Pandia Post No. 24 Part 3

Recent search engine news and articles

Below find selected articles from the Pandia Search World search engine news service.

Worm uses Google to attack sites

(December 22 2004) A Web worm is using Google to identify sites using the vulnerable PHP Bulletin Board (phpBB) software. News.com believes that as many as 40.000 sites may have been infected.

The Santy.A worm uses a vulnerability in older versions of the PHP scripting language, which is underpinning the phpBB open source software, and defaces bulletin boards using this program.

The worm fills the relevant web pages with the text This site is defaced!!! NeverEverNoSanity WebWorm generation 15.

This worm will not attack personal computers, and you do not risk infection by using Google.

Google is now blocking the worm from searching for vulnerable bulletin boards.

Karspersky.lab: Net-Worm.Perl.Santy.a threatens Internet forums
List of defaced sites as found by Google
Information Week: Google Worm Shows Bad Guys Want Efficiency, Too

New version of the Santy worm

(December 28 2004) There is now a new version of Santy called Santy.e or PhpInclude.Worm that uses AOL Search and Yahoo! to spread. According to InformationWeek the new version of the worm can exploit any site that's left allowed arbitrary file inclusion into PHP scripts.

See also Dev Shed: PHP security mistakes.

Behind the scenes at MSN desktop search

(December 27 2004) Since the previous issue of the Pandia Post the search engine world has seen the birth of several desktop search tools that can be used to search your own computer (see our special desktop search survey).

One of these is the new MSN Desktop Toolbar Suite.

The toolbars add new search forms to the Outlook email program, the Internet Explorer and the Windows Explorer.

Microsoft's Channel 9 site presents a lot of interesting information on the development of Microsoft software, the desktop search tools included.

Pandia takes a look at two online video interviews with the teams developing the Microsoft Toolbar Suite.

Pandia launches search engine search engine

(December 27 2004) You can get a long way by reading Pandia and Pandia alone, but there are other search engine oriented sites out there.

By use of Gigablast's Custom Topic Search feature we have developed a search engine that searches the best English language sites on searching and search engine marketing.

Those of you who tested it during its first day of operation will be glad to know that, based on advice from Gigablast founder Matt Wells himself, we have improved the accuracy of searches significantly.

Among the sites included are Pandia, Search Engine Watch, Traffick, Search Engine Showdown, Researchbuzz, Resourceshelf, the search engines' own weblogs, search engine forums and many more.

In fact, we have included most of the English language sites listed in our resource section.

Visit Pandia's Search Engine Topic Search Engine!

Internet Explorer rapidly loosing ground

(December 23 2004) There is a new web browser war going on, as the Microsoft Internet Explorer is rapidly loosing ground to the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Pandia takes a look at alternative web browsers and their effect on Internet searching.

Seekport launches UK search engine

(December 20 2004) In June Seekport launched its German search engine. Now this European search engine company adds a British search site, focusing on web pages relevant to the UK searcher.

Pandia has more about Seekport UK and its support for advanced searching

blinkx launches TV and radio search engine

(December 15 2004) blinkx has launched a new video and audio search engine called blinkx.tv.

blinkx captures and indexes video streams published by TV and radio company web sites, letting you search for news, movie trailers, popular multimedia spots etc. Moreover, it actually makes an analysis of the audio track of any transmission in order to understand the words spoken.

Pandia has more on the new TV and radio search engine.

Yahoo! Video Search Beta

(December 15 2004) Yahoo! has silently launched the beta test version of its new video search engine.

Pandia has more on the new video search engine and the new standard for supplying information about digital video files.

Google to scan books

(December 15 2004) Google is intensifying its efforts towards academics and scholars.

The company is now planning to scan books owned by the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library.

Ultimately the texts will be included in the Google search engine index. This will give searchers access to a large number of rare and out of print books. At the same time Google will include links to booksellers that sell some of the more recent publications.

Google already does this for some publishers, and includes scanned material through its Google Print feature.

Clicking on a title link will bring you to a Google Print page where you can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material.

See also: Google press release
Program to promote books in Google Print (Pandia)
Searching for printed material using Google

Ask Jeeves launches desktop search tool

(December 14 2004, update December 15) In our recent article on desktop search tools Pandia discusses the reasons why all the search engine companies are launching "total search" tools, i.e. software that lets you search the web, your own computer and your own emails.

