated every which way on the Internet even by Google, Google has introduced the encrypted search.

"Google’s introduced a new “secure” encrypted version of its search." - to be found at https://www.google.com/

It's not a 100% private - only the search part - and not your history - "... this is not a private search interface in that Google will continue to store your search history, as they do with normal web search, and your search history will be available in your Google account login area."

More - Encrypted Search Arrives From Google, The Next Web (May 21)

Postscript (May 23) Benefits of Google Encrypted Search, Tom Bradley, PC World (May 22)

"The most obvious benefit is that searches can't be intercepted. But, for businesses there is another feature of the encrypted Google search which has an even more relevant and directly applicable benefit. Searches conducted via Google encrypted search are not archived in history and won't appear in the autofill during a subsequent search. ..."

"The beta of Google's encrypted search only works with the core search functionality--not Images, or Videos, or Maps, etc. It also doesn't keep the browser history clear of URL's that are entered directly (as opposed to via a Google search). Perhaps an even more secure solution is to use the encrypted Google search from within an InPrivate Browsing session on Internet Explorer 8."

Wolfram Alpha may get more popular

Wolfram Alpha's niche continues to elude by Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (May 18)

Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine that so far appeals mainly to researchers and scientists. Comscore shows that fewer people are visiting it now than a year ago. Wolfram Alpha has some plans to change that.

"The company plans to make over its home page, and will start adding data for more pop-culture-friendly information such as sports, music, health information, and even its own take on local mapping."

Tonight I see that WA has added more tips in a dropdown box on things you might do there - math, weather, bio of a person, logic. There is also a link to Examples by Topic, making it easier to explore the possibilities.

This is a tool people need to spend time with to see how it can help with their questions whether scientific, nutritional, historical, or pop-cultural. But we have been made very lazy by the dead simple keyword web search.

Added May 20 - ResearchBuzz picked out ways to use the features in Wolfram|Alpha Celebrates First Anniversary with Some New Features

Google Squared Comes to Web Search Results

Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 12)

Something to watch for -- "Currently, Google Squared powers the “sources” displayed for the “best answers” one box and it also powers the new “something different” refinements on the new Google design."

Best Answers don't show very often - and no longer show for the example used in the posting (iron man 2 release date). Something Different is also occasional - depending on your topic and relationships with other topics. For oil spill we see other kinds of environmental disasters such as forest fire, chemical spill, and landslide.

Google Blog has a longer posting that explains Best Answers and Something Different.

Notess on changes in Google Search

Google Moves Left to Navigational Search Facets , by Greg Notess, Newsbreaks (May 13)

Greg Notess gives us a very orderly and clear description of the changes in Google search to the new left rail of search options. He boils it down to database (the Everything section), Search Tools, and Alternate Suggestions (which do not show yet on non-US Google versions.)

He also lists what was dropped.

"Search terms used to show up after the estimated number of results but are now gone. Single word queries would also link to a dictionary definition. That is gone. The advanced search page has lost the links at the bottom to "Topic-specific search engines from Google." The "View Customizations" message that previously alerted searchers to when the ranking had been personalized is no longer visible."

Add to this, that the limit-to-pages-in-canada has been moved to the left rail.

Using the Old Google

How to access the old Google Search. No hacks or scripts required., The Next Web (May 9)

If you don't like the new search results page at Google with the left rail to help you explore the results, use http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all.

Postscript May 21 - Google Removed Only Way To Get To Old Google Design

Semantic Search Engines

Top 7 Semantic Search Engines As An Alternative To Google, Nancy Messieh, Make Use Of (May 1)

Most articles about semantic say the following - "Semantic search engines are able to understand the context in which the words are being used, resulting in smart, relevant results." I'm not so certain that they really deliver on that promise, Broad categorization - yes, specific understanding - no.

However, here is the list - the comments are mine.

+ Kngine - can pick out "concepts" - best on places and things
+ hakia - will group by Web, News, Blogs, Twitter, Image and Video - but so do many search engines today
+ Kosmix - my favourite - good on broad topics.
+ DuckDuckGo - another favourite - helps in choosing the meaning you want
+ Evri - very social
+ Powerset - great technology but limited to Wikipedia
+ Truevert - new to me and one to try - "All results are filtered and organized from one specific perspective – with the topic of environmental awareness in mind."

The Ghost of Teoma

Teoma Returns As Ask.com’s “Simple Interface”, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 7)

Ghost from the past - Ask.com has resurrected Teoma domain to present a "simple interface" to searchers. It is simple - sponsored results, some organic, more sponsored - and a list of related searches from the much modified Teoma algorithms for finding similarities. What's the point?

Teoma can join Altavista, Webcrawler, Excite, HotBot and some others as lingering relics of early days of Web search.

April US Search Market

Google Regains Search Share In April, Hitwise Says, Search Engine Land (May 5)

Hitwise has US market share statistics for April 2010 - "says Google held 71.4% of the market during April, up from 69.97% in March. Yahoo and Bing saw slight drops in market share between March and April."

Has chart.

Ask.com Sputtering

Proof Ask.com Is Dead, Search Engine Roundtable (May 5)

No one has posted a message to the Webmasterworld forum on Ask.com in six months! Webmasters probably don't care how they rank in Ask.com. This post gives some other reasons why Ask is falling apart. The major reason could be because they try to monetize everything to pay the bills. A very nasty and definitely downward spiral.

Google's new search results page

Google has tested Show Options long enough. Today it moved the whole kit to show directly on the search results page in the left rail. This will make it much easier for the searcher to explore and refine results.

Google will have a sense of whether your search suits web, news, images, shopping - and present the first result from that collection. In the search for changes in google search it found news stories. Where there is no dominant source, it show Everything only - and the link to More.

More opens Everything to show Google's main collections - Images, Videos, Maps, News, Books, Blogs, Updates (real time), and Discussions.

If you are using google.ca, Google shows the Pages from Canada under the Web. It's no longer under the search box.

Google offers the time dimension - Any Time - specific time choices will vary with the query.

Standard View set of options by default will be for the Web. In the screenshot, we see WonderWheel, Timeline, and Page Previews.

But there is much more under More Search Tools where we get the full range of choices we know from the Search Options page. Those selections will change depending on the vertical you are viewing: images, video, news etc.

Google.com will also show related topics under a new heading Something Different in the bottom left. This tends of be for names, places, products. For example, for Elizabeth May, Google suggests other political leaders, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe, Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion. Although Google has suggestions for Canadian topics, it does not show this at google.ca.

For guidance on how to use these options strategically in your search, see my article on Google's Search Options Reveal More (Jan 2010)

Many have written about Google's redesign.

+ Meet The New Google & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column, by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 5) -- Very detailed and thorough report - recommended reading.

+
Google gives search results pages a makeover, by Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (May 5) -- Makes point that Google will "surface" results from most relevant area (news, web, shopping etc) first.

"For example, a search for "red shoes" would produce the usual set of results, but on the left rail, Google will surface a link to Google's shopping search pages. In the same vein, a search for "NFL draft" would surface news and real-time updates on that rail. Users can access the full list of search options by clicking on "more" but will see a changing list of highlighted options on the left rail for different queries."

+ Google's search results redo plays out on iPhone, Android, too by Jessica Dolcourt, Webware (May 5)

+ Google's New Look, ResearchBuzz (May 6) - comments that the three main engines are looking more alike with the three column display (which, as we know, Ask.com introduced 2 or 3 years ago).

+ Business Week provides this video interview with Google personnel on the redesign. They say it's about making search faster and to help people "slice and dice their information". Also describes the process for redesign that includes much testing by many different groups of people inside and outside Google and through many iterations. [About 4 minutes]

Ask Changed Hompage

Ask.com has questions on its entry page now. This is to promote what it thinks its best feature is - the Q&A service. Changes to the page are described in Testing a New Homepage at the Ask blog.

But really, what Ask has become best at is showing as many or more sponsored results than search results. For birds in kauai, I get 1 good opening result, 5 sponsored results, followed by 9 organic, and ending with another 5 sponsored.

Google will prevail

5 Reasons Why Google And Search Will Dominate The Next Decade. by Alex Wilhelm, Next Web (Apr 29)

Responds to five points in an article that argued that Google would be surpassed.

Mainly - Google is smart and agile - "Google is a mixture of the smartest people alive today, unlimited money (check their tens of billions in the bank), and loose creative license. In other words, you have the smartest coders with time and money on their hands to invent what they see to be the future."

Also counters points about social matching, local search, recommendations, suggestions.

Changes in Web Search

Yahoo's search model developing a new face, SF Chronicle (Apr 29)

Yahoo, having just come to an agreement to outsource web search to Microsoft, is investigating other ways of navigation and search that involve social networking, and location aware models.

Yahoo noted in its studies that less time is being spent in traditional web search - "It found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user's favorite content."

Two areas of interest are social media - especially Twitter and what it indicates for popular interest, and using images to refine results.

More detail in Yahoo Study Shows Search Responsible for 1 in 5 Pageviews Online, SEO by the SEA (Apr 28)

"This study tells us that 8 days of Yahoo toolbar data, collecting the browsing activity of a large number of people, indicates that searches of the Web, multimedia, and items take up about 10 percent of all pages viewed online, and those search starting points lead to another 11 percent of pages viewed on the Web. "

There is also a breakdown of the type of web search - "They noticed that about 50 percent of queries refered directly to some kind of specific item or object, that 8.5 percent were about some broad topic or concept, and smaller percentages of searches included things like searches for URLs of pages and for navigational queries that didn’t include URLs but were aimed at bringing searchers to specific pages."

The dot ca domain

To Dot-CA or not to Dot-CA?, CanuckSEO (Apr 28)

Written for SEO but interesting for searchers - Google displays Google.ca to people using a Canadian IP address and will rank .ca sites more highly there. This does not happen in the Google Toolbar or third-party sites.

Webmasters whose target audience is Canadian would benefit from .ca, but must also consider .com when non-geographic search engines are used.

Brands in Google Search Results

Google adds brands within search results, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Apr 29)

Google will show brand names as links under results for some types of product categories. It works for cars and digital cameras.

"t seems Google is getting ready to make significant changes to its product search strategy, coming off a deal that makes it easier for retailers and manufacturers to funnel user-generated reviews to Google product pages. Product-related searches are obviously a big source of ad revenue for Google, and improvements to those searches could create new opportunities for advertising within individual product pages and regular search results"

Kngine Stats

Kngine is a new "semantic search engine and question answer engine"

"Kngine aims to organize the human beings Systematic Knowledge and Experiences and make them accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and organize all objective data, and make it possible and easy to access. Our goal is to build Web 3.0 Web Search Engine on the advances of Web Search Engine, Semantic Web, Data Representation technologies -- a new form of Web Search Engine that will unleash a revolution of new possibilities."

It now supports search of statistics, along with web, and images. It was the statistics part that provoked the headline from The Next Web - Watch out WolframAlpha, announcing Kngine

"It is now able to collect, organize, and index about 65 million record of statistical data from resources such as: the UN, the World bank, the CIA Factbook, and many others. For now it is a stand alone Application, but soon it will use this massive amount of information to empower Kngine."

At the moment search is weak - looks for any words and hard to get words together. It is better to browse the categories.

Google - Pages Similar To

Google Shows Related Results At Bottom Of Results: “Pages Similar To”, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 26)

More like this is back as a feature. Google is building on its "related" to show "pages similar to" on some navigational searches.

Xmarks, if you have it installed on your browser, will show similar pages too.

Google's Average - One Change per Day

Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 22)

"Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm."

Recap of Google and Bing announcements

New features from Google and Bing, Pandia (Apr 18)

Google and Bing added or changed features over the last couple of weeks. Pandia give us a recap. Several items relate to Twitter.

Very special purpose search engines

8 Crazy-Cool Search Engines You Should Know, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 16)

It would seem that there is a specialty search engine to meet nearly every conceivable need or interest.

