Internet News

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. We consider how effectively the Websites of new Finnish, French U.S. domain names are indexed by two US-based major search engines (Google and Microsoft's Live Search) and three European search engines (Virgilio, www.fi Voila).

Results. The results showed that Google provided the highest coverage of the five search engines that US-based search engines Google and Live Search indexed US sites more effectively than Finnish and French sites. These findings are in line with earlier research findings based on a different method and different countries. The Finnish www.fi indexed only Finnish sites and the French Voila only French sites. Virgilio indexed European sites more effectively than US sites.

Conclusions. The biased coverage of Google and Live Search raises concern because of their international nature. The coverage bias by the European search engines only seems to have local or regional significance."

It does suggest that if you are doing research that requires European sources, it would be wise to look to European search engines.

Of course, we must be mindful that Google depends on inlinks - if a site isn't linked to, Google won't find it.

Search engine slideshow

Beyond Google: Top Search Alternatives, Business Week (June)

Slide show of 18 search tools as alternatives to Google. Some of the recommendations are big web search engines themselves - Ask, Bing, Cuil, Yahoo - and oddly, Google is on this list. There are several smaller specialty type - Answers.com, Mahalo, Yellowpages. Technorati.

Critique of New Search Engines

Cuil Meets Wolfram Alpha - Gives Birth To Google On Crack, by Alan Bleiweiss, Search Engine Journal (June 8)

Cutting examination of three search tools that have been much hyped: Cuil - not heard of as much - somewhat improved but still weak; Wolfram Alpha - where is it really getting its information?; Google Squared - not really ready for use. Alan Bleiweiss doesn't take on Bing in this article.

Notess on Bing

Microsoft’s New Bing—The ‘Decision Engine’ , by Greg Notess, Newsbreaks (June 8)

Full description of what the new Bing looks like and does. A couple of points to note that don't get as much attention in reviews:

+ The gorgeous photo on the initial screen: "The initial screen has a new photo every day with various hot spots that link into information about the photo's topic via various Bing searches. New in the bottom-right corner is an arrow to scroll back through previous days' photos of the day."

+ Deep links into a search results: "Deep links, Microsoft's name for subsite links that show up under a homepage result, have been increased to show up to eight. (Google calls these site links while Yahoo! calls them quick links.) According to Weitz, "Deep links are one of the top drivers of user satisfaction on the search page, and we invested a lot to increase the quality and number of sites that have deep links.""

+ Source of information for the "decision areas" for travel, health, local.

Bing is a strategic move to stay in search and make money at it. Quoting Charlene Li, ""Microsoft doesn't want to beat Google in terms of displacing it from [its] lofty 70% dominant share of US searches. Rather, Microsoft is out to win more users in the most lucrative categories where advertisers want to influence decision making. This is a focused strategy, and a smart one for (distant) #3 player Microsoft to pursue. ...""

Bing again

Microsoft’s New and Enhanced Search Engine Named “Bing” Debuts on Web, Resourceshelf (June 1)

Detailed description and review of Bing with examples of some of the quick answers.

Popular queries

Bing: Can a "Popular" Search Engine Become Popular? , Traffick.com (June 3)

Tip for getting answers at Bing - don't add qualifiers.

Andrew Goodman tells this story about getting stats on Roy Halladay, pitcher for the Blue Jays.

"Type 'Roy Halladay shutouts single game' or whatnot." (We search experts try not to give more precise directions. It makes normal people feel uncomfortable.)

I've seen many demos (by Microsoft, even). But rarely do I do just like the people in Microsoft focus groups did: notice a difference with the engine's usability, and recommend it to someone.

We didn't find the stat quickly.

Then I remembered that the Bing engine has been tuned to offer more orchestrated consumer-friendly results pages when you type in "Roy Halladay" without any qualifiers.

Sure enough, Carolyn saw a pretty useful Roy Halladay search result full of photos, stats, and search refinements... just one notch short of a Roy Halladay shrine."

To give credit where due though, that one big page of stats was from Yahoo Sports.

How well do other search engines do on this kind of popular query about a sports person.

Ask.com is supposed to be strong on sports. For Roy Halliday - we get a smart answer with profile, photo, news, video, questions, statistics - bonanza.

Yahoo.ca shows photo and stats from Yahoo Sports and an enhanced Wikipedia entry.

Google.ca compared to the others has the answers - with news first, followed by Wikipedia and Yahoo - but is very plain.

Ask and Yahoo seem to me much more attractive and informative than the plain text display of Bing and Google. Sorry Bing - struck out on this one. I did check other names. Bing is more competitive with Yahoo for information on singer Celine Dion and golfer Tiger Woods. Ask holds its own on both. In all cases though, we do quite well just entering the name - don't even need quotation marks.

Yahoo Search VS Bing

Microsoft Bing: What does Yahoo think?, by Mary Jo Foley, ZDnet blog (June1)

Interview with Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Search Strategy, on his impressions of Bing.

Of interest: "Is the Powerset natural-language technology which is integrated into Bing give Microsoft a leg up over its competitors? “‘Semantic’ is an overloaded term,” Raghavan said. He said many in the search field, from Yahoo to Google, are using statistical semantic processing, rather than the natural-language semantic processing techniques Powerset uses."

Also - information on Search Monkey and Boss

"SearchMonkey is all about getting Web publishers to provide Yahoo with data for search listings; it’s a replacement for meta tags “which were largely used by spammers,” Raghavan acknowledges. BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) is Yahoo’s program aimed at getting developers to build custom search engines using Yahoo’s technology underneath. "

Yahoo's move from blue links

Yahoo searches for answer to fewer links, by Michael Liedtke, IOL Technology (June1)

Yahoo has begun to change its search results - leaning to fewer and more informative - based on its understanding from your search history of what "you" are interested in. On a search for "paris hilton", travellers would get the hotel in Paris, and celeb followers would get the person (at least that is how it would work in theory). Also expect to see more images and videos.

Yahoo hopes it can differentiate itself from its rivals by packaging its results so just about everything users want is on the first page of listings.

As part of that process, Yahoo has been phasing out the blue links that have traditionally filled up search result pages. In their place, Yahoo is showing more capsules of vital information that include images, video and even sound bites.

"We need to move away from a web of pages to a web of objects," said Prabhakar Ragahavan, who oversees Yahoo's search strategy.

Some of Yahoo's upgrades were made months ago and are probably already familiar to the search engine's millions of loyal users.

For instance, searches for restaurants already include the address, phone number and maps on the main search page while requests about baseball players return their current statistics.

Searches of singers often feature videos and snippets of their latest songs.

Google, Yahoo, Bing

Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo: Feature Smackdown, by Tom Spring, PCWorld (May 29)

PCWorld compares "top features of three search engines--Bing, Google, and Yahoo--in the ultimate search engine battle royale."

Compares web search, search refinements, travel, shopping, local, health, maps. Not exhaustive but does have screen shots. Conclusion - use all of them, but don't ignore Bing.

Thumbs Up for Bing at Webware

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected by Rafe Needleman, Webware (May 28)

Reviews features and capabilities of Bing and compares to Google Web Search - and turns out that Bing won Rafe Needleman over.

"The new game in search is parsing information and displaying it in the engine itself (see Wolfram Alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, and other search products, have areas where they will collate and format information for you, instead of just linking you to external pages where the data reside. Bing does an extremely good job at this in several popular areas -- like product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices."

Videos about Google Search

Videos about Google Search features done by Google engineers. These were announced in the Google Friends newsletter.

"The bells and whistles behind Google Search

We put together two series of videos giving you a closer look at
various features of Google Search. The first is a set of 15-second
tips on how to check the weather, get the latest sports scores, find
word definitions, and more. In the second series, our search engineers
get up close and personal, sharing stories about the features they've
created and the challenges they face in making Google Search better."

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B3A7CCFD7CD5CF09
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=396574970FFD6E31

Sergey Brin on Search

Sergey Brin On Newspapers, Breaking “Page’s Law” & Bing As Name Of Microsoft’s New Search Engine by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 28)

Notes and video from a session where Google cofounder Sergey Brin talked about Google’s relations with newspapers, software, and search.

About search:

He thinks search is getting smarter and will increasing combine information from many pages about a topic, rather than relying on what contained within particular pages on their own (Google Squared was one example of this, he noted — though not the only one).

He also said expectations of search engines have increased with more esoteric and complex questions being asked.. “That’s why we’re seeing more success from these smart techniques,” adding other examples such as searching beyond exact terms entered.

“I think you’ll see that kind of technology really accelerate, and I hope you’ll find more surprises from Google when you do searches in the next few weeks,” he said.

Search Brands and Strategies

State Of Search: Google Will Stay Strong Despite Bing & Yahoo by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 28)

Enjoyable reading in this sweeping - and rambling - article about Microsoft's launch of Bing, and Yahoo's apparent retreat (or neglect) of search, and Google's continuing strength. It may boil down to the observation that Microsoft is paying a lot of money ($80 million alone for advertising) to kill the lacklustre Live brand with a new search suite. It's said to be better and could improve search market share somewhat, but it still has flaws (some endemic to Microsoft) and isn't truly a "decision engine".

And where does Yahoo place? It might look stable and strong on the outside, but on the inside "Yahoo is incredibly, disappointingly weak". Sullivan examines statements from CEO Carol Bartz and sees trouble. Yahoo is losing people and a search strategy. Maybe selling Yahoo Search is still an option. (Though why would Microsoft buy Yahoo Saerch now that it has re-developed its own?)

And by the way - search is not broken - it's exciting.

Close Looks at Bing

Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine, by Danny Sullilvan, Search Engine Land (May 28)

Danny Sullivan, in his review of the web search part of Bing, opens with - "If you’re expecting Bing to be a Google-killer, reset your expectations. The most dramatic change, in my view, remains the name itself. "

+ Categorized Search and Web Groups - there is an "explore pane" with categories on the left, and in the main pane results from each category organizes as 'web groups". There are 20 results on a page - double the normal default. The categories, Sullivan says, look as if Microsoft is analyzing content and grouping, but they aren't - as Microsoft said that "With categorized search what we’ve done is take the related searches for individual queries and pop them up a level of abstraction to about classes of entries".

+ Related Searches - also in the Explore Pane - look very much like the ones Live Search had.

+ Search History - good for 48 hours at same machine. But a Windows Live member can "use of Windows SkyDrive folders and access your history from any computer". Silverlight users can save to own computer. Sullivan says that the search history is "incredibley rudimentary" compared to Google's.

+ Best Match - will show at top of page if there is one.

+ Quick Previews - mouse over to get excerpt.

+ Instant Answers - flights, movies, weathers - shortcuts

Also see Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results by Greg Sterling

Overall impression was that Bing is not a Google killer, but much better that Live Search.

"My overall assessment is very positive. Kumo, now Bing, has performed well and I’ve been satisfied with the results. There haven’t been any significant deficiencies or missing links (so to speak). While there have been a few occasions where I’ve found Google results to be better, the substantial gap that existed between Google and Live Search is largely gone with Bing."

Hello Bing, Goodbye Live

There will be hundreds of articles over the next few weeks about Microsoft's new search place - called Bing - that will take over from the Live Brand of search and I presume everything else.

Goodbye Microsoft Live Search, Hello Bing, Stuart J. Johnston, Internet News (May 29)

Some are saying it is better at finding relevant results than Live ever was. It's being called a "decision engine" - to help people make decisions starting in the consumer areas of shopping, travel, local companies, and health.

"Within those areas, the idea is to provide an organized "experience" where all the information that a user would need -- say, for planning a trip -- is available in one place. Other features meant to enhance the experience include a "quick preview" function that lets a user hover over a link to provide a caption of what's at the link, as well as an "instant answer" capability that aims to provide all the needed information on a single results page."

Travel component sounds promising -- Bing is using Virtual Earth for maps (renamed to Bing Maps), Farecast for travel information on flights and hotels, and Powerset semantic language processing.

Google's New Search Features

Google’s New Search Features: Google Squared, Rich Snippets, and Search Options by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Newbreaks (May 28)

Report on the three new features that Google introduced at its Searchology event. Google described these as addressing the question "how can we better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment"

+ Google Squared works on structuring unstructured data. It "looks for facts from webpages, pulls them together, and then organizes them into a table with rows and columns. At Searchology, the example "small dogs" showed a table of names of small dog breeds with descriptions, sizes, weights, and origins. Clicking in any cell reveals the source of the information. You can edit incorrect information, add additional rows and columns, and save results to your Google account."

+ Rich Snippets - "what kind of information will answer the question that is most important to searchers at that moment". Webmasters can use microformats to enhance snippets in search results.

How do they work? Well, if you were looking for restaurant reviews and found a page marked up using the open formats that Google had indexed, the Rich Snippet could reveal, at a glance, the number of reviews, a star rating, and a price range for the restaurant.

+ Search Options - "a new set of features and tools that let you "slice and dice your search results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier."

Visual Search Options

Top 5 visual search engines, Pandia (May 19)

Pandia names "five innovative and intriguing ways to look at search."

+ SearchME - page thru thumbnails and use clusters.
+ Viewzi - many ways to view search results
+ Eyeplorer - finds facts
+ Ujiko - still around
+ NeXplore - choose display

Adding Variety to Search

Could Anti-Google Choices Re-Energize Yahoo? , by Cory Kleinschmidt, Traffick.com (May 22)

Judging from this posting there could be some backlash building against Google in reaction to its size and reach. Perhaps it is too big, will have too much control, and will know too much its users.

Cory Kleinschmidt concludes: "Ultimately, I'm all for personalization and targeted advertising, and I don't really have a beef with Google knowing a lot of information about me. But there comes a point when too much is enough. When I realized just how much I rely on Google's services, it hit me like a slap in the face from Moe the bartender."

Just as we shouldn't eat the same food everyday or only exercise the same set of muscles, we should add variety to our search diet. There are alternatives - Yahoo, Ask, Hakia, the new Live (whenever), several new visual engines, several good metasearch engines.

Yahoo's Plans

Yahoo Plugs Search Progress: Toward a Web of Objects, by Rob Hof, Business Week (May 19)

Writes -- "Yahoo’s looking to transform search results from a list of Web sites to results that try to fulfill the apparent intent of the searcher with actionable information. Honestly, no search engine any longer just returns a list of Web sites, so that’s a bit of a red herring to my mind, but I do think there’s something potentially interesting here."

Has more notes on the Yahoo presentation.

Of interest: "Now Matthew Hertz, CEO of Pipl.com, comes on to tell how the company uses BOSS. ... What they’re doing with BOSS is adding deep Web discovery and spam detection to the usual crawling open Web pages."

Search Engine Kumo Expected Soon

Microsoft's Next-Gen Search Engine Kumo Expected Next Week, Ian Paul, PC World (May 20)

It's expected that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Microsoft's new web search engine code-named Kumo next week. Meantime, there are many leaked screenshots floating about.

"The screenshots show a three-column search results page featuring useful tools like related searches, a single-session search history for quick backtracking, and a set of search categories that relate directly to your query. Searches for a musical artist, for example, would bring up search categories like song lyrics, tickets, albums and the artist's biography, while searching for a product would bring up categories for images, reviews and manuals."

Yahoo's Direction

Yahoo: We’re Moving From Web Of Pages To Web Of Objects, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (May 19)

More change in the air - Yahoo talked about initiatives at a search event in San Francisco. One theme is to move away from a list of links to documents to a 'web of objects".

"The “web of objects” presented by Yahoo is a better representation of the “real world” in search results. In other words: more closely aligning user intent with search results and mapping those to real-world tasks"

.. "Raghavan added that Yahoo is not going to be concerned about index size going forward. Rather Yahoo will be building these composite bundles of structured data. As a practical matter, these web objects are manifested in the form of multi-media content and images (Shortcuts). The broader objective is to provide more context and “answers” to minimize links and clicking back and forth."

Fuller description at : Yahoo Vows Death to the '10 Blue Links' James Niccolai, IDG News Service (May 19)

MG Siegler at TechCrunch doesn't think much of Yahoo's announcements about search - or rather about other things and very little about search.

Yahoo Search, As We Know It, Is Over (May 19)

"...Yahoo is just trying to display things in a different way to users. They’re saying they’re going to display “objects” rather than links, but that just means they’ll show pictures, movie show times and other slightly more useful cousins of web links in results.>

Ask Jeeves

Ask puts results in frames again, Pandia (May 18)

Pandia reports that Ask has put search results back into a framed pages. Dumb - it confuses new people, and annoys experienced. What should Ask do? Change it back. Where can users go to get away from the frames: The new Ask Jeeves in the UK - http://www.askjeeves.co.uk/.

Ask was once so innovative. Now it shooting itself in the foot. The only bright spot is it restored Jeeves in the UK version.

Scoopler for real time search

Scoopler: real-time search for social content, Pandia (May 11)

"Scoopler indexes live updates from services like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query, updated in real-time."

Pandia comments on Google Show Options

Google introduces some important new features, Pandia, May 14

Itemizes the new "show options" at Google and comments on their usefulness. Some are a bit baffling - such as - why is Video on the list for Types of Resources and not Blogs? But this page is sure to change. Pandia does not comment on the value of being able to Restrict results by time - I can see 24 hours, but how reliable is past week or past year?

Google Searchology 2009

Google Searchology 2009: The Big Recap, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (May 13)

A lot happened at the Google Searchology day. This posting brings together "noteworthy coverage". Lots to read.

I especially recommend What was new at Searchology? by Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team. He picks up some of the details such as those about spelling and the new sort-by-date.

Google Search Options

Big changes in Google Search have arrived.

Search Options brings us an entirely new display that shows choices for results from video, forums, or reviews, plus time periods (can we rely on them?), a timeline view (yea), and a wonderwheel (more applause). All you need do is click on the link for Show Options.

The Options

All the options will enrich the search, but especially those at the bottom under Standard View.

Results display is a better implementation of universal. A top News cluster could show - as it does for searchology. Having a link for videos under All Results makes it more inviting than using the one on the top bar. You know that you'll find videos for that search term (and there are several - look for ones with May 2009 date) or use the Time Option.

Google Timeline

This has been brought out of the Labs where it had been part of Experimental Search to be easily accessible. It is a fantastic tool when doing research on a topic to see different events or treatment of the subject. Google mainly uses its num range search to place pages on the timeline.