The main reason is that they want to achieve a positive lock-in. If you use their desktop search tool, you may also use it to search the web, using their search engine.

Ask Jeeves won't be left behind and has launched a beta version of their own Ask Jeeves Desktop Search.

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is a small application (some 750K), but is nevertheless able to search your hard drive for Microsoft Office files, Outlook emails and various text, image, music and video files.

The technology is based on a desktop search tool developed by Tukaroo, a company Ask Jeeves bought in June.

According to Search Engine Lowdown this desktop tool gives users more control over the software than some of the competitors. Hence users can define how much of their hard drive they want indexed, and how much processor power should be allotted to this task.

The search form is integrated into various Windows dialog boxes, including "Open file". Results are presented in a window with two panels, where one gives a preview of the relevant file.

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search

New from Google: automatic suggestions

(December 10 2004) Google is testing a new feature called Google Suggest. An equally suitable name would probably be Google Guess, as Google tries to guess what you are trying to find in real time.

As soon as you have started typing Google will try to guess what you are looking for, offering you alternative search keywords and queries with an estimate of the number of pages containing the relevant search keyword phrases.

Yes, Google already has a similar feature in its "Did you mean?" links. However, you will have to click on the relevant link to get those suggestions. These ones are produced automatically.

How do they do it? Google says that they -- for instance -- use data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. They add that Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.

Google Suggest can also be used as a tool for generating alternative search queries for search engine optimization.

The technical requirements for using Google Suggest are: Internet Explorer 6.0 (or newer), Netscape 7.1 (or newer), Mozilla 1.4 (or newer), Firefox 0.8 (or newer), Opera 7.54 (or newer), or Safari 1.2.2 (or newer). JavaScript and cookies must be enabled.

Google Suggest FAQ

Source: xcandyman at Webmaster World

Disclosure of paid placement and paid inclusion

(December 5 2004) More than two years ago Pandia reported that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had demanded that search engines should distinguish clearly between sponsored and regular search results.

Lars Våge presents the recent Consumer WebWatch study on disclosure of paid search results.

Creative Commons search engine in the new FireFox

(December 2 2004) With a Creative Commons license you can allow others to copy, distribute, quote or develop what you have made available online. You keep your copyright, but at the same time you make it possible for others to profit from it, provided they stay within the limits set by you.

The latest version of the FireFox browser has got a new search engine for searching such public license documents.

Lars Våge has more about the Creative Commons FireFox search engine.

China censors Google News

(November 30 2004, update December 1) Interfax reports that Google's new service has been inaccessible in China for more than a week.

Interfax adds that the service is still available through the use of proxy servers, a clear indication that it has been blocked by the authorities.

The Google news search engine and news aggregator gives Chinese searchers access to uncensored news from all over the world, something the Chinese dictatorship fears more than anything else in the world.

In September Pandia reported on Google giving in to Chinese authorities by excluding some sites from the news listings presented to Chinese searchers. It didn't help. InternetNews.com reports that the Chinese government might be trying to force searchers to use the Chinese version of the site. According to Reporters Without Borders that version has been purged of the most critical news reports.

China's road towards internationalization and market based capitalism makes the demand for freedom of speech stronger and stronger. Indeed, other countries in the region that have followed this path have ended up as democracies, including Taiwan and South Korea.

The Chinese censorship is another clear indication of the Internet's power as a political equalizer, meaning that search engines like Google and Yahoo! are not only important tools for knowledge diffusion, but for democratization as well.

Amnesty International on human rights in China.

Google to search TV

(November 30 2004) News.com reports that Google is preparing a search engine for your TV set.

Both regular broadcasts, DVDs and Internet TV transmissions contain closed-caption text, i.e. descriptions of the TV programs, subtitles for the hearing impaired etc.

Google is to use this text to identify the content of the programs, much in the same way as they identify webpages today.

This will, for instance, make it possible to search for the name of a person, and get a list of programs containing relevant information, with still photos from shows or movies.

Google keeps its mouth shut about the technology, but has apparently been presenting it to representatives for American broadcasting corporations.

News.com reports that Microsoft and Yahoo! are working on similar technologies.

Thanks to Search Engine Lowdown for drawing our attention to this one.

Google's copyright problems

(November 29 2004) Google has been brought to court for its use of thumbnails images in its image search engine.

