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Record of changes to WSG made in the last year or so (excluding corrections in URLs, and minor additions and deletions to the sites listed).
| Day / Month / Year |
Section |
Change |
Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including Search Syntax. Minor updates to Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask, Exalead, Google, and Yahoo. Bing replaced Live - the syntax is largely the same but Bing is more attractive and can group results better than Live did. I removed Gigablast - not competitivel Updated Guides for Ask, Bing, Google, and Yahoo. Directories: Directories are shrinking. The merger of Internet Public Library and Librarians Index to the Internet into ipl2 has happened. Search at the new service is rudimentary. Intute in the UK is still strong but 2010 will see sharp cuts in funding. A new, small directory has appeared at RefSeek. See List of Directories. Social Bookmarking and Social Search: Delicious was enhanced with new visuals and search suggestions in 2009. But the one to beat is the fantastic Diigo which goes well beyond bookmarking to be a personal research tool. In Social Search, Google has made its personal search more social. See social search. Search Engines: WSG explores four search engines in detail: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. These four WSG pages were rewritten to describe the search results page and all its parts: grouping results, aids for refining the search, additional information (such as cached), enhancement of some results, any extra tools (eg translate). WSG also describes Advanced Search, lists some shortcuts, and has capsule accounts of other search tools. Bing, Google, and Yahoo made extensive changes to display. Bing moved to grouping results and showing previews. Google responded by developing several viewing options on a new page (Show Options). Yahoo, in spite of the upcoming partnership with Bing in 2010, made design changes to make better use of Search Assist and to encourage web developers to enhance the display of results on the page. All in all, uses were well served by thes improvements. Meantime, Ask, although it did some retrenchment, became better at answering questions, especially through its huge database of question and answer pairs. Twitter and real-time search became mainstream. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have added feeds of Twitter status updates - Google and Yahoo incorporated these into the main page, and Bing put them in a separate tool. Best Search Engines: Cuil has improved so much and is such a joy to use that I added it to the list of best "standard" web search engines. Alternative Search: These search engines do something different. They might use semantic search (Hakia, and Kosmix), have a differently designed interface (DuckDuckGo is new in this category), or work computationally with data - the new Wolfram Alpha. [See Alternative Search] Multimedia Search: Bing and Google took over from Yahoo as leader in multimedia search. Yahoo dropped audio and podcast search, although it still has a New Music site. Bing and Google made video search much easier - their tools are better than those at You Tube. In image search, Bing and Google both added finding similar images, and Google supports a search on colour. WSG also has a new short piece of searching for podcasts. [See Multimedia Search ] Meta-Search Engines: Nothing exciting has happened in the past six months in new metasearch engines for the web. The best ones continue to be Allplus/Polymeta, Carrot, and iSeek for the clustering. Clusty now searches Ask, Bing and Yahoo - an improvement. But Leapfish.com did become a metasearch engine for real-time and multimedia web. It's worth trying. There are some new all-in-one pages (Intelways died and now redirects to Mr Sapo). Comparison search engines where you can compare Bing and Google have been popping up. See MetaSearch Engines. |
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Research |
Minor changes to Research Starter Kit for searches at Yahoo and Google. |
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching and especially Search Syntax. Minor updates to Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo, and the Guides for Google, Windows Live, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: LII.org joined the IPL Consortium but has managed to continue as a separate entity, albeit without the faceted navigation it once had. Intute continues strong. Dmoz carries on. All others are showing fatigue. Social Bookmarking may be filling some of the gap the directories are creating. Delicious received a makeover and looks and handles much better. There are a couple of noteworthy new bookmarking services which are listed in WSG. Search Engines: All pages in WSG about search engines have received some tweaking because of closed services or small changes in messages or features. Ask dropped its 3D display and what remained of its Teoma search technology to adopt a more semantic stance - it is good at answering