The Pandia Post 20 - search engine news

(January 28 2004) The search engine industry is all about human capital, i.e. the engineers, scientists, researchers, designers and marketers that makes innovation possible.

A research team is more than the sum of its part, however. You need to develop a culture that can function efficiently, where people thrive and feel that they take part in something meaningful. In spite of all the cyberspace hype, this normally means that the researchers must be located in the same place, i.e. they should be able to drink coffee together.

So what do you do when the people you are looking for have their families on the other side of the world? And no, they are not willing to move.

The answer is that you compromise. You do establish a second research unit, even if it situated far away from your main canteen.

Hence Yahoo!/Overture has researchers in Oslo, Norway, even if that can be considered a cumbersome way of doing things. And because of this Google is now establishing a new research center in Zürich, Switzerland.

According to Google the European engineering center will "focus on improving our language-specific offerings in ways that will benefit all of our global services, while ensuring that Google's usefulness in each of the major European languages is unsurpassed."

Google has another center in Bangalore, India.

Google Europe is hiring
Google kommt nach Zürich (NZZ)
Webmaster World discussion

Meceoo, a new kind of metasearch engine

(January 19 2004) Metasearch engines are search facilities that combines search results from several search engines. Pandia has, as some reader's will know, its own metasearch engine.

Meceoo is a new metasearch site that adds a few interesting innovations.

First of all, Meceoo allows searchers to define their own "exclusion list". Hence they may ask the metasearch engine to exclude sites that includes specific terms in their domain name.

You may also set up Meceoo in such a way that you search a batch of selected sites only, for instance sites that focus on search engines and search engine marketing.

Behind Meceoo you find people involved in the excellent Abondance site, the French answer to Pandia.

By the way, the name "Meceoo" means "Mais c'est o ?" -- pronounced "meh-seh-ooh" -- which is French for "But where is it?".

Meceoo includes data from AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi.

Meceoo on the creation and management of an exclusion list
Meceoo on preselected list management

MSN leaves LookSmart behind

(January 19 2004) Microsoft's MSN.com portal has for a long time added LookSmart's directory listings to its search engine results.

Although the LookSmart database does include listings from the volunteer based Zeal directory, most of the results are now pay-per-click text ads.

Obviously someone at MSN realized that the LookSmart results reduced the quality of the overall search results. Moreover, it became hard to distinguish between paid entries and regular search result.

Pandia has previously reported on MSN's decision to abandon LookSmart. Last week LookSmart results started disappearing from MSN-sites all over the world, and will probably be gone in most countries shortly. (In Norway we continue to see LookSmart "Web Directory" results, though).

In the future MSN.com will deliver search results from the Inktomi search engine, and add text ads (predominantly from Overture) marked as "sponsored" and "featured" sites. Later this year, or -- more likely -- next year, MSN will replace Inktomi with its own search engine.

Google adds more search features

(January 13 2004) Google has expanded its arsenal of special searches. If you search for the following items, Google will include special links at the top of the search engine results pages.

US citizens may find it useful to enter a US telephone area code in the search field to get a map of the relevant geographic region.

If you find a universal product code (UPC) on products you buy, you may enter this code in the search field to get more information on the product.

If you enter an airline name or code and a flight number Google will give you links to travel information. Yahoo! has implemented a similar feature.

A Vehicle ID number (VIN) will give you more information on the year, make and model of a specific car.

USPS (U.S. Postal Service Tracking Numbers) will lead you to the USPS web site which gives you the shipping status of a package.

A feature aimed at giving access to more information about the owners of domain names (e.g. whois pandia.com) has apparently been removed.

It is interesting to note that most of the relevant links lead to informational web sites that include Google AdSense text ads.

Internet.com has more. See also Search Engine Watch.

MSN improves advanced searching

(January 13 2004) Resourceshelf reports that MSN has added a few new advanced search operators.

You may for instance truncate search terms by using the * symbol. The star replaces any number of letters, but the search keyword must be at least four characters long (including the "*").

You may use the NEAR operator. A search query like dog NEAR cat indicates that you are looking for web pages where these two keywords appear within eight words of each other.

Google tests book search

(December 28 2003) Google is experimenting on including excerpts of the content of books and publications in regular search engine results. The results are marked with a [Books - Beta] tag,

So far only a few publishers have been included. The result pages include links to the online merchants Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, where you can buy the publication.