"There’s a new breed of search engines out there, and they’re letting users search and find some utterly crazy stuff. And by “crazy,” I mean a lot of things: unique, cool, awesome, and downright strange. Sometimes all of the above. A search engine that lets you find (and buy) discontinued soda pop? Check. A search engine that helps you find cheap Amazon.com items so you can get free shipping? Sure! A search engine to locate misspelled eBay and Craigslist items? Got one of those, too. Looking for dead zones in cellular coverage?"

Some curious items here - like dead cell zones in the US and in the UK, or self-storage facilities in the US. They are all intended for US users but Canadians might find Pillbox from NLM will help in identifying pills.

Google spells and suggests

Google brings new autocorrect and name search enhancements to Search, The Next Web (Apr 16)

Google has been making small refinements in search aids.

+ localized Google suggest - those type ahead suggestions will be targeted to where you are.

+ improved search on a name - Google will use the additional information you provide (such as so-and-so lawyer toronto) to try to figure out the correct spelling of name and right person.

+ spelling is corrected automatically - if you really want the spelling you used you can override the correction.

Google blog has an announcement on Search with fewer keystrokes and better spelling.

Google's Q1 2010 Earnings

Google’s First Quarter 2010 Results Show 23% Revenue Increase, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 15)

"Google announced earnings, showing a 23% increase in revenue from the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010. Google earned $6.77 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2010. Google’s operating income was $2.49 billion, or 37% of revenues and net income was $1.96 billion up from $1.42 billion the year prior."

Cuil adds a Cpedia

Lots of buzz about the announcement from Tom Costello in the Cuil blog that Cuil's next project is Cpedia - a search engine that would return encyclopedia-like pages of synthesized content - not "web results".

The Next Web called this a relaunch - Search Engine Cuil Relaunches As Massive Encyclopedia (Apr 8)

Oddly, the Cuil post does not link to Cpedia, and the Cuil site shows no press releases about it.

Cpedia (pronounced see-pedia) is at cpedia.com. Already, it claims over 134 million automatically generated articles.

"For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces. Just as Wikipedia uses the effort of a large number of people to edit a topic, we combine all the documents written about an idea on the web to generate one article."

I'm not sure I'm ready to trust an automatically generated article, synthesized by a computer from web contents and lacking citations for the sections.

Cuil does a good job on high showing categories - detailed and varied enough to be close to facets. It does this best on broad topics - semantic search, geothermal energy, arctic explorers; but it can also cover "mad men", the TV series.

Interestingly, it can generate a page about Mad Men as well. But the fragmented writing and vagueness (etc), and some non-sequitors illustrate the problems with this endeavour, and why, until or if those can be fixed, using the page is hard work.

Cuil, I have come to like. It is most remembered for the hubris in its claim to be a Google killer. Search was useless when it was launched. But it has improved, and its strongest feature is in the categories.

Cuil will refer the searcher to videos as well. And on some searches there is a timeline; eg abraham lincoln.. This isn't consistent - a time line for arctic ocean, but not for arctic exploration. Also I'm sure Cuil had more a month ago, and it definitely used to be able to search Facebook. That is gone now. There are no notices to explain or confirm.

I haven't seen anything written on the future of Cuil. For now, it seems to continue as the main engine, and when there is a Cpedia article, it says it will show it first (explained in preferences) . That did not happen in my searches. I also never saw a link to Cpedia to encourage me to look there. For now, Cpedia is hidden.

This is not good communications, and, although it is good the Cuil group isn't hyping Cpedia, it could be more forthcoming on its plans.

It's a very tough market - and I don't think people will switch to Cuil for the sake of Cpedia.

See also Cuil Launches Cpedia, Web Aggropedia, ResearchBuzz (Apr 12)

Yebol - New Look

“Harvest the Knowledge” with search engine Yebol by Charles Knight, The Next Web (Apr 10)

New design at Yebol - a search engine that uses some semantic technologies to make sense of results. It identifies top sites, and related searches, and breaks the page into parts for web, images, twitter etc.

Seems similar to Kosmix.

New bits for Google

Google Expands Search Suggestions, Real-Time Search & Adds Refinements To Local Searches by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 29)

Google has made some small improvements to web search.

+ search suggestions bolded and easier to read
+ search suggestions in 50 languages and across 170 domains - everyone should see them now
+ realtime search in more languages
+ more information about points of interest in local city searches - good if you are a visitor I suppose - and if you are in one of the 200 US cities where this information is available.
+ lists for Google bookmarks - way to share.

For the local search, you can see an example in this search on Kauai. There are no photos of the place, but we do see links to points of interest.

Bits about Bing

Bing’s Adding some Features, ResearchBuzz (Mar 29)

Bing is making some changes

+ moving tabs from the left panel to the top.
+ new publication search (enter the newspaper name) that shows latest posts (but actually getting results on this is spotty as we see from Tara Calishain's posting)
+ Map App - but you have to have Silverlight. Like Calishain, I'm holding off.

More from Bing

Microsoft Announces Raft Of New Bing Features: Improved UI, More “Answers” And Of Course Foursquare, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Mar 25)

More improvements to Bing's UI interface coming our way, along with "richer vertical experiences, maps and real-time information."

+ There will be new "autos results" pages - not a selling point for me.

+ "integration of Foursquare data into Bing Maps" - this does not refer to four square meals a day. Foursquare - I had to look this up in the Seattle Times - is "the location-based social network that encourages people to visit new restaurant, bars, venues and more. The app will let Bing Maps users see Foursquare check-ins, badges and mayorships." This is for Silverlight-powered maps.

+ "improving its presentation of real-time data in search results" - so that if you search for the new york times, you'll also get top tweeted stories. True for the Globe and Mail too.

Future of Search

John Battelle On The Future Of Search, Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Mar 19)

John Battelle, author of the 2005 book The Search, spoke to Gord Hotchkiss about direction of search today. There are much higher expectations today - expect nuanced answers that can only be obtained from applications with structured data. So - how will we find them, and what will the be effect on revenue models.

"Battelle is envisioning a significantly different type of search interaction, and that changes everything. In my next installment of Just Behave, I’ll share the conversation John and I had about what that interaction might look like, both from the perspective of the user and from what that might do to the search industry, both the big players we know and some dark horses we haven’t yet met."

Google's Snippets

Anatomy Of A Google Snippet, by Stephen Spencer, Search Engine Land (Mar 18)

Very detailed and informative article about the construction and content of Google snippets.

Of interest:

+ there are some subtle indicators that an item is scholarly, book, blog.

+ "Google is quite adept at teasing out the date from the page."

+ The ellipses ... occur for different reasons. "If there is no date but the snippet begins with ellipses, that indicates the snippet was excerpted from a larger body of text (whether part of a meta description or page copy"

+ Meta descriptions are used - "It’s most likely that the meta description will be used by default when the page doesn’t contain the user’s search term and is ranking primarily because of inbound links and their anchor text. "

+ It's a good thing to be listed in Open Directory Project.

+ "Google uses stemming, morphology, and synonyms to relate the searcher’s keywords to the keywords in the document. A different gerund (-ing instead of -ed) could be considered a match by Google’s relevancy algorithm, but it may or may not be bolded as a keyword in context. Doing my own tests, "

+ There is a snippet optimizer tool!

There was no description or discussion of the larger snippets we get under Show Options - Page Previews.

How Google Search and Ads work

Google Explains How Their Search, Ads & Apps Work by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 15)

Three videos from Google -- Google’s search technology (with the charming Matt Cutts), search ads and Google Apps work.

Can also get them from http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

Kngine - Parallel Search

Search Engine Kngine explains Parallel Search, The Next Web (Mar 13) -

Tour Kngine - a "Web 3.0 Engine" that provides Information about concepts (its understanding of your keyword), answers questions, shows "relations between the keywords and concepts" and links different kinds of material.

"Parallel Search allows you to refine results based on concepts of your queries, and return more accurate yet extensive result that you might not even think of."

Kngine - have no idea how that should be pronounced. I'm going with kin-gin.

Google Closer to Leaving China

Google Is Leaving China, Jacob Friedman, The Next Web (Mar 13)

Google is likely to leave China - or as the Financial Times reported - 99.9% sure. Google declared it would run the search engine censorship free - and China said no.

"Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quick to emphasize that Google would not be quitting China entirely. “It’s very important to know we are not pulling out of China,” He said. “We have a good business in China. This is about the censorship rules, not anything else.” However, there is a growing fear among other Google executives that backlash from this decision will make staying in the Chinese market entirely untenable."

February Search Market Share

Bing’s Market Share Up For Third Straight Month: Hitwise Search Engine Land (Mar 11)

Bing 9.7, Google 70.95, Yahoo 14.5, Ask 2.8 - Google lost a bit, Bing gained.

Surf Canyon as Search Engine

The Best Discovery Engine of the Year – Surf Canyon, Charles Knight, The Next Web (Mar 4)

Surf Canyon won the About.com Web Search Reader’s Choice Award Winners for 2010 as "best search engine".

SurfCanyon is a browser add-on - that enhances search results at Google, Yahoo, Bing and Craigslist by being able to show "more like this" based on an analysis of words (roughly). It also has a web page - search engine style.

"Using Surf Canyon as your starting page or by downloading the tiny, safe Surf Canyon browser extension you will see the little Surf Canyon bull’s eye icon next to each search result. Click on that and in almost every case Surf Canyon will pull search results like that one from as far down as 20 pages deep (100 pages deep is the theoretical max)."

Google Answer Highlighting

Understanding the web to make search more relevant, Google Blog (Jan 22, 2010)

This was announced a while ago - but doesn't hurt to be reminded.

"Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference."

Example was empire building height - but does a good job on cost of obesity. Google.ca results are better than I recall too - snippets have dollar figures.

Yahoo still in search

Yahoo! and the future of search, Emma Barnett, Telegraph (Feb 27)

Another article in which Yahoo says it is still doing search even though it is going to be using the bing index.

Yoelle Maarek, senior director of Yahoo! Research, explained that the arrangement with Microsoft "should be seen as liberating Yahoo! to focus on front-end search innovations, rather than spending time and money on ensuring the back-end technology is working well. If anything, says Maarek, the Microsoft deal has freed the company up to start fighting the search war in the most important area – the bit the consumer can see. Yahoo!’s search teams are planning to launch several new initiatives in this area over the coming months, to try and steal share from search Goliath Google, and also, somewhat confusingly, from Bing, the search platform of Microsoft, its new partner. "

That's good - because we need the competition in features and ranking - the crawling has been taken care of.

Maarek names three areas:

1. anticipating user intent
2. make searching easier - eg SearchPad
3. ‘web of things’ concept - variety of types of results (like Kosmix)

Five things about Bing

Five Ways Bing Is Better Than Google by Jacob Friedman, The Next Web (Feb 26)

These five things are more to do with visual effects.
+ Cashback (in the US)
+ Visual search - said to be strong - requires Silverlight
+ Bing maps with photosynth - "The feature, which runs on Silverlight, displays collections of photos stitched together into a panorama."
+ More on this page - hover to right of result for information - good feature
+ Bing Video - incldues network shows and Hulu - easy handling too.

Google's Nearby Search

Google has added an option on Show Options for search Nearby - but, as of Feb 27, this shows in Google.com but not Google.ca

The idea is to find the stores or events or other locally relevant thing near where you live or plan to be - mainly the city.

You can pick a location (override the default) to localize results. In my search for locavore markets toronto I didn't notice any particular improvement when using Nearby However, using Nearby on the query locavore markets returns results related to Toronto. But they were only so-so in quality. Google has said Nearby works on geography, not a keyword. Relevance was much better with Toronto as a search term.

For Canadians, it's not worth using Google.com to get this feature. It will turn up in Google.ca in time and perhaps by then it will be better at selection and relevance.

Two articles:

Google integrates Nearby location in search results, Don Reisinger, Digital Home (Feb 26)

Google said the Nearby tool works by geography, rather than keyword, which means that results will include surrounding areas; they won't be limited to the single town or city a user selects."

Google search goes local with new ‘Nearby’ option, Martin Bryant, The Next Web (Feb 26)

Does it work - the UK perspective

"We’ve found mixed results so far. Searching for “Bars” near Manchester brought up a mixture of results, including the usual Google Map with pins marking local bars (no different from a usual search) and a mixture of local results and disappointingly general results from Wikipedia."

