SITESEEING

As a reader of the Pandia Post newsletter, you clearly appreciate the usefulness of search engine newsletters. As noted in our previous issue, there are more, and we have now added a separate page on such publications in our Resource section http://www.pandia.com/resources/newsletters.html.

Traffick Monthly

Andrew Goodman has written some very good articles on the search engine scene for his own "portal for portals" Traffick (http://www.traffick.com/). He is not afraid to go in depth or to add his own personal perspective to topics that are only referred to by the traditional news services.

You could say that Andrew writes like a self-confident newspaper columnist that knows his audience and feel confident that he has some really interesting points of view to offer his readers -- which he does.

If you want a monthly dose of his reflections, you should subscribe to the Traffick monthly newsletter. If you are into portals and search engine marketing, you will enjoy it!

Go to http://www.traffick.com/about/newsletters.asp#monthly to subscribe.

The Beeb goes Google!

BBC has launched a new search engine based on the Google database. What makes it different from Google is the lack of advertising.

Yep, you heard us: There are no blinking banners, and no text ads hidden as search results. There are just regular high quality search results, plain and simple.

"We will fight them on the Web!"

Pandia has written a lot about the search site's need for revenue and their search for new forms for advertising. How on earth is the BBC able to offer a search engine generating no income?

Believe us: Running a search engine is very expensive -- even if you let Google generate the database. Running a popular search engine is even more so.

Well, the BBC is a public institution owned by the state, and a fair guess is that the British tax payer is footing the bill. That's good news for us who do not live in Britain.

An interesting question, though, is whether the British tax payer will accept this sacrifice. An even more interesting question is whether the competitors of the new BBCi (there has to be an "i" there, hasn't there?) will stand for this. The European Commission has very strict rules about "unfair competition", and this may be interpreted as an example of exactly that.

For the time being, however, all of us may enjoy the benefits of having an ad and p/o/r/n-free version of Google readily available.

BBC notes that the company will add "BBCi recommends" sites that benefit a UK audience, educate and entertain or are genuinely useful, are the best at what they do, are accurate and reliable sources of information, cover their subject area thoroughly and imaginatively, contain up-to-date information, and are easy to use and fast to load.

You may limit your search to UK sites only, and click on tabs to search the BBC sites or BBC News. The new search engine is part of the new version of the bbc.co.uk site renamed BBCi.

Gary Price (http://resourceshelf.freepint.com/) notes that most of the Google limiting syntax works with this version of the Google database (site:, intitle:, inurl:, link:, related: ). PDF and other non-html formats don't seem to be available. Cached pages are also not available.

BBCi Search can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/

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