Google Wonderwheel

Finally we get a display of the related topics. This star design has been around for a long time, but this implementation is attractive because clicking on a word opens a new node while showing the results on the right. Play with this one.

Google has a video tour of the changes in its blog posting - More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event . This posting also describes the new "rich snippets".

Also - a must read - Tara Calishain's review of the changes and especially her comments about date searching. See Google Goes Searchology, Offers Options, Clusters, and More, ResearchBuzz (May 12)

Google Adds "Rich Snippets"

Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results, by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (May 12)

Google will use metadata from a site to enrich the search listing.

"Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time."

Page has some screenshots that show examples of ratings and reviews that will show.

It is noted that this is similar to Yahoo's Search Monkey - but easier for site owners. One key difference: "Google chooses which sites to include in the program and the enhancements display for all searchers. With SearchMonkey, Yahoo chooses which applications display for everyone, but searchers can opt-in to additional applications to customize their search experience."

Middlespot Visual Search

Middlespot is a very promising visual search engine that combines screenshots of the pages with controls for viewing the pages on a grid, browsing and selecting. The results appear to be coming from Yahoo.

The Tips pages have instructions on using these controls which will take some time to digest and apply. Also, because there is so much on the screen, it would be easier to view the results on a large screen (over 20 inches) with good image density.

Len Charnoff at TimeSaving Tutorials created a video tutorial on using the new Middlespot visual search. He does a good job at showing the visuals, but only makes a small mention of the workpad.

This, I think, is the best feature. Here you can save items you find, name the workpad, add comments to describe it, add other urls, and maximize for full viewing. There are sharing options - to send a url by email or to embed the workpad in a webpage for others to use.

Middlespot describes the workpad as "a great way to create a launch pad for sites you visit often. Save a bunch of websites to a workpad, use the workpad "open" tool to view the websites in your screenshot gallery, and make that page your browser start page. Now, everytime you open your browser, your favourite sites will be ready for you." From http://middlespot.com/updates.html

In addition, inSuggest brings up suggested sites based on Middlespot's analysis of your collection.

If you like Middlespot, you can register for an account that will let you access your workpads and search history from any browser or mobile device.

Predictive Search Query Suggestions

Predictive Search Query Suggestions By William Slawski, SEO by the Sea (May 8)

A patent application by Google gives some insight into how Google makes search suggestions. There are several factors: mobile device or desktop computer, search history, member of a group, browsing preferences.

But even more interesting - how do search engines differ in their "predictative search suggestions"?

Google Suggest was described in an FAQ - "Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history"

Yahoo Search Assist - described here - but it doesn't say much, and I think the operation of Explore Concepts has changed.

Microsoft Live Search Suggestions

Ask - no information

Cuil - fills out the query, but also offers categories and topical suggestions.

Kumo Coming

Microsoft Kumo on June 2, by Milo Riano, EveryJoe.com (May 3)

Sure -- "Microsoft’s rebranded search engine named “Microsoft Kumo” is expected to launch on June 2. The new engine is going to replace Windows Live Search in the hopes of giving it a snappier name and hopefully attract more users into the engine."

Will Google and Twitter Mate?

Why a Google & Twitter marriage makes sense, Pandia (May 10)

There's a new Twitter search engine that searches the content of the microblog tweets and also the content of the articles people link to and recommend. Seems that more and more people are using Twitter as "an intelligence tool for following the latest trends and the hottest news.

Google uses many methods to identify best sources and index them frequently to stay current. For the Web it exploits links, but News doesn't have the network of links (tho blogs do).

But - "Twitter may provide that input, as the tweets give real time information about what the twitterati think is the most interesting stuff on the web this very minute."

And Pandia suggests that Twitter could use Google to fight spam.

But will it happen?

Google and Microblogging

Google To ‘Integrate’ Microblogging?, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (May 8)

Google is definitely interested in social web. How will it use it to enhance search? There are several possibilities considered here - enhancing search results (the ranking), separate search, or intermixing (likely).

Hint about Kumo

Live Search and Give Shuting Down, by Marius Diaga, Softpedia (May 4)

Headline needs hyphens - Microsoft is suspending the Live's Search-and-Give program that made it possible for US users to raise money for charities through using Live Search.

But Microsoft is probably cooking up something else.

"Microsoft is not saying much related to the new program it is cooking; however, speculation already points out connections with the upcoming rebranding of Live Search. Microsoft is currently dogfooding (testing internally) the successor of Live Search, codenamed Kumo. The Redmond company insists that Kumo is just a codename and not the actual brand. Microsoft is reportedly planning the release of Kumo for June 2, 2009."

Twitter Search

Twitter Search (Finally) Available To All Users, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 30)

Twitter Search is now available on all user account home pages and it has a “Save This Search” feature .

Jeeves Returning in UK

Ask brings back Jeeves, ComputerWorldUK (April 20)

Ask is bringing Jeeves back due to user demand. You have to wonder who runs these companies and decides on marketing strategies. Ask paid millions for the rights to use Jeeves, and then gave it up in 2006 when it thought it couldn't live up to the expectation that it could actually answer questions. It worked for a couple years on developing the 3D interface for better handling, only to drop it last October and at the same time as going back to the answer theme. Now it wants Jeeves back. Apart from the attention Ask received for retiring Jeeves, and now again for reinstating, this all seems like bad marketing.

Also
Ask brings back butler Jeeves , BBC (Apr 20)

Peter Matthews, manager of the brand and digital consultancy Nucleus, said

""Ask without Jeeves lacked character and while the actual product - searching the web - is very effective, in trying to be more like Google they shot themselves in the foot."

These stories are coming out of the UK - nothing said about US yet and no mention of it at the Ask Blog either.

Postscript: Ask Welcomes Back Jeeves, At Least In The UK, That Is by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 19)

Key question: "So why only bring Jeeves back in the UK? Mascaraque explained that the polls they ran in the UK showed a strong desire for Jeeves to make a come back. The same desire was not found in the US, although Ask admitted they did not run similar polls in the US. Nicholas Graham, spokesperson for Ask.com in the US, did remind that you can bring Jeeves back in the US by typing in askjeeves.com into your browser. Mascaraque also added that Jeeves is more of a British character than a US character."

In my classes, people remember Ask Jeeves and ask what happened to it? But that's in Canada.

Omgili has Novel Approach

Help to crack Google’s secret, Pandia (Apr 17)

Omgili is experimenting with its interface to show its own results of what people are saying about a topic, and what is found through Google. This combination means that you'll see discussion on particular articles. Important articles do emerge from this process.

From Omigili - "Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, Forums, Discussion groups, Mailing lists, answer boards and others."

Worth trying.

Quintura Homepage

Quintura has a new homepage. This is a visual-based search engine - it shows tags representing main topic of groups of results.

The new home page points you to its Web Search, the default; Quintura for Kids; and Site Search, a hosted site search webmasters can use.

From the announcement: "Quintura has been recently awarded three U.S. patents for its search engine graphical interface and context-based search visualization using neural networks. In addition to engaging users, the Quintura patented search technology powers interactive search solutions, such as customizable search terms and the ability to populate the Quintura search cloud with contextual images and banners. "

March US Market Share

Google widens search lead, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Apr 15)

comScore figures for March on US Market Share

+ "Google had a 63.7 per cent share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, up 0.4 percentage points from February, and above the 63.5 per cent level that was its previous high."

+ Yahoo 20.5
+ Microsoft 8.3%
+ Ask 3.8
+ AOL 3.7

News about Kumo / Live Search

Microsoft's search must begin in Redmond by Ina Fried, Cnet News (Apr 13)

Microsoft has a hard time getting its own staff to use Live. However, things should improve with Kumo, its new search engine that is still under wraps.

"The revamped search page shown in those prototypes focuses on several key changes, including using the left hand for navigation and refining a query as well as splitting the results into various categories. In the Taylor Swift page, for example, the left-hand navigation allows a user to quickly shift to images, songs, or lyrics by Swift. The results, meanwhile, are also split into different sub-categories."

Article has screenshots.

Brace yourself for a heavy ad campaign when this product is released.

"For starters, the company is reportedly planning a $100 million ad campaign to accompany a mid-year release of the product. "

Search Cube for Visual Results

Search Cube scours Google in 3D by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Apr 13)

SearchCube shows images representing results on a cube that you can flip and turn. Mouseover the image to see the url - and not much else. Cute but not very useful.

"Search Cube is the latest in a string of search engines that forgoes displaying search results in an easy-to-parse, ordered list, in favor of a whiz-bang 3D interface. It grabs its results from Google and site preview thumbnails from Thumbshots, then combines them in a 3D cube that you can rotate freely either with your mouse or keyboard."

Posting has demo, or you can try it yourself at search-cube.com

Calishain on Changes at Google

Google Doing a Little Tweaking to Its Search Results by Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Mar 24)

Posting has some observations on Google's changes in March for longer snippets and related searches.

"You can now get semantically-related searches for some queries, and more complex queries will yield longer “search snippets”. "

Of interest: Tip about using ~ as the "synonym operator".

"Google has for a long time had synonym searching. You can put a tilde (~) in front of the word and Google would find not only your keyword but words similar in meaning. To see this feature in action search for ~flowers. Wondering what words Google are actually finding? Search for ~flowers -flowers. You’ll spot the synonyms without your keyword. "

Twitter Search Tips

Twitter search is broken by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Apr 10)

If you search Twitter for buzz or latest news / reports from the street, you'll want to read these twitter search tips and references to tools.

"You can't discount the importance of timeliness, since Twitter Search is unparalleled at taking the pulse of the Web moment-to-moment. But as a research tool it needs more finesse. And while I realize that adding features like these (as options, please) would undermine the brutal simplicity of Twitter Search, they'd also make it more useful. "

Topical Search

Atopical is a "topical search engine" - search for a topic (1 or 2 words), and limit to a subject area, if wished. For example, might look for screencasting in software. ATopical compiles a page of "best links from best sites" drawing from Google. Quality is fairly good - maybe should consider acquiring it.

Atopical is a product of the UK company Topicala. It has other projects that are topic focused and seem to interconnect. Topicala.com has a Country Search that shows for a selected country news, resources, and overview.

ATopical was mentioned in 15 cool apps from the Google Applications Gallery, Webware (April 8)

Figures from Hitwise

Hitwise: Google’s Lead Growing, Searches Getting Longer, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 8)

Hitwise figures on US search market share are:

+ Google 72.39%
+ Yahoo 16.36%
+ MSN 5.5 %
+ Ask 4.07%

Ask went up a bit, and MSN down.

More reports of lengthening of queries also - this time significant.

In March 2008, 3 words or less was 67.38%; and in March 2009, 65.37%. The biggest increase was in 8 or more words: from 3.01 % to 3.6%

Info Capsules in Yahoo

Thanks to Yahoo's Search Monkey program, searchers will see summary inforamtion and links from Wikipedia on matching entries.

For example this search for lester b pearson .

Presentations on Search at CIL Conference

Some presentations from the Computers in Library 2009 Conference are available.

Under Information Discovery & Search

+ A Super Searcher Shares 25 Search Tips/Thoughts by Mary Ellen Bates

+ Searching Google Earth by Ran Hock

+ Searching Conversations: Twitter, Facebook, & the Social Web - by Greg Notess [Not available yet[

+ Information Discovery: Science & Health by Walter Warmick - entering the deep web by using federated search of scientific databases. [Available at site]

+ Seeking Health by Tamas Doszkocs - lists several health search engines and identifies some with semantic search capabilities (medstory, healthline, goopubmed) [Available at site]

Conference also had a track on Search and Search Engines - federated search, mobile search, RSS, emerging search technologies.

Document Search at DocJax

DocJax is a new search engine for finding doc, xls, ppt, pdf documents. It states on the front page that it is powered by Google and Yahoo. Thus it's a metasearcher, likely blending the two and taking some number of results from each (not all).

DocJax could be useful. A search on paperless office results that appear relevant and high quality.

It is attractive but flashing ads are spotted about including AdBrite hotlinked words - any more of these will make it look like an ad machine and turn off searchers

Counter for number of search results seems off to me. Searches I tried always had 1059 results.

All document types are retrieved on a search. Clicking on pdf puts those first.

There are three ways to view:

+ Click on the title link - document opens in Scribd - a bit small to read but you can toggle for full screen. The conversion to iPaper of Scribd can be slow.
+ Preview - opens in a small popup screen (also converted for viewing in Scribd) leaving search results still viewable.
+ Download - shows the document in a viewer on your computer - could be pdf in a browser / Adobe window, ppt through MS PowerPoint.

There is some syntax (undocumented) for being more selective - probably available because the query is passed to Google or Yahoo - and both understand site and intitle.

+ limit by site, eg paperless office site:ca
+ search title, eg intitle:paperless office

There are a few "web 2.0" features:

+ say you "love it" - anyone can do this
+ become a member using Google, Yahoo, or AIM account or Open ID. Here the idea is to let friends know what you are looking at - and seeing what they do. (People have time for this?)
+ Most viewed documents, loved document (etc) - mostly Vietnamese at this early date.

Compare this to Google where filetype:pdf intitle:paperless office yields 1,320 hits. There will be more results from Google direct. But the Google search results page is not as easy to read, and you don't get the benefit of Scribd for seeing the document.

I would use DocJax again for document search because of the viewers and possibly the metasearch capability on Yahoo and Google.

Short review in One-Up Google, YouTube With Tools From Hassle-Free PC, by Rick Broida, PC World (Mar 31)

Wikia Search Closing

Wales giving up on Wikia Search by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Mar 31)

Jimmy Wales is giving up on Wikia Search, hyped in 2008 as a Google killer. People were to make the difference at this search engine - using the index of about 30 million pages to run searches and then modify the results - improving ranking, deleting, changing description. Turns out not many people wanted to do that - and maybe not many people wanted to use the result. There were only 10,000 users a month.

Answers at Live Search

Live Search Rolls Out Instant and Active Answers by Arnold Zafra, Search Engine Journal (Mar 24)

Two features at Live Search to note:

+ "Live Search’s Instant Answers to get the latest and up-to-the-minute going ons in the NCAA Tournament such as Team Standings, Score highlights and more useful information that fans of March Madness would surely appreciate."

+ "Live Search Active Answers. Similar to Instant Answers, this feature also gives you instant information on a more active search query, say “Flight Status”."

Ms Dewey Retired

Bye Bye Ms.Dewey Search Engine, Cre8pc Usability & Holistic SEO (March 27)

MS Dewey, a Microsoft Live-based search engine with the amusing and experimental interface, has been closed. Ms Dewey would tap on your screen to get your attention. It was cute - but it was a bit slow and maybe those who stayed with it for a while saw all that Ms Dewey could do and moved on.

Google adds Related and Lengthens snippet

Two New Improvements to Google Results Pages, Google Blog (Mar 24)

1. Searches related to

Google, through its understanding of related concepts and word associations, will be showing more related searches on search results. These usually show at the bottom of the page (though the top would be much more useful). Look for them on general searches such as knowledge management where you'll see system, benefits, tools, strategies, business intelligence; or aspartame with splenda, sorbitol, phenylaline ...

However, I found Google was erractic - at one moment offering related searches for aspartame adverse effects and the next moment not.

This is better but it needs to be consistent, and the suggestions to be more easily noticed.

2. Snippets

Google will adjust the length of the snippet according to the query.

"When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples."

Examples:

green energy ontario - two lines

proposals for green energy technology ontario - longer snippets - often three lines

Middlespot for Visual Search

Middlespot is another new visual search engine. It shows results as screenshots but with features for panning and zooming around on the page. Navigate using arrow keys, mouse wheel, and clicks. Has a workspace for saving pages. Saerches the web, images, news, twitter, and amzon.

Middlespot Is An Alternative Visual Search Engine by Robin Wauters, TechCrunch (Mar 21)

From article: "Kicking off a keyword-based search opens two columns: to the left, you’ll get standard stuff like title, summary and full link, and on the right you’ll get a visual representation of search results. In the latter column, you can make the frames bigger or smaller by using the slider or scrolling your mouse wheel, and hovering over the boxes will highlight them and offer a couple of options. It’s all pretty straightforward, so check it out."

Comments that, "The problem with Middlespot is that its overall website design is below par, and it’s horribly slow with current response times that will prove to be unacceptable for the majority of people who are used to getting search results much faster"

It is slow to load but fairly easy to use. Worth a look.

WebKruz Visual Search

WebKruz - visual search engine that shows results in tag cloud at the top, and the pages are thumbnails organized into panels by "topic". There are four panels on a page with three thumbnails each - and a play button to more thumbnails scroll by. Additional page information can be seen through a mouseover for the page.

It's getting some notice but has been around since June 2008.

Visually it's very interesting and one could get to like it. There is no syntax that can be used. I can't tell how good the index is. Would be very pleasant to use for broad topics such as local food canada

Search Twitter with Tweetzi

Tweetzi Twitter search by Pandia (Mar 19)

Twitter search is the current growth area. Now there is Tweetzi

"With the enormous amounts of information and the appalling signal to noise ratio on Twitter, good search tools are always welcome. How else would we get at the gems? Tweetzi is a Twitter search engine, developed by Craig Hughes, that is great for monitoring trends and following breaking news."

There might be something to this - intersting results on this search for cbc advertising.

Tweetzi has several search operators: for example, tweets that are positive, or negative, or with links to your query. Check the Help page.

Kumo and Microsoft's search intentions

Why Microsoft continues with search: it's still not solved by Emil Protalinski , Ars Technica (Mar 17)

Microsoft is working on web search. Here we learn from Stefan Weitz, a member of Microsoft's web search team. on intentions.

Recently there have been reports about a new engine called Kumo, and speculation for some time whether Microsoft would use the Powerset technology for semantic search. Get some inkling of intention here --

"The whole idea behind Kumo is to allow Microsoft employees to test drive various new search features before they are rolled into Live Search. This allows Microsoft to figure out what works and what doesn't at a per-feature level. Weitz wouldn't say whether the testing base would expand beyond just Microsoft employees, or if the Kumo brand will end up replacing Live Search completely with the next update, but he did say that Kumo is the start of an emerging "reinvestment in search" trend we will see from Microsoft in the coming months. "

We'll see.

Marissa Mayer and the user experience

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google speaks again - see her in action in this video of her presentation at the Google I/O Developers Conference. Here she talks about building the "best possible user experience" and the main principles of the Google ethos (such as "imagination is a muscle").