Google's Algorithms

Google Explains Search Rankings After Complaints in Europe by Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Feb 25)

Google has been under attack in Europe for the way it ranks results - European firms, they think, are receiving lower placement.

"One of the complaints was filed by Foundem, a U.K. price comparison site. Foundem's co-founder wrote the op-ed piece that Singhal links to, which suggests that regulators should set rules for how search engines rank results. The editorial accuses Google of exploiting its dominance in search by displaying its own services at the top of search results, something that Google denies."

Google responded with this posting on This Stuff is Tough

"Our philosophy has three main elements:

1. Algorithmically-generated results.
2. No query left behind.
3. Keep it simple."

Updated Coming to Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers Gets A New Look, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 25)

Yahoo is rolling out a new look and interface that will improve navigation at Yahoo Answers.

The surprising line in this posting is - "Hitwise has previously said that Yahoo Answers is the number two reference site online, behind Wikipedia."

Collaborative Search Engine?

Personal Cognitive Utility Zahdoo with augmented socio-cognition. Marketing gone amok., The Next Web (Feb 24)

Charles Knight writes - "Zahdoo, a personal cognitive utility (PCU) with augmented socio-cognition, belongs to a new class of semantic applications that enhance user’s content and experience by analyzing, linking and building relationships contextually while seamlessly integrating user’s content and experience with the external content and services."

No kidding - here it is Zahdoo - you have to sign up and get your friends to. Interesting as a concept but too much.

More Twitter for Yahoo

Yahoo turns on the Twitter firehose, Tom Krazit, Webware (Feb 23)

Yahoo will be getting a direct stream from Twitter - this will augment the real time items in the News blocks that turn up in web search results - and be an option for Yahoo account users to add twitter feeds to their profiles

"The battle is on to see if search engines can analyze, rank, and display real-time data from services like Twitter in a relevant way. It's early days so far, but this could be the next battleground in the search market now that everyone is trying to augment search results with structured data."

See Twitter and Yahoo Team Up, ResearchBuzz

Tara Calishain has some details on what you will see - and concludes - "Simply integrating a tweet stream into search isn’t enough. Especially for Yahoo, it isn’t enough. I have faith that Yahoo can do more".

Try for yourself on a search for something topical - this week it is Toyota recall.

All about Google Search

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web, by Stephen Levy, Wired (Feb 22)

Ripper of an article about Google's work on its search algorithms over the years. Each year it puts in 100s of changes - this year 550 or so improvements.

Interesting points about competition.

+ Facebook (of course) - getting answers from friends.
+ Twitter - with chatter
+ Yelp (in the US) for finding restaurants etc
+ Bing - and its success (says Stephen Levy) in health, travel, and shopping (I've yet to see this).

The main value to the article for searchers is in the clear description of how Google search works - crawling the web, ranking using signals, the signals, analyzing words.

Pay particular attention to the explanation of what Google does with mike siwek lawyer mi

Yahoo-Bing

Yahoo! switches to Bing search results, Pandia (Feb 21)

Pandia's summary of what a Yahoo that uses the Bing search index will mean. Pandia says we could start seeing this change in the next week.

"Yahoo is trying desperately to explain that this does not mean that Yahoo! is no longer a search company. The argument is that although the organic search results and the paid text ads will be provided by Microsoft/Bing, the presentation of these results are Yahoo’s own."

Google donates to Wikipedia

Google and Wikipedia: Separated at Birth?, By Mathew Ingram, Business Week (Feb 18)

Google has donated $2 million dollars to Wikipedia. Ever wonder why Wikipedia shows up in Google as the first result so often?

"Google and Wikipedia maintain that pages from the user-edited encyclopedia show up high in search because the site has a large amount of particularly high-quality content, gets linked to a lot, and therefore ranks highly based on the criteria that Google uses for PageRank and sorting of search results."

There is another theory in which Wikipedia sends advertising dollars to Google.

"One theory is that Google is effectively acting as Wikipedia's advertising partner: Since the site itself doesn't carry any ads, Google gets to monetize that traffic using its AdWords and AdSense programs.Wikipedia gets lots of traffic and attention, and Google gets to keep the ad revenue."

Microsoft-Yahoo partnership approved

The US Justice Department and the European Commission have approved the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo whereby for the next 10 years, Microsoft provides the search index, and Yahoo handles the search-related ads.

Yahoo, Microsoft to begin their Web ad partnership , Joelle Tessler, AP via Globe and Mail (Feb 18)

Where does this leave Yahoo as a search engine? It won't be using its own database, but it has said it will provide a unique search experience. But what that means isn't clear to some.

Yahoo, Microsoft make search pact official (FAQ). Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Feb 18)

Tom Krazit answers the questions we are all asking. What will change at the Yahoo site? What will happen to Search Monkey and BOSS? When? - database work may be done by the end of 2010.

Search Engine Wars: Is Yahoo Doomed to be the Next Alta Vista?, by Jeff Bertolucci, PC World

There are some skeptics who see this as the beginning of the end for Yahoo. Might Yahoo under this partnership become the hollow shell that Altavista (and Alltheweb) became under Yahoo?

"It's not exactly clear yet how Yahoo will add value to Bing's search results. According to the companies' press release, "Yahoo will innovate around those listings by integrating rich Yahoo content, enhanced listings with conveniently organized information about key topics, and tools to tailor the experience for Yahoo users.""

Kngine - Stunning new Semantic Search Engine

Kngine - Web 3.0 Search Engine

I nearly missed this new search engine that aims to "unlock meaning" in search. Amazingly, this search engine comes to us from Cairo, Egypt. The about page says -

"We are working on next generation of searching technologies to unlock meaning; rather than indexing the document in Inverted Index fashion, Kngine tries to understand the documents and the search queries in order to provide customized meaningful search result."

"Our goal is to build Web 3.0 Web Search Engine on the advances of Web Search Engine, Semantic Web, Data Representation technologies -- a new form of Web Search Engine that will unleash a revolution of new possibilities."

The Tour page shows the ways this approach can assist in searches.

* Read Perception Words with Multiple Meanings.
* Smart Information.
* Available Results. NEW !
* Concept List (List of things).
* Answer your questions.
* Comparisons.
* Updated Information (Weather, Stock, Currency Price, and Sport Matches Results).
* Link the data, and view direct data.

There could be a Canadian connection. One of the sample questions is When did the Toronto Dominion Centre open (but the link that Kngine provides for this is a bad search - somebody is not good with detail.)

Kngine gets its reference and question-answering information from Freebase, web results from Google, and maps from Google.

You have to stay high level in your queries to see the concepts. There are none for exploring the Canadian Arctic, but Canadian Arctic as a search identifies one concept and several "nearest" concepts. The full treatment of a topic shows in this query for green living.

Choices for search are Web, Web with full information, and Photos. I haven't seen any difference in the two webs. The concept analysis doesn't apply to Photos - it seems to be the standard photo search.

I'm quite surprised that Kngine can answer questions like - top 10 countries for oil production, or top 10 countries for wheat. with a clickable map no less.

Since the web results are coming from Google, we can use Google's syntax. This can somewhat defeat the purpose of a semantic search engine, but may be helpful if you want pages from a domain: eg gov for US Government (site:gov), or ca for Canada (site:ca).

Kngine is very promising. For now it seems to deal with high level topics very well, and can handle some kinds factual questions. I don't know how far we can push that but it does a very good job on population of Toronto.

A note on the site reveals that "Kngine contains 1.2+ billion of pieces of data about more than 8 million concepts".

This is one to use and watch. Let's hope Kngine succeeds.

Hakia Bungles its Redesign

hakia Serves Up Comprehensive Universal Search in New Design , Search Engine Watch (Feb 11)

Hakia, the semantic search engine that is supposed to be able to discern meaning of query and answer, has changed its display of results. Whereas before it had segments on the page - somewhat in columns - for different types of sources - now it strings the "categories" down a very long page.

Search Engine Watch has some screenshots - these will help you know what to expect when you go to Hakia.

This is terrible design - you don't know what to expect first - might be news, might be web - you don't know if there are any credible sites unless you scroll further. The only control the searcher has is to contract and expand the sections. There are no clues at the top of the page as is normal at search engines. The results themselves are dense text with some faint highlighting. This design is very unfriendly. Also I fear that the direct connection to galleries has been dropped.

There is nothing attractive about this. hakia once had a design reminiscent of Ask.com's 3D. That was a fine model. This is not.

Search Engine Shares - Jan

Nielsen: Bing Regains December’s Losses In January, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 12)

The search market share statistics do fluctuate. In the US according to Nielsen during January it looks like Bing picked up a percent from Google.
Engine / Dec / Jan

Google / 67.3 / 66.3%
Yahoo / 14.4% / 14.5 %
Bing / 9.9 % / 10.9 %

Comscore has figures too - ComScore Releases January Search Numbers (Bing Gains) & Year In Review

Google 65.4 %
Yahoo 17 %
Bing 11.3 %

Is Yahoo in search or not?

Yahoo struggles to gain search respect by Tom Krazit, Cnet (Feb 10)

Conflicting messages come from Yahoo. Shashi Seth, Yahoo's new search chief, says "Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will be in search in the future,"

CEO Carol Bartz has said Yahoo is not a search company - "“We have never been a search company,” she said. “It is: ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.’ ” [said in August 2009]

Now we read,

"This is perhaps the key problem for Yahoo search in 2010. The general public has long stopped thinking of Yahoo as a search vehicle. "

Of interest: "Around 80 percent of all searches on Yahoo are conducted by people who are on one of Yahoo's other Web pages, such as the home page or e-mail inbox, according to the company."

Which was Carol Bartz's point - they are already at Yahoo - but for Yahoo to give up the index and claim to concentrate on the "experience" which can be so easily copied - well - it's probably trouble. But don't let that stop you from using Yahoo for search.

Postscript Feb 15: Yahoo Search: This Is The “Dark Time” But We’ll Be Back by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 11)

Shashi Seth, the new Search Products SVP at Yahoo, assured people at a press event that Yahoo was still serious about search.

Greg Sterling, in the audience said, "I came away from the Q&A and these more informal discussions much more “convinced” than during the formal presentations that Yahoo would in fact continue to innovate and would retain and perhaps gain new search talent. "

Yahoo Search Accomplishments

Looking Back at Six Months of Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Search Blog (Feb 10)

Recap of all that Yahoo has accomplished in search over the past 6 months. Remarkable considering that the CEO said Yahoo is getting out of search.

Internet Librarian 2009 Presentations on Search

Internet Librarian 2009 - Information Discovery and Search

It is never too late to blog something. The Internet Librarian site has three presentations on aspects of search.

+ WebSearch Review by Chris Sherman - Down to 4 search engines, cool Bing, Wolfram Alpha, "Real Time" search follies and Twitter Twaddle, the Targetting Trend. Finally, some one who says social search is a fad.

+ Super Searcher Shares Search Tips Spectacular by Mary Ellen Bates

+ Digging for Gold with Social Media Tools by Samara Omundson and Emily Wheeler. Evaluating social media tools for their usefulness in obtaining information on a current interest (product, issue etc).

SearchZooka Video on Advanced Search

SearchZooka helps people create advanced search queries at Google, Yahoo< Bing, Ask, Digg, Technorati, Delicious. The video describes the advanced search options and explains how you can use these. The first 5 minustes is an excellent tutorial on advanced searching. The remainder shows how to use the SearchZooka interface and take advantage of its features to save and rerun searches. Only 9:19 min.

How Search Engines Find Content

How Search Engines Find Your Content, David Harry, Search Engine Journal (Jan 28)

It isn't just links that will get your site found and indexed. There are the traditional means: submitting a site, being found through links, and using a site map. David Harry points to new methods of watching RSS aggregators and social media. But patents suggest that search engines can dig into applications such as email, instant messaging, Google Wave, Microsoft apps - except it's not clear if this is being done yet.

"Now, is this being done? Well, the availability of methods has never been the problem; processing power was. Notice how I say ‘was’? This is because with the spectre of new technologies (the least of which being the Caffeine update) they can start to incorporate these methods even deeper. What was once the domain of tin-foil apparel may now be coming to fruition."

