SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour. This way, the browser extension applies a layer of real-time implicit personalization. The software is transforming static lists of links into dynamic search results pages that work with the you as you explore the search results.

How does it work?

Once the plug-in is installed, you go to one of the three search engines supported (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) and enter your search term as usual. In the search results, you’ll notice the difference: A little bulls eye icon appears next to each search result. If one strikes you as particularly useful, click the bulls eye and SurfCanyon suggests more hits like it, retrieved from deep within the search results.

If none of SurfCanyon’s suggestions are exactly what you want, click the bulls eye by the best one and drill down a layer. This way you can keep refining your search until you get what you want.

Is it any good?

Many plug-ins that are supposed to help you do the exact opposite by being a nuisance. SurfCanyon isn’t intrusive. All it adds are the little bulls eye icons.

So you can forget all about it until next time you get annoyed at the enormous amount of search results presented by Google and the total absence of any tools for refining your search. I’ve never understood why Google doesn’t offer suggestions for refining your search like Live Search and Yahoo. With SurfCanyon, you can add a handy tool for improving your search results.

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• Microsoft directors consider increasing bid for Yahoo

  Microsoft Corp.’s directors met yesterday to consider raising the software maker’s $41.9 billion bid for Yahoo Inc. instead of pursuing a hostile takeover attempt, according to a published report. (May 1 2008)

• Microsoft weighs options on Yahoo

  Microsoft has yet to decide if it will up its $41.8bn (£21bn) bid for Yahoo, go hostile or walk away from the deal. (BBC May 1 2008)

• How-to track Google using Twitter

  I set up a couple Twitter accounts that automatically send tweets that include Google focused news items, blog posts, bookmarks, and even Digg items that just hit the frontpage! (Google Tutor April 28 2008)

• Audiobaba Music Search

  Audiobaba Music Search is a next generation music search engine that allows you to find songs by acoustic similarity. (Phil Bradley April 29 2008)

• An Interview with Exalead’s François Bourdoncle

  On the connection between AltaVista and French Exalead and much more (AltSearchEngines April 29 2008)

• Yahoo Integrating Facebook Style Social Map & Unified Profile Pages Across Network

  Yahoo is finally taking the social route in fully connecting its Yahoo Network users across multiple Yahoo platforms in a Facebook meets Yahoo type setting, where users will be able to view the doings of their friends over a central Yahoo social map. (SE

• Yahoo! Launches SearchMonkey!

  This open source tool known as SearchMonkey will give the publishers the possibility of enhancing their search results on Yahoo! through the inclusion of links, images and name-value pairs in the search results. (PageTraffic April 25 2008)

• Yahoo Starts SearchMonkey Rollout

  Back in February, Yahoo announced SearchMonkey, a project that would allow site owners and developers to customize their search engine listings’ appearance and information. (SE Land April 25 2008)

• Google’s Vision of the Future of Image Search

  Can Google’s technology automatically analyze what’s inside an image? (SE Journal April 28 2008)

• Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide

  What is the hottest social media tool to emerge on the scene this year? It’s ‘Twitter’, and you may get hooked too… (April 28 2008)

• How to Analyze Page Keyword Prominence

  While keyword density is really something SEOs should really stop paying attention to, keyword prominence is a concept that still should be analyzed and evaluated. (SE Journal April 29 2008)

• Google unveils new prototype image search system “VisualRank”

  VisualRank works using image recognition software, which groups images together that seem most similar to each other. (Dave Naylor April 29 2008)

• Wikipedia is Still Useful for SEO

  Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet. Bigoak explains why a Wikipedia link may help you (April 29 2008)

• Google Toolbar PageRank Update Creates Major Webmaster Buzz

  Usually PageRank updates aren’t that noteworthy, but it seems something is different about this PageRank update, Barry Scwartz says (SE Land April 30 2008)

• Google Analytics for Bloggers - Google Relaunches Measure Map

  Email invitations went out this week to alpha users of the blog tracking software. (Search Engine Watch April 30 2008)

• Microsoft’s $1.5 Billion Plan to Retain Yahoo Employees

  Search Engine Watch quotes the Wall Street Journal (April 30 2008)

• Google Ocean?