Fascinating - worth the hour.

Of interest:

+ Opens with iGoogle and gadgets.

+ Reveals that the Google homepage is simple because Sergey, the founder and designer, didn't "do" html.

+ Practices Occam's Razor for simplicity - check the piece about the technology around 10 minute mark.

+ speed of display of results really matters - and searchers prefer the speed of 10 results over the slower display of 30 results. [Around 15 minute mark]

+ Learning curve on search - claims that users get to "expert level quickly". Has decided against "coaching the user". [20 minute mark]

+ View of search 10 years out: more personalized, more content.

+ Cross language translation and search; eg Arabic to English - might expand to searching all languages

+ Disambiguation is a very hard problem - meanings of dr, new york times square - although didn't explain how Google deals with this, just that it is working on it.

+ Google works in 140 domains and 110 languages - world largest translation network - uses Google users.

+ What you just searched for is the best predictor for the next search - use this to improve relevance.

Source: Marissa Mayer Gives Us An Insight Into How Google Works, Zee (Mar 1)

Kumo for Live Search

Microsoft to start testing 'Kumo' search service by Ina Fried, Webware (Mar 2)

Kumo search to replace Live Search - someday.

"Microsoft plans later this week to begin internal testing of Kumo, a long-anticipated update to its Live Search product, CNET News has learned.

Ultimately, Kumo is designed to be both a rebranding and an update for Live Search, although at this point Microsoft is describing it as "an internal test environment." "

Do Brands Get Top Billing?

Microsoft Live Search Tests: Best Match And Categorized Listings by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Mar 1)

Vanessa Fox has two articles that suggest that brands get higher ranking.

In her article she reported that Live Search is presenting a Best Match for navigational type searches. (Happens in the US in Internet Explorer - not in Canada). She has found that it seems to favour brands - "Search engines can be more confident of a searcher’s intent with a branded search than with most other types of queries". Fair enough.

Google is also said to be favouring brands in new ranking algorithms. This has often been observed over time. Brands are 'authority sites'. Danny Sullivan wrote Big Brand Shift On Google: Good, Bad Or In-Between? in which he examined a posting by Aaron at SeoBlog about more branded results showing in top spots on Google.

Sullivan: "Looking at it, Aaron may very well have identified a trend – though I think it’s likely just a continuation of a trend that he was one of the first people to talk about years ago, that of authority domains. There are plenty of people that believe that having an authority domain means you can rank for virtually anything in your topic area because Google trusts you more than other sites. It’s not a new concept – many have felt this has been in operation for years. I’ve seen it first hand having left behind an authority domain of 10 years to start up a new site with Search Engine Land. For my part, I firmly believe that’s part of the Google algorithm."

But it is hard to know exactly what is happening - some brands you think should rank high don't.

How to improve ranking

What France Can Teach Us About Search Successby Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Mar 1)

Nice short lesson in what to think about when optimizing a site to rank well in Google results - in this case the lovely town of Ville d’Eu in France.

Along the way we learn that Google expands acronyms - EU to European Union.

Key message: "Success in search is really all about understanding your customers. Who are you targeting? What are they searching for? How can your site help them accomplish their search tasks?"

Site: at Live Search

Is Microsoft Live Search Crawling More But Indexing Less?, Search Engine Roundtable, Nov 24, 2008

There is a shocking bit in this posting. SER was doing comparative page counts at Google and Live to check indexing - and saw much lower counts at Live vs Google.

Microsoft responded - "For webmasters, It is problematic to use the “site:” operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query."

What does that mean for searchers who combine the site search with search terms? Are the numbers just as unreliable?

Live.com misconnected

Someone has wires crossed at Live.com tonight. The addresses www.live.com and search.live.com bring up the UK page in Toronto.

However, if you begin with a search at Sympatico, and click on the menu item for Live Search on the search results page, you do get the right entry page. But that is a lot of work.

It would be a good thing if Microsoft could figure out Live vs MSN, and sort out the country versions. Sympatico/MSN for example connects to MSN Video - but Live Video is so much better - and for that you have to go through this elaborate pathway.

But since I hadn't used Live the portal for so long I hadn't realized that it has combined with Hotmail to create a Facebook-like environment. Except it's too late in the game for Microsoft to do this.

Search Market Share Stabilizing

Bad News For Google: U.S. Search Share Stabilizing (GOOG, YHOO) by Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Insider (Feb 20)

Figures finally show that Google's share of the search market is settling down at about 63% in the US leaving the rest to Yahoo, MSN, the rest. This is good news for everyone - means there will be some competition, and some alternatives for users.

"Six months ago, with Google continuing to gain almost 0.5% of share per month, it seemed inevitable that Google would quickly march to 80% of the US market, leaving everyone else with crumbs. Over the past six months, however, Google's share has flattened in the 63% range...while Yahoo's share losses have stopped at just over 20%."

Twitter Search

Twitter search gains prominence, importance by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Feb 20)

Searching Twitter be easier once Twitter moves the Search to the front page. This is being tried first on selected accounts that have signed in.

Why does this matter? Danny Sullivan sees Twitter search as a "hyper-real-time tool to see what's being buzzed about."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone went further: "Searching over Twitter messages is like a filter for what is happening right now--it's an interesting look into the real-time thoughts of people and organizations around the world. Whether you're curious about something specific or you just want to browse the trending topics, we've found that Twitter Search adds a new layer of relevance ... "

Yahoo Search at Five Years

Five Years of Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Search Blog (Feb 18)

Five years have passed since Yahoo broke with Google to launch its own search engine that it built from its acquisitions of Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb.

And today? The Yahoo Search Blog entry mentions achievements during this time. Here are my comments:

+ Search Assist - resurrected something that Altavista did quite well and then made it viewable only if you knew to click on the small tab and then fiddled with it to make the suggestions less readable / understandable. Grade C+

+ Site Explorer - provides ability to analyze links to a site - the main page, individual pages, the site as a whole - in numbers and the specific links. As well, Yahoo has an excellent backwards link search for finding pages that link to a given url and have certain keywords. Grade A+

+ SearchScan - warn users of dangerous sites - partnered with McAfee - and might have been the first to offer this. Grade A

+ Delicious - improved social bookmarking tool. Firstly, lets remember that Yahoo acquired this at the same time it was developing its own, did not appear to support delicious for the first few years, only recently enhanced - and there are still features users are clammering for such as private networks, and left MyWeb to languish until ditching it last week. Grade: B for delicious; Grade: F for being completely rudderless.

+ SearchMonkey - tool for developers to use to build search applications. There is a Gallery you can browse. You can access this from the Customize button on the search results page too. These apps are intended to enhance search results, but you must be logged into your myYahoo to see them at work. Idea is good, execution isn't always clear, does take time for searchers to figure out and use. Grade: A for effort, B for result.

+ SearchPad - this new tool for searchers to use to compile research on a topic and share is available only to a trial group but it does sound promising. Grade: unknown.

+ Yahoo Widgets - went without notice entirely - these sit on the desktop - pick up news from customized selection in MyYahoo, use calculator, calendar etc - as good as Google's widgets (though there were some problems with Yahoo's news feed last year). How could Yahoo forget about this? Grade: A

However, to this let us add a failing grade (F) for what Yahoo has done to its directory over the past few years.

1. Hid the link to the Directory under the dropdown list for More from the menubar at the top.

2. In Yahoo Canada, the entry page to using the directory does not show the high-level categories - there is absolutely no guidance for the user.

3. In Yahoo, the directory entrance page has the categories down the side, and front and centre are short articles that are to be guides to popular topics - such pressing matters as Conan O'Brien taking over Jay Leno's spot. In the eye of this beholder - junk.

4. Changed the search function for the directory so that it searches the indexed words of the pages rather than only title, description, categorization. This sounds beneficial but isn't - it clutters results with pages that have incidental mention of a word but are not about that topic.

5. Loaded the pages with Sponsor Results that now take up nearly 1/3 of the space.

6. On web search results, stopped showing Category for sites that are in the directory - preventing searchers from using the directory to find other sites that are similar.

On balance, Yahoo Search has some nice features for personalizing the search experience, but it has bungled often, lost focus, and lost market share. If they could do one thing, I would suggest that it be to revamp Search Assist and provide clustered results in an easy-to-see-and-use interface. Bring back some of the "intelligence" that Altavista had. My second wish is that they return Yahoo Directory to former glory - but that's not going to happen.

Link Lists

Mahalo Caught Spamming Google With PageRank Funneling Link Scheme by SEOBook (Feb 17)

Jason Calacanas, CEO of Mahalo, is using link lists to increase PageRank of some Mahalo pages (higher paying). SEOBook calls this, and other practices of Calacanas, as "Google gaming and PageRank selling strategies". This latest one is in clear violation of Google's guidelines about link exchange.

"Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines ..."

This helps us understand how Google ranks results, and makes us think less of Mahalo.

Ask Frames Pages

Ask.com commits a cardinal sin Pandia by Pandia (Feb 14)

Two bits of news about Ask.com

The Good - they are investing in a new data centre - this means Ask is staying in search and not becoming some demographic portal (we hope)

The Bad - a clicked-on result is displayed inside an Ask frame at the top that shows a search box and related searches - and there is no-remove frame button. Pandia calls this a "cardinal sin" and predicts that it will anger experienced searchers and confuse novices.

It's an interesting idea - keeping the related searches on top could help a searcher change tack and try another route. But it's not good to force it on people. This would have been better done as a browser extension.

Since we are looking at Ask, Ask should ditch the NASCAR background image on the entry page. Not everyone likes noise, fumes, and insane speeds, not to mention deaths in fiery crashes.

Divining the Searcher's Intent

How Search Engines May Try to Match Searcher's Intents from Analysis of Search Engine Query Logs, Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea (Feb 13)

Bill Slawski finds through search engine patents that search engines are looking for ways to divine the intent of the searcher's query - and that one method is to look to patterns in the search logs to see what other words searchers have used and what they have selected. This can help in time sensitive queries (year of Olympics) and in strong keywords such as buy, reviews.

"If you perform a search at Google or Yahoo or Live.com, chances are that they will be considering the intention behind your search, and may show you results that are influenced by what the search engine believes the intent behind your query might have been.

One place that a search engine might look at is in their query log files to see if they can glean an implicit intent behind your search terms by seeing which results previous searchers might have chosen as search results, or looking at how searchers might have rewritten, or refined their search queries. "

This suggests to me that searchers can help themselves by describing as much of their intent as possible in their query. This includes using stock terms such as review, where search engines are now better at understanding the meaning and intent and will rate 'reviews' higher than pages that happen to have the word review.

Danny Sullivan Speaks

Search guru: What Google ought to change by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Feb 10)

Danny Sullivan had a lot to say at the recent Search Engine Marketing Expo with advice to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Google needs to be more transparent in its dealings with advertisers and less accepting of map spam (and I would add the other spam that still turns up in results). Yahoo has good product but is adrift and without focus. And Microsoft - will it ever figure out a brand for Live?

Answer Seeking Engines

3 great answer search engines, Pandia (Feb 6)

Pandia identifies three search engines that deliver "answers". Not Yahoo Answers - other sources of answers - such as discussion groups through Omgili, faqs through QueryCAT and Snappyfingers.

Google Search Help

Google has been improving its help pages for Web Search and iGoogle. Best start page is Web Search Help .

There is a new page for help in troubleshooting - click on the image of the Google home page to indicate where you have the problem. I'm not sure how easy it will be for people to connect a problem with an area on the screen, but following the trail on each of these areas reveals answers to a multitude of problems including presence of malware and Google preferences that you set up and then disappear.

One of the most informative pages explains Search customization details - how Google customizes results based on your location, recent searches, and web history.

Exalead at Work

Exalead meets Steve Arnold 12-11-2008

In this video, "Search engine expert Stephen E Arnold discusses the state of the search market, assesses Exalead's technology, and explains why he considers Exalead a company to watch."

One reason is the new search-inside a video called Voxalead that Exalead is demoing at its Lab.

There is some additional information in the blog entry - 5 questions to Stephen E. Arnold (Nov 19)

Get Air Miles thru Yahoo Canada

Yahoo! Canada, Air Miles® and FreeCause Target Two-Thirds of Canadian Households With Agreement That Rewards Consumers' Online Searches, press release , FreeCause (Jan 28)

Air Miles members will be able to chalk up points by using the Yahoo Search toolbar.

"The fully-integrated AIR MILES Toolbar allows Canadians who are AIR MILES Collectors to earn five free reward miles for every 50 AIR MILES Toolbar searches (to a maximum of 360 reward miles per year), displays account balances and ensures Collectors earn reward miles when shopping at the more than 100 online sponsors at airmilesshops.ca. "

Ranking Algorithms

Google's .edu Domain Love: Department of Economics ≠ Mortgage, or Does It? , SEO Book (Jan 27)

Does Google give .edu results higher ranking even if page doesn't match well on terms? This entry suggests that something is amiss in the ranking algorithms.

Number Count at Google Web Search

What's going on with Google web search? I'm getting some very bizarre number counts that change with the placement of a word - california at the beginning of the query , or at the end, or in both places.

california legislation and regulations for "tailpipe emissions" -- 5,570 -- shows 504 results

legislation and regulations for "tailpipe emissions" california -- 3,650 -- and shows 691 results

california legislation and regulations for "tailpipe emissions" california -- 5,540 - shows 461

The first two queries have exactly the same words, and one would expect the same count with possibly some differences in ranking. And why does it drop some when adding a second california at the end? Is Google doing something with proximity matching?

Further inconsistencies in:

california ~legislation and regulations for tailpipe emissions -- 17,600

california ~legislation and regulations for "tailpipe emissions" -- 65,100

Marking the phrase should have dropped the number of results.

Also the query -- legislation and regulations for tailpipe emissions in california -- produced 6,250 results today and 80,600 in June 2008. The larger number seems more reasonable. Yahoo for the same search shows 119,000 (tho this drops to 116,000 as you page through to the 1000th and last result shown). Is Google's counter off? Did Google purge its databases? Is Google matching differently?

Ask.com "Semantic" Technologies

AnswerFarm Technology from Ask.com, Ask.com Blog (Jan 14)

Ask.com has been blogging about its "semantic" technologies. This post gives us some idea of how the Q&A works.

"The technology behind the Ask Q&A channel is called AnswerFarm technology. We built it by crawling and extracting question/answer pairs from across the web – more than 100 million question/answer pairs from several hundred thousand sources – and it is, no doubt, the most comprehensive and diverse repository of question/answer pairs in the world."

From Semantic Search Technology Advances from Ask.com we learn that Ask can get into databases with its DADS technology - Direct Answers from Databases.

"With DADS, we no longer rely on text-matching simple keywords, but rather we parse users’ queries and then we form database queries which return answers from the structured data in real time. Front and center. Our aspiration is to instantly deliver the correct answer no matter how you phrased your query."

But they are "trialing" all this good stuff on sports, and specifically NASCAR.

Google Ends Some Products

Google killing Jaiku, Dodgeball, Notebook, other projects by Rafe Needleman (Jan 14)

There are quite a few products that are going to be closed. Development will stop on Notebook - and one presumes will fade away as users move to other products. Some speculate that Knol will go too - though it's not on the list to be axed yet.

Yahoo's SearchMonkey delivers Wikipedia

Yahoo Shows Wikipedia Some SearchMonkey Love by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 15)

"Yahoo has just announced that the Wikipedia SearchMonkey App is now turned on by default for all Yahoo search users. Wikipedia becomes the sixth app that all Yahoo searchers will see, joining LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, and Zagat."

See what you can expect from the screenshots of snippets taken from Wikipedia and included in the Yahoo search results.

Googlebomb Lurks

Bush: Fix Your “Miserable Failure” Googlebomb Legacy Before Obama Takes Office, by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 7)

The 'miserable failure' Googlebomb lives on. Danny Sullivan sees it at work still at Live and Yahoo, and it's a "lurking threat at Google". It won't end when President George W. Bush leaves office - links are just redirected to the biography of the current president. Sullivan proposes a solution, which we hope the White House tech staff read.

Reminder - the bomb worked this way - back in December 2003, "people were told to use the words “miserable failure” and link to Bush’s biography here" - and hundreds did. Very quickly the pages received high ranking for those terms - since so many other pages linked to it. Enter miserable and failure separately or together - you'll likely see www.whitehouse.gov/president/ in the top 10 results.

Search as a Habit

Cuil, the search engine that claimed to be a Google killer in 2008 received some notice recently from Matt Asay at CNet and then Stephen Arnold.

Breaking the Google habit by Matt Asay, CNet (Dec 29, 2008)

He asks, why is Google the search leader leader and concluded it is because Google has become a habit.

Stephen Arnold says that he has been talking for years about a "theme of search as a habit". Cruel to Cuil (Dec 30)

But the puzzling line from Asay is, "for competitors looking to kick the Google search habit, you can't take the Cuil route and compete on search. It just won't matter if you're better. You need to create a different, compelling habit."

Cuil is hardly proof that a better search engine won't score against Google - it is considerably inferior - fine for the two or three word broad search query, completely inadequate for more complex queries.

View of quality of results may be subjective, but for general web search, Google still leads in relevant results and offers the searcher many advanced techniques. Using Google is not a bad habit.

Recap of 2008 in Search

50 Most Memorable Moments in Search for 2008, Search Engine Watch (Dec 31, 2008)

If you like to review the year, this posting picks out the top stories about the major search engine companies: Yahoo, Live, Google, Ask and a few others.

The Right Search Tool by Richard Martin, Internet Evolution (Sept 27, 2008)

Although written earlier, this article is an excellent review of 12 months of change in the Web search market that spots several new niche tools.

Interesting conclusion: "As niche products take their place alongside mainstream tools, the frustration of having one imperfect search engine soon could be replaced by a new one -- having to constantly switch tools based on the type of work a person’s doing. Nevertheless, if new search technologies do a better job of finding the information people need, it’s a consequence many of us will accept. "

Five New Search Tools

5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 29)

Five search tools to try - Track this Now news search engine that shows location of stories on Google Maps, StateStats - statistics on US states, Jogli - for music search, 2Itch - US local search engine, Ninja Tickets - for tickets in the US.