Search data retention

Microsoft Complies With EU Demand, First To Cut Data Retention To Six Months, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jan 19)

Microsoft moved first to meet EU Demand to retain user search data for no more than 6 months. Others are expected to follow. This posting has the details and some history.

"Microsoft is the first of the major search engines to agree to the European Union’s demand that data retention be cut to six months. The company will now completely delete IP addresses after six months."

Google's Synonym System

Helping Computers Understand Language, Google Blog (Jan 19)

This posting describes how Google handles synonyms. Years ago Google introduced tilde (~) command to return words that were "related" to the word you use. For example: ~help would find tips, tutorials, guide. It was called a "fuzzy operator". A couple of years ago Google began to return related words which were mainly stemming variants but sometimes synonyms. This posting provides some details on the operation of the synonym system today.

+ Google analyzes the impact and quality of synonyms
+ will bold words that Google algorithms identify as synonyms
+ the algorithms consider all the words in the query in deciding whether synonyms should be picked up
+ Google's systems "analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts."

One example - song words - Google bold lyrics.

If you don't want the synonyms, put + in front of the word.

Ujiko and Kartoo

Two search engines, Kartoo and Ujiko, have closed. They both had interesting interfaces with visual aids and handling. Kartoo had just undergone another redesign and was still an interesting tool to use.

Worldwide Search Market Share

comScore: US Has Most Searches; China Slowest Growth; Google Tops Worldwide In 2009 by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 22)

Searches worldwide grew by 46%. US continues as the country that searches the most, with China in second place. Google handled the most searches at 67%.

Google Looks for Answers

Google Pulls Answers, Events Out of Search Morass, Research Buzz (Jan 25)

Google says it is better at answering factual questions. One method is by highlighting the answer. It does a good job on its sample question - How tall is the Empire State building? - but it takes a lot of tries to get it to work on other questions. Tara Calishain says that Wolfram Alpha is better at this type of question.

It will also highlight events in a "rich snippet" if the web developer has made use of the new format. Details are given in a Google blog post.

US Search Statistics - Dec 2009

Google rules search in December; Bing drops by Don Reisinger, Webware (Jan 13)

Nielsen data on US search engine market share in December 2009

+ Google 67.3%
+ Yahoo 14.4%
+ Bing/MSN 9.9%
+ Ask 1.7%

About Entireweb

Is this the best search engine in the world?, Altsearchengines (Jan 11)

You'll sometimes see Entireweb at a metasearch engine. Here's a description of it.

Quite the promise - "The new Entireweb will have at its disposal a very complex indexing technology which is used by our web crawler, Speedy Spider. This new technology will decide in a very early phase of the process if a specific webpage that we visit is likely to be important to you or not. This means that we will keep unwanted web pages out of the search engine, not by filtering them out from the search index afterwards, but instead trying not to let them in through the front door."

Some obscure engines

My 10 Favorite Search Engines for 2009 – Part I and Part II - by Charles Knight, Altsearchengines (Dec 31) - five engines each - there might be something you'd like to try - diverse interests.

RefSeek for Researchers

Advanced web search for students and researchers, Pandia (Dec 22)

Pandia discovered that RefSeek does much more than search for documents.

"RefSeek is a search engine that offers advanced web search for students and researchers without information overload. It has its own index of more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers. A recent upgrade introduced document search, definitions, math calculations, and an expanded reference directory."

RefSeek is developing into a high quality search service.

A year in search 2009

2009 – capping a decade of web search innovation, by Manyam Mallela, Kosmix (Dec 29)

Five big themes to search in 2009 - it was a big year: the flight from "10 blue links", real time search, reawakening of competition between the majors, online advertising did not falter during the recession / depresssion, there were many new search engines.

Ask Answers Questions

Ask.com has re-established itself as a question and answer center. It did not disappear from the search scene as we feared it would in 2008 and may even be stronger. Market share is steady at around 2.5%.

The philosophy of Ask is to find the answers. Its algorithms are tuned to identifying the answer in published sources and matching it to the question. In addition, Ask has built a database of 400 million Q&A pairs.

In looking at it again, I'm impressed with its cleaner look and its search aids.

The front page is now free of Nascar advertisements. Users can put a new skin on it selecting from a gallery or uploading their own. Normally I don't care, but I was delighted to see that I could put Jeeves back on this page.

Search results page has some subtle changes.

+ Ask will link search terms to results from Dictionary.com - this at a time when Google and Yahoo have dropped definitions (although Google will look up single terms).

+ Top ranked results are usually smart answers or major sites. This is especially true for general searches.
+ Related searches are strong
+ Good questions from the Q&A may show up in a grouping.
+ Search history shows for the browser session.
+ Ask.com stopped putting opened results inside a frame.

On the negative,

+ There are still a lot of sponsored results - as many as 10 on a page.
+ The personal Ask.com doesn't work - can't sign in, can't sign up.
+ The shortcut map montreal to get a map of montreal and direction no longer works. The shortcut only works for US cities - eg map seattle.

Ask is looking to the social web to expand its question-answering capabilities. Ask.com president, Scott Garell outlined this scenario -

"We think over time, if you can connect to people’s networks, tap into their Facebook Connect and other sorts of things, that we can route questions, using our history of billions of questions that have been asked over time, we can use that to understand what is being asked, and to route it to the right person in your network to answer those questions."

Source: Ask.com president discusses the future of the search site, San Jose Mercury News via NJ Business News (Dec 22)

The Next Frontier in Search: Questions & Answers in the Ask.com blog (Nov 13) describes the signals that Ask looks for in identifying answers, and its intentions to turn to its "question-loving users to build a community of answerers available through Ask".

Google Expands Search with Synonyms

How Google May Expand Searches Using Synonyms for Words in Queries, SEO by the Sea (Dec 22)

Google sometimes searches on words related to the ones you use. This patent discovery confirms that.

"A patent granted to Google this week explores how the search engine might expand the search terms that searchers use to include synonyms in searches, to make it easier for searchers to locate information on the Web. In the Ft. Wayne example, this could mean that Google would look for pages on the Web that were relevant for both [web hosting Fort Wayne] and [web hosting Ft. Wayne]."

This posting describes the process for finding the synonyms (or related words) and evaluating the quality of the words in context.

"What does this mean for you as a searcher or as a site owner if Google is using this process?

For searchers, it might mean that Google may add pages to your search results based upon words it perceives as synonyms to words you used in your query. Search for something while including the words “District of Columbia” in your search, and you may see also see pages that use “Washington, D.C.” or “D.C.” instead of “District of Columbia.” "

What SERP Should Be

Is Social Media Ruining Search Results? by Shari Thurow, Search Engine Land (Dec

Shari Thurow does not favour "social media" search results in the main stream web results. I'm with her.

"I honestly believe that the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. I can remember when I really admired our industry. Instead of a marketing department telling us what we want and how we should get it, web searchers turned it around. With the search engines, we are able to tell marketing departments what content we want to see on a website, not the other way around. If I want to watch a video, then I will type in the word “video” as a keyword. Don’t shove a video in my search space when I do not want to see one."

Majestic 12 - a Distributed WWW Search engine

UK Search Engine Takes on Google @ Birmingham Science Park Aston, UK Business Incubation (Dec 12) - mentioned in Altsearchengines

Majestic 12 is a web search engine developed in the UK - it uses distributed computing to crawl and index (like the SETI@Home project). It reports that it reached its 1 trillionith url - confirming Google's announcement of a year or more ago.

The engine itself will be of more interest to internet marketers than general searchers.

"The web map can be explored by visiting Majestic SEO, where anyone can get free data by verifying ownership of their web site. There is an option to compare the back-link history over time and find competitor data. The web interface is currently used by Internet marketing professionals for link building. "

Google World in 10 Years

What the Google Web will look like in 10 years by Devindra Hardawar, Pingdom (Dec 9)

Looks out 10 years to see a faster Internet (especially if you use Chrome as the browser), much more use of web applications in the Cloud, ubiquitous access, extensive collaboration enabled in large part by Google Wave, and Google Android the king of mobile.

Of interest about Google Wave: "Real-time updating, threaded conversations, and the ability to play back updates all end up making Google Wave the best collaborative resource on the Web. It’s better than Google Docs for simultaneous collaboration because of the real-time updates (instead of the “whenever it feels like it” updating of Docs), and the threaded conversation allow for some order amidst the collaborative chaos. And to make even further sense of how the conversation evolved, the ability to play back edits is immensely useful."

10 years is probably too long a frame. Could all be with us in less than 5.

Google's Marissa Mayer Talks

Fireside Chat with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience, Google and Michael Arrington, Techcrunch , at uStream.tv (Dec 9) [33 minutes]

Has all the news from a very big week: Google Goggles, real-time search and feeds from Twitter and MySpace.

Marissa Mayer talked about modalities of search - voice, sight, text - and doing search from nearly any activity or place. There is also language and translation, and personalization.

She also mentions the Living Stories
which provides complete coverage through one url of an on-going story. Currently this gets material from New York Times and Washington Post. One example is "The Politics of Global Warming". One scenario is to have a personalized stream of news that is portable.

Music search is new with a lyric search and option to play a portion. Landing page is at http://www.google.com/landing/music/. Hey - it works for o mio babbino.

Google Social Search came up - to get results from your circle of friends in order to identify someone who has mentioned this and might know something. Once again, the example given is about restaurants.

Real-time search may be attached to the social search - "crawling the cloud as you see it".

Michael Arrington does ask about problems of authority with real-time and the risks of rumours spreading even faster. Mayer replied that Google is looking at about 12 different signals, including re-tweets.

Google Wave seen to have value for group communications, but it's not easy to use - or perhaps the problem is knowing what to use it for. Mayer admits that it needs critical mass.

Kosmix Categorization

Head-to-Head: Comparing Kosmix to Bing by Abhishek Gattani, Altsearchengine (Dec 10)

Kosmix compares itself to Bing and finds, not surprisingly, that it does a better job in cutting out 10 blue links, organizing information, and presenting topic pages. And - Kosmix is right.

Bing has something it calls an "entity card" - "Entity Cards bring together content from third party sources which are considered relevant to the query" - bit like Ask.com's smart answer. Bing, on some broad searches, will organize search results around categories.

Kosmix also categorizes and is much better at it. According to this post, the Kosmix "system works algorithmically, drawing from a taxonomy of millions of categories to find content most closely related " to your topic.

Searchers need help in organizing the different kinds of content. As Abhishek Gattani writes, "The Web is exploding with content of different types: the Deep Web, the Real-time Web, the Semantic Web, maps, videos, images, and so much more. " Kosmix sorts through this fairly well while selecting the items that are most relevant to the query.

Google Gives Searchers More

Google Gets Real-Time, Personalized Search by Douglas MacMillan, Business Week (Dec 7)

More about these two changes at Google:

+ Real time items from Twitter, Facebook and company - "This means that if you’re looking for information on events that are unfolding quickly — such as a sporting event or an earthquake — you can scan through messages posted in the last few minutes rather than news articles or Web sites that are already outdated."

+ Personalized search for everyone like it or not - "Search tailored to individuals will no doubt make Google more useful. But what will it do to advertisers? Businesses that have spent years and millions of dollars optimizing their Web sites for search may find themselves gradually shoved out of the top 10 listings for choosy Web surfers who prefer non-commercial pages like Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Ultimately, businesses could decide to spend less money juicing their placement in “organic results” and more on the paid search ads from which Google derives the bulk of its revenues."

Personalization at Google

Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 4)

Google is tracking what you search for and look at whether you are signed into your Google account or not (done through browser history) and will customize results according to what you seem to prefer.

If you use the account version you can look at your history and remove and adjust. With the browser version you have no access.

Danny Sullivan describes the clues that you can pick up from Google on what kind of tracking and customizing it is doing for you. Watch for Web History, and for View Customizations. There is an opt-out page for personalized results.

Ultimately this means that no two searchers will get the same results for the same query.

"“We want diversity of results,” said product manager Johanna Wright. “This is something we talk about a lot internally and believe in. We want there to be variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. We want them in personalized search to be skewed to the user, but we don’t want that to mean the rest of the web is unavailable to them.”"

In Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention, Sullivan wrote,

"The days of “normal” search results that everyone sees are now over. Personalized results are the “new normal,” and the change is going to shift the search world and society in general in unpredictable ways."

Personalized Search Results

Google extends personalized search to all by Tom Krazit, Webware (Dec 4)

Google will deliver personalized search results whether you want them or not.

"Google keeps a history of your Web searches for up to 180 days, using what it says is an anonymous cookie in your browser to track your search queries and the results you most frequently click on. For several years it has allowed those with Google accounts to receive customized search results based on that history, but now even those without Google accounts will receive tailored results based on a history of their search activity, Google said in a blog post late Friday."

Yahoo Search Assist more helpful

Yahoo’s Search Box Gets Smarter by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 24)

Yahoo has enhanced its Search Assist by including the answer or some content.

"For example, do a search for a company’s stock symbol, and Yahoo will show real-time stock prices and a couple related links before you even execute the search."

It also points the user more quickly to Yahoo properties.

A Lot of Search Engines

Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines has published his list of 100 Search Engines. See it at http://www.linkli.st/CSKnight/3jP5f. There is very little annotation but you may recognize most of them.

October 2009 Search Market Share

Bing Searches Increase 7 Percent in October 2009, Experian Hitwise (Nov 11)

Bing has gained search market share in the US - now 9.57%. Google holds at 70% and Yahoo at 16% - very small drops for both.

Google Doesn't Always Look for All the Words

This is new. Turns out that Google doesn't always search for ALL the words - though it is very quiet about telling us so.

On this multi-word query

I noticed a message at the bottom of the SERP page.

On saying Yes - show all - Google "required created" by putting a + sign in front of it - and number of results dropped.

Google admits to not searching for created until we say we must have it. This happens on a shorter query tax revenue created by a new job in canada.

Hard to know what to make of this. Are we returning to a form of ANY word search? Lately we have needed to use + to stop the stemming, now it appears we need it to require a word to be searched at all.

Fall Improvements at Bing

Bing getting a fall refresh by Ina Fried, Beyond Binary (Nov 11)

Has a list of improvments at Bing this fall.

+ Hover - it's not new but "Bing's hover result will now feature more information including a thumbnail preview of the site in question. "
+ arrangement with Wolfram Alpha to get some data - nutrition and math calculations.
+ "improved local results for topics such as weather and events." (US)
+ Bing gets the MSN Video site
+ easier handling in Bing maps

These mostly relate to the user interface rather than aids to help the searcher refine a query.

Public Data at Search Engines

Google Makes World Bank Data More Discoverable: Takes a Swipe at Wolfram Alpha by Frederic Lardinois, Read Write Web (Nov 11)

Google will get data from the World Bank on queries like children per woman in brazil or gdp of india. Data is presented in an interactive graph, making it easier to select a period and to compare to other countries. There are several energy questions Google and the World Bank can answer - Electricity consumption per capita - where Canada exceeds the US and the UK.

Wolfram Alpha handles similar queries also using "curated data sets" like the World Bank.

Bing is not idle. Microsoft has some arrangements (not completely clear) to use Wolfram Alpha for data queries -- Bing Teams Up With Wolfram Alpha

"A query for "french fries" will still result in the standard search results page with a list of links, but a new compute tab in the left sidebar will open up results from Wolfram Alpha."

For now, it is nutrition and math.

Google's Caffeine coming soon

Google to launch new search engine, Lesley Ciarula Taylor, Toronto Star (Nov 10)

Google is getting closer to taking the wraps off its new search engine, Caffeine. Described as a "rewrite of our indexing system", this has been tested by a select group of users for several months.

""The idea of Caffeine is that it is more powerful, more flexible and more robust and can index documents a lot faster," he said. While "regular users" won't see much difference, "power users" will, and they've had the opportunity since August to test the search engine on a Google site."

Expected "after the holidays."

Review of Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha: Not Quite the Alpha Dog, Mike O'Leary, Information Today via Allbusiness (Sept 2009)

The bloom is off this rose. Wolfram Alpha is not yet the computational engine it and others would like to be. Too much hoopla that raised expectations that the engine can't meet.

Mike O'Leary identifies what it does well (such as company financials, makret data, population, weather, definitions) and what it doesn't - most everything else.

WA does not do words - this is a numbers place. Even so, O'Leary "found numerous mistakes, often because the information was out-of-date".
Also WA does not show source for the facts and numbers returned.

O'Leary prefers Ask.com for finding facts - those capsules of content that Ask puts at the top of the search results page and used to call "Smart Anwsers".

DuckIT Topic Summaries

Duck Duck Go releases a new way to search “Duck It”, Altsearchengines (Nov 4)

DuckDuckGo now shows topic summaries for your terms. You can see it in this search for "paperless office".

[Make sure you are using the Duck It search from the front page, not the Normal Search]

If the summaries don't hold the answer, you can go on to "get weblinks".

This works really well for short queries - a search on a concept rather than a search to dig out a detail.

People are going to love it for travel queries about a destination. It works like a dream for saint martin. First it presents the several different meanings of saint martin. Ours is the island in the Caribbean.

Select that to get a page of topic summaries that in one page gives an overview of the island.

Google's Search Options

Everything has its personality, and too often Google's personality is erratic. Today the Options panel shows changes from what it was two weeks ago.

All results: These choices seem limited to videos, blogs, and forums. No matter what the search terms books, news, and reviews no longer show. Did Google drop them?

Any Time: Looks the same, though it would be nice to define the period the covered by "recent results"

Standard view: Has the wonder wheel and timeline - both marvellous; but there is a new "related searches" if you are using Google.com. Why only at Google.com and where did it come from?

Also under standard view, we have images from the page (good), but no longer the choice "more text" which provided longer snippets. Instead it's a "page preview" which might be the same or might not.

There is a "reset options" link now - no harm in that.

If Google is going to play around with these as if the Options page is in beta, then there should a notice on the page - "today we are featuring xyz". This isn't the experimental lab - or is it?

Take the case of related searches.

Google.ca has this set for effects of climate change

At Google.com it shows roughly the same set at the bottom of the search results page, but another on the Options page.

But the Wonder Wheel uses the other set.

Where, oh where, will the wheel stop?

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Adds Delicious.com, Other Data To Site Explorer, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (OCt 19)

Yahoo's Site Explorer shows more information about sites.

* Key Terms
* Delicious Activities
* Top Delicious Tags
* SearchMonkey Objects

Zakta - Personal Social Search

What is Social Search? by Sundar Kadayam Founder & CEO, Zakta The Personal and Social Web Search Engine

Sundar Kadayam digests many defintions of social search and takes an historical view of social search. From this he developed a framework for placing the many different services that claim to be social.

"On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information)."

He proposes that Zakta is personal and organized.

+ it has guides who put together resources on a topic - community contributions
+ a meta search capability in the search packs for web, news etc.
+ search results are grouped into sections - a bit like Bing
+ tools for personalizing - selecting and saving results

It's a grand idea, but for this to work well, Zakta will need a large critical mass of users. It does seem to bring together into one interface many of the new approaches to search. Google might get some ideas.

Search Market Share Canada

Google Receives 80 Percent of Canadian Searches in September 2009, Hitwise (Oct 19)

Google has had roughly 80% of the Canadian search market for some time. Hitwise shows that this is holding. It's hard to tell if there is really a trend but Bing (Microsoft) dropped by 6% to 7.65% and Yahoo by 5% to 7.99%.

"Experian® Hitwise® announced today that Google search properties accounted for 80.46 percent of all Canadian searches conducted in the 12 weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009. Yahoo! search properties, Bing search properties and Ask search properties received 7.99 percent, 7.65 percent and 3.09 percent, respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Experian Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1 percent of Canadian searches."

Also - at least in the US, searchers are slowly using more words in their queries. About 49% are now three words of more.

Bing Reference Channels Powerset

Taking a Look at the Bing Reference Homepage, ResearchBuzz (Oct 19)

Tara Calishain introduces us to a new Reference service from Bing that will do natural language searches of Wikipedia and Freebase.

Bing doesn't show this at bing.com - not as a tab nor under More. You need to know the url - www.bing.com/reference

The opening page for Reference has a featured article from Wikipedia - today it's about the Longhorn cowfish, October 20 in History (US history), People in the news (based on what?), and sample searches.

Here is where it gets interesting. Microsoft is using the Powerset technology for natural language search that it acquired a year ago or so. Powerset service searched Wikipedia. Now Bing Reference runs Powerset to answer questions . Essentially, Bing Reference channels Powerset: search results from Bing Reference are the same as from Powerset.

This really boils down to which interface you prefer.

Bing Reference

+ front page - not very useful
+ controls to turn on highlighting, and view results are a grid or list
+ thumbnail images - detail obliterated but adds interest to page.
+ has links to sections on a page
+ Groups by source: Facts from Freebase, Articles from Wikipedia

Powerset

+ welcome page describes what Powerset does with several examples. Shows why you would want to use this.
+ option to hide highlighting
+ sort by article or sort by sentence
+ open preview of article in the results page
+ Explore pages on Powerset - kind of related search
+ Shows by source: Freebase, then Wikipedia

Both are pleasant to use, and will do fairly well on questions like - what did Robertson Davies write, who won the war of 1812-14, causes of obesity, languages in China - where you are looking for facts or summaries. It's worth some time to review the examples on the Powerset home page. Either of these tools could serve as starting points on a topical search - and many quick fact searches

Freebase is a Wikipedia-like community effort - that uses Wikipedia.

From the Metaweb About page:

"Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients."

Show More Results at Google

Google's "Show More Results" Plus Box, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 12)

Google has been changing the search results page to a new way to show additional related results from a site. It used to be "More results from". Now it is + Show More Results - and that leads to + Show All Resorts.

See screenshots in the posting.

Tweets in Google results

Google is picking up tweets from Twitter and including them in web search results. Here's an example where I used * to force words to be found close together - and lo and behold there is a useless tweet ranked in the second spot.

The news results are relevant, the tweet is not. For now, the best (and only) recourse might be to use -site:twitter.com.

US Search Market Share

Google Takes 71% of U.S. Searches, Search Engine Journal (Oct 6)

US Search market data from Hitwise for September 2009: Google 71.08%; Yahoo 16.38%; Bing 8.96%; Ask 2.56%.

Yahoo Works on Presentation

Yahoo ponders the meaning of search by Tom Krazit, Webware (Oct 9)

Yahoo may give over crawling and indexing to Microsoft but it plans to keep a tight grip on the presentation of search results. But will that work?

"If Yahoo's goal after the Microsoft deal is to keep searchers on Yahoo pages in hopes of maintaining investment in search ads, focusing on search presentation isn't necessarily the best way to accomplish that goal, [Danny] Sullivan said. "I don't think the presentation becomes more important, I think the brand becomes more important," he said, pointing to Microsoft's decision to invest not only in presentation improvements but to also create a huge marketing campaign to boost Bing's image before the world."

Quick View PDF at Google

Practically Perfect PDF, Courtesy of Google by Harry McCracken, PCWorld (Oct 8)

Google will show a PDF directly from the search results page through a built-in viewer. Click on the "quick view" link to load the page quickly through Google Docs display rather than activating Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer.

"Google says that more than half of the PDFs it's indexed now offer Quick View, with more to come; others still provide only the not-very-useful, plaint-text HTML view."

You'll see the "quick view" link on this search for irs 1099 form - it's on the line below the title.

This is also described in the Official Google Blog - Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results
New Google search feature lets you browse PDFs from search results."

No Meta Keywords Tag

Yahoo Search No Longer Uses Meta Keywords Tag, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

Yahoo is the last search engine to drop use of the meta keywords tag - and it did so some time ago.

Coupons at Ask.com

Ask launches Ask Deals for bargain hunters Tom Krazit, Webware (Oct 5)

US searchers have a new reason to use Ask.com - the coupons.