To read an excerpt of Neil Gaiman's wonderful children's book Coraline, take a look at this Google Print page. As you will see, the Google URL identifies the book by its international ISBN number.

Google says: "On Google Print pages, we provide links to some popular book sellers that may offer the full versions of these publications for sale. Book seller links are not paid for by those sites, nor does Google benefit if you make a purchase from one of these retailers."

If you want to see how the books search results look like, visit this search result page (thanks to vitaplease at Webmaster World)

Google About Google Print
See also High Search Engine Rankings

Google adds number search

(December 13 2003) Resourceshelf reports that Google has launched several new search by number options for US citizens.

Enter a special "code word" and a number and Google will search the relevant database for you.

The following options are listed at the Google web search feature page::

To see delays and weather conditions at a particular US airport, type the airport's three letter code followed by the word "airport." For example, San Francisco International Airport updates can be found by searching for sfo airport.

On Google's stemming of search keywords

(December 8 2003) As several search engine experts have pointed out, Google has started "stemming" search keywords.

This means that if you are searching for a specific term, Google will also look for variations of the same word.

As Google puts it: "If you search for 'pet lemur dietary needs', Google will also search for "pet lemur diet needs", and other related variations of your terms." Included are also variation of verbs, including -ing forms.

However, as Greg Notess points out, it is not always obvious when this occurs. "The stemming does not seem to occur on single word searches or on phrase searches," he says.

This means that you can use quotation marks to override the automatic stemming. You may also put a plus sign in front of words you would like Google to leave untouched, like this: car +park

Greg Notess: Google Starts Auto Stemming Searches
Danny Sullivan: What Happened To My Searches On Google?
Google on stemming

The new Google filter

(December 2 2003) The latest Google topic debated in search engine optimization circles is the new Google filter. Is Google really "punishing" sites with search engine savvy webmasters?

The story goes like this: After Google's search engine index update of November 16 webmasters discovered that quite a few optimized webpages dropped dramatically in search engine ranking.

However, this was clearly not a general penalty, i.e. a drop in PageRank (the boost Google gives to pages due to its "popularity", i.e. the number of relevant inbound links).

Instead the pages seemed to suffer when you searched for particular keyword phrases, while the pages remained as popular as ever for other search queries.

As MakeMeTop puts it: "It was as if Google were checking to see if external links to the site included the phrase, on-page optimization was being done for the phrase and even if the domain included the phrase."

In other words: It seems Google is dampening the effect a clever harvesting of keyword relevant inbound links has on the ranking for selected search phrases, in particular popular commercial search queries. The purpose for this may be to promote sites that are truly content-rich, authoritative and relevant instead of cleverly optimized sites.

Google, of course, does not comment on their ranking recipes, and the complexity of such search engine algorithms makes it impossible to find the true cause for the changes.

It is always useful to remember that Google does not owe webmasters anything, and that there is no such thing as a permanent top ranking.

Barry "MakeMeTop" Lloyd: Making Sense of Update Florida
Danny Sullivan: Google Dance Syndrome Strikes Again

MSN is testing a new search service for news

(November 18 2003) Microsoft is testing a new news service -- clearly an answer to Google news search.

It has been developed in co-operation with Moreover, the company that the delivers the news headlines you find in the right hand column of this page.

The new feature is called Newsbot, and MSN is so far testing British, French, Italian, and Spanish versions.

Like Google, MSN Newsbot generates the selection of headlines on the "front page" automatically. Pictures are often included.

You can personalize the news site based on your interests, so that the Newsbot selects stories from news sources and topics you have been interested in in the past.

It is to early to deliver any judgment on the quality of the new service, these are -- after all -- beta versions.

MSN is clearly investing much money in its new search adventure, which may pay off. However, apart from the personalization feature, there is not much new to the Newsbot site. The motto is clearly: "Why innovate, when Google can do that for you!"

On the other hand. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and if you are good at doing it, you may actually deliver high quality products and services and win the market.

Microsoft copied the Apple Macintosh OS interface when replacing MS DOS with Windows. A very wise move, indeed! If the new Microsoft search engine is as good as Google's when it is launched maybe sometimes next year, MSN may actually take the search engine throne away from Google. That's a big "if", however.

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.

Pandia Search World is a short weekly news update on searching and search engine marketing. And yes, it is free as well!

The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 20, January 2004, part 4

Selected search engine news

Google to open research center in Europe