Videos on Google

Learn more about search and SEM from Google videos, Pandia (Dec 23, 2008)

Several videos are presented here for Google users about search, Google maps, privacy, the new SearchWiki, and webmaster tools, as well as a link to a catalog of Google Videos at YouTube.

Changes at Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land gets a facelift, Pandia (Jan)

Describes the new design at Search Engine Land. See for yourself - Search Engine Land.

This change took place in December. Danny Sullivan wrote about Search Engine Land’s New Look.

Biggest item is probably the addition of premium membership with access to two years of stories. Members can also view videos from the SMX conferences.

Top 10 from Altsearchengines

Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008 by Charles Knight, via ReadWriteWeb (Dec 19)

Charles Knight, master of Altsearchengines, picked 10 new search engines. He notes - "As evidence of just how much the landscape is changing, three of our top 10 products require one-time downloads: once thought to be the kiss of death when Google sits in wait. But AltSearchEngines thinks that 2009 will be the tipping point when the rewards outweigh the "risks," at least for power users. For everyone else: 2010. Faroo, KallOut, and Surf Canyon (and, again, Tazti) are all well worth leaving your comfort zone for."

These are good picks. SearchMe and Viewzi are very interesting for visual search. I'm one who would rather not download - so that rules out Cooliris (3D environment for thumbing through visual sites -) for now, but SurfCanyon was irresistible.

"Surf Canyon is a browser extension that personalizes search engine results as you search! Available for download as an add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE6 and IE7), the software figures out what you want and then automatically recommends relevant search results."

Altsearchengines also has top ten lists for the following:

* Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 International Products of 2008
* Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
* Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
* Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
* Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008

The Agenda - Google and Us

The Agenda at TVO.org examined the influence of Google on our lives today in It's Google Earth, We Just Live On It. (Dec 5)

Steve Paikin interviewed a panel that included Eric Morris of Google Canada, Mathew Ingram - new media reporter at the Globe and Mail, Leila Boujnane, CEO of Idée Inc. in Toronto, and from the US, Alexander halavais at Quinnipiac University and Siva Vaidhyanathan of University of Virginia.

Topics:It began with the statistics on the market share of search and revenue from paid search (Google's revenue is $16 billion a year - after only 10 years in business). There was some discussion about whether Google is invincible - others have lost ground (Yahoo and Microsoft being two examples). Does Google live up to its motto to do no evil? What about privacy? Do people appreciate how much data Google collects on their habits and that there is some risk. One of the liveliest parts was on whether Google is making us more stupid because we can so easily look things up. Leila Boujnane thought it might be making us lasier. Mathew Ingram wouldn't say dumber since people are able to get answers to questions but they might get the wrong information or be overloaded - people need new research and literacy skills. From the US, Siva Vaidhyanathan opined that Google is making us smarter. Is Google Americanizing the world? Of interest - over 50% of searches at Google are from outside North America. Google chat can be translated.

Video is worth watching - 39 minutes. Available from http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/ for a couple more days. There is also an audio file.

Kosmix is Topic Centric

Search start-up Kosmix raises $20 million, by Steven Musil, Webware (Dec 8)

Technology stalwarts back Google rival Kosmix in fight for cyberspace, by Richard Wray, The Guardian (Dec 8)

Big news for Kosmix: it has new funding and new front page. Kosmix started in 2006 with a novel way of presenting topics by subject or format (weblog, journals) and organizing by category. Early on it had verticals for health, travel, and politics. Over the 4 years or so it has waxed (I loved it at the beginning for the way it organized the information) and waned (when the pages became terribly cluttered).

Originally supported by Jim Bezos of Amazon, it has entered a new phase with an infusion of $20 million from Time Warner and Ed Zander, former head of Motorola.

Kosmix has relaunched with a new look and the Beta label (meaning it's in test and may change). Front and center is the line - What's happening on the web: December 9, 2008 - with stories, videos, images, shopping, and some headlines from People.com on celebrities.

It all looks shallow to me - and especially the hot topics with names of celebrities, politicians, and sports teams - probably the subjects of interest to current searchers. But one stands out - 'cholera outbreak'.

Click on Cholera Outbreak to get an excellent collection of news, images, web search results, related topics, blogs, opinions, videos - truly universal search. This illustrates why Kosmix should be back on our radar.

The Guardian wrote - "The site looks more like a web portal than a search engine. It pulls together text, audio and video content based on the underlying concept behind any query entered, rather than just looking for sites that contain the words in that query."

There will be advertisements. The sponsored ads on the cholera question included an AARP article on the cholera emergency in Zimbabwe.

Kosmix is also the power behind Right Health, a health vertical that is topic-centric and has similar features.

Travel and Politics did not evolve into their own sites - but you can get a good overview of travel resources in the travel topic.. Beyond that, you might search directly for a place (eg Kauai ) or tag on the word travel ( travel kauai)

Kosmix - good to use to get a big picture view on a topic and appreciation of the variety of resources to consider.

Abstracts of search results coming to Yahoo Search

Yahoo technology will offer abstracts of search results John Ribeiro (IDG News Service) via PCWorld (Dec 5)

This will be a dramatic improvement for Yahoo Search - "Yahoo India is developing information extraction technology that will offer abstracts of URLs when users do a search."

"The Bangalore lab is working in the area of automated information extraction, which involves going into the URLs, going through billions of pages, and extracting the relevant information, he said."

Alexa Web Search

Alexa Search: The Gone-Goose Flock Grows, by Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search (Nov 29)

There are reports that Amazon may be closing Alexa Web Search, a service for which there were few subscribers. I don't think this means that Alexa.com will be closed but it's hard to tell.

Pandia on Google's SearchWiki

Google SearchWiki: What are the implications?, Pandia (Nov 23)

Good, long thoughtful review of Google's SearchWiki.

"Google SearchWiki launched this week. It is Google’s way of making search a more interactive experience. We tell you how it works, how we like it and what the wider implications are for searching and search engine marketing."

More Concerns about Google's SearchWiki

SearchWiki a Blight on Google's Record Heather Havenstein, Computerworld via PC World (Nov 24)

Google is taking a lot of heat for not having an opt-out option on the personalized SearchWiki.

Dave Weinberger, at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, identified one very troubling aspect - that "results page shows users the nicknames of others users who have voted a page up."

Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, commented that Google is having its users do the ranking and selecting.

""With SearchWiki, Google can now amass an even larger data set of user behavior, including how particular users rank certain results, what results they don't find relevant, and even what results should be there that Google's spider hasn't yet discovered," he noted. "In short, users are now performing much of the crawling, indexing, and ranking functions that Google has previously stated was done to near perfection through its algorithms. "

Google International

Our international approach to search, Official Google Blog (Nov 21)

Google operates in many languages and must handle synonyms, stemming, spelling differences, diacritical marks. There is a lot going on.

"So far I described how we improve the quality of search in a language. However, there is a strong effect of the location of the user, even if it is only approximated to the country, since in many cases local content is more relevant than global information."

Kumo Live

Microsoft Rebranding Live Search As Kumo.com? by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 24)

Don't you wish you could get paid for stupid ideas?

"Say it ain’t so! LiveSide is reporting that Microsoft might be rebranding Live Search under the name, Kumo.com."

RefSeek for students and researchers

RefSeek says this about itself - "RefSeek (rĕf-sēk) is a web search engine for students and researchers. RefSeek aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers."

It also has a small directory to types of sites. Perhaps RefSeek indexes their content. RefSeek doesn't say. Nor does it say who or what sponsors it.

Has basic syntax for phrases, exclude, search a site, and use OR. Does give suggestions for narrowing the search.

Mentioned in RefSeek - Academic Search Engine Filters Advertising, Free Technology for Teachers (Nov 11)

What's Wrong with Search

Why Google Must Die by John Dvorak, PC Magazine (Nov 17)

Strong words from John Dvorak about search engine optimization practices and consequence.

"By reverse-engineering the way Google operates, SEO experts can see how the process works. From a user's perspective, once you learn how Google does what it does, it's a miracle that you ever get the right results. And from my experience, the right results in many circumstances are nearly impossible to obtain—and may never be obtainable in the future."

He suggests - "rethinking the basic organization of the Web itself, using the Google News concept. In other words, compartmentalize the Web to an extreme. Tagging might help. But you should be able just to search through a subsegment and check a box that eliminates merchants with faux-informational sites."

A Reason for Canadians to Use Live Search

Win A New Car! Live Search Offers Canadian Searchers Prizes With “Big Ticket Search” by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 20)

"Ars Technica reports Microsoft is now trying a new way to incentivizes searches, this time in Canada. Microsoft launched Big Ticket Search to influence Canadians to search using Live Search. Canadians can win wide range of prizes, ranging from 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer SE to gift certificates."

Google's SearchWiki

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Nov 20)

If you're logged into your Google account you can use Google's new SearchWiki to adjust the search results - and as you adjust, Google learns what you consider to be relevant.

"Google's SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes."

There is a notes feature also -- "There's also a collaborative element: people can show the collective wisdom of the masses by clicking a "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of each search results page. That shows notes and how people have promoted or deleted pages in aggregate."

Promising. Could be personalized and social at their best.

SEO and Personalized Results

The Future of Google's Search Personalization By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, (Nov 18)

Google's personalization of results is getting pervasive - it's location, recent activity, history.

"So, for those of you who may not have received this message before: search engine ranking is dead. In the very near future, you will no longer be able to reliably check your rankings in the Google search engine."

What's this mean to SEO? Jackson advises, "Concentrate on understanding your ideal Web site visitor. Understand what you want someone to do when they come to your site. Focus on content and keeping visitors on your site."

Search Engine APIs

Yahoo! BOSS Adds Key Terms Feature by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Nov 18)

Yahoo BOSS users can enrich their custom search engine with key terms based on the same technology that underpins Search Assist.

Of interest: "ast week, Microsoft Live Search launched a fuller-featured API, which also opens up access to their data. Search engines have an amazing amount of data and intelligence about the web and it’s a great trend that they’re beginning to make that available to developers as the foundation for innovative web applications."

Reference Extract

Project Proposal - The Power of Search meets the Credibility of Librarians by Jeffrey Penka, OCLC (Oct 1, 2008)

Here is more about the proposal for Reference Extract as a new web search engine that would be built using the " expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe." The project has received funding frm the MacArthur Foundation.

From the article:

"Reference Extract seeks to add another dimension to search—credibility. Reference Extract takes the success of the page rank approach and uses it to highlight credible (not just popular) sites. It does this by using the judgments of a high credibility population, librarians, to determine which sites are searched, and the order of the search results."

Article refers to the Librarians' Internet Index as a service that is highly regarded for credibility. One of its shortcomings was that it didn't add enough resources to expand its scope. This article must have been written before it was known that LII also didn't get enough funding to even survive.

Nonetheless, this project will proceed to develop plans over the next few months specifically "to aggregate the citation patterns of reference librarians into a general purpose search engine". Other OCLC sources - books - could be tied in.

The aim is admirable. But what will be the financial model after the funding is gone?

Thanks to Odette for the link.

Librarians at Work

OCLC, Syracuse University, and University of Washington Team Up, Econtent (Nov 11}

"Researchers and developers from OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington announced their participation in a new international effort to explore the creation of a more credible web search experience based on input from librarians around the globe. "

What's Next for Yahoo?

Bye bye Google! What now Yahoo?, Pandia (Nov 6)

Interesting comments by Pandia on what Yahoo's options are now. Yahoo has been fumbling along. It gets very high traffic for services and content, but not revenue.

"Still, the company has reported no increase in its cash flow for four years, according to the Financial Times. Part of the explanation can be found in a lack of a clear overall strategy and a bad compartmentalisation of its activities. In short: Company units are competing as much against each other as against external competitors. Yahoo has, for instance, two bookmarking services."

Questioning Ask

Is Ask.com's Web Search Technology Falling Apart? at Search Engine Roundable (Nov 3)

This doesn't sound good. People at Webmasterworld are reporting poor results at Ask.com - limited set, old items, outdated statistics from the binocular information. Ask has been doing things to its algorithms to try to "answer" questions - perhaps that work broke other things.

Ask.com's Position

Diller's IAC loses after 5-way split by Rachel Metz, AP via Globe and Mail (Nov 5)

IAC – which includes Ask.com - lost 11 cents per share in the period ended Sept. 30. It would seem that all is not rosy with Ask.com with market share dropping slightly in the US, although holding in other places. Analyst Jim Friedland of Cowen & Co said, “The bottom line is if Google can offer better map features, better search results and related features like Gmail, over time it's just likely that Ask becomes less relevant for the users.”

Effect of Search Monkey on Yahoo Search Results

Yahoo offers SearchMonkey experiments by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Oct 31)

Yahoo is encouraging more programmers to augment Yahoo search results for their web sites.

Nice description of what the searcher sees thanks to Search Monkey.

"SearchMonkey embeds selected search results into more elaborate packaging. For example, a restaurant appearing in the search results can change from a name with a Web site link into that plus an address, phone number, map, and customer reviews. Programmers create SearchMonkey applications that present the fancier results; SearchMonkey apps are enabled by default from Zagat, CitySearch, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local. "-

Google Indexes Scanned PDF Documents

Scanned documents found...by Google, by Eric Franklin, Webware (Oct 30)

BIG NEWS -- Google is now indexing scanned documents.

"Google is now able to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on any scanned document it finds stored in the PDF format. OCR technology is able to "read" a scanned document and covert it into words that can be searched and indexed. "

Also see - A Picture of a Thousand Words at Official Google Blog.

Ranking - Trust and Authority

How Google Might Differentiate Between Trust and Authority, Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Oct 9)

Summary of points about distinguishing between trust (as in trust a domain) and authority (where page is to be an authority - and more relevant - for a parituclar query).

7 New Search Tools

7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 21)

These are 7 new search tools each with a different twist. Some do web - offering selection of several tools, some do images, one does recommendations and one finds tickets. The twists are mainly in interface and display.

+ Fasteagle - multi-tool, all-in-one kind of search - except choices are limited.

+ Kedrix - meta search - Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask - individual tabs. This approach has been used before (many times - Zuula is one). Some love this kind of engine, but it's tough for these guys to stay in business.

+ Soovle - wonder if they meant swivil, or maybe it's so-o-vle? Either way - Soovle expands search terms as you type to show suggestions from 6 centres (Google, Ask, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube, Answers) - and you then choose which suggestion you want to try and where. Interesting idea, not very helpful in practice. Screen is difficult to read (Firefox 3.0), and suggestions are always going to be very elementary, common phrase expansions.

+ Facesaerch - great film-strip type of display of faces matching your search term.

+ CompFight - has features for searching Flickr, whether on text or tag, Creative Commons or original, safe search. Search for Utah rocks - some fantastic photos.

+ Tastekid - recommendation engine - these are always time sinks where you can spend hours telling the engine about your likes and dislikes and sometimes get a good recommendation, but most of the time not.

+ Fansnap - finds tickets - works with ticket providers in the United States

Scour Revamped

Search Engine Scour Ramps Up Search Speed, altsearchengines (Oct 20)

Scour is social and it's rewarding -- and now it's faster and has a new layout with new features.

"Launched in July, Scour is a meta search engine, gathering results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. People are rewarded with VISA gift cards for searching, voting and commenting on results. One point is awarded for each search, vote or comment. Accruing 6500 points translates into a $25 reward. Scour has paid out many users already."

Hakia's New Interface Sparkles

Hakia, the meaning-based engine, has redesigned its interface dramatically and Hakia is all the better for it. This takes it out of experimental and fringe to a very useable search tool and contender for our attentions.

Hakia works more meaning of words - the concepts of a query and of the content - and not with links to rank results. It has also begun a program to use "credible sites" for queries in health and environment.

Display may be in three columns, depending on results. The first is for the results, next images, and right-most column has the sponsored links. You'll see this in treating sciatica pain

Tabs give quick access to:

+ Web results: The results are pleasantly different (though they may not always seem higher in relevance than those from Google).

+ Credible sites: health and environment so far
+ News: Good range of sources from USA, UK, Canada and other countries
+ Images
+ Meet Others: talk to others about a topic - where people registered with Hakia post stories on topics such as Wall Street Rescue Plan.
+ Galleries: Hakia's mini-encyclopedia of entries on topics and people created from analyzing web content and assembling the material in meaningful groupings. These are always excellent.
+ MyHakia: personal space to customize - limited in sources and options. Weather is only for US cities, but can get headline news from many different parts of the world and can set up own news topics.

See Hakia improves the presentation of search results Pandia (Oct 13)

"Semantic search engine hakia launched a new user interface last week. The aim is to “take search beyond 10 blue links”. "

Also Search company Ask.com makes some changes - does it matter?

Pandia also compared the new Hakia to the new Ask, and suggests that Hakia wins in adopting an interface style that Ask has dropped. The article also describes the technology for answering questions that Ask is now using - a useful contrast to what we know about Hakia.

Indexing Flash

Flash is no longer the Search Engine Pit of Death, Pandia (Oct 16)

"Google is now reading the text of Flash content. Google’s spiders will “click” on buttons and fill in forms in order to get access to content."

Yahoo and Google have both been working with Adobe to improve indexing of words in flash presentations.

Ask does semantic

Ask.com Sails into Semantic Search to Differentiate from Google, by Clint Boulton, eWeek (Oct 6)

Ask is said to be leveraging semantic technologies to make it better at answering questions. The example given is that "What NFL games are on TV next Sunday" would get the same answer as "What Sunday games from the NFL are scheduled?" thanks to new powers at understanding the intent. This should improve relevancy for "high-volume entertainment, health and reference patrons " - but what about other pursuits? No mention in the article if Ask is beefing up content or capability in other subject areas.

Instead, it has launched a new Q&A search across the populist services - wiki answers, Yahoo answers, allexperts etc. Hope they give people instruction on how to vet the answers.

However, others are praising Ask for the change.

Ask.com rearms with semantics, rich media in search war By David Chartier, Ars Technica, October 06, 2008

"Our testing gives credence to Ask.com's claim that it has the best semantic search engine for the general web so far. "

Searchmonkey application at Yahoo

Yahoo SearchMonkey gets Zagat, CitySearch by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Oct 16)

"Yahoo has broadened use of its SearchMonkey technology to spruce up search results with specific information from Citysearch and Zagat, the company said Thursday."