"Ask Deals is expected to launch Tuesday, blending links to coupons from a plethora of online coupon aggregation sites alongside search results for certain types of queries, such as "cheap jeans" or "plasma TV deals," said Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks. There will also be a link to a Deals page off the Ask.com home page, which will have a "deal of the day" type promotion as well as links to other opportunities for savings."

The Ask.com welcome page is now festooned with Deals - and a link to best deals. I question whether this will help it improve its share of market - likely to lose more than gain.

In-Depth on Google Search

Business Week ran a lengthly series on Google Search in which Silicon Valley bureau chief Rob Hof interviewed CEO Eric Schmidt and the major heads of search technology.

The main article was Can Google Stay on Top of the Web? (Oct 1)

Below are the four interviews with the company's search gurus plus one with CEO Eric Schmidt.

Matt Cutts: How Google Deals With Web Spam, Rob Hof, Business Week (October 04)

This interview with Google's Matt Cutts tells us more about how Google search departments work together: ranking, spam control, and ads. It's all part of their mission to deliver quality results.

Evaluting search results:

+ "we’ve built up a lot of evaluation metrics"

Understanding search intent:

+ "We try to do a lot so we can understand queries better. Some people will mistype queries, so we try to do a real good spell-check system. A lot of people will type in synonyms, like "automobile" instead of "cars" when the name of the business is Cars R Us. So we try to take the query as a suggestion."

+ "We used to require an absolute perfect match, but over time we’ve gotten better at spelling, morphology, synonyms, all these sorts of things like stemming, where somebody types in “runners” and maybe they meant “runner,” or “running.”"

Delivering freshness:

+ "But in general, Google is fresher. Google is not only fresher but more comprehensive. Those are three key things: freshness; comprehensiveness (you want to crawl as much of the Web as possible); and relevance (core ranking and Web spam). And you want the user experience to be really clean."

Detecting hackers

+ "We write detectors. We’ve written classifiers—an algorithm, a heuristic that essentially takes a bunch of signals and tries to say yes, this site has been hacked or no, it hasn’t, and at what level of the directory and things like that."

Other articles in this series on Google search:

Google's Udi Manber: Search Is About People, Not Just Data

Udi Manher is VP of technology for search.

Excerpts:

Q: Can you give me a sense of the types of methods you use to improve search?

A: Humans are involved, formulas are involved, experiments are involved. We often do A/B tests, give one set of people an algorithm, give another set of people another set of algorithms and see how they behave. We measure lots of things, not just clicks.

Q: So you have to determine what does change and focus on indexing that?

A: We have to determine from the query whether it can benefit from something in real-time. Like “history of the Renaissance.” It’s possible that somebody on Twitter just mentioned that. But a) it’s not that likely and b) it’s probably not what you want. You want the best article on the Renaissance. So time is not as important on that kind of query.

But search for “earthquake” and time is much more important. Or a particular celebrity that had news in the last five minutes. So we have to change the algorithm based on the query. We do that now.

Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas

Amit Singhal looks after ranking algorithms. His team ran 6,000 experiments last year which led to roughly 500 changes in how search works.

Google's Scott Huffman: Many More Search Features Coming

Scott Huffman's team evaluates the effects of every proposed change to Google. Last year there were 6,000 experiments.

"Huffman explained in detail how Google runs all those experiments—which include the use of hundreds of human evaluators in addition to Google’s massive computer infrastructure."

Google uses people and statistical analysis of clicks to evaluate the results. It especially works on relevance for a country or locale.

Excerpts:

Q: What does the evaluation unit do?

A: We try to measure every possible which way we can think of how good is Google, how good are our search results, how well are they serving our users. And we break that down all kinds of ways—by 100 locales [country plus language pairs], by different genres (product queries, health queries, local queries, long queries, queries that don’t happen very often, queries that are very popular) times how are we doing on those in France and Switzerland and other places

Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?

A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.

The other data source we use is live experimentation with our users. A typical example where we use that more is for user interface changes to search. It’s hard to guess what people’s reaction will be to any particular UI change.

Q: How are personalized search results evaluated—any differently?

A ... Another thing that we spend a lot of time on is at the country level. Many countries speak English, but when I type in, say “bank,” I want pretty different answers if I’m in the U.S. vs. the U.K. vs. India vs. Australia. And today Google gives you very different answers for those. It also applies inside the country—in Dallas and Atlanta, you’ll get different results for “First Baptist Church.” Those kind tend to be a little trickier for us.

How Google Plans to Stay Ahead in Search

"CEO Eric Schmidt discusses how Google is handling challenges from Microsoft and upstarts Twitter and Facebook—and why search remains its priority "

Q You said recently that you worry about where growth for a large company such as Google comes next. Where will that growth come from, and what does that say about what Google will be in five to 10 years?

A We are first and foremost a search company. Of course, search changes. Location will become more important, for example. As long as we can be first to invent the new solutions to search, we'll be fine. We're still investing a lot in search and search quality. In our case, growth will come from businesses we're already in.

DuckDuckGo added preview

Useful search previews, Pandia (Sep 29)

Pandia likes Duck Duck Go even more now that it has added previews of sites. See the preview by hovering over the magnifying glass beside the URL in the result snippet.

Search Market Share

Microsoft Bing U.S. Search Share Falls, Sparking Google's Gain by Clint Boulton, eWeek (Oct 1)

Several reports have picked up the drop in Bing's search share in September and wondered if the honeymoon is over. Probably too soon to tell.

"Microsoft Bing's U.S. September search share fell to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August, with Google gaining more than two percentage points, according to analytics firm StatCounter. "

Statcounter has US market for Google at 80%. That is high. There is sure to be a reaction.

Google's panel of options

Google adds even more search options, Pandia (Oct 4)

Pandia describes the latest changes in Google's Show Options page.

Google has more "Show Options"

Google has added more options to the Show Options page to aid in zeroing into particular content types of results (video, news, blogs, images, forums, reviews) or time period.

Notable this time are the addition of news and blogs to content types, and last hour to time periods.

Writers attribute this to competition with Bing's new presentation style.

People who use Google's search history will also see a section "All Results" with links to visited pages, and not yet visited - thus making it much easier to refind pages.

Also searchers can adjust results for more or fewer shopping pages. This doesn't necessarily remove commercial results from search and on many searches selecting "fewer" will have no effect. However, if you really do want to find a product, clicking on "more" may find the online source.

Once you have selected Show Options, the next search will also be done with that display. It would be useful for Google to make this a setting under preferences.

New filters in Google search for speed, news by Tom Krazit, Webware (Oct 1)

Of interest: "The new options emphasize how competition in the search business at the moment is focused on improving the presentation of search results, as opposed to better ways of indexing and ranking the results themselves. Work obviously still goes on at that level--Google is currently in the process of testing its massive Caffeine update--but much of the innovation we've seen in recent months involves the presentation of search results through graphics and a focus on the so-called "real-time" Web."

Google adds options as search engine race continues, AFP via Canada.com (Oct 2)

For more detail read Danny Sullivan's two excellent articles:

Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering

Up Close With Google Search Options

This article has some disconcerting proof that Google has not solved the problem of dates on web pages (created, updated, indexed/spidered, server) - even though Google has said it uses the date it first indexed the page. It's a mess - might use these to get a rough idea, but don't depend on date ranges being correct. This affects the timeline presentation too.

Google won't say how many people are using Show Options but it has said that the date and time options are the most popular. This should be a clue to them that people would like the date problem fixed.

About Bing Search

Interview With Stefan Weitz - Putting the Bling Into Bing by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 2)

Barbara Quint interviewed Stefan Weitz, a director on the Microsoft Search team that developed Bing.

Microsoft, as we know, did many users studies into search as part of developing the new Bing. They concluded that "more people are adding more tasks on search engines to make complex decisions that the current search engines were never designed for." - and in response designed an interface that is "better" at "organizing the results and then adapting a user interface that depends on the task the user is performing—different grammars. "

In explaining practices to keep content current, Stefan Weitz talked about the "tweaking" that is done to meet "query spikes". "This is a way to watch what’s coming and the classes of suddenly higher concentration over a period of time. We can see if people are querying for cookie dough and systematically or manually re-jigger the results page for the query. We can fire up a different type of result, for example, news. All the search engines do it differently."

Display of Google Search Results

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack, by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Sep 28)

Google shows search results in new ways. Danny Sullivan describes these.

"Google’s “normal” listings show the title of a web page, a description of it (also called a “snippet”) and the web page’s URL. However, Google also has other listings that appear within search results that are designed to give access to some of its specialized search tools (such as news search), to allow more information to be shown than a standard answer provides or to show answers directly within the search page. Here’s a short overview to these alternatives."

Hot Trends in Google's One Box

Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Sep 29)

Google is putting "hot trends" information into web search results in the form of a new OneBox near the bottom of the search results page and just above the related search area.

"“The idea behind the [Hot Trends] OneBox is to not only provide you with search results as you’d want but also extra meta data on how popular the search is and whether it has peaked in interest, plus the number of sites that are creating chatter and buzz about this particular topic or person, to give a relative hotness rating as well” said RJ Pittman, director of product management for consumer search properties at Google."

Bing has something like this called xRank but it's harder to view - you have to know to click on xRank option / icon.

Google Trends itself is interesting for sociological or possibly marketing purposes. Perhaps the new OneBox feature will twig people to look at trends.

Postscript (Oct 2): Google Labs updates Hot Trends, The Gadget Website (Sept 30)

Notes that the new "hot trends" link in search results will show only for Google in the US (.com), or Japan.

If you ever happen to search on something that is a current hot trend you will see an entry like this one on winter olympics toward the bottom of the search results page.

Google and meta tags

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking , Google Webmaster Central Blog (Sep 21)

Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag for web search ranking but it does sometimes use meta tags for other purposes - such as picking up the description meta tag for the snippet on the search result.

Changes at Yahoo and Google Search

Google and Yahoo! improve web search, Pandia (Sept 27)

Good recap of changes at Google and Yahoo to improve search experience. Shows that search scene is never idle.

+ Google - Snippets with direct links to relevant content.
+ Yahoo - new Yahoo search (though some features have been around for a while)

Google's 10 blue links

Google Adds Links to Web Page Sections in Search Results, Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Sept 25)

Google has been making changes in what it chooses to show in the first 10 links.

+ provides links to different sections of Web pages, in addition to the traditional main Web page

+ includes "links to news articles, images, video clips, maps and other specialty pages".

+ "suggests related search queries to help users narrow the scope of their search, and offers options to filter results by the date when the page was published, such as in the past 24 hours or the past year".

+ let users view thumbnail images from the results, or get more text on snippets.

Also - Google “Jump To” Links Within Search Snippets by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sep 25)

Has screenshot to show the new links.

Of interest: "As a side note, Google has also been testing what I am calling “deep sitelinks.” This is a combination of date and post data with Google Sitelinks in one snippet. "

Yahoo Search Gallery

A Look at the New Yahoo Search, ResearchBuzz (Sept 23)

Yahoo launched its new search interface - and Tara Calishain points out some of the strengths and weaknesses. The nteresting part is that one link took her to the Yahoo Search Gallery.

"That took me to a beta site called the Yahoo Search Gallery, which lists some features that are already enacted in the new Yahoo search but a bunch that aren’t. I wandered through the galleries and added several features to the Yahoo search results, including getting delicious bookmark information and automatically pulling RSS feed information from a site and making that available in the search results. "

August US Market Share

Google Gains Volume, Bing Gains Share In August by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sep 23)

Comscore numbers for August search engine market share - "Google has 2.5 times the search volume as Yahoo and Microsoft combined. But Microsoft’s Bing also grew its share of the overall US search market from 8.9 percent in July to 9.3 percent in August."

New Yahoo Search

Yahoo Goes Live With New Search Format by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sep 22)

Yahoo went live with its new search format.

"However, there are some nice upgrades and improvements. Most prominently, it features a new left column that allows users to filter results by Search Monkey content providers or refine by related concepts. It also features more prominent placement for Search Pad and an expansion of Search Assist. Yahoo says it has also improved image and video search and says speed and performance are better across the board."

Has screen shots.

Exalead Lab Experiments

Exalead Laboratories, Phil Bradley (Sept 17)

Phil Bradley reviewed the experimental search engines Exalead has developed and makes available through its lab site.