questions and has a new, actually useful, Q&A, but it did lose many search aids for refining the search. Google offers a more personal search with SearchWiki but it ended Google Notebook. It is doing more altering of the search terms with multiple forms including two words as one - and not making it easy to turn off. Google has a mind of its own when it comes to your search. Yahoo dropped all reminants of boolean logic, and seems to have cut back on the analysis it does in Search Assist. It also killed MyWeb. Gigablast went minimalist - and its great new feature for freshness dating doesn't seem to be working properly. At Exalead Search nothing changes, not even the reported size of the database. Live Search shed several areas in 2008: academic, books, feeds, but has a nice interface for images and video search. Live itself has been stuck onto Live Mail / Hotmail in an effort to be a social networking centre. Multimedia search page starts with Yahoo but also looks at others. MetaSearch Engines received an overhaul to remove dead wood, and to add and reposition some very strong clustering engines such as AllPlus and iSeek. Deep Web is getting the attention of the major search engines today, but the main progress is being made by smaller firms. There is new content in WSG about Deep Web. There were many updates in Search Syntax to reflect improved capabilities for natural language, show more examples of phrases, and update the "related search" page (in which all the major search engines showed a decline in the last year) - use a good clustering metasearch engine instead. |
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8/May/08 |
Research |
Minor updates to Search Engine Comparison tables and the Guides for Ask and Yahoo for stemming words, and use of +, and at Yahoo for removal of NOT. Some other minor corrections. |
Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including Search Syntax. Minor updates to Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo, and the Guides for Google, Windows Live, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: Very little change except that Intute continues to grow. Search Engines: Ask enhanced it binocular view to include site statistics. Other engines have made small changes to the appearance, mainly moving tabs around and not adding features. Yahoo did add the excellent Search Assist to Yahoo Canada. All are probably trying to make 'universal search' work. SearchQuilt scooped Google by creating a meta-search that takes in many Google properties. Gigablast is back with a new look, some improved syntax, and a new date feature. Worth going back to. Lots of media attention to search engines that work with natural language processing. Hakia is in the lead and has become better at returning good results. Several engines are experimenting with data visualization. Quintura and Touchgraph are on the Alternative list. SearchMe is a new addition, still in beta, shows page views - apply for a test account - you'll like it. Pagebull seems to have gone down Everyone is waiting to see if Yahoo really does fall to Microsoft, and what will happen to the product lines. Social Search: Answers.com has joined the QnA space with WikiAnswers - not bad so far. Furl.net received a makeover for adding bookmarks and pages. Can still get recommendations. Stumbleupon is new to WSG. It has been a raging success. Very handy for viewing ratings in search results. Meta-Search: Dropped Allth.at (too few engines), Jux2 (display was awry), Fazzle (finally). Added Carrot2 (very good at clustering and has many sources), iSeek (has iViews), TripleMe (results by engine in columns). Search Syntax: The * at Google has become very powerful - place it anywhere and see how it improves proximity of terms. Also Google handles singular and plural on most words and is good at automatically picking up word variants. Google redesigned its Advanced Search page almost completely hiding search in title and number range. |
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26/Feb/08 |
Research - comparison charts |
Search engine comparison charts reviewed and updated for small changes at Ask, Gigablast, and Live. |
Research |
Updates for syntax on comparison charts and guides: Yahoo - no allintitle; Google date search; Live - can make inurl and link work by putting a + sign in front. |
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Research |
Updated details about searching the Yahoo Directory - new syntax and the fact that Yahoo Directory searches the words on the pages it lists in the directory. |
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Research |
Rewrote and reinstated the page in Search Syntax about proximity. Describes Exalead's NEAR, and Google's use of * as a wildcard. |
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4/Oct/07 |
Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. Updated Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo. Guides for Google, Windows Live, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: The scholarly directories done by librarians are still in business, especially Intute in the UK which is actually thriving. However, on the web, the Open Directory Project gets weaker by the day and has been demoted even further by Google. Social Bookmarking and Social Search: Social bookmarking through del.icio.us continues to be very popular - libraries do it. Millions also participate in Stumbleupon where serendipity is at play. Tagging and recommending sites is part of the Social Search movement which I've added to WSG. There are new human-powered guides such as Mahalo and Squidoo, and more opportunities to vote and tag news stories at Digg and others. Sample some of these here. Search Engines: The major search engines are all intent on helping the searcher with query formulation and in showing results from multiple content areas. Ask does it best with the new 3D display consisting of search suggestions, search refinements, and a variety of content. Google sometimes shows related searches and "universal search" results. Live and Yahoo have followed. Yahoo has Search Assist, and Live has Related Searches. Both also pick up video and images in imitation of Google's universal search - but Ask trumps them all. WSG has new descriptions for the four major engines. The page about Gigablast has been dropped - its database has grown, but there are no new features, freshness is non-existant, and relevancy isn't great. Exalead is still described because it has good features, but the web results are spotty in quality, often commercial and lack freshness. There is more attention in the press to "alternative" engines. WSG has a new page to feature those that are "meaning-based" - they do content analysis rather than link analysi;, and those that use new ways to display results. Meta-Search Engines: Metasearch seems to be getting quite tired. There aren't any new ones except for eTools.ch, and the old ones are barely holding on with fewer and fewer target engines. Syntax: Search engines have added features but no new syntax. Some have even cut back. Live disabled inurl, links to, and date search. Yahoo hid its advanced search. However, the major search engines are bending over backwards to make search suggestions and show related searches. A searcher will want to exploit these. WSG has a new page in the syntax section about Related Searches. The page on query-by-example has been dropped - no engine does a good job at that.
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. Updated Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask.com, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo. Guides for Google, Windows Live, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: Yahoo is sidelining its own directory, and ODP is rotting. However, three-librarian run directories continue to get support and show energy: Intute in the UK, LII.org, and Internet Public Library. Please use them. Social Bookmarking: While people may not be keen on using directories, they sure like classifying what they find and sharing these. WSG has a new page just on these bookmarking services. Vertical Search Engines: Topical search engines are getting more profile. These are also meeting the need for subject-specific information. These crawl the content of sites in a subject domain. Some are major commercial / consumer projects such as Healthline. Others are being assisted by programs offered by Google, Yahoo, and others to create specialized engines. Google Custom Search and Eurekster have possibly been the most successful in this. WSG has a new page about vertical search. Meta-Directories: No one has time for these. The section in WSG is gone. Search Engines: On the one hand, Web search seems stable - we're not seeing any improvements in capabilities. But, there have been some changes in the interface and results display. Ask.com has been working with a new look in AskX.com, which is fairly pleasing in the way it integrates various media. Ask.com has also made tremendous progress with its Smart Answers for quick answers and content capsules. Integrating content - news, blogs, images, video, audio - may be the main issue now, and Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft are looking for better ways to lead the web searcher to other media. Multimedia is a big chunk of that new media. WSG has a new page for Yahoo Multimedia that also references AOL. Personalization is believed to be the next stage for improving web search. Google has linked all its tools to the home page and personal account, following the lead by Yahoo and Microsoft. It's part of the personal portal - WSG touches on this in several spots but you have to explore it on your own. New search engines are springing up. Collarity claims to add community smarts in searches on the Yahoo database. Pagebull is a visual engine that shows the front page of each result. Quintura, also visual, shows topics for a set of results as a tag cloud. But the one that might make the biggest difference is Hakia, a "meaning-based" search engine that can really answer questions. Meta-Search Engines: Metacrawler in, Dogpile out. Who knows what Infospace was thinking when it removed the facility to compare results from Dogpile and put it in Metacrawler, but it did, and WSG dropped Dogpile. Zuula is the new meta-search engine to try and watch - it doesn't collate results, but it certainly makes reviewing results easier. There is also Allth.at - it combines meta-search with some customization. Searchguy has a good set of engines. Syntax: There is no new search syntax but Gigablast and Yahoo both seem to have got their title search working properly. Ask.com changed its Advanced Search to offer less control over a date search and geographic regions. |
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. Updated Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask.com, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo. Guides for Google, Windows Live, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: Number of links dropped by a million in Open Directory Project. People are turning more to social bookmarking centres like del.icio.us for leads. WSG now has a small segment on social bookmarking tools with one exercise at del.icio.us. The channel approach, a high-level taxonomy of portal content, is disappearing. Microsoft dropped it in the new Live. LII.org converted to faceted search. Suite101 underwent a complete redesign and is much more attractive. Intute has launched in the UK replacing the Resource Discovery Network. Look to Intute for excellent online tutorials on conducting research on the Web. Search Engines: Microsoft ended MSN Search and moved into the Web 2.0 space by releasing Live, Live Search, and Live Local and introduced many other services in beta. When it's finished the entire Live suite will be fantastic. For now, not all the pieces fit together. Ask.com became a bit smarter. Its new homepage is a delight to use and much less complex than Live's. There are several services - Encyclopedia, Images, Local, Maps, Blog and Feed Search - all excellent. Exalead is working on a new version - same function, but much easier on the eyes. Everyone is going big guns on audio and video: Yahoo and AOL, the leaders; Google and Live, the followers. Google's personal search is getting better - search history, bookmarks, and notebook, but it isn't as social as Yahoo's tools, or Microsoft's intended tools. Google added a News Archive search going back 200 years. Most content costs money but it is still useful to see the headlines. Google Books links to libraries now and will deliver the full text of books in the public domain. Alexa uses its own crawl now - no more Google or Live. Answer services are very popular now. Google opened Google Answers years ago. Yahoo has a questioning answering community (Yahoo Answers), and Microsoft started QnA. MetaSearch Engines: Metasearchers have hardly changed at all.
Otherwise, the MSEs are same ol' - not even bothering to update the site for changes. A9 is now more like a metaseach engine than anything. It discontinued personal search, took on a new look, and turned to offering searches across categories of databases. Live Search powers the Web search.
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. New Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask.com, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Guides for Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask. Directories: AllLearn.org closed. Directories continue to struggle. Lii.org in California is facing a budget cut of 50%. However, those in the UK seem to thrive. Watch for changes to the Resource Discovery Network over the next few months. Search Engines: Ask.com retired Jeeves, closed Teoma, added a new image search, added more smart answers, and launched a terrific facility for maps and directions. It also has fewer ads. Each month it seems to get better. See the WSG Ask Guide and the Ask Search Engine Exercise. Exalead came out of beta and grew to 4 billion pages. This engine is so good that I've added it to the Search Engine Comparison Chart. Also see the WSG newsletter about Exalead Gigablast has stopped showing the number of pages indexed. Google continues to grow Google Scholar and Google Books. There is also a Google Blog Search and a web-based RSS feed reader. MSN Search added more smart answers from Encarta and changed the look of the search page. Microsoft, meantime, is also building a new search portal to be part of Windows Live. Yahoo is getting into social search through MyWeb2 and the 360 Degrees communities. Visual search engines to watch are Ujiko (love that control panel), and Grokker (gives you a choice of text or orbs). MetaSearch Engines: Metasearchers have not seen any major changes. Because Zapmeta stopped showing source I removed it. Best metasearchers continue to be Clusty, iBoogie, and Dogpile. Some toolbars can be used for meta-search. There is new information about them on the metasearch page. There is the new desktop searcher - Quintura, which has a strong visual component. |
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Complete update to the tutorials about using e-mail.
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. New Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask Jeeves, Gigablast, Google, MSN, Teoma. Yahoo. Guides for Google, MSN, Yahoo and Teoma. Directories: Librarians' Internet Index received a facelift in July and a shorter name. Looksmart directory has been hidden and one wonders if Looksmart intends to kill it off. Zeal.com carries on and Looksmart provides subject treatment for its new verticals aimed at different demographic groups. Open Directory grew but continues to have performance problems. Search Engines: MSN Search added syntax to handle search in the title, url, and filetype fields making it a much stronger search engine. Yahoo grew its database to 19 billion pages (it claims) but hasn't done anything to improve the search operation. Its efforts have been in personalized and community search (MyWeb2.0), more shortcuts and the handy Instant Search for answers as you type. Similarly, Google got bigger and worked on its version of personalized search. Yahoo has a podcast search and Google, a blog search. AOL Search relies on Google but has many useful features for clustering results and saving searches. Amazon's A9 has more searchable databases and the "search inside the book" gets better every month. Ask Jeeves added a very nifty zoom feature for narrowing or expanding a search and picking up related names. Gigablast introduced specialty searches for blogs, travel and US government. Exalead, a relatively new engine with strong functionality, is out of beta. In a poll done by Business Week Online, 5% of readers picked it as the best (third after Google and Yahoo). Metasearch Engines: Dogpile makes it easier to compare results from individual engines. It has the strongest set of engines of any metasearcher. Clusty is out of beta and has extended its metasearch offerings. iBoogie also clusters results and may become a strong competitor to Clusty / Vivisimo. Ez2find and Fazzle are long in the tooth, and like several others, they trundle on but aren't maintained well. New metasearch engines do appear but none match Dogpile, Clusty, iBoogie, or IxQuick. |
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Research |
Changes to Research Starter Kit and More Searching including the tutorials for using Search Syntax. New Search Engine Comparison tables for Ask Jeeves, Gigablast, Google, MSN, Teoma. Yahoo. Guides for Google, MSN, Yahoo and Teoma. Yahoo! has sidelined its directory even more and Open Directory continues to look neglected. The commercial directories are getting weaker. People will want to turn to the ones prepared by librarians. LII.org had added sites, and the Toronto Public Library has relaunched its Virtual Reference Library. New York Times bought About.com. This will likely mean some improvements in the service and writing. MSN launched its own search engine in early 2005 with a very large database of 5 billion pages, a unique interface and some interesting features such as shortcuts to information in Encarta. However, it is not as strong in fielded search as other engines are. Google and Yahoo compete in launching new beta search services. They have expanded their image databases to well over 1 billion. They both do Video, though Yahoo does it much better. They both do Maps, where Google excels. Google opened Google Scholar. Yahoo added a Y!Q search for identifying concepts in long text queries. Try out new tools at Google Labs and Yahoo! Next. Greg Notess declared Altavista and Alltheweb dead, but WSG still has a page on Altavista because the multimedia search is good. WSG considers Hotbot next to dead - it searches Google and Teoma, but you're better off searching either of those directly. Gigablast has grown to 1.5 billion pages. It has had some growing pains but remains a good alternative to the Big Three. Exalead is a new search engine with many attractive features for proximity and truncation and categorization. Showing the date a page was cached is becoming more common. MSN and Gigablast do this and Google has reintroduced it. Meta-search engines have been affected by the consolidation of search engines that has taken place and also by difficulty in getting agreements with Google or Yahoo. Also there seem to be fewer new meta-search engines. Three have been added to WSG are: Info.com - web search is from Infospace but it has several other collections; Jux2.com - shows overlap of results from Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves; TurboScout - a new all-in-one with a very wide selection of engines. Queryster has been dropped from the list. It still exists but has lost all its cute features. Clusty is the meta-searcher to watch. It works its clustering magic on several collections of resources, to which it has just added a meta-searcher for US Government information. Reviewing the syntax exercises always reveals something that no longer works. Yahoo doesn't handle complex queries that involve searching the title of the page well. Brainboost is a new engine that handles natural language questions very well and answers in sentences. Gurunet, once a for-fee application that involved a download, is now the web-based Answers.com that is open to all for free. Answers from Answers.com come up in searches at Google (instead of Dictionary.com), Gigablast, and A9. |
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