Information includes ratings, address, and hours on restaurants. Doesn't appear to show for Toronto restaurants, even those listed in Zagat.

Postscript (Oct 20) - Yahoo Adds Local Content To Search Results Via SearchMonkey by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 17) -- more examples of how businesses can add "more local business content to their web search results thanks to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey program."

How will Ask Prove this?

Search engine Ask gets a facelift , BBC News (Oct 6)

UK perspective on the revamped search results display at Ask.com is generally favourable.

Of interest:

"Data from net measurement firm ComScore found that Ask is more often used by people searching for specific answers to questions.

While such questions account for about 5% of queries to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, it accounts for 15% of Ask's searches. "

How will Ask prove that " the re-designed site will be faster, produce more relevant search results and improved search technology. " ?

Google - more types of content in web results

Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 9)

Search Engine Land notes -- "two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages."

Google has been adding dates to news items pulled up in web search results, and number of posts for a discussion thread.

Ask trys to answer questions

Ask.com, now with more answers by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Oct 5)

The changes at Ask were to improve its answering capabilities. Usage will tell us whether it succeeds at this - but it removed all the aids it provided users to improve the question.

"The biggest change is that Ask is parsing more data from various sources and displaying that in its search results. If you ask Ask a question, the algorithms will try to give you an answer in the result pages, not just a link to a relevant Web site. Ask.com president Scott Garrell confirmed that, yes indeed, this is the premise that Ask was founded on in 1996 when it was Ask Jeeves, but back then the answers were hand-crafted. Today they're created by the engine. "

Graphical Search Display

Search interfaces of tomorrow you can try today by Rafe Needleman, Webware (oct 2)

Reviews several new search interfaces that use a graphical display. Generally these are not successful because images are too small, service is too slow, or some other functionality is missing. There are a couple of exceptions worth looking into.

+ Redzee - thumbnails
+ Nexplore - uses Yahoo index for web - panels - a bit like the 3D Ask.
+ Viewzi - does a meta-search across four engines - shows thumbnail shots.
+ Cuil - said to be attractive
+ Searchme - "a genuinely useful visual search engine"
+ Piclens (or Cooliris) - "It's a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you search for and display photos and videos from specific sources like Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, and Amazon.com."

Changes at Ask.com

Ask.com Upgrade to Add Improved Relevance, Speed Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Oct 5)

This looks like the official line on the changes at Ask.com that abandoned the 3D look and return to what looks like basic search results with some suggested related searches.

"Ask.com has sharpened the relevance of its search results, made the engine faster and simplified the site's layout, said Ask.com President Scott Garrell.

"The strategy from a product perspective is to provide the best answer the first time, everytime," Garrell said. "We want to reduce the distance between your query and the answer you want.""

Accoona Gone

Post #2000! Rest in Peace, Accoona, Alt Search Engines (Oct 3)

AltSearchEngines reported that Accoona has closed up shop. This was a business oriented search engine that had quite a boost several years ago with endorsement of sorts from President Clinton. It had some interesting features for extracting entities but was never fully successful - perhaps inadequate index, perhaps never particularly compelling.

Wikia Search

Wikia Search Debuts App Platform to Sharpen Query Answers, by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World (Oct 7)

"Wikia Search already allows anyone to participate in building its index by manually adding, deleting and rating Web pages, as well as editing a search result URL by modifying its headline and description. Contributions are reflected immediately and don't go through an approval process."

Hakia asks Librarians

Hakia Relaunches Site With “Trusted Results” by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

"Today at SMX East, natural language search engine Hakia has launched a new search experience that enables searchers to view categorized results, as well as view “Trusted” Results” from “Credible Sites”."

Librarians helped in developing this list of credible sites. It's called the Trusted Results Program. These are available for health, medical, and environmental topics.

Ask Steps Backwards

Ask.com Goes Back To 1996 With New Release, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

"Ask.com has released version 11 of their new search engine today. The new version somewhat goes back to the Ask Jeeves approach, focusing on providing structured search results, mostly in the form of answers."

From what I can see, Ask has dismantled the very effective 3D interface that showed results from a variety of collections and formats and gone back to Teoma times with linear search results in one panel, and "related searches" on the right.

We've been patient with Ask, and have often applauded its innovations. This new design is a giant step backwards. Ask can answer 'what is a recession' fairly well, but can it answer correctly, what is a failed search engine?

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer gets a redesign, blogstorm (Oct 3)

Link analysis tool - Yahoo Site Explorer - has a new design for presenting option

Cognition's Semantic Map

Cognition Technologies Creates Semantic Map of the English Language, Newsbreaks (Sept 25 )

"Cognition Technologies (www.cognition.com), a company with next-generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, has announced the release of what it calls "the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language." Technologies incorporating it will be able to provide users with more accurate and complete search capabilities, the ability to personalize and filter content, and an improved user experience by significantly reducing the amount of irrelevant information presented"

Ranking - dynamic vs static urls

Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs - The Best Practice for SEO is Still Clear by Randfish, Seomoz.org (Sep 23)

So - dynamic urls do still cause some problems - they get indexed but don't rank well.

"So - bottom line - dynamic URLs don't afford you the same opportunity for search engine rankings, usability or portability that rewritten, keyword-optimized URLs do. Just because one of the engines doesn't have trouble crawling them doesn't mean it's any less critical to continue optimizing this element of a site's structure."

Quintura Visual

Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov - The Interview by SEOBook at Alt Search Engines (

The CEO of Qunitura talks about the technology and intentions of the Quintura search site. The Quintura interface is remarkable for the visual aids it provides the searcher. It uses the Yahoo index mainly for web search.

"At the heart of our technology is a semantic-based ‘neural network’ algorithm. The cloud is literally a depiction of those search terms laid out to show their contextual relationship. Since the graphic depiction is dynamic - (you are interacting with the search in real time) one of our design goals has been to develop the widget to be extremely responsive."

There is also the comment that "Quintura makes boolean search easy to visualize."

There is a Quintura for Kids that has been favourable received by schools and libraries -- "The search engine is used mostly in the elementary schools and public libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."

Google may be the synonym for search, but Quintura could be a strong second engine for exploring a topic.

Market Share Stats - August

Google Searches at 63% of the Search Market for August 2008, Search Engine Watch (Setp 19)

Comscore figures for the US Market. Google continues to gain from Yahoo and Microsoft.

+ Google 63%
+ Yahoo 19.6%
+ Microsoft 8.3%
+ ASK 4.8%

Musings on search

Search engines: Your questions answered before you ask Telegraph (Sept 20)

"Search engines of the future will answer any question, anywhere, at any time, says Claudine Beaumont "

Google's Marissa Mayer hopes that search will be more accessible. She went so far as to write down every question that came up in an evening that she would like to get the answers for. Might we be gathering too much information, have too many questions?

However, this article suggests that the semantic web might be a solution.

"The semantic web, by contrast, will focus on the meaning of data on a page. In turn, this will enable computers to "understand" the context of the information and the links between the data and the people and places that underpin it. It will, in theory at least, produce richer, more complex and more useful search results that don't simply return an answer to the initial question, but add related information that contributes to our understanding of the subject at the heart of the query."

It stil depends on the question.

Google Search Quality

The Human Side To Google: Search Evaluations by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sep 16)

Google blog posting describes how Google evaluates search. Short story is that Google uses people in many country to evaluate quality of results, and Google runs some live experiments (unknown to the user) and watches what happens.

Google Co-Dependence

The Future Of Search: Your Best Friend With All The Answers by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sep 11)

Schartz picks out the best line by Marissa Mayer of Google on the future of search.

"So what's our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best."

Note the points about quality and preferences. But there is also the implication that search is always on.

Exactly - it is. NPR in Talk on the Nation examined this a new social phenomenon. Wherever you go - subway, dinner party, business meeting - people are checking facts and looking up restaurants with a Google search.

See Sarah Handel's post - I Can't Quit You, Google (Sept 8) - Rob Dubbin of Colbert talks about trying to do without Google for 24 hours.

Personalized Search

The future of search may be personalized, but what about your privacy?, Pandia (

"Pandia takes a look at how the search engines may use your web surfing habits and other data to fine tune your search results."

Personalized search really hinges on the user trusting the search engine enough to know history and interests. So far, remarks Pandia, the improvement to search results is negligible. Google might be trying a user voting (which I think is even less likely to succeed.)

Yahoo, meantime, is going down the semantic search / analysis path. But there are problems there too, at least for public web --"There is one huge problem with semantic search, however. It is based on the premise that web page producers are rational beings that are actually willing to tag their pages with relevant information."

Hakia Alternative

Search Engines’ Choices: Google v.s. hakia.com, Hakia (Sept 5)

Melek Pulatkonak at Hakia noticed a paper by James Grimmelmann, an Associate Professor of Law at the New York Law School, who posed a telling question about Google, "Where is the line between a search engine’s First Amendment right to build its system as it likes, and its responsibility as a public corporate citizen guiding users in the Web jungle?"

This posting from Hakia shows how Hakia's results are different from Google's. ffers an alternative to the system Google uses.

Personalized Search at Google

Google Friends has announced that Google now notifies you when it personalizes results based on your search history or geographic location - you'll see a note in the upper right; e.g., "Personalized based on your web search history - More details".

Other updates are available by subscribing to Google Friends through Google Groups.

Privacy at Yahoo

Yahoo! Announces New Privacy Choice eContent (Aug 12)

"Yahoo! Inc. announced that it will offer users the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. ... Users will be able to access the opt-out in the Yahoo! privacy center, which is linked on the home page and nearly every page on the Yahoo! network."

Small change at Yahoo

Yahoo Grouping Results & Google Tests Sort By Date Or Relevance by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 19)

Main news item is Yahoo's new indent.

SortFix for trying alternatives

InfoTip: SearchFix.com Mary Ellen Bates (Aug 2008)

Mary Ellen Bates fully described SortFix in this review. It uses Google, Yahoo, and the Open Directory. It's a bit cute with its boxes but does have some useful aids such as drag and drop of terms.

Main point: "It appears that the best uses of this search engine are for searches where you know you will be trying a number of alternative words and phrases, and would appreciate the Standby box"

More about BOSS

Yahoo's BOSS touts its search site creations By Holly Jackson, Webware (Aug 7)

Many are building new search mashups with Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS). There are some examples given in this article including 4HourSearch - it took 4 hours to build and it looks pretty good.

Another take on Cuil

Cuil: New Search Engine to Watch by Greg Notess, Newsbreaks (Aug 7)

Despite the numerous problems with the new search engine, Cuil , Greg Notess sees some merit at least in noting its features.

"For the information professional, Cuil is worth evaluating at this stage to see how it works and to consider its potential. While it has no advanced search and few advanced features at this point, Cuil does support phrase searching. The attempts to categorize results, the alternate display, and a different approach to ranking means that Cuil may be able to help searchers find documents that might not appear at other search engines, especially since Cuil uses its own unique database."

Yahoo Olympics Shortcuts

Yahoo! Shortcuts for Summer Olympic Fever, Yahoo Blog (Aug 5)

Yahoo Search will respond to searches for information on the Olympics with results from Yahoo Sports - eg queries on medal counts, athletes, events.

Alternative Viewzi

Search the web visually with Viewzi by Andrew Mager, ZDNet (Aug 4)

Viewzi is a new service that introduces an entirely new approach to exploring a space on the web. This posting has screenshots of most of the views you might use. Read the posting and then try the service, or try the service and then read about it. Either way you're in for an interesting time.

Viewzi offers a variety of types of searches: news, site information, photos - through thumbshots. Pick the view that best fits what you searched on - if you searched on a politician, select news; if you're searching on a place, you might want photos. Viewzi would be easier to use if it let you select what you want first and then run the search.

Alternative Search Engines - August

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, August, Altsearchengines (Aug 4)

Get this list in many formats now. I prefer the plain web page .

I see that the metasearcher / federated search with faceted clustering, iSeeks, gets top billing. But the absolutely magnificent pair Allplus.com and Polymeta.com done by WebLib get scarcely a nod - Allplus is #24, and Polymeta is not on the list.

Otherwise, there's lots to try out. Would be nice if Alt Search Engines ran a contest and invited votes.

Trends in Search

Options, We’ve Got Search Engine Options! by Paula J. Hane, Newslinks (Aug 4)

Picks out four (and possibly five) trends: vertical, semantic, social, rewarding (small payment or possibility of), and maybe some recognition by search engines about privacy concerns.

Related search at Google

Google Tests Related Search Phrases Inline With Search Results by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 31)

Some have spotted signs that Google may introduce new links for related search results.

Google Reveals Customization

Google Now Notifies Of "Search Customization" & Gives Searchers Control by Danny Sullivan, Searchengineland (Jul 30)

Important posting on the customization Google does to searches based on geography and search history.

"Google is now showing "search customization" messages to inform searchers when their search results have been modified from "normal" due to a searcher's geographic location, previous query or web surfing and search history. It's a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on "under the hood" at Google and override it if the wrong choices are being made."

Search Hubris

Can we please kill the Google killer talk? Sara Holoubek, DMNews (July 28, 2008)

Yes please

"Just when I thought it was safe to go outside, a new Google killer has been reported to be on the loose. Monday morning, start-up search engine cuil.com was launched, accompanied by a rapid fire of cheerleading, speculation and, ultimately, ridicule. Search experts around the globe threw five to 10 queries at the engine before declaring Cuil a failure."

Cuil promises "contextual search"

New search engine takes aim at Google By Rafe Needleman, Webware (Jul 27)

Sounds like the new search engine Cuil is serious about taking on Google, but it sure would be a tall order.

"The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web.""

I think they should have labelled this as beta because the engine is still quite rough.

Good points:

+ display in 3 colums is attractive

Bad points:

+ utah places - the first page of results are all from Oddpath, a commercial site for searching business and places

+ best places to visit in utah - no results - too many search terms

+ utah tourism - not bad but nothing special either. Also kicks out with an error message. Search engine is probably overloaded with people trying it out.

The review mentioned that Cuil will group results - but I don't see it.

And to top it all off, the Info page was a bad url.

Back to the drawing board.

Postscript: Danny Sullivan really went to town on Cuil (pronounce Cool - maybe it's welsh) in Cuil Launches -- Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?

Surely the answer is no.

+ notes Cuil's claim to a large database of 120 billion pages - but what about relevancy? Danny has a lot to say about size - it's a bugbear of his - and in this instance I don't see that size makes Cuil better than a smaller engine such as Ask.

+ link analysis and page rank vs pages related to the topic based on word analysis. "It [Cuil] figures out these relationships by seeing what type of words commonly appear across the entire set of pages it finds... Cuil then looks at the entire set to see which pages are linked to from them. Those with many or important links are likely to do better." Sounds like Teoma, says Danny.

+ three column display - explains that in the "top right corner" there are related search. Sure - for the test search Cuil advertises there is (test search is harry potter), but it doesn't show for my search - utah tourism - and this is not a complex topic.

There's more but Cuil doesn't do it for me. Search is very complex today - have to have the smarts to block out spam, be powerful enough to handle the scale, have enough language capabilities to handle meanings. I think semantic search such as Hakia offers has possibilites , and there may be other displays that will appeal more than Google's list - but if a creative team at Ask.com couldn't make significant inroads on Google's market share, can a new crew at Cuil?

Google Bomb 2.0

Good-bye, Google Bomb By Garance Franke-Ruta, Washington Post (Jul 23)

Goodbye Google Bomb 1.0 but hello Google Bomb version 2.0. Google did block the old and, as we see now, simple style of bomb where pranksters could game the ranking algorithms to have particular sites show in top results for searches on certain key words. The most famous of these was "miserable failure" bringing up the Whitehouse page for George W Bush. Google can spot these "swarms" and neutralize them.

But it is still possible to influence the results by overtly linking a politician's name to positive (or negative) news articles.

"As [Chris] Bowers explained it, "What I'm doing isn't a Google bomb." It's a much harder to detect effort "to alternately optimize John McCain" in the Google search engine rankings, by linking his name to nine mainstream new organizations's stories that raise questions about the GOP presidential contender."

Described in detail by Chris Bowers in ACTION: Searching for John McCain

Results in Sentences

Smart Search Engines Find Best Facts by Mick O'Leary, Information Today (June 2008)

Mike O'Leary directs us to two search engines that try to make sense of search results - or make it easier for us to make sense of those results.

Nice description of service -- "They start with search results that are similar to what users would receive from Google and the others, and then they apply postsearch analysis to extract answer-oriented content".

Sensebot creates a text summary or sentences from the results - a kind of abstract. There is also a tag cloud. To search enter the query; select from Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Google News; and pick the language. The select from the 10 results which ones you would like included in the analysis.

Factbites also extracts the more meaningful and relevant sentences. However, it works best from its "datqbase of common search topics".

Dmitri Soubbotin, CEO of Sensebot, describes the tool in Alternative Search Results Part II - Alt Search Engines (Jul 23)

"The niche that SenseBot occupies within the semantic search engine family is in attempting to provide an overview and facilitate overall understanding of the subject, as opposed to finding hard facts and answering direct questions."

Add both to your list to use on the non-Google days. Mike O'Leary recommends against using them for obscure or very new topics because both need substantial content to work with.

Search Statistics June 2008

comScore June 2008 Search Search by Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (Jul 18)

Search market share in United States - June 2008

* Google: 61.5% - slight drop from 61.8
* Yahoo: 20.9%
* Microsoft: 9.2% - up from 8.5
* AOL: 4.1%
* Ask: 4.3%

But the total search figures are higher. Google jumped to 7.1 billion searches.

Searching Flash Files

Search-Friendly Flash? Vanessa Fox (Jul 15)

Google and Yahoo are working with Adobe to make Flash files more searchable. Vanesa Fox says - "While I think it’s great and absolutely vital that search engines continue to evolve beyond strictly text (to ensure they are providing the best possible experience for their users), I don’t think this announcement means that all the Flash content on the web will now suddenly start ranking in search results and I don’t think that Flash developers can stop thinking about search engine optimization."

Search engines work with text and metadata about that text -- "With this latest innovation in crawling Flash, Google can more easily access the text in Flash, but they still can’t process it quite as well as it can HTML text because they aren’t extracting any meta data about that text"

Ranking and Translation at Google

The Technology Behind Google Rankings, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 16)

Bullet points from latest Google posting on how results are ranked. Of interest - Google has "strong concept analysis system" - "They try to associate concepts to pages, even if those concepts aren't clear from the language on the page."