+ Constellations for visual presentation of results
+ Miiget for celebrity search - presumably illustrates connections
+ Chromatik - image and colour search
+ Exalead Lite
+ Tweepz - people finder - except that it crawls twitter accounts.
+ Voxalead - finds keywords in transcriptions of video.

Google Indexing

Real time indexing in Google, Pandia (Sept 17)

Article describes in simple terms Google's indexing practices - it aims to be fresh but it doesn't follow tweets. Twitter might do this - indexing the pages that the tweets point to - making it truly a real time engine.

"How often Google revisits a site is dependent on its popularity, authority (i.e. to what extent other “good” sites link to it) and its updating frequency."

News has its own index, and Blog search pulls in RSS feeds. Google Search "will contain a mix of search results, some from traditional web search, some from news search and some from blog search, all powered by different indexing systems."

Google Docs in Google Search

Your Google docs: Soon in search results? by Zoë Slocum, Webware (Sept 19)

Those who use Google Docs will want to be careful with their document settings. Google has said that the "public" documents will be picked up by Google Search.

"Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that "in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines...This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public Web sites will reach a much wider audience of people.""

Prediction about alternative search engines

Disruption is so Web 2.0. Convergence is the new Paradigm, Charles Knight, Altsearchengines (Sep 16)

Prediction - "As we head into 2010, the alternative search engines will continue to trend toward convergence, the integration of more and more search technologies into a single engine."

Bing and search market share

Bing Passes 10% Market Share, Nielsen Says by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep

Bing is gaining according the Nielsen studies of search market share in August.

"Nielsen says Bing captured 10.7% of all searches in August, up from 9.0% in July. Based on that jump, Nielsen says Bing is the fastest growing search provide in its Top 10. Google remains a distant number one with almost 65% market share in Nielsen’s survey. "

Visual Search at Bing

Bing is one up on Google by introducing a visual search - http://www.bing.com/visualsearch. I have always said that searching through images can find good pages on a topic as well as - or maybe better than - a straight text search. Bing has introduced this but only in some consumer areas: entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping, sports. Reference is very US-centric at present but you'll get the idea.

However, to use this you must install Microsoft Silverlight™ 3.

Microsoft Bing adds visual search By Maggie Shiels , BBC News (Sep 15)

Browse results through pictures rather than text. "Visual search will initially concentrate on four main areas: travel, health, leisure and shopping. "

Bing announces new Visual Search!, AltsearchEngines.

"Visual Search helps you search information visually, and helps you refine a query when a picture makes it easier to sift through all the online information. Look for that movie you wanted to see, find the best new purse, or figure out which digital camera is right for you using an engaging visual experience without having to sort through page after page of links. "

Bing 2.0 “Visual Search” Launches, Allows Search By Pictures by Elisabeth Osmeloski, Search Engine Land (Sep 14)

"Bing Visual Search lets searchers browse easily through a slick interface of “structured data sets from trusted partners” using Sliverlight technology."

Very detailed.

SpaceTime3D for Visual Search

Alltsearchengines had an entry on SpaceTime3D. The line was - Goodbye SearchMe, Hello SpaceTime! (Sep 12)

It's not SearchME, which was a fantastic visual search engine (now closed), but it does have promise and is pleasant to use. SpaceTime3d shows the pages, one by one like a slide show, making it very easy to browse results. Results come from Google, Wikipedia, About.com, Answers.com, Amazon, and "image" depending on what you chose.

There are some categories: technology, news, sports, business, health, entertainment, music, tv.

Is said to work in any browser.

Bing and Wolfram Alpha

Bing strikes licensing deal with Wolfram Alpha by Tom Krazit, CNet (Aug 21)

"Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch."

Wolfram Alpha - after the hype

Wolfram|Alpha after the hype, Pandia (Aug 25)

After the hype indeed. Don't expect to use natural language. You need to know how to phrase the query, and for most users that is too difficult. And when users do get answers they like to know the source - Wolfram Alpha doesn't say.

Yahoo's Social Side

Yahoo to overhaul search despite pending Microsoft deal , Michael Liedtke, AP via Globe and Mail (Aug 25)

Yahoo says it intends to improve the user's search experience with some redesign of the search results - mainly by being more "social".

"Toward that end, Yahoo plans to devote the left column of its search results to other popular services like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and even Google's YouTube. Click on any one of the icons there, and information from that service matching the search keywords will appear instead of the regular search results at the centre of the page.

The feature will enable users to look at Facebook's personal profiles, Twitter's message updates, Yelp's restaurant reviews and YouTube's video clips without having to leave Yahoo.

By drilling deeper into destinations filled with personal information and images, Yahoo is betting its search engine will gain a reputation as the best place to research and discover things about people. "

ResearchBuzz commented on the design result - Yahoo Launches “New Search Experience” for Some Reason (Aug 25)

"Yahoo’s doing some interesting stuff here. First of all the search pad tool, which allows you to aggregate data from different result pages, has a more front-and-center presentation. Yahoo’s also giving some prime real estate to third-party data sources like Wikipedia and Loney Planet — pretty bold and not a bad idea! Related concept searches are also available on the left side bar, along with some related searches in an area underneath the query form. (This box is hidden by default.)"

Postscript Sept 3

Yahoo’s New Search Clothes — But Will It Help? (Probably Not) by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Aug 24)

Yahoo has been improving search as some services - delicious and Flickr - and most recently in web results. The new design is only for selected users. Danny Sullivan lists the changes and has screenshots.

+ Three columns
+ Site filters
+ Video on the page
+ Social media
+ Related concepts = concept drilldown
+ Cool apps

Will it make a difference? Danny Sullivan thinks not - "The problem for me remains that the “central place” idea of Yahoo isn’t new. That’s like circa 1997. It’s called being a portal. And while Yahoo’s been successful as a portal, search success has been slipping away over the past few years. There’s absolutely no reason, none, to believe giving up its own search technology will somehow translate through user interface magic into new gains in search."

Customer Satisfaction with Search Engines

Google Tops In Search Satisfaction According To Pre-Bing Survey by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Aug 18)

Draws on recent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report about Internet portals and search engines. Google kept is substantial lead over Yahoo, Ask, AOL. Unfortunately, there is no data on Bing

Bing Could be Best for Canadian Searchers

Best Search Engine In Canada? Hitwise Says It’s Bing by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 19)

Surprising finding - "In a detailed report about the Canadian search landscape, Hitwise says Bing is the best search engine at producing “successful searches,” beating out both Google and Yahoo, as well as their Canada-specific search engines."

But Hitwise defines Hitwise defines “successful search" as "one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search.”

Well - a person could leave a search engine because the results don't please, or a person could carry on even if the search was successful.

But putting that aside - Search Engine Land has a chart that shows, "Bing is the 6th most popular search engine in Canada, but has the best success rate at 78.61%. That’s about 2% better than Yahoo Canada (ca.search.yahoo.com), and more than 6% better than Google Canada (www.google.ca)."

Other bits:

+ "Canadian searchers use one- or two-word queries 51% of the time"

+ "When you combine the .com, .ca, and other domains, Google powers 80% of searches in Canada. MSN is second with 9% (combining Bing and Live.com), and Yahoo third with 8%."

Bing's Algorithm

Bing SEO: 5 steps to top rankings, By guest writer Brandon Leibowitz, Pandia (Aug 16)

This advice for improving rankings in Bing search results will be useful to searchers too.

The following may be considered in the algorithm:

1. Established sites get better rankings.
2. Original content on landing pages matters.
3. Matches on words in title - rich and unique titles are important
4. Being linked to might not be as important - but linking out could be.

Yahoo Search Dimming

Twilight time for Yahoo search by Tom Krazit, Webware (Aug 12)

The Microsoft - Yahoo search agreement doesn't have government approval yet, but the lights are dimming on Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said that "we have never been a search company", in a moment of trying to portray Yahoo as something else. At conferences like Search Engine Strategies, the Microsoft engineers speak - not the Yahoo ones. There is confusion about what of Yahoo's search tools will be kept - eg what about the excellent Yahoo Site Explorer?

"While that might be true regarding the public face of Yahoo search, it's clear that a tectonic shift is taking place in the search industry. It's hard to imagine that should the deal pass government scrutiny, Yahoo will be back for Search Engine Strategies 2010."

Google's Search Sandbox

Google has revealed work on its "next-generation infrastructure".

From Google Webmaster Central Blog

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback."

Vanessa Fox speculated that "Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”."

Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Aug 10)

The sandbox is at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

There is sure to be many articles on this in the coming weeks.

Search Engines 1994 - 2009

The Big Three of Web Search Becomes the Big Two by Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (Aug 6)

Explores the implications of the Yahoo-Bing merge for the developers who have been using Yahoo systems like Search Monkey (OK), and BOSS (not so ok).

Also gives a quick history of search engines that captures all the high points - although Ask Jeeves / Ask.com deserves a mention on that list because of its various efforts to answer questions and staying power in doing so.

Searching Craigslist

Search all Craigslist in One Place, ResearchBuzz (Aug 3)

Use Craigslist as a way to check for trends in search words and ads. Tara Calishain describes how.

AllofCraigs http://www.allofcraigs.com/

T"he site is just what it sounds like: the home page allows you to enter a query, specify all Craigslist (or all Kijiji or all a couple of other ad sites) and get a list of search results pulled from a custom Google search. "

The new Yebol

Another Semantic Search Engine Enters Fray by Megan Burger, PCWorld (Aug 2)

Short positive review of the new Yebol - "knowledge based (semantic) search"

"At launch, Yebol can provide categorised results for more than 10 million search terms. According to the company it intends to provide results for 'every conceivable search term' in the next three to six months."

If your search is on one of these topics, the results page can provide related topics, categories, news, web results - a reasonably good profile - somewhat in the style of Kosmix (which I still prefer).

But if your keywords don't match the results are slim - some expanded searches, and top sites.

Ads by Google are also treated topically - get short topical phrases that link to ads related to that topic.

Compare land conservancy at Yebol to Kosmix.

Microsoft Yahoo Time Frame

Microsoft and Yahoo Team Up — Eventually, ResearchBuzz (July 31)

Tara Calishain is steamed about the Yahoo - Microsoft deal - and rightfully so. Microsoft is no underdog. And Yahoo wasted opportunities over the past couple of support its core search. She notes that the time frame of at least 2 years for this partnership to get off the ground is unbelievable - a million things could happen to change search in the interval.

Greatest worry is that Yahoo will stop innovating. Though it ignored its own search engine, it added other tools and services. What will happen to BOSS?

"Yahoo Pipes. SearchMonkey. BOSS. (A post on the Yahoo Developer Network Blog says Pipes is okay but there’s no news on SearchMonkey or BOSS.) "

Frankly, air is out of the balloon - I'd be surprised if Yahoo keeps up the pace or has the heart for search. Not clear what Microsoft will do in the meantime either. It has a history of introducing new search technology and then falling back.

Posting has links to other articles with news and some analysis.

PageRank Slipping?

Social Tweeting Outstrips Social Linking 100-1 by Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (July 30)

Interesting view - more linking to and recommending of pages (urls) is being done through Twitter rather than through websites or blogs with "authority". What effect does this have on search engines that use link analysis and specifically Google's PageRank? Digg and others like it would be contributing to this change too (though I think they would lose to Twitter as well).

Goodman writes, "Comparing old time linking to new-school tweeting, recent posts we've made here have been spontaneously tweeted and retweeted all over the place; a 100-1 ratio of tweets to regular links is roughly in the ballpark. No going around asking people to do it. Just the Twitter community and typical code of behavior working its magic."

Search Market Share - Hitwise

Bing + Yahoo! Now Equals 26% of Search Market, Hitwise (July 29)

"... latest search numbers tell us that Google has 70.6% of all U.S. query volume while the combined Bing and Yahoo! Search now comprise 26% of all U.S. searches, leaving only 3.4% for the other 54 engines that we track in search share"

Microsoft Yahoo ctd

With Yahoo search gone, content becomes king by Tom Krazit, Webware (July 30)

Yahoo will be a media company with some web-based service applications (Email, Flickr etc). CEO Carol Bartz said ""It's where people find relevant and contextual information," ... "It's news, it's sports...home page, mail. It's a fabulous place.""

Breaking down Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal by Tom Krazit (July 29)

Has the details one what each gets, and loses, and what's next. Includes Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Advertisers, and Consumers.

Yebol for "semantic" search

The new search engine Yebol is good at what it does, Pandia (July 28)

Yebol - new search engine that works with topics.

"Yebol has developed a technology that combines the advantages of a traditional Google like search engine (spider the web, and add an algorithm that determines what’s “best”) with a human touch (group high quality web sites into different categories that may be relevant to the query)."

Has many features: related topics, top sites, news, categories, expanded searches (similar to related searches). Twitter box is not useful.

Try it.

SpaceTime 3D

Searching the Web in Three Dee by Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Jul 24)

Reviewed SpaceTime 3D

"Do a search (it defaults to Google but you can search other resources like Wikipedia, About.com, and Amazon) and Spacetime will think about it for a few minutes and the present your results to you as a series of Web pages through which you can browse."

Good if you like to browse through pages rather than list of results.

Microsoft Yahoo Agreement

Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Deal on Search Partnership by Steve Lohr, New York Times (July 29)

Finally an agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo. Yahoo will use Microsoft search engine (Yahoo search will say "powered by Bing") and keep its own web services (finance, news, email etc). Microsoft will use Yahoo's search advertising for premium search advertisers, while keeping its own ad center for smaller customers.

"Under the deal’s terms, the advertising work will be split. Yahoo will be the exclusive ad force for premium search advertisers who bargain to negotiate deals. But the Microsoft Ad Center automated search market will be used for smaller customers, whose prices for search advertising are set by an automated auction process."

Agreement is for 10 years. Full implementation is expected within 24 months after regulatory approval. Should start to see changes in 2010.

Also Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape, press release (july 29)

Of interest - A Search Eulogy For Yahoo by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land.

Tells the history and the analysis of how search leader Yahoo folded its cards to concentrate on other assets and abandon search.

Links to more coverage.

Grab Bag of Search Engines

Five More Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 21)

A variety of search engines

+ SearchMuffin - good for searching for results from US cities through Google.

+ Glearch - international meta search engine - select country and language and search engine

+ Roooby - real time search.

+ Spezify - visual search - pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, eBay and Amazon.

+ Joobili - travel / event search in Europe - pick your time

Lots of search engines

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google By Ryan Singel, Wired (June 30)

Wired looked at 50 specialty search engines and provides a cursory tour of the ones that seemed to have an edge - real time, travel, general knowledge, mobile, video and music.

Exalead's New Skin

Exalead has adopted a new look which is infinitely more pleasing than the previous. Most of the features are intact and a few new ones were added. It's an improvement but Exalead still says it has only 8 billion pages, which by today's standards is very small.

For Exalead, web search is mainly a showcase for software it aims to sell to enterprises. Enterprise content is likely more homongenous and of higher quality than the horrendous mix on the public Web. Exalead has never been as strong as other engines in blocking spam - and perhaps because of smaller results sets - the spam is more visible.

For Exalead's description of the changes, see Exalead changes its skin! (July 9)

NEW

Exalead's best feature has been its related terms in the right pane. Now it has related searches under the search box.

On this search for land conservation in canada, the related searches are on targe: conservation easement, land trusts - are exactly the terms.

Related terms, which often help to break down the topic, seem granular in this example. The term, "natural resource", appears to be a frequently occuring phrase in the results. Clicking on it adds keyword:"natural resource" to the query. I suspect that Exalead has made some changes to how it determines and uses related terms.

Exalead still shows the thumbnail image of a page, though not the choice to turn these off. It used to be that you could click on the thumbnail to see the cached version of the page and the date. Now click on cached - this is in line with what other engines do and much easier to find.

Options to filter are more graphically displayed - countries and languages show as pie charts.

Thankfully, one no longer has to click on More to see all the choices for filtering results. Instead, we can configure the selection. Click on the tools icon in the upper right to see the choices.

Exalead has said it has added auto-completion of a query. I don't see that.

PROBLEMS

Sitetype: Exalead offers a view by site type: blog, forum. But identification of blogs is usually off - the sites are not blogs. Forum is better and might be easier to identify because forum occurs in the url or the title.

Country: Exalead often mistakes Canadian sites as US. It's unlikely that Ontario Land Trust Alliance or the Wildlands League, which is part of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, are on US servers.

Date: Exalead shows a date on each result but what date is it? Exalead doesn't say but my guess is that it is the date on the server for the page. Dates are notoriously unreliable on the Web. Exalead has nice features for searching by date - request before or after a date, use sort:new or sort:old to control the order, or select all pages for a year - but all are handicapped by bad data.

SYNTAX

Exalead has always been strong in syntax, described on the help page - Web Search Syntax. It has the full set of operators: AND, OR, NOT, and even NEAR. Not stated on this page is the fact that you can specify the distance betweeen the words: eg., "land trust" NEAR/4 ontario looks for land trust within 4 words of ontario. People accustomed to constructing boolean queries on commercial databases initially find this appealing, but Exalead can't handle complex constructions: it's generally best to stick with an OR phrase and maybe NEAR.

OTHER COLLECTIONS

Exalead also offers:

+ Image search - nice set of refinements by size, content (face), orientation, color (with it or B&W). But it lags behind the flash of Bing and the function of Google image search.
+ Video search - metasearch of other services. Some controls
+ Wikipedia - with tag cloud of results.

But will I use it? Exalead looks much better, and I've always liked related terms and the NEAR operator - the related searches are a good addition. But Exalead still doesn't have the strength in top ranked results that the others have. Perhaps the others have added more semantic analysis (Microsoft did buy Powerset and Google is able to pull in related words), or perhaps index size matters for web search.

Ask and Nascar

Nascar gives Ask.com time for a few more laps by Tom Krazit, Webware (July 10)

Ask is still a distant fourth or fifth in the pantheon of search engines. It has tried hard to change that - adopting more semantic search methods, using question and answer approach, adding search aids. But these alone are not enough to gain market. For that, it turned to a partnership with Nascar for search and advertising. Will the Nascar startegy work? Numbers aren't there yet. Perhaps Ask should have cultivated a relationship more with libraries and schools and other educational players to build an image as a reputable, reliable, and innovative search engine. They made a huge mistake dropping Jeeves.

Article provides a description of the main trend in search today: "All major search engines are examining different ways of presenting search results with semantic technology in mind. The idea is to allow queries to be presented in a more natural format instead of a series of keywords, and to present results with different types of data--pictures, graphs, videos, and the like--rather than page after page of search results."

Saerch Engines Evolving

Search is a Darwinian Game by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Jul 10)

Saerch engines are evolving even if users aren't making use of the features. Hotchkiss makes the interesting point - "So the engines have to innovate and develop new functionality, even if nobody is ready to use it yet. Because some of that functionality will form the foundation that the new generation of search will be built upon."

Bing v Google - Usability

Focus Group Study Offers Good & Bad News For Bing by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jun 26)

A NY design firm Catalyst Group ran a study with 12 people on the usability of Bing and Google.

"Note that on “visual design,” “organization” and “refine & filter options” Bing is preferred ... Relevance is a tie for most people in the group. Also note that the “overall reasons for preferring” seem to contract the scoring in the individual categories. Google wins 8 to 4 based on:

* Familiarity
* Use of other Google apps (probably Gmail, Toolbar, Maps, Calendar)
* Enhancements in Bing not enough to convert
"

Don't let familiarity with Google stop you from using Bing - the design is very pleasing.

Blind Search

Try the Blind Search test - enter your query and look at results in three columns - consider the results - look at a view - then vote for the best. What search engine did it turn out to be? You may be surprised.

Blind Search was developed by Michael Kordahi.

Cuil's Mapline

Cuil Maplines: A Good Idea That Needs Work. by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 25)

New, interesting idea from Cuil to map instances related to a search. For example this search for George Frederic Handel
Google has something similar in Google Books. Cuil's - while interesting, isn't fully formed - there are too many false drops - Cuil doesn't recognize that I want only the composer, and not a modern adaptation of the Messiah done in Ireland.

New Search Engine A Pleasure to Use

The name is silly but the features at this new search engine are appealing. Duck Duck Go is a new search engine developed by Gabriel Weinberg in Pennsylvannia. A small blurb on the site says -- "A recent JP Morgan "survey" found that a majority of people would switch search engines if offered less clutter and better results, which is exactly what Duck Duck Go does."

Fair to say - there is much less clutter, and there are several features that may make for better results.

The front search page has options to search information sites, shopping sites or both. The Information choice may be most useful for queries that match on an inordinate number of book titles from Amazon.

Top results may come from Wikipedia or other human-powered source. Most search engines do give Wikipedia high ranking and some special placement. DuckDuckGo gives Wikipedia a box, somewhat in the style of an Ask smart answer.

Suggested Topics breaks down the query into its parts and allows exploration of each.

This helps in widening and exploring a topic. It doesn't help in refining it. The searcher needs to redo the query with more words - there are no search aids for that.

For a suggested topic, if there is more than one meaning, DuckDuckGo lists the meanings and asks you to select. This idea has been around a long time, but this implementation is simple and clear.

No need to click on results - just move the mouse across the page and hit enter key. However, snippets or text about the query result are often very short or there is only the title.

Search It On, a box of icons on the right side, lets one quickly search another source such as WebMD, Twitter, CNet - and many others.

Bookmark and Share lists all the popular services.

Gabriel Weinberg, the creator, and his cat did a short video on the thought that went into this design.

In a response at TechCrunch (Dec 2008), Weinberg explained that DuckDuckGo does its own web crawling, and supplements or enhances by using Yahoo Search Boss . Further, it excludes 40 million spam or parked domains.

Presumably, thanks to the use of Yahoo, Duck Duck Go handles some syntax.

• - sign to exclude
• quotation marks for phrases
• intitle for words in title
• site for domain

For example - intitle:"carbon pricing" site:ca

The font is large, but all in all, this search engine is easy on the eyes and very pleasant to use.

Reviews:

Separate shopping sites from info sites in your search results, Pandia (June 15)

Duck Duck Go: Silly Name, Interesting Search Engine, by Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb (Apr 30)

Ask has more Answers

Ask.com and Ask Jeeves launch database of 300 million answers and questions, Pandia (June 21)

Pandia gives a succinct description of the Q&A search at Ask.

"... they [Ask] crawl and index questions and answers from different sources across the web. Ask then makes use of a so-called semantic search technology (a technology that analyzes the meaning of sentences) to cluster, rephrase and determine the relevance of answers. The result is, according to Ask, “a Q&A database that is fine-tuned to give consumers the best answer, the first time, every time through streamlined, localized, concise results to their questions.”

This database now has 300,000 pairs. Answers my be mixed in with regular search results as well.

QnA at Ask.com

Ask.com Expands AnswerFarm Q&A Database, by Matt McGee., Search Engine Land (june 17)

Ask.com has grown its “AnswerFarm” database from 100 million question-and-answer pairs to 300 million.

Quality is better too:

“Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance enable us to determine when we have multiple questions that all semantically mean the same thing, so we can aggregate those Q&A pairs, filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats, and thus find the most relevant answers.”

See Ask.com Blog - Harvesting the Best Answers from Ask.com’s AnswerFarms! for examples.

Search Engines - New Sites, Different Countries

The effectiveness of Web search engines to index new sites from different countries, by Ari Pirkola, Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere, 33014 Tampere, Finland, Information Research (June )

This study showed that Google and Live (now Bing) are good at picking up new US websites, but not at finding others. The study looked at newe Finnish, French U.S. domain names.

Abstract:

"Introduction. Investigates how effectively Web search engines index new sites from different countries. The primary interest is whether new sites are indexed equally or whether search engines are biased towards certain countries. If major search engines show biased coverage it can be considered a significant economic and political problem because of the international nature of the major search engines.

Method. We examine what share of the sites of recently registered domain names from a certain country appears in a search engine index after a given period of time following registration of the domain name