Pandia takes a look at Google's use of thumbnails and cached versions of webpages.

EEVL ejournal search engine

(November 24 2004) We don't know about the name. However, EEVL is far from evil. It is rather a beneficial search engine that lets you search free online ejournals in the fields of engineering, mathematics and computing.

EEVL is a UK-based not-for-profit guide. It is run by information specialists from Heriot Watt University, with input from other universities in the UK, including the University of Birmingham, and Cranfield University.

EEVL now provides three new dedicated ejournal search engines:

• Computing, searching 60 full-text ejournals in computing.
• Mathematics, searches 28 full-text ejournals in mathematics.
• Engineering searches 160 full-text ejournals in engineering.

There is also a search form for searching all three databases at once.

It should be noted that EEVL provides more than these search engines. There is also a special directory for sources related to engineering, mathematics and computing, including a subset of essential key sites in these fields.

List of indexed ejournals.

Google adds new search engine for scholars

(November 18 2004) Google has launched a new search engine focusing on the needs of scientists and scholars.

The Google Scholar index is based on a subset of the regular Google index, but -- as Google says -- this service enables you to search specifically for "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."

The search algorithm is apparently a little bit different from the regular one.

There is also a special search query syntax rule to be learned. If you want to find a specific article it is best to combine a search phrase (in quotes) with the last name of the article's first author: author:einstein "theory of relativity".

If a search result is marked [citation], that means that Google has found a reference, but that the article is not available on the open Web. This also applies to books. Some of the articles will not be available for free on the Web.

For the time being the service will not include Google Adword text ads.

See also the Google Scholar FAQ.

Google Scholar advanced search interface

(December 28 2004) Gary Price reports that Google has added an advanced search interface to Google Scholar, Google's search engine for academic papers and publications.

The first section of the search form presents menu based replacements for Boolean operators like AND, OR, AND NOT, exact phrase, and field searching (for now limited to "all of the article" and "title").

The second section lets you specify the name of the author, the name of the publication and the date of publication.

This is the minimum of what should be expected from a scientific search engine. Note that there exists a regular search query term that can be used instead of the author menu selector:

Hence: Write author:price to find papers written by Price.

For more information see Google Scholar advanced search tips

Help, my site has been banned by Google!

(November 17 2004) It is the ultimate search engine marketing nightmare: Your site has been removed from Google's index and your traffic is falling.

By all means panic. Then draw your breath and read our Banned by Google Survival Guide and learn how to get your pages back in. And yes, the tutorial works for the other search engines as well.

Jux2 lets you compare search engine results

(November 16 2004) Jux2 is a relatively new metasearch engine that lets you compare results from Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves.

The Jux2 search listings include information on the position of a relevant web page in each of the three search engines. This is interesting, as it shows how much the search results actually differ between the three.

Jux2 notes that in tests conducted using the 500 most popular search terms, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results. In a separate test of 91 random searches, Jux2 found that Google and Yahoo! share only 23% of their top 100 results.

However, it should be noted that Jux2 is still in its beta test phase, and may not -- as SiteLines has pointed out -- be totally reliable.

Search engine algorithm development is no exacts science, and the lack of overlap does not necessarily mean that one search engine delivers lower quality than the other. This does prove the usefulness of using more than one search engine, however.

Jux2 serves are more than a toy for search engine oriented people. It also works as a metasearch engine in its own right. There is even a separate search form for advanced searching, that gives room for a little menu based Boolean searching.

See also Search Engine Watch Blog.

Google reaches 8 billion documents

(November 11 2004) Web masters have noticed some very aggressive Google crawlers recently. Google has obviously been indexing new pages en masse.

And indeed, today Google announced that it has expanded its search engine database to 8 million documents, including web pages, PDF files, PowerPoint files, Flash, PostScript, JavaScript (sic!) and -- presumably -- Word and Excel files.

MSN's new test index (see below) is currently containing some 5 billion pages. The size of Yahoo's index is not public.

Again, it is not size that matters most in this game, but the quality of the search engine algorithm that picks out the top ten result pages. Still, a larger index may make it easier to pick information on more obscure and narrow topics.

MSN Search one step closer to launch

(November 10 2004, update November 11) MSN has upgraded the Techpreview of their new search engine to a more advanced public beta test site. This site will be run in parallel with the regular MSN search site and portal, which both are powered by the Yahoo! search engine at the moment.

So MSN is not rushing it. They want the new search engine to be as good as Google's before they do a proper launch -- which is clearly the most sensible thing to do.

The company seems very optimistic. MSN chief executive Steve Ballmer told shareholders on Tuesday that "We will catch up, we will surpass [Google]". But then gain, this is exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to tell shareholders.

Among the new features added to the MSN search engine is a "Near Me" button that restricts your search to your local area. The feature is based on your computers IP address, but you may also set the geographical location manually.

There is extensive support for advanced searching. A separate "Search Builder" link opens up a more advanced search form on the search page itself. You may limit your search to specific domains, countries, languages or regions or to pages that link to a defined URL. The "Search Builder" then transforms your query to the correct Boolean syntax.

Another innovation is the search engine algorithm sliders. Yes, you may adjust the search ranking by degree of match, page popularity and freshness.

It is this type of innovation that gives Microsoft a chance against Google. However, there is no reason to believe that MSN will overtake Google as the leading search portal in the very near future. This technology is not better than Google's, and Google has built a better brand. However, searchers will definitely benefit from getting such a strong alternative to Google.

Note:The beta search page may be unavailable at times. There are obviously many who would like to test out the new search engine.

EWeek has more: MSN Search Beta Set to Launch
Webmaster World discussion on the beta version
New beta test home page
Search Engine Watch on the new beta test

Using linking in your search engine marketing efforts

(November 9 2004) Having relevant high quality sites link to your web pages will help their search engine rankings. But how do you get them to link back to you?

Pandia Guest Writer Peter Larmey discusses the benefits of a good linking strategy.

Using press releases in search engine marketing

(November 9 2004) Newsworthy press releases help your business. What if you could get traffic and better rankings, too?

The four easy steps outlined in Laura Cunningham's article on using press releases as a search engine marketing tool will help you get results.

Exalead: new advanced search engine

(November 2 2004) A French company is testing a new global search engine with some very interesting advanced features. It is already powering the French version of AOL Search, but what does it have to offer the rest of us?

Lars Våge takes a look at the Exalead search engine.

New Google Cheat Sheet

(October 29 2004)Google has added a new help page -- called Cheat Sheet -- presenting various search operators.

There are, for instance, a few field operators that are not that well known.

The "safesearch" operator will filter out adult content. Hence when searching for information on the movie "Beautiful Girls", you can use the following syntax: safesearch:beautiful girls.

You can also ask Google to search for pages related to one you find interesting. related:www.pandia.com will for instance bring up Search Engine Guide, Search Engine World and ResearchBuzz.

Our Google Q-card has more of Google's field search operators and tips on Google's search syntax. For a general introduction to Web searching, see our Goalgetter Web search tutorial.

Source: PR Weaver Blog

Yahoo! adds mobile search

(October 29 2004) Following in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo! has launched a cellular/mobile phone search service.

The service lets user search for local information on businesses (shops, restaurants etc.) and Web resources. Yahoo's image database -- which now contains some 1 billion images -- is also supported, in thumbnail format.

Like Google, Yahoo! allows the use of search shortcuts that returns weather information, stock quotes, sport scores, flight information and more. Phones that can handle HTML pages can also access regular Yahoo! search results.

It should be noted that this is not a SMS based service like the one offered by Google. Yahoo! mobile search requires the use of WAP or readers that support HTML. For the time being the service only works on a few US phone operators. Given that Pandia is located in Scandinavia, we have been unable to test the service.

Yahoo! press release

Google goes 3D

(October 29 2004) Google has acquired the mapping company Keyhole Corp. Keyhole's software lets searchers enter a location in a search form and get a 3D digital image of the location in return.

The images are based on satellite and airplane images. For now the database mainly contains pictures of larger, US metropolitan areas, but Keyhole will add more images as time goes by.

Users may zoom in on locations from space-level to street-level, and tilt and rotate the view. The tool can also be used to search for other information such as hotels, restaurants or subways.

The software is not free, though, even if Google has reduced the price from US$ 69.95 to 29.95. Windows is required. Your PC needs a graphic card from one of the following manufacturers: NVIDIA, ATI, Intel, 3D Labs, Wildcat, Matrox or S3.

Google press release