Also - "Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Google said, "CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible.""

Try SearchMe

July 2008 InfoTip: Searchme.com, Mary Ellen Bates, Batesinfo

Likes Searchme.com visual search -- "Searchme is one of the best search engines I’ve seen. It also does a surprisingly good job at clustering results, and it has a nice feature for easily sharing web pages with others."

Yahoo's BOSS

Yahoo! Expands Its Open Strategy With BOSS by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Jul 17)

Describes Yahoo's new Build Your Own Search Service and recaps the comments from industry experts.

"BOSS allows third-party developers to build their own custom search experiences using Yahoo!’s index and results ranking as a base. Then, developers can blend the results with other web data sources, control the presentation, and rerank results without restrictions. With this first release of BOSS, developers can fetch Yahoo!’s search content for Web, News, Image, and Spelling Suggestions. Yahoo! says that other search verticals and data sources are coming soon but declined to disclose what they might be at this point. A company spokesperson says it will make decisions based on feedback from the beta."

Microsoft's strategy with Powerset

Microsoft's Plan B for Search, Catherine Holohan, Business Week (Jul 1)

Analyzes advantage to Microsoft of having the semantic search engine Powerset.

"The technology itself is difficult to develop. Though Google has hired some semantic search experts, the technology behind semantic search engines has been in development for the better part of a decade. "Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset makes perfect sense and is probably the best shot at a disruptive technology that might allow it to leapfrog Google," says Andrei Hagiu, assistant professor of strategy, focusing on technology, at Harvard Business School."

Yahoo's Build Your Own

Yahoo's Plan to Open Search Draws Mixed Reviews Heather Havenstein, Computerworld via PC WOrld (Jul13)

Examines Yahoo's new Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) - it's a great idea but will it put Yahoo at risk?

"While the move could put Yahoo's own search business at risk, Malik said the risk is worth taking because it will shake up the search status quo.

"It helps people to think of Internet search beyond the tried and tired paradigm of proactively 'finding' information," [Blogger Om Malid] Malik wrote. "Unlimited queries, the ability to mix with other content including news, and research from universities and other such repositories could really change the game. By allowing folks to use its engines in tandem with their proprietary data (such as a proprietary social graph), Yahoo will allow them to build a different kind of user experience.""

Yahoo's New Build-Your-Own

Yahoo! Lets You "Build Your Own Search Service", Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Jul 10)

Surely this announcement puts Yahoo in the lead in opening up search to new developers and some new and exciting custom-made applications.

"The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other sources, rerank them, and define their appearance."

Mentions use of this by Hakia - "Hakia, for instance, is using the API to blend Yahoo! results with their own and runs all results through their proprietary algorithm SemanticRank. And they are displaying Yahoo!’s image results in a mashup with their own web index results. Neither Google nor Microsoft allow such flexibility, and both require branding of the search results."

For more details on hakia's use see hakia Joins Yahoo!’s Search BOSS

Also Yahoo seeks ad revenue by fueling others' search innovation By Stephen Shankland, Webware (Jul 9)

The revenue will be in the ads -

"The BOSS API (application programming interface) to Yahoo's search is free to use, but BOSS partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search.

"We fully expect it to expand the footprint of Yahoo search advertising on the Web," Raghavan said. "There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising." "

Your Google Query

Behind the Scenes of a Google Query By Brian Ussery, Blogscoped (Jul 8)

"Today it’s estimated that Google queries travel across 700-1000* machines, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2006 perhaps due in part to the introduction of Google Universal."

Would Microsoft buy Powerset?

Microsoft To Buy Powerset? Not Just Yet. Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch (June 26)

Maybe Microsoft will buy the semantic search venture, Powerset - and then what will happen? It would take it out of Google's reach but would Microsoft do anything with it for consumer search?

Ask may be off its mark

Sorry, Ask.com -- I Still Don't Think You're Focused On Core Search by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 26)

Barry Schwartz spoke with IAsk.com CEO Jim Safka and the cofounder and inventor of Ask.com's core search algorithm, Apostolos Gerasoulis.

Of interest:

+ The new ranking algorithms code named Edison are in place. "Edison is a compilation of Ask.com's core search technologies, including Teoma's subject specific communities with Direct Hit's click tracking algorithm layered on top of it."

+ Jim Safka -- "Ask.com's core focus is on being a general search engine focused on core search" [which sounds a bit like double speak]

+ ""greatly over indexes in certain categories" such as references, health and entertainment and hobbies" - [there's the female audience.]

+ Barry Schwartz runs test searches himself and has found Ask off -- "told AG and Jim that I track a number of search results, typically the longer tail queries, and 80% or more of those results are not even close to as relevant when compared to the Google's results."

Search for Meals

Yahoo Cooking with Gas: Food Search on the Web, SEO by the Sea (June 27)

Yahoo has filed a patent for a Meal finder search engine. Bill Slawski thinks it sounds good - and he used to be a chef. He describes how the process might play out and concludes "this process may link the searcher to websites of restaurants, recipe descriptions, or food markets where the user’s selected items may be found."

Something to look forward to.

Showing Well at Yahoo

Get More Clicks in the New World of Universal Search Richard Morochove, PC World (June 25)

Here's advice to webmasters about Yahoo that searchers will want to know about -- "For many small-business owners, the easiest way to improve rankings may be to mark up existing Web pages with new, more descriptive tags that Yahoo will automatically pick up when it indexes pages. The use of tags is Yahoo's take on building a smarter, so-called Semantic Web, which permits easier, even automatic sharing of all types of data. Think of it as an extension of the current Web with a layer of electronic glue that helps other sites better access the data on your pages."

Also, to take advantage of universal search, webmasters can make sure there are videos and news releases in order to "optimize your other digital assets".

Another piece of this is Yahoo's Search Monkey, used by developers, to enhance a listing on the search results page.

Firefox Extensions for Google

11 FireFox Extensions to Search Google Properly by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (June 23)

There are quite a few ways to adjust settings to get extras when searching Google - Google Global to search USA, Canada, Ireland, UK and Australia, numbering results, page previews, Digg ratings, Hot Keys - and more.

Google Bomb on John McCain

John McCain's Google Bomb by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 23)

The bomb is back - Action Left is using Google bombing techniques to influence ranking on results so that the "damming truth" about McCain is told through the news stories. Google might not be able to stop them, though Barry Schwartz also says that -- "Google's search results are frequently changing in placement for many reasons. In this case, relevant results for John McCain are constantly being included in Google's index, which may change placement for these results. Plus, as news sites add more stories about the same individual, Google may remove or indent some of those results."

Search Engine Statistics May 2008

ComScore: Google, Yahoo May US search share rose Business Week (Jun 19)

"ComScore's May search report concluded that of a total of 10.78 billion searches conducted in the U.S. during the month, 61.8 percent of searches, or 6.66 billion, were conducted on Google sites, compared with 61.6 percent, or 6.51 billion, in April."

Google 61.8%
Yahoo 20.6
Microsoft 8.5
AOL 4.5
IAC/Ask 4.5

Where is search going?

11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google by Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb (Jun 15)

Presents 11 points about current search market and concludes that there will be "thousands of innovators in niche markets".

As Google controls the web waves, many people predict niche, vertical, specialty. But I bet people stick with Google.

Hakia for PubMed

hakia Adds 10 million PubMed Articles to its Semantic Search Engine, Hakia (June 12)

Hakia has added PubMed.

"PubMed.gov is one of the largest data aggregation points in medicine, and the only one that covers more than 4000 journal entries. We are proud to announce that hakia has QDEXed more than 10 million PubMed abstracts, and is now offering PubMed search exclusively at pubmed.hakia.com, or at hakia.com as part of a general search."

BLog post demonstrates that Hakia can find articles that Google and Pubmed itself can't.

Big Picture Search 2008

Search Illustrated: Search World 2008, SearchEngineLand (Jun 10)

"multi-channel nature of the Internet"

Powerset for broad topics

May 2008 InfoTip: Powerset.com Mary Ellen Bates (May 2008)

See potential in using Powerset, the new semantic search tool that helps one make sense of search results by identifying the facts and creating summaries.

"PowerSet is best used for those searches that cover a number of topics or areas. It's not perfect, and it only searches Wikipedia, but I find it an exciting new approach in the efforts of search engines to make sense out of web content.

Matt Larkin has some comments on Powerset too - Smarter isn't better...yet Traffick.com (June 6)

"While it’s silly not to consider a search engine that “understands” us an exciting prospect, the effectiveness of existing methods makes me wonder if we “need” semantic search yet. Powerset claims it works best for research, for those not searching for specific items but instead seeking general information on a topic. Well, which types of users are most likely to use search for research and inductive gathering of information? Anyone in the educational field. The last time I checked, they have large internal databases through which they can gather boatloads of literature on their topics of study, be it government documents, journal articles or online writings. In other words, they’re doing just fine. Is there a demand yet for a smarter search?"

Google Search Quality

At Google, a search guru's dream comes true by By Stephen Shankland, Webware (June 5)

Interview with Udi Manber, Google vice president in charge of search quality touched on most of the main themes to search now: personalization, social search, verticals, universal search, differences in results according to location but not clustering search results.

Of interest: "There are a lot of things you don't search for now, because you don't expect Google will know or that the search engine will find out. We are finding that user expectations grow. The kind of searches people do now are more complicated than the kinds they were doing five years ago. People expect a lot more from us."

On reproducible searches: Those days are over. "The other difference is it depends on location. If you do the same search from a different country, you get different results, even if it's the same language. We will tune the results by the country in which you're searching. It's by language and location."

About verticals: "If you have cases of searches where some things matter more and you want to allow people to operate on those or navigate those parameters, then we'll give you more tools to do that. But you shouldn't have to navigate to a specific site to do that." - This is promising - Google may be able to kick in with topic-specific tools when it realizes you want health, travel etc. It does that today with one or two word health or drug queries.

Article referred to Goosh: A retro Web app with cutting-edge interface, CNet (June 3) - Goosh presents real command link searching - takes you back to DOS in 1990 - good if you're nostalgic for that. (I'm not.)

Search Live for Charity

Microsoft Launches "Search and Give" Charity For Searching by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 4)

I'm all for charity, but does this sound desperate or what? "The Live Search Blog announced the new launch of Search and Give. When you search and Search and Give, Microsoft will donate a penny each time you use that page to search the Web."

Fix Live Search (Please)

Microsoft says Live Search needs image fix JESSICA MINTZ, AP via Globe and Mail (June 3)

Microsoft acknowledges that they need to do something about Live Search but it's not clear if they mean fix the "image" or actually fix the search.

"Microsoft is working hard to convince investors, advertisers and Web surfers that it has a fallback plan for improving the quality of its search engine and boosting traffic without help from Yahoo.

So far, the company is focusing on searches that lead to some kind of transaction, which Johnson called “commercial intent queries.”

Last month, Microsoft launched a shopping search site that gives Web surfers a rebate on purchases from advertisers. It also relaunched Farecast, a Seattle-based travel search startup it acquired this year, as part of its network of sites."

"Commercial intent queries" is not much of a fall back plan.

UK Search Market Share

Google extends control of UK search market y Robert Jaques, ZDNet UK (June 3)

ComScore has released numbers on market share for search in the UK.

+ Google Sites -- 74.2 per cent of all searches in April.
+ eBay 6 %
+ Yahoo sites 3.4 %

"According to the research, there were 4.1 billion searches conducted in the UK during April, more than in any other European country. Some 31.2 million UK internet users made at least one search during the month."

Google Search Interface Design

We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment By Stephen Shankland, Webware (May 29)

Marissa Mayer, vice president at Google of search products and user experience, italked about user interface design at the Google I/O conference.

+ people don't like to increase the number of results per page because it slows down search (but are they using broadband?)

+ people searched Google Maps more when Google reduced the load and improved the response

+ people respond to yellow background to ads -- "And it changed from the industry practice of a pale blue background behind ads to a pale yellow background. People not only clicked on ads more, they also searched more in general, she said."

+ "A typical search will require actions from between 700 to 1,000 machines today"

+ predicts more "universal" search - a more "holistic" answer

+ also more personal search

Personalization key to Search 4.0

Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 28)

We had search 3.0 -- "how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into "regular" web listings". Danny Sullivan says we're moving to "Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results."

It's all about personalization- and Google seems to be in the lead.

"Since Google expanded personalized search last year, there's been one further major development. Personalized search uses searches over time to refine results. However, Google also has a system it is testing to refine results based on the last query you did, even if you aren't taking part in the personalized search program."

It won't be about "social search". Sullivan says - "... search is NOT a social activity. I believe people tend to search when they have an immediate desire that needs fulfilling, and taking time away from the search activity to "share" with others is a distraction. "

But there could be people selecting and editing for others. This is the formula for Mahalo. But it won't scale to cover everything (and I would add it will be western style consumer oriented). "I [Danny Sullivan] I think human review can be part of the solution, part of the Search 4.0 addition to what we have out there already -- but humans can't craft pages for every possible search. In addition, it's hard to keep those pages maintained once they've been made. "

So - personalized search Google-style is the route to Search 4.0.

How to do things

A how-to search engine, Enterprise Search (May 28)

HowDoYa.com is making itself known everywhere - even Enterprise Search.

"HowDoYa.com is said to offer a comprehensive and relevant search experience for people looking to find how-to expertise across all Internet content, including the growing number of video and text how-to content Web sites."

Howdoya also announced X-Ray Vision for Internet Search

From the press release:

"HowDoYa’s x-ray vision provides searchers with a quick and easy method for determining the quality of search results without ever having to leave the results page. When the user clicks the x-ray glasses, the site is “x-rayed” and matched to a set of 75 words that are precisely relevant to the search query. The greater the quantity of words matched, the increased probability that the website is relevant and has sufficient depth to provide the information sought. This helps the searcher decide which sites to visit and helps avoid sites such as link farms or those that may expose searchers to viruses or other forms of malware. "

See it in this example on "how do ya compost" - I had clicked on the first result. The tag cloud on the left shows related terms for What. There are more boxes for who, why, where.

ResearchBuzz reviewed it -- Search Engine for Instructional Information Launched

Bias Against Info Domain

Google Temporarily Purges .info Domain Names, SEO Book (May 25)

For a day, Google did not show .info domain pages in the search results. What a relief that must have been. Article confirms that the .info domain is considered spammy and that Google, although it restored the domain, has a distinct bias against it.

Congratulations Hakia

hakia Receives a 2008 "Webware 100" Award for Search and Reference Hakia press release (Apr 21)

"hakia.com today announced that it received a 2008 Webware 100 award for "Search and Reference" by Webware, a CNET site. The Web 2.0 user community cast nearly two million votes in an online voting poll which ultimately selected the winners. Finalists for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards were selected by the editors of Webware. "

Search Engine Market Share - April 2008

Nielsen: Google Hits New Search Share High by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 20)

Google - April 2--8 - 62% share of US searches.

* Google: 62.0%
* Yahoo: 17.5%
* Microsoft: 9.7%
* AOL: 4.3%
* Ask: 2.1%

Shows trend data - Microsoft is falling the most.

Ask gets Dictionary.com

More Questions For Ask.com by Miriam Marcus, Forbes (May 15)

Ask.com is acquiring Lexico Publishing Group, owner of the popular reference sites Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

Ask expects this will increase its user base by 145 million monthly. "Ask plans to use its search engine results on the newly acquired reference sites in an effort to expose its technology to an even wider audience. Similarly, reference materials will be featured at the top of Ask’s search results page devoted to “smart answers.”"

Optimising on URL

Supercharge Your URLs For Maximum SEO Impact, Stephen Spencer, Search Engine Land (May 15)

Studies have shown that the url does affect the clickthrough rate. Short ones with keywords are better.

Of interest:

"# A keyword in the filename portion of the URL is more beneficial than in a directory/subdirectory name.
# Hyphens are the preferred word separator, although underscores are gaining acceptance over times past . So if you have multiple-word keyword phrases in your URLs, I'd recommend using dashes to separate them. "

Country versions of the big four

How Search Engine Redirect Users To Country-Specific Sites by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 15)

Yahoo now redirects users to the country version of the search engine - as Google has done for a long time. Barry Schwartz reviews "how all the major search engines may intercept people trying to reach their ".com" versions from countries outside the United States."

Google and Yahoo will skew results and ads to what is more likely to be preferred by people in that country - UK for the UK, Canadian for Canada.

At Google, if you don't want this - or want to see both - add &gl=us to the search url at Google.

Ask also redirects.

Live does not redirect but it does have country versions - now listed at the Live Worldwide page.

Searching for How to do things

A how-to search engine KMWorld (May 12)

HowDoYa.com is a how-to engine - it finds answers to how-to questions. It advises that precise words will improve results.

"HowDoYa also uses natural language technology and linguistic methods to provide suggestions on how to further refine and investigate results of the initial how-to query."

The answer may not leap from the page, but I did find out how to wash outdoor table umbrella.

Analyzing Search Engine Results

In teaching the current run of the Mastering Web Searching course, I've discovered that the major search engines have been changing how they handle words and syntax.

Word Variants and use of +

Google has been stemming words for some time - enter the word smudge and Google will bold smudges and smudging in the search results. In many cases it looks for singular and plural and word variants - the gerund. Word variants can be a bit bizarre - it considers principal a variant of principle.

If you don't want Google to do this use the + sign -- eg, +smudge.

Live operates the same way, as do Yahoo and Ask now. In all cases, use + if you wish to stop it. However, having these extra terms automatically does make the query richer and usually improves results.

Boolean at Yahoo

Yahoo Search dropped its acceptance of conventional Boolean operators other than OR. It used to accept AND NOT, NOT. No more - now it even bolds NOT in the search results. Therefore, use the minus sign to exclude.

Ask.com - To Exclude a Domain

Ask.com does not let us exclude a site when using site as the prefix. Maybe this has been true for some time and I didn't notice. Enter -- native american -site:gov -- you get gov sites rather than removing them. But they do disappear with -gov. It's possible that Ask strips out all .gov in a domain name. That seems to be the case with aboriginals in australia -gov. And also with canada parliament -gc.