  Google is planning to map not only the sky and land masses (Google Mars, Moon, Earth, Google Maps and so on), but – according to a report by News.com – also aims to map the oceans. (Google Blogoscoped April 30 2008)

• Artist Themes for iGoogle

  Google in the US is currently promoting a new “artist themes” section for iGoogle via a special logo and text below the search box. (Google Blogoscoped April 30 2008)

• Search Conference Controversy Sparks Up Again

  Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies spoke with Daron Babin and discussed the current state of the conference circuit with regards to individuals believing that they have been banned from either SMX or SES events. (SE Roundtable April 30 2008)

• Microsoft Live Search Adds More Images, Multimap, Find My Location, & Celebrity Rank

  The enhancements include an expanded image search index, a new integrated mapping experience with Multimap, a location based mobile search feature to “find me,” and more content for the celebrities and books sections. (SE Land April 30 2008)

• How to Use Headline Tags To Boost Page Performance

  Aside from the title tag, which isn’t really a part of the visual page, the heading tags can provide both visitors and the search engines significant cues to the importance of your on-page content. (SE Guide April 30 2008)

Microsoft has two other alternatives: (1) To give up acquiring Yahoo! (it is just too expensive) or (2) withdraw the bid, wait for the stock price to fall and go for a hostile bid.

Microsoft had given Yahoo! until 26 April to accept its US$41.8bn bid, which Yahoo has said is inadequate.

According to the BBC Microsoft may up its bid from $31 to $33 per share, but Yahoo shareholders are hoping for $35 to $37 per share.

Microsoft desperately needs Yahoo!s web content and search engine to meet the threat from Google, as its own web adventures have been halfhearted at best.

Our guess? Microsoft will get what it wants, simply because the Yahoo! leadership has been unable to develop a viable alternative. A merger with AOL — which has been proposed — makes no sense to us, as AOL is nothing but a weak and less innovative copy of Yahoo!

Microsoft will at least give Yahoo! a strong financial clout.

See also: Microsoft Says They’ll Pay More for Yahoo (Seeking Alpha April 30 2008)

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According to CNet Google has established an advisory group of oceanography experts to help them develop the new product.

In December the company invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Googleplex in California to discuss the creation of a 3D oceanographic map.

Not all of the ocean floor has been mapped in detail, and Google’s project may speed up the process of us getting to know the deep.

Google Earth is a free PC program that lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.

Google Ocean is expected to work in much the same way.

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Pandia: Kosmix generates “home pages” for themes or queries. This seems like a difficult job for a search engine spider. I’m guessing some semantic analysis is involved? Are there any human editors as well?

Venky Harinarayan: Humans are involved not as editors for individual topics, but to help set up the taxonomy i.e. the categories and how they relate to one another.

At the core of our technology is a sophisticated algorithm-based categorization engine. Our technology combs through billions of Web pages and structured data points to aggregate, categorize and return the most targeted content to users, all of which is done algorithmically.

The difference is in the taxonomy

Pandia: The Kosmix result pages have the feel of directory pages but are in reality an alternative way to present universal search results (result pages that mixes different types of search results, like Google Universal Search).

How does Kosmix stand apart from Google Universal Search, Ask’s 3rd column etc.?

Venky Harinarayan: Google and Ask are approaching this problem as a bolt-on to search. We believe that search should be a small piece of creating useful “home” pages for topics.

The algorithms, technology and user interface required are very different, and we are making big investments to get there. For example, search does not admit to the notion of a taxonomy, except at the highest level – Web Pages, Videos etc.

We believe the biggest value of a topic home page is organization that enables consumers to explore and connect to the relevant content for their specific needs. Taxonomies and categorization are central to this organization.

Pandia: At the moment Kosmix has portals for health, travel and cars. Do you plan to expand your scope? What will be your next additions?

A home page for every topic on the web?

Venky Harinarayan: Our goal from inception was to create a home page for any topic on the web.

Health, autos and travel are the first three testimonies to our technology’s ability as we roll out a horizontal offering that addresses any topic on the Web.

Pandia: And how are are you progressing towards your goal?

Venky Harinarayan:Today, our consumer health site, www.righthealth.com, is in the top three most visited health online information sites according to Hitwise.

www.rightautos.com and www.righttrips.com are in beta and will be fully launched in the coming months.

Pandia: Many search startups are solely technology focused. Do you have a business plan?

Venky Harinarayan: We are very pleased with the strength in our business so far. RightHealth is a top 3 Health Web Site according to Hitwise. We have 10+ million unique visitors every month and our properties together are a top 100 US Web site.

Our business model is advertising based. We provide display advertisers with both fine-grained targeting and real reach, unlike most other sites/ad-networks that can provide either reach or targeting, not both. We have partnerships with other publishers to use our technology and widgets which we will be announcing in the coming months.

Kosmix in the search engine food chain

There are lots of search engines out there. I addition to the Big Three, Charles Knight has counted 227 alternative search engines. Is there room for Kosmix in this eat-or-get-eaten race?

Venky Harinarayan: Today, the world of the Web is changing dramatically. Search engines to date are all about how to search and how to find. There is a new paradigm that we are defining, which is more about organization and connection. Both models work for consumers and are complimentary.

For instance, if you want to look for a single answer question like “fidelity,” a traditional search engine is best and gets you to “fidelity.com.” But, if you want to look for “castles in Barnsely,” a categorization engine like Kosmix serves you better. If you don’t want to get lost in a lot of links and want to have a view of everything in one place, a Kosmix topics page would be best for you.

Alltop SEO contains the five freshest stories from some 50 popular SEO blogs, all on one information packed site (Pandia is there too ). And it’s always up to date, so this is a great place to go to feel the buzz of the SEO community.

I can imagine it would work nicely as a start page for SEO research: Browse the headlines, get excerpts by pointing your mouse to the individual entries and open your favorite blogs or stories that interest you in new tabs.

A digital magazine rack

SEO Alltop is one of a myriad of similar collections. Alltop is owned by a company called Nononina, who’s CEO is entrepreneur and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki.

Guy Kawasaki tells Pandia that: “Alltop is collection of “single-page aggregations” organized by topics such as Fashion, Celebrities, Sports, Gaming, Macintosh, Science, Green, and Autos. People can find news from dozens of sites, side-by-side, at a glance. We think of it as a “digital magazine rack”.

At Alltop, you can browse an entire directory of these aggregations in categories like work, living, culture, geekery (our favorite), people, news and more.

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We present the three best sites for researching search engines or finding that one search engine that delivers exactly what you need.

Search Engine Race
Charles King is the champion of search engine diversity. His blog, AltSearchEngines , is a great place to go to keep up with news of alternative search engines.

Recently he launched a new site called The Search Race. Here you’ll find a list of what Charles Knight considers the top 100 alternative search engines at the moment. There are options to sort the list to view the top 10, top 100, or all. At the moment the list contains 146 search engines. You can also view the most recent additions and those that have the best growth rate.

If you register, you can comment on the listed search engines, vote for your favorites by clicking Pick. These favorites will then appear in a separate tab labeled My Picks.

The Search Engine List
The Search Engine List is a larger list than The Search Engine Race with some 230 search engines. Each search engine is represented by a logo, a link and a short editorial description.

The only way to sort the content is by category. The categories are accessed by pointing your mouse to an alphabetical index on top of the page. For instance, the letter M reveals the categories Maps, Medical, Meta-Search and Multi-Media.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a list of search engines. This list contains links without commentaries or descriptions. There are 265 search engine listings, but the number of actual search engine is lower because some search engines appear in several categories. The search engines are sorted into these categories:

• By content/topic:

• General
• Geographical limited scope
• Accountancy
• Business
• Enterprise
• Search appliances
• Job
• Legal
• Medical
• News
• People
• Real property
• Video games

• By information type: Forum, blog
  * 2.3Multimedia
  * 2.4 Source code
  * 2.5 BitTorrent
  * 2.6 Email
  * 2.7 Maps
  * 2.8 Price
  * 2.9 Question and answer

# 3 By model

* 3.1 Open source search engines
* 3.2 Social search engines
* 3.3 Metasearch engines
* 3.4 Visual search engines
* 3.5 Desktop search engines
* 3.6 Usenet

# 4 Based on

* 4.1 Google
* 4.2 Yahoo!
* 4.3 Live Search
* 4.4 Ask.com

# 5 Defunct search engines

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Since we reviewed Omgili back in 2006 it has kept evolving and now spiders Digg, MySpace and other social media sites for answers.

I talked to Ran Geva, CEO at Omgili, to find out what’s new.

Pandia: It has been a while since we reviewed Omgili. How has your product evolved since then?

Ran Geva: Omgili has changed a lot, both on the surface and behind the scenes. Here are some of our new features:

Omgili Product Reviews. Here you can find the overall users sentiment about the products you are looking for.

From electronics and computers to books and apparel, it covers thousands of user reviews from various review sites and returns the overall ratings for these products.

Omgili Buzz. This is the place to be if you want to know what people are discussing on the web. From online videos and movies to news and general topics.

The popularity of the topics is updated once an hour by analyzing the content of online discussion sites.

Google@Omgili. By using the Google@Omgili service, you get the best of two worlds — “objective search” (Google) combined with “subjective search” (Omgili).

Other than searching both search engines and getting more information about the search terms you enter, you also get discussions about Google’s search results.

For example, if you are interested in learning more about Barack Obama, searching on Google@Omgili will return results from Google and Omgili, but also discussions about the links returned by Google, a deeper conversations linking to those results.

Search Aid. Search Aid helps you find better results to your search query. You can search in real user queries and get ideas about how to refine your search terms and what are the best keywords to use.

For instance, if you search Search Aid for a broad search term like iPod, you’ll see that previously, others have searched for queries like iPod vs Zune, iTunes to iPod error and iPod videos.

Pandia: Not all discussion forum answers are equally helpful. How do you go about measuring the reliability of answers.

Ran Geva: This is where Omgili is unique. Our proprietary algorithm analyzes the complete discussion (thread) and detects its structure (the different posts), their dates, user names, signatures etc.

When a query is entered, Omgili searches in the context of the complete discussion. A keyword in the 1st reply is more relevant as if it appears in the 17th reply, more so if it is in the topic or the title.

By understanding the discussion, the relevancy of the results is much better. Furthermore, the user has the ability to leverage Omgili’s analysis to search for discussions with minimum number of replies, engaged users or in a certain time frame.

We also calculate the authority of the different boards and boost discussions up or down as a “tiebreaker”.

Pandia: At your site you write that you spider forums, discussion groups, mailing lists and answer boards. What about Yahoo Answers and similar services? And there is bound to be Web 2.0-style sites of advice out there for you to crawl?

Ran Geva: We also crawl Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! message boards. We crawl Digg, MySpace, Yedda, and many others. Basically we try to cover “Many to Many” sites where discussions take place.

Pandia: The Web keeps changing and search engines have to change to be on top of it. What are your plans for the future of Omgili?

Ran Geva: We have many plans for Omgili. As a search engine we are looking to constantly improve the relevancy algorithm and to add more data sources. Spidering blogs and Talkbacks (e.g. Twitters) are on the way.

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• Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers

  You can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” (TechCrunch April 18 2008)

• Finding Google custom search engines

  Browsing around today I found Guide To Custom Search Engines (CSEs). (Phil Bradley April 15 2008)

• Arnold’s New Study “Beyond Search” Now Available

  Stephen E. Arnