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The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 19, October 2003 - Part 4Search Engine World News
AOL renews Google deal(October 9 2003) The huge American Internet service provider American Online (AOL) has decided to keep Google as its search engine results provider. That is probably a wise move. AOL would like to keep its own paying customers as its own site as much as possible, partly to build up brand loyalty and partly to be able to serve them ads. Hence it is better to serve the visitor Google results at the AOL site rather than having them leave for the Google site. Unlike Microsoft, AOL has no plans towards developing its own search engine technology. The external AOL search service (for non-AOL customers) Yahoo!/Overture merger complete(October 8 2003) Yahoo! has announced the completion of Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture. As a result of the merger, Overture is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!. This means that Yahoo! is now the proud owner not only of its own directory (Yahoo!) and search engine (Inktomi), but also of a pay-per-click text ad provider, Overture, and Overture's two regular search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Overture is expected to merge AltaVista and AlltheWeb into one search engine shortly. It is unclear, however, whether Yahoo! would like to joint the Inktomi and AltaVista/AlltheWeb teams, in order to develop another unified search engine. Overture's headquarters will remain in Pasadena, USA, following completion of the acquisition. Ted Meisel will continue to lead Overture and will report to Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo!'s chief operating officer. LookSmart in big trouble(October 7 2003) LookSmart may be near its end, as it looses its main source of revenue: the MSN account. Read what Pandia has to say about the future of the LookSmart directory and pay per click service. Amazon to launch shopping search engine(September 28 2003) This week Yahoo! officially launched its new shopping search engine. Yahoo! lets you search a large database of products from merchants affiliated with the company. As previously reported by Pandia Google is still working on its Froogle product search search engine. European Kelkoo is testing a similar service, and the American old-timer Dealtime has launched the new Shopping.com comparison shopping search service (see below). Online shopping is clearly seen as an important revenue generator. No wonder then that Amazon.com would like a larger piece of the pie. What was originally a bookstore has expanded into all kinds of goods, from CDs to kitchen appliances. It has also made deals with a lot of other online vendors in order to be able to offer as many products as possible. Amazon will now also launch its own shopping search engine, going under the nickname of "A9". The plan is to launch the new site on October 30, and Amazon has already some 30 people working on the project. Google and AltaVista test local search(September 23 2003) Q: What's the next big thing in internet searching? A: Localized search. The search engines are now testing technologies that let you narrow your search to one local geographic area, being that a city, a county or a state. Read Pandia's article on geo-targeted search engines! FindWhat's cold feet(September 19 2003) As reported by Pandia this summer the American pay per click text ad search engine FindWhat announced that it would buy European Espotting, thus laying the foundation for what could become a new major player in this market. Alas, there seem to be a strain in the relationship. FindWhat now wants to renegotiate the deal. After having reviewed Espotting financials FindWhat has changed its views regarding Espotting's strengths and prospects, and could even decide not to finalize the merger. Pandia does not know why FindWhat may want to leave its European bride at the altar, but one reason may be the hard competition in the European market. Given that both Google and Overture now can offer complete packages combining regular search results with pay per click text ads, Espotting might find it harder to compete. Espotting does not own a regular search engine of its own, nor does the company have a reliable search engine partner. FindWhat.com says that, at a minimum, any successful renegotiation of the terms will include "a reduction of the purchase consideration, along with other material changes to the existing Merger Agreement." See also: Reuters and FindWhat press release. Wotbot becomes Wotbox(September 17 2003) As Pandia reported in August there is a new British search engine in town called Wotbot.
"With repeated pressure and threats of legal action, we had very little choice," Mike Nott of Wotbot says. "We are a very small outfit - two guys, both with responsibilities, so the risk of losing our homes was too great to take." Which is why the search engine has got a new name: Wotbox.. Did you mean: Google?(September 15 2003) Google is testing a new feature on some selected searches. The search engine adds some links, suggesting alternative and more focused search queries. The feature is called "related links" and is added to the top of the list of results. According to GoogleGuy, a Google representative, an internal group came up with the idea for this experiment. That being said, quite a few search engines and metasearch engines have had similar features already, including Teoma, Lycos, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Google has not yet decided whether they will implement the new feature across the board. If it works, it can actually be a good idea, as it helps non-savvy searchers target their searches more efficiently. By the way: Google is also testing a new format for their AdWords text ads, where the present separate colored boxes are replaced by a right hand column for continuos ads. Search Engine Lowdown has a screen shot of this alternative format. Webmaster World discussion Gigablast adds Boolean searching(September 6 2003) There is in fact a search engine world beyond Google, AltaVista and the other well known brands. Gigablast is one of them. Gigablast is run by Matt Wells, an American mathematician. Wells originally worked with the search team at the now defunct Infoseek search engine before starting coding Gigablast. A test version was ready in March last year, and the search engine has managed to spider some 200 million web pages. Wells has now added true Boolean searching to Gigablast's advanced search functions, something which is bound to please librarians and other professional researchers. By searching for cats AND dogs for instance, you will get pages that include both words, not only one of them. Boolean is a simple set of search terms that lets you combine keywords in a way the search engines can understand. The readers of Pandia can easily learn how to "speak Boolean" by reading the Goalgetter search tutorial. . Gigablast asks you use to use AND NOT to exclude a word (cats AND NOT dogs). Alternatively you may - of course - use the minus sign instead (cats -dogs). Please note that Gigablast defaults to OR, meaning that the search dogs cats will bring you pages that includes one or both of the words. You do not have to learn Boolean to make use of Gigablast's advanced features, however. You may also make use of the site's advanced search form, which lets you combine keywords by using different form fields. You may restrict searches to sites, URLs, titles, IP numbers, and links, as well as to PDF, doc, xls, ppt, ps and text files Gigablast help pages Search the past with Recall(September 4 2003) Several historians have worried about the Net and the fact that web pages disappear just as easily as they are born. A lot of valuable historical material may be lost when a site shuts down or pages are deleted. The Internet Archive is doing something about it. With regular intervals it sends robots our crawling the web, gathering data. It then keeps these "snapshots" of cyberspace in its computers, giving you the possibility to reconstruct the past. If you search for www.pandia.com in the WayBack machine you will, for instance, get a list of snapshots of Pandia from May 1999 onwards. Resourceshelf reports that The Internet Archive is now testing a new search engine that lets you search the contents of the 11 billion pages found in the index. The Recall search engine is simple to use. Just enter your search query in the search form and hit enter. Advanced search functions are included on all result pages. They let you limit your search to a specific time period. You may also narrow results by category and topics selected by Recall on the basis of the the meaning of the search query. Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization(August 22 2003) The new Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization was established during the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose (see below). It is clearly a serious effort. The board of directors includes well known search engine experts like Barbara Coll (Webmama.com), Brett Tabke (Webmaster World), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch) and Fredrick Marckini (iProspect). SEMPO defines itself as a "non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide." In short: SEMPO is to educate business and marketing managers about the value of systematic search engine marketing. Membership requires a fee. Nevertheless, even non-members may benefit from the the resources found at the SEMPO site. Inside Search Engine Strategies, part IV(August 19-22 2003) Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Strategies rolled into San Jose in August, bringing an unprecedented four days of search engine marketing advice (SEM) and news to more than 1700 attendees. Andy Beal reports from day 4 of the conference. See also his reports from day 1, day 2 and day 3. Yahoo! is preparing a switch to Inktomi(August 22 2003) The Yahoo! search engine is at the moment powered by its main competitor: Google. It is no secret that Yahoo! feels uncomfortable with this arrangement, but the company has learned from Google: If you want to get returning searchers, you must give the visitors what they want -- and that is high quality search results. Yahoo! already owns one alternative, the Inktomi search engine, and is in the process of acquiring Overture with its two search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Hence the use of Google is not caused by a lack of options. Yahoo! is now performing tests in several countries, including Australia and Brazil, to see if Inktomi can replace Google. According to CNET, Yahoo! is also testing an alternative news search in the US. A Yahoo! spokeswoman tells CNET that the tests make up roughly 2 percent of the search volume in those areas. The idea is in part to determine if Inktomi is now, in fact, as good as Google, so that visitors will not abandon Yahoo! in favor of Google when the switch takes place. To ZDNet Australia Yahoo Australia search producer Peter Crowe says that they will switch to Inktomi "if the Inktomi results are better for Australian users". The Australians are particularly concerned about getting search results that are relevant to the local market. At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference (see below) Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search, said that Yahoo! has every intention of deploying Inktomi globally. Hence it is not so much a question of if Yahoo! will switch to Inktomi, but when. The AltaVista search toolbar(August 18 2003) The new AltaVista toolbar is an add-on to the Internet Explorer browser for Windows and gives you direct access to the AltaVista search engine from the browser-window. Read more about this new search tool from AltaVista. Search Engine Marketing Done Right 4(August 17 2003) In his series Search Engine Marketing Done Right, Pandia Guest Writer Steve Winkler takes a look at how to turn visitors into buying customers. Read about how to close the deal. The Google calculator(August 13 2003) Google follows in the footsteps of AlltheWeb and turns its search form into a calculator. Pandia has more on the Google math. New "democratic" search engine(August 5 2003) California gave birth to Google. Now a new search engine is being prepared for launch in San Diego. NetNose is based on a new and original approach to site ranking: the public voice algorithm. All users of the search engine are asked to contribute by voting on selected sites. Hence the site that gains the highest number of "quality points" based on this voting, will be listed first. It sounds like an open invitation to spammers. However, you cannot select the site you are to vote for yourself. NetNose will open up a Web page for you along with a pop-up window listing a number of related search terms. You are then asked to what degree these terms accurately describe the site. You may trash low quality sites by clicking on a trash can icon. A site will have to be rated before it is included in the search engine index. In order for NetNose to succeed it will have to encourage users to vote. This has apparently not been a serious problem so far. NetNose is currently in its beta testing stage, and it is too early to evaluate the quality of its search results. It supports a few Boolean operators (and, + and -) and allows you to limit results to certain types of sites (e.g. kid safe sites, entertainment and shopping). More about NetNose Google adds search for synonyms(August 5 2003) Google now allows you to extend your search to synonyms. Enter a tilde before a keyword, and Google will include pages that includes words that have a similar meaning. Google may also include variations of the same word (plural, ing-form etc.) Resourceshelf reports that the tilde operator only works in the English language and when you are searching for Web pages and similar documents. Hence it does not work when searching for newsgroup messages or news. Google gives the following example: To search for browser help as well as browser guides and tutorials, enter browser ~help in the search field. We know from experience that some users will find it hard to find the ~ character. On our Norwegian Windows-keyboard you hit AltGr and the relevant button and then hit the space bar to make the character visible. By the way, Google News is now ready in a French version. New search engine optimization forum(August 3 2003) Well known search engine marketing expert Jill Whalen has launched the new High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum. http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php Sign up for our free newsletters today!The Pandia Post is our free bimonthly newsletter on Internet searching, search engines, ranking and optimization. We will give you useful tips on how to search the Web and get higher rankings, as well as information on the development of Pandia. 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