Sponsored Ads

Speaking of Ask.com, sponsored results are filling the middle section. A smart answer will still appear first, if available, and is followed by as many as five sponsored ads, and then another set at the end of the page. Makes you rush to change options to show 50 or 100 results per page. Too bad the cookies don't hold to the next session. The three pane design is nice, but not at the cost of having to deal with sponsored ads front and center all the time.

Counting Results

Google's counter has been out of whack the past few days. I've seen several examples, but this one in which the * is used for answer format was the most dramatic.

Google said there were 388,000 hits for information literacy is critical to * (unbelieveable), but on page 2 of the results changed the count to 71.

Have to wonder about Yahoo too. Results count is often much higher than Google's and some figures are truly astonishing.

For concerts Vancouver June 2008 listings, Google has 153,000 and Yahoo has 2.3 million. Interesting also that adding the word listings had Yahoo increase from 1.5 million. It's possible that this has something to do with the stemming / word variants that is picking up lists and list at both engines. Use hte + sign to get more reasonable numbers - concerts Vancouver June 2008 +listings -- Yahoo has 703,000 (still very high) and Google 30,100. I don't know whose counter is wrong - maybe both.

We get a better sense of relative size from a single phrase search - "religious melancholia" -- Google has 2,260 vs Yahoo's 683.

Thanks to the students of the MWS class for these examples.

Live Search Enhancements

Microsoft Live Search Adds More Images, Multimap, Find My Location, & Celebrity Rank by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr 30)

Some small enhancements at Live Search -- "... expanded image search index, a new integrated mapping experience with Multimap, a location-based mobile search feature to "find me," and more content for the celebrities and books sections."

Maps are nice.

Book search might be -- "Live Search books provides free access to out-of-copyright content to all internet users and allows people to search online to find answers from authoritative and trusted books."

Quaero dead duck

European search engine project to pass sell-by date? Silicon Republic (Apr 24)

Quaero - Europeans have funded this "killer" search engine to the tune of 93 million Euro. Target date is 2013.

"Search engine marketing company boss, Mark Furber, believes a five-year development plan for the new search project QUAERO could be out-moded due to the pace of technology change and it has therefore no chance of overtaking Google."

Yahoo v Google

10 reasons why Yahoo search sucks Brian Turner, Internet Business UK (Apr 28)

Brian Turner in the UK really prefers Google. These reasons don't look very serious to me and we could find several that would tell us why we should use Yahoo - starting with Search Assist.

Google Annoyances

Google Annoyances Google Operating System (Apr 25)

There are some annoyances. One that resonated for me was --

"4. Search results with tracking code. Because Google needs to track the search results you click on in order to add them to Web History, it replaces their addresses with redirects like: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=... That means you can no longer right click on the link and copy the location. Some workarounds: disable/pause Web History, log out or use a Greasemonkey script."

Diversity in Google Search Results

Diverse Google Results Are Good Philipp Lenssen, Google Blogscoped (Apr 25)

Interesting post that looks at results Google gives on ambiguous queries such as google blog, or amsterdam hotel.

Many search engines will show related searches - and you choose the one you mean. Google will too (sometimes) at the end of a page.

Lenssen finds that Google does reasonably well presenting a variety of results in the first 10 for google blog - blogs about google, google blog search - and others. And amsterdam hotel has some variety.

But searching for an individual hotel by name does not. The hotel's web site is not optimized or linked / networked sufficiently to rise above the many intermediaries.

Concludes:: "So the problem remains: heavily optimized, backlinked and well-networked sites are doing better than non-optimized island pages. Most hotel or small business owners may not have the same resources to invest in optimization, or they may simply not realize there’s need for optimization, or in the case of hotel booking networks, they may be perfectly happy if those other sites handle the booking."

SearchMonkey will change results listings

Yahoo! Launches SearchMonkey Developer Tool in Limited Preview by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Apr 24)

SearchMonkey is a tool for developers and site owners to use to enhance the listings of their pages in Yahoo. Article describes two types and provides instructions on how to set these up.

- enhanced with extra links and navigation
- infobar with additional information

Will this improve quality of search results?

"How does this impact the future of the web and search? On first glance, it appears to be a strong move to advance the semantic web and the beginning of a whole new way to view search results beyond ten blue links. But at least for the short term, Yahoo! is taking things more slowly than that. Their plan seems to be to use the presentation applications that others create as a test of search quality compared to the current results. Will searchers choose to opt in to these enhanced listings? (With Google's Subscribed Links, that answer seems to be no.) Will the additional meta data from the semantic web be useful or spammy? This may be a test to find that out."

Google's algorithm

Google was a links-driven search engine
by Brian Turner, Internet Business (Apr 21)

History of Google's ranking algorithms - maintains that "Google are moving to providing search results based on a human user-driven algorithm."

Google engineers have denied that Google has people influencing the results - they change the algorithm when they see problems. But this will come up again.

Whois at Google

Google Gets Whois Answers In Search Results Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Apr 18)

Google will show whois information for domains as a direct answers. Try it with whois websearchguide.ca

Inside Track on Google Web Search

20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber, Glenn Derene, Popular Mechanics (Apr 16)

Udi Manber is vice president in charge of search quality for Google. He gave interviewer Glenn Derene a glimpse into Google's work on search.

+ search engines are better but user expectations are also much higher

+ Google uses clickthrough to rank results (along with much else). "The results we show you are based not only on what we know of the Web, but also what other people have searched for. "

+ Manher explained why Google puts suggestions for refinements at the bottom of the page. "Second, we are developing more tools to allow you to refine your queries—at the bottom of many pages, you’ll see query refinements. These are suggestions from us about what your next query should be. And we put it at the bottom because that’s where you run into problems—you tried to read the page, you didn’t find what you want, you may need other suggestions. "

+ Google made over 450 improvements to the ranking algorithem last year.

+ Manher says by knowing a user's web search history Google can improve search results in two ways: "One is, we will tune the result for you slightly. We’re not going to change the whole page—we might change position 5 to position 3 here and there, but we’ll use whatever we can from your previous searches to adapt the current search to you. The second is, we allow you to search within your Web history, which can also be very useful. You may remember something you did three months ago and you don’t remember exactly how you did it. "

+ There were several indications that Google is thinking about social search - ie search influenced by networks. The strongest of these was - "I can imagine if you give us permission to do that [social network], and we find that that’s useful for some queries. The question is, what percentage of queries and what kind of queries? When should you use it and when should you not use it? "

+ new language feature - Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Google takes a query, translates it, searches in the foreign language, translates the results. Available for 12 different languages.

Google into Deep Web

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (Apr 11)

Google is extracting some information from databases that are accessible through forms.

Specifically, when we encounter a FORM element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML.

Bill Slawksi at Seobythesea noticed the patents that Google had filed on how to do this. Google Diving into Indexing the Deep Web (Oct 2006)

Powerset Hype

Can Powerset Unseat Google in Web Search? by Nitin Karandikar, altsearchengines (Apr 15)

There seems to be a lot riding on Powerset. As this article says, it is "the darling of tech media". But, Karandikar finds three reasons why it won't unseat Google.

"Regardless of how good Powerset’s semantic matching algorithms are, and how effective they are at finding relevant search results, I think there are three reasons why Powerset will have a great deal of difficulty in unseating Google as the leader in Web Search:"

It presumes too much to think Powerset or any other semantic search engine will take over. But the points are good.

+ Google has a tremendous amount of experience with keyword search algorithms.
+ Websites tune themselves to Google's rules
+ Users will be slow to change.

Of interest: "Powerset may instead focus on trying to answer user questions by building tools to extract information from within web pages, rather than just trying to find the most relevant web pages for a user query."

Live Search - Quality Drops

Microsoft Live Search April 2008 Update? Search Roundtable (Apr 15)

Lots of chatter about a dysfunctional Live Search index - "1,000s of links from article directories and spammy blogs". I thought Live was supposed to have fixed that problem, which was certainly the case a year ago.

Yahoo not grouping results

Yahoo Search Stops Grouping Results From Same Domain? Search Roundtable (Apr 15)

Yahoo Search seems to have stopped grouping results by domain - article has screen shots to prove it.

I think that is just as well. When results are grouped by site, people rarely click through to see what else is available from that domain. This might be better. Yahoo still has the option to have a link to get "more from this site".

Hakia aims for quality

Hakia Goes For "Quality" Over "Popularity" by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Apr 15)

Hakia, the meaning-based search engine, is aiming for quality, it says.

"The Hakia blog explains how the engine is taking a "quality" approach, trying to assess the credibility of sites in ranking them, together with the help of professional librarians. Hakia specifically discusses this in the context of health-related search and contrasts its approach with that of "popularity," a general reference to Google's original PageRank algorithm."

It's going to have a "a range of verticals -- "law, finance, science, and in many other content-rich verticals" -- based upon expert sources and librarian-aided indexing."

This sounds as if Hakia is expanding on its galleries - the compilation of answers to ready-reference type of lookup such as Michelangelo - that employs higher quality known resources.

Search Market Stats March 2008

Compete: Microsoft Gains Share; Google Hits New High In Raw Searches by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Apr 15)

More figures on market share for search in the US and the number of searches done in March 2008. This time the figures are from Compete.

"Google is just off its previous high over the past year of 70% set last month. Yahoo sees an all-time low over the past year, while Microsoft comes up from an all-time low over the past year of 8.4 percent last month."

But if you look at number of searches, they went past the 9 billion. Google in spite of its slight drop in market percent handled more queries (6 billion), Yahoo held on at (1.3 billion) and Live rose about 200 million.

Blended Search Works

Blended Search Results Change Searcher Behavior by Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch (Apr 8)

Searchers seem to be noticing other media in the blended search results that are now the rule at all the major search engines.

"This week, search marketing firm iProspect came out with more research emphasizing the prevalence of blended search results, and the way they change the behavior of searchers.

In the iProspect Blended Search Results Study, conducted by Jupiter Research for iProspect, the data showed that searchers are much more likely to click on image, news, or video search results when they are presented in a blended format."

Here are the numbers:

"In fact, a full 35 percent of respondents said they do not use vertical search, and 25 percent do not recall if they have clicked a result after having used vertical search (60 percent combined). But when those results are presented in blended, or universal search results, 36 percent of searchers click on "news" results, more than twice as much as the 17 percent of respondents who do so when they use the vertical "news search.""

IAC Rushmore Drive

First-of-its-kind Search Engine to Deliver more Relevant Search Results to the Black Community launches April 10 Press release, PR Newswire via Yahoo News (Apr 10)

IAC does something good by serving the black demographic.

"IAC, one of the world's largest internet services companies, together with Black Web Enterprises (BWE), today launched RushmoreDrive.com- the first-of-its-kind online search engine designed exclusively for the Black community. The new search engine combines basic search results, with mainstream findings, to deliver information specifically tailored to a Black audience."

A dent in the Invisible Web

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Apr 11)

Google is dipping into the "deep web" or "invisible web". Danny Sullivan reports that it has figured out a way to present questions to databases and take away and index the answers.

"Google says that for the past few months, it has been filling in forms on a "small number" of "high-quality" web sites to get back information. What words has it been entering into those forms? Words automatically selected that occur on the site, with check boxes and drop-down menus also being selected ... "

Note -- "Companies like Quigo, BrightPlanet and WhizBang Labs were doing this type of work years ago" Sullivan commented that this method was not adopted by the web search engines. Let's add that the indexing efforts of BrightPlanet etc weren't entirely successful either.

Cluuz for clues

The Next Generation Search Engine - Cluuz Altsearchengines (Apr 7)

The new Cluuz is certainly worth some time. It searches Yahoo, Live, Alexa, Technorati (Blogs), but more importantly it offers several ways to view the results in normal web pages or through Flash (which seized up on my computer)

- chart, a network of nodes
- clusters
- list

"The core technology driving Sprylogics’ solutions is embedded in the Cluuz Search Engine platform which enables both consumers and corporate users to methodically search the Internet and internal corporate resources and find the information they are looking for."

Powerset soon to launch

Powerset Will Launch In Coming Weeks Tech Crunch (Apr 5)

Powerset, the natural language engine-to-be, will be launching the beta version for the public soon. It will be using Wikipedia and Freebase in this test mode, and not a web index. Still, Michael Arrington thinks that, "... anyone who uses it will be able to see the potential value of the engine when it is placed in front of a full web index."

Does Microsoft want Yahoo Search?

Oh Yes, Microsoft's Still Interested -- And "It's About Search, Stupid.", Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (Apr 6)

In Part 2 look at Microsoft's interest acquiring Yahoo, Andrew Goodman says it's really about search. Yahoo is number 2, small though that market share is now, and Microsoft is a distant third.

"Because when it comes to search, and anything that looks like search, Microsoft is desperate to buy into what they haven't been able to grow organically. As things stand, they're being squeezed nearly into oblivion, which really doesn't bode well for the company's future. They're looking to make a strong transition into anything scalable with an advertising dollar attached."

Squidoo has Authority

Yahoo Loves Squidoo : Search Spam Love Affair Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal (Apr 1)

Yahoo considers a Squidoo lens an authority when ranking results.

"Google has given Squidoo less overall authority over the years (unless a lens is of rather high value), but even with all of the spamming over at Squidoo, Yahoo seems to be giving a major preference to pages built within Squidoo that have original content and build a basic amount of incoming links."

SearchMe - Visual Search

SearchMe (www.searchme.com)

SearchMe's tag line is "you'll know it when you see it". It shows a page image first with an area below for short snippets. Full page view can help one in assessing the page's relevance, though it does slow down the scanning. It also broadly groups results. A list view of results is also available. This is still in beta but SearchMe is accepting testers. Database is about 1 billion. It could be the tool you love. View the demo first.

Search intermediaries

Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person. By Brendan I. Koerner, Wired (Mar 24)

It's the overload problem - how to deal with rss feeds and screenfuls of search results? Have people intermediate.

+ Brijit - 8 employees sift through 100 sources to select the stories and produce 100-word abstracts of both online and offline content and then score them for importance.

+ Mahalo - volunteers create the information capsules

+ Google's Knol - "In December, Google announced that it was developing knol, a tool that will allow experts to write authoritative introductions — knols — about a vast range of subjects. "A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read," wrote Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google. "

Search Alternatives - Visual

Life Beyond Google: Some of the Best of the Rest, Mary Ellen Bates, Fumsi (Mar 2008)

Recommends some engines to use as alternatives to Google either for the interface (Quintura, Touchgraph, Searchcrystal are more visual), database (Gigablast has a new presentation), or search aids (Carrot's clusters).

"Some of my favourite alternative search engines are the ones that offer a visual results page... something more informative than the plain list of search results you get with Google or Yahoo. In fact, some of the search engines that ‘cluster' results are using the results from one of the major search engines, but doing a lot more with those results."

Inside Hakia

Hakia begins licensing out semantic search technology VentureBeat (Mar 18)

Some bits on Hakia , the semantic search engine:

+ "The four-year-old Hakia has accumulated some $21 million in funding to support its development, and has grown to about 50 employees. "

+ "Last year, Hakia launched Hakia Challenge, a side-by-side matchup of Hakia and Google. The results sometimes compared well to Google, but generally did pretty badly. " -- odd, I always thought Hakia did as good or better.

+ "But the company always planned to build its technology for specific applications ... because it can helpful for various tasks."

+ "These tasks include information analysis, summarization of documents, machine translation and terminology standardization (in which similar words like “separation” and “divorce” would be changed to a common term, because in some instances users don’t necessarily want to differentiate between the two). The process is supported by Hakia’s internal reference table, which includes over 100,000 words. Any task automating the processing of data can benefit from having Hakia involved."

See the Hakia blog -- hakia Starts Technology Licensing, First Partner Riverglass Inc. for more about Ontological Semantics Technology.

Search Market Share February 2008

Google Search Share Up, Yahoo and Microsoft Down by Peter Sayer, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Mar 20)

February 2008 - search market share statistics

+ Google 59.2 %
+ Yahoo 21.6
+ Microsoft 9.6
+ AOL 4.9
+ Ask 4.6

Advertising network figures - interesting that AOL is so much higher.

+ "90 percent of U.S. Internet users saw a page served by advertising network Platform A, and 88 percent a page from advertising.com, both of which are operated by AOL"
+ Yahoo advertising 85%
+ Google advertising 79%

Would-be competitors to Google

Is Google's user interface outdated? Posted by Stefanie Olsen, NewsBlog (Mar 18)

Would-be competitors to Google are lining up with new interfaces and approaches. Mentioned: Mahalo (I don't think a quasi guide set will do it), Powserset (semantic search), SearchMe (visual search - by invitation only - may be released in April).

"But by displaying Web pages graphically, Searchme and others could open up a new way for people to find information. (The company also categorizes Web pages in its engine.) Kvamme referred to it as visual relevance, or choosing Web pages by their appearance, rather than their ranking."

Search Share February 2008

Google search share down globally by ERIC AUCHARD, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Mar 19)

Comscore - "The data, released to paying subscribers Tuesday night but not yet made public, show Google's dominance of the worldwide market for Web search dipping slightly to 62.8 per cent in February from 63.1 per cent in January, said the analyst, who declined to be named, though Google gained share in the U.S. market."

Number of searches was down too - "ComScore, which tracks online audiences in 20 major Internet markets around the world, estimated Web surfers performed 66 billion searches overall in December, 71.9 billion in January and 67.4 billion in February."

Suggested Alternative Engines

12 Search Engines Which Can Replace Ask.com Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal (Mar 13)

Let's hope we don't need engines to replace Ask, but as this articles says, "there are plenty of new technologies out there and it will be interesting to see when (and if) any of the engines comes to claim a significant share of the search market".

There are several semantic search engines listed. Of these Hakia is the most advanced as a web search engine.

Google in the Past

The Lost Features of Google Blogscoped (Mar 13)

Memory trip on services or features that Google used to have, or has renamed, or has merged into something else.

To this I would like to add its old personalized search, where you checked off a list of interests and Google used these in ranking results.

Exalead reviewed

10 Reasons Why Librarians Should Use Exalead by Phil Bradley, Alt Search Engines (Mar 13)

Several good points - but Exalead is smaller at 8 billion, and (I think) not as fresh. Nonetheless, it's a good search engine to get to know. The Related Terms and other facets for grouping results are excellent.

Yahoo Semantic Search Coming

Yahoo makes semantic search shift BBC News (Mar 14)

Yahoo will be adopting some key standards of the semantic web starting with including "some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search."

"By starting to include the tags and descriptors defined by semantic web standards into its search index, web users suddenly have a good reason to use them.

These tags are similar in concept to the familiar HTML labels that help format text and other data on webpages.

The result could mean that web searches can be made much more specific to pull up exactly the data that someone is seeking. "

Swoogle is given as an example of a semantic search engine in experimental stage.

Microformats at Yahoo

Yahoo to Begin Indexing Microformats Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch (Mar 13)

"As part of its move toward a more open search platform, Yahoo announced today that it will begin supporting microformats and other semantic Web standards. Site owners can markup pages with microformats like hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN to the HTML code on a page, or create structured feeds using RDF."

Google's Alternate Words and Advanced Search

Google Help - Alternate Words

Google's Help page has information on what Google is doing with words - they call it "looking for alternates" and we know it as stemming and word variants. Google is the most advanced in automatically looking for other combinations and forms. If you find it is biasing your results put a + directly in front of the word you want to control. Eg evaluate will pick up evaluating and evaluation. If you want only evaluate enter +evaluate.

Google may also have updated its page on Advanced Search, especially related to alternate words.

Certainly the Advanced Search form has been expanded to show more options.

News Corp not buying

Yahoo loses a possible partner - NEWS CORP. BACKS OFF By Pete Carey, Mercury News (March 11)

News Corp won't be Yahoo's white knight.
" News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch told a Bear Stearns conference in Palm Beach, Fla., Monday that he's not going to battle the Redmond, Wash., software giant for Yahoo."

Ask Recap

Ask.com Scales Back to Target Its Core Customers by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 10)

Recaps the story of Ask and the shock of the announcement last week to cut 40 people and re-focus on its users (said to be women). Does say that Ask has tried to retrack or counter the story about Ask becoming a "women's site".

"In a phone interview, Graham said he felt the company’s message had indeed been subject to misinterpretation and over simplification. According to him, the first headline on the AP story (Ask.com Seeks Makeover As Women’s Site), which highlighted the women search focus, was withdrawn and rewritten (Ask.com Scales Back in Makeover)—but not before it was picked up and repeated throughout the blogosphere. But he stressed that the company would pay attention to and build on its core legacy of users. "We can’t be all things to all people. It’s not about ‘niche-ing,’ it’s about focus. It’s a business doing the smart thing.""

This suggests to me that Ask or its owner IAC bungled the whole affair, alarming and possibly insulting users - now at great risk of losing the users they have and deterring new ones. It's been a terrible mess of badly managed press.

Yahoo Wants Women to Shine

Yahoo's New Appeal to Women by Jon Fine, Business Week (March 7)

What's with the new interest by search engines in women? First Ask.com says it will be changing its focus to address the women, who are supposedly the main users. Now Yahoo is putting together a new content site for women where they might also keep a home page (presume that is personalize) and a blog.

"Yahoo is quietly putting the finishing touches on a major new content site aimed at women between the ages of 25 and 54. Much like a general-interest women's magazine, the site will focus on familiar content categories: fashion and beauty, entertainment, health, astrology, home, food, parenting, relationships, and work and money. It's not yet clear what the site will be called, but one name in contention is Shine."

Of interest: Top sites for women are -- "Top players among what comScore identifies as "women's community" sites are NBC Universal's iVillage.com (GE), AOL Living (TWX), and fast-rising newcomer Everyday Health. Those three sites respectively notched 17.8 million, 16.9 million, and 14.4 million unique U.S. visitors in January"

Site performance a ranking factor

Site Performance Increasingly Important to SEM Performance Traffick.com (Mar 6)

Google may be considering site performance (such as quick loading) when ranking results.

"As for even broader meaning, I think it's fair to take away the theory that Google does now, and will increasingly in the future, incorporate assessments of site performance into the ranking algorithms for organic search. They're publicly stating the importance of these factors to users, so take heed."

Another interpretation of the Ask.com situation

Ask.com Remains Committed to Search By Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch, Mar 6, 2008

Kevin Newcomb suggests that stories in which Ask.com becomes a woman's search engine are overblown and erroneous. He quotes Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham -- "The idea that we're going to become a women's site is just plain wrong. We know that a sizable group of our core user base is women, and we know they come to us for a certain kind of search: to get answers, often in areas of reference, health and entertainment."

Also - "We want to address the answer-seekers, who put things in a search box in certain ways," Graham said. "We think it's smart to identify who our most active users are. It's smart to identify the kind of searches they're looking for, and focus on building that up. We want to be the first place our core customers come when they're looking for answers."

There is a similar report and interpretation in Ask.com And Ye Shall Receive by Maurma Desmond, Forbes (Mar 5)

Let's hope.

Ask.com Obit

Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Mar 5)

Danny Sullivan gives a capsule history of Ask.com ending with Tuesday's announcements about staff cuts. He praises Ask for its innovation, and reflects on the difficulties it had in fighting for marketshare (but, as he notes, that might have changed after the MSN-Yahoo merge). This change to focus on women will be devastating.

"Now you're just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the "West Coast elite" or "digerati" you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you're dead. You're about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon."

Sullivan predicts that Ask will quickly fall into the deadpool like Altavista, webcrawler, excite, iwon - but heh - IAC already owns or has a connection with the last three. There will still be a few visitors and a few clicks but the life of the engine is gone.

What will happen to all the related services - Maps, BigNews, Bloglines? It's probably like the anchor store pulling out of the shopping mall.

Lament for Ask

Goodbye Ask.com: A Brand Evangelist Hangs It Up Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay Inc (Mar 4)

Lisa Barone is "heartbroken over the loss of an engine I loved and intensely angry at Barry Diller, the man who never understood the gem he had in his hand, and in return, threw it away when it wasn’t making money as fast as he wanted it to."

Exactly - we will mourn with her.

But Diller isn't getting away scot free - he has some problems.

Diller expresses doubt at event in Variety.

"Barry Diller acknowledged Tuesday that at this time next week, he may have lost control of the company he has been building for more than a decade."

Google will help you search the target site.

Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (March 4)

Second search box turns up in Google results for certain sites - such as Amazon - so that you can search it directly. Box doesn't show for Chapters Indigo. But it does for Canadian Tire.

SHOCKING: Ask.com Changes its Spots

IAC Cuts 8% Of Ask.com & Kills Search Engine Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 4)

The vagaries of fate in a fiercely competitive market. Ask.com survived the loss of Jeeves, became a much better service with the hard work that went into the interface 3D, managed to make the underlying Teoma technology better, led in improving search aids for searchers, and now - judging from these bits Barry Schwartz has managed to put together - is abandoning it all. This is short term mentality, and a rush for the advertising dollar.

IAC, owner of Ask.com, has laid off 40 people (8% of staff), including the esteemed Gary Price, and is "re-orienting its strategy" to serve its supposedly female audience.

From Hitwise: "As of the four weeks ending 3/1/2008, 57.85% of U.S. visits to Ask.com were from Females."

Main news headline seems to be that Ask.com is going to be made over into a women's site.

Ask.com Seeks Makeover As Women's Site Michael Liedke, AP via Washington Post - not just any woman - the married woman! "With the shift, the Oakland-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children's homework, entertainment and health."

No doubt, what it all means will become clear over the next few weeks, but it seems we shouldn't look to Ask for any more innovations and the underpinings of its search engine may be in grave danger. I can't see it succeeding as a "woman's engine" - there are several of those already.

WebinSuggest for suggestions

Web inSuggest - new Swedish recommendation service for finding relevant web sites Lars Våge, Internetbrus.com, Pandia

WebinSuggest - recommender site for web sites - try it - serendipity might kick in.

"Web inSuggest can, according to the owners, not really be called a search service, but is rather a recommendation engine. You tell the service what kind of sites you are interested in and get a list of similar sites in return. This list is based on the interests of other users, so the system is a bit similar to Amazon’s “People who bought this book also bought the following…”"

Dipiti Search Message Boards

A Search Engine For Message Boards, ResearchBuzz (Feb 26)

New tool for searching message boards - Dipiti.com.

"Dipiti, according to its home page, indexes over 2300 communities and almost 29 million conversations. They’re divided broadly into health, legal, money, and pet care. (So this is not the search engine to find hockey conversations or discussions of politics.) There’s a tag cloud of topics or you can search within one of the aforementioned categories (or all of them if you like.)"

Quintura for your web site

Quintura Launches Affiliate Program for Site Search (Cloud Search Widget) - press release (Feb 29)

"Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search, has launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. Quintura for site search is available on http://affiliates.quintura.com T .he Quintura affiliate program for site search gives web-site publishers and blog owners a unique chance to bring their readers new search experience and increase number of page views. "

Gigablast in new Beta

Gigablast has been relaunched with a new look and some improved capability. The press release -- Gigablast Launches New Search Engine with “Freshness Dating” and Privacy-conscious Search today trumpets two major points.

1. "Gigablast’s patent-pending “freshness dating” algorithms estimate the last date that relevant changes were made to the web page. This innovative technology gives the user unparalleled flexibility in finding the right result from the right time."

2. "Gigablast is implementing the most privacy-conscious personal data policy of the major search engines. Not only is the minimal amount of information collected to provide useful and relevant search results, but all personal information is erased from Gigablast’s records within sixty days." But doesn't say what information it keeps for those days.

Improvements I noticed

+ cleaner look
+ Advanced search is now a link from the search page
+ Control on date through the Freshness Dating
+ Cached version shows last modified date and cached date. Link to Internet Archive is gone.

+ syntax site:au works now to pick up country domain. This may have been fixed earlier and I didn't notice.

+ added search for images (from PicSearch) and videos (Truveo) - both good additions. Dropped blogs, travel, and US Government.

+ Buttons on side for easily running query against web, images, video, directory

+ shows the category on results from the Open Directory. (But the Open Directory is no longer a star resource).

Best features:

+ GigaBits group results quite well into topics
+ No advertisements
+ Custom Topic Search - build your own engine using selected sites

Still hoping for:

+ Preferences so that can change number of results / page. However, there is an off/on for family filter and for advanced search settings.

All in all, a welcome change. Searchers will appreciate the re-emergence of Gigablast as an alternative search engine to the majors.

Added Mar 2 - Gigablast Takes Off Again reviewed by Mary Ellen Bates. She picked up this little morsel that Gigablast claim is uses less energy -- ""a search using Gigablast required 1/500th the energy compared with a similar search at our leading competitor".

Human powered search

Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup by Phil Bradley, Ariadne, Issue 54 Jan 2008

Human powered -- "Essentially it means a search engine which can, and will have its results (or at least the position of its results) affected by human intervention, usually by people rating individual results further up or further down the rankings."

It's a mixed bag.

There are search engines where you rate the result (people have time for this?) - Anoox is one. Earthfrisk is a meta-searcher of search engines, social media, and reference sources. It invites registrants to discuss and vote. iRazoo gives rewards for votes and can also be used for its email web client. Sproose looks better and is easy to use but as Bradley points out, you can only vote for, not against.; and the voting is only as good as the people doing it - who's to say they'll have your political views or standards?

The idea of a having a human do the search is still popular. ChaCha does that - and pays the person helping $5/hour. Let buyer beware - you get what you pay for.

Bradley lists Collarity - it may develop into a good community search engine. The idea is that results will be influenced by what others in your community where the community could be other users of a specialty web site. Bradley's says that Collarity seemed to remember associations from earlier searches he did.

Mahalo is a guide-based service but extending itself into social networking. Join the gang. "There is also a ‘Mahalo Social’ section, which allows users to register, create profiles, create and share recommendations, recommend links for searches, and discuss specific pages with other users. This is a very interesting development and Mahalo is taking some of the best elements of existing social networking systems such as Facebook, as well as social bookmarking systems and blending them into a new style network."

Bradley's conclusion: "While there is a variety of human-powered search engines, they all have drawbacks as well as advantages. To come full circle, my major concern remains that they are still just as easy to ‘game’ as more traditional engines (despite what their creators say) and in order for them to work a lot of people do need to buy into the concept."

It's good he had the patience to review these, but I'm skeptical that any will become a first choice. Any search engine that invites comments and votes is inviting spam and gaming. Only an Ask-a-librarian service could ever be relied upon for reference questions. Collarity is the one on this list that might find a way to make community / social search work.

Need for Information Literacy

Phil Bradley in his article Human-powered Search Engines: An Overview and Roundup (Ariadne, Issue 54 Jan 2008) makes the point that search engines that depend a great deal on using inbound links for ranking purposes can produce poor results. The example given is a search for "martin luther king" at Google that shows a white supremist website (martinlutherking.org) in the top three. In September 2006 when this was first noticed, it was in the top position, and now (Feb 2008) it is in third. This is true for Microsoft MSN/Live where it sits second even today. (To Yahoo's credit it is number 6). Why does it still rank so highly?

I used Yahoo's Site Explorer to see who is linking - several are pages done by librarians about how to evaluate websites. This website has been given as an example of a misleading site since 1999 or earlier. ( Evaluating Webbed Sources for Research ). In addition there are the many links from the white-supremist Stormfront, who owns MLK.org, and racists or hate sites. There is even one link from Microsoft's Encarta because the Encarta page has an embedded MSN web search - and martinlutherking.org comes up in a top position.

Many links raise the ranking. Even if search engines could weigh university or library sites higher, it wouldn't solve the problem - they have to analyze the context. As Bradley notes, this is just how it works - "Google sees any link as a positive thing".

In the end, the searcher must be able to evaluate clearly and well.

From the archives: Most reliable search tool could be your librarian By Elinor Mills, CNet (Sept 29, 2006) - a call for information literacy

Hacking Google

Hacker group releases automated 'Google hacking' tool by Jaikumar Vijayan, Computer World (Feb 22)

In the Googlag Scanner, hackers and IT admin people now have a tool they can use for widescale check for vulnerabilities in access to data on web servers. This makes execution of specialized queries using Google syntax easier.

"The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group has released an open-source tool designed to enable IT workers to quickly scan their Web sites for security vulnerabilities and at-risk sensitive data, using a collection of specially crafted Google search terms."

"Google hacking" techniques became more widely known through "Johnny I Hack Stuff." "More than 1,500 such queries -- or Googledorks, as they and the people who leave their Web sites exposed to them are sometimes known -- have been compiled into a database by Johnny I Hack Stuff over the past few years."

People don't seem to be too concerned about malicious use - yet - "Over the past few years, Google Inc. has increasingly improved the ability of its software to detect and stop large-scale automated searches, according to Shulman. People who frequently try to run such searches via Goolag Scanner could find their IP addresses being blocked by Google, he said."

Bias in ranking algorithms

Peter Morville: the Tagsonomy interview in You're It (Oct 19, 2005)

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, is always worth reading. In this article from a few years ago he comments on tagging and its spread (he, himself, finds tagging too much work), and also on Google's ranking algorithms.

"... Google’s multi-algorithmic solution is not even close to objective.

Google’s algorithms are optimized to produce the greatest advertising revenue to Google Inc. in the short-term and the greatest shareholder value to GOOG in the long-term. To be fair, Google has exercised great restraint. They understand that for long-term success, Google must provide the most useful results and the best user experience, so they have maintained a clean interface, and they haven’t yet tilted their algorithms too far towards commerce.

But we can already see a subtle bias towards the types of web sites most likely to host Google’s sponsored links. This partially explains why Google searches on “melanoma” and “breast cancer” don’t present the authoritative content from the National Cancer Institute in the first few hits. Government web sites are not great clients for advertising, so Google doesn’t like .gov."

Yahoo Mindset is also mentioned. I had forgotten this existed. Here you can "View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources). "

Search at MindSet for "breast cancer" research -- the mid-point position shows 2 .orgs in the top 5 results. Move the slider to the upper end - researching - and get 1 .gov and a .org. The same search at Google Canada is more commercial - a journal in first position and 2 foundations raising money following closely after. Proves Morville' point.

Lanzone on future of search

Six Minutes With Former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 22)

"AllThingD's Kara Swisher does a wide ranging video interview with former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone. Among other things Swisher and Lanzone discuss "the future of search" at only the very highest level however."

Points to note:

+ eg of Ask3D - more multimedia content in search results
+ more query refinement and guidance - help users through the process.
+ Microsoft - Yahoo merger is about ad revenue [of course].
+ social networks will filter results
+ more search will be done on mobile devices [would have to be the quick look up]
+ richer content in the future - more machine learning to find it.
+ most hyped - virtual worlds. Jim does not have an avatar.

Bush and the Googlebomb

Bush - Tops For "Who Is A Failure" On Google by Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineLand (Feb 21)

This again! But this time it may not be a linkbomb/Googlebomb where 100s of pages have used this anchor text intentionally - it might be a legitimate linkage (I'll believe that).

Sullivan -- "My bet is that all those links out there with anchor text saying "failure" in them are making him come up for a variety of terms combined with "failure.""

Article describes the Googlebomb and links to earlier articles. Google has said that it periodically screens for potential Googlebombs and "defuses" them.

Of interest is the continuing use of the Open Directory Project by Google: Bush's presidential page comes up in Google with the description - "Article from Encarta Encyclopedia provides an overview of Bush's life" - that Google took from the description in the ODP. Google should have used the meta description tag on the whitehouse.gov page. And the Whitehouse should have put in a NOODP meta tag.

Ask adds Compete data

Ask.com Binoculars Adds Compete.com Stats by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 21)

Barry Schwartz describes what it is, what to look for, and why Ask added statistics from Compete to the popup preview.

"Ask.com has announced that they have added site statistics from Compete.com to the binoculars feature in the search results. Now, instead of just getting a site preview, you also get estimated visitor stats, site rank, a line chart to plot this data over time and a link to a more detailed report over at Compete.com."

Webmasters and search marketers would care - but they would have been looking at Compete anyway. Searchers can judge how popular the site is - maybe - but will they stop to do so? are Compete figures reliable? do they matter to users outside the United States? However, Compete does provide additional information on the domain, the company, the history. Searchers could use this in evaluating a source.

Odds n Ends

How Vulnerable is Google on Search? by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb (Feb 21)

+ Ask has added Compete's US traffic data in search results. [Nice - but A9 added Alexa data to search results years ago and it didn't draw searchers.] See posting on Better Binoculars for details and screenshots.

+ another argument that Google is vulnerable in search and isn't the "most lovable brand in the world". Must be the message of the day.