SEARCH ENGINE NEWS

What now, AltaVista?

Jupiter Media Metrix recently released a top 10 search site list based on search traffic (i.e. search-related visits to the relevant sites only) for January 2002.

According to this list MSN is now the most popular search site, with 36.3 percent of US Internet searchers; Yahoo! is close behind with 33.3 percent, while Google attract some 24 percent of the searchers. The figures for AOL, Ask Jeeves and LookSmart are 22.2, 15.9 and 9.6 respectively. Note that some visitors go to more than one search site.

The figures are not 100 percent reliable, and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Whether Yahoo! or MSN is number 1 is a matter for debate. Moreover, Lycos has not been included. Still, the numbers do give a general impression of the popularity of the various sites, and what's most interesting is that the old search engine champion, AltaVista, is now listed behind InfoSpace, Overture and Netscape with no more than 5.7 percent.

In the search engine discussion forums the dominant opinion seems to be that AltaVista will meet the fate of the Infoseek and Excite search engines, ie. death and oblivion. The main reason is reported to be the lack of search quality. Google consistently manages to produce more relevant search results, and as soon as AltaVista users discover this they jump the fence.

This is obviously part of the reason for the demise of AltaVista. Another one is their attempt to become a broad based Internet portal at a time when searchers decided that they liked pure search sites like Google better.

It is too early to lament the death of AltaVista yet, however, for the company is clearly learning. In February AltaVista dropped the last remains of its portal features, free email, and the site has once again become a search site only.

Furthermore, AltaVista is constantly adding new features, demonstrating a new capability for innovation that might -- possibly -- save the site in the long run.

To give a few examples: In February AltaVista added the following new or revised features:

Images corresponding to news stories are now provided in results when available (currently for approximately 20% of all news stories).

News listings have also got expanded abstracts to help searchers determine the relevancy of listings.

AltaVista has added additional news subcategories to news search, including region-specific news stories from around the world.

The tabs above the search box on all the main search pages have been restored, including tabs for the search engine and the (LookSmart based) directory. At the same time the search boxes have been simplified. AltaVista tells us that testing and experience gleaned from their 21 international sites have taught them that users find tabbed results easier to navigate and more effective for scanning results.

AltaVista is now employing a script that carries the query currently in the search field forward to alternative search services such as audio and image search.

AltaVista has reduced the number of results per page from 20 to 10.This allows them to make the links larger and increase the space between them, thus increasing readability. On the other hand, it also makes it possible to include twice as many banners and paid links, thus increasing the time it takes to download the results on a 56K modem. Moreover, the fact that AltaVista includes as many as five text ads above the regular search results, means that you have to scroll to see the results on a small monitor. (And we really do not like the fact that the text ads are called "Products and Services" instead of "Sponsored Results". AltaVista should follow the example of Lycos in this respect.)

The new advanced search page includes separate search fields for key operators like OR, AND NOT, and NEAR. For instance, there is a separate field for "this exact phrase". According to AltaVista this means that users no longer have to learn Boolean syntax. By doing this, the company is in line with most search sites.

However, the main point of learning Boolean searching is not the simple use of one operator, but the fact that you can build more complex queries using brackets and quotation marks. Fortunately, AltaVista has retained the free-form Boolean box for what they call "super-advanced searchers" (which - of course - includes all readers of the Pandia Goalgetter Search Engine Tutorial!)

Also note that AltaVista has changed to a default AND for most regular searches. This means that if you enter several keywords in the search field without using Boolean operators AltaVista will normally give you pages that include all these words only.

See also: AltaVista adds shortcuts at http://www.pandia.com/sw-2002/05-altavista.html

Danny Sullivan on the Jupiter Media Metrix figures: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0226-traffic.html.
See also http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/mediametrix.html

Google indexing https-pages

Planet Ocean reports that Google has started indexing https:// pages -- i.e. pages from secure servers. Secure servers are normally used for shopping carts, web server interfaces, and other services that requires encryption.

To our knowledge the pages indexed by Google do not contain sensitive information as credit card numbers or email addresses.

Click on this link to see the 3,8 million https-pages indexed by Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en
&as_qdr=all&q=allinurl%3A+https&btnG=Google+Search

Espotting becomes European pay-per-click champion

A pay-per-click search engine is a service that lets advertisers pay for a good ranking in the search results. At the moment Overture is dominating the North American market, feeding text ads to nearly all the major search portals and sites, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and AltaVista.

Overture has not been equally successful in conquering the European market, where Espotting is giving it a good fight for the pay-per-click throne.

You will find Espotting results at the British version of Ask Jeeves and Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, BT Looksmart UK, Searchengine.com, UK Plus, and more.

On February 27 Espotting announced a deal with the French branch of the Internet service provider Tiscali, which means that Espotting France’s search results will appear on Tiscali France’s search engine, Nomade.fr.

As a result of the Tiscali deal, Espotting has increased its reach amongst French Internet users to 70% . Espotting France’s search results already appear on Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista France, Netscape France and will soon be going live on Yahoo! France.

According to research by Nielsen/NetRatings Espotting powers 31% more searches than Overture in Germany.

See also our article "Overture gets some serious competitors delivering paid search results" at http://www.pandia.com/sw-2002/04-overture.html

Espotting home page: http://www.espotting.com/

"Latest Figures Confirm Espotting as the No.1 Pay-per-click Search Network in Europe" (press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020301/10122_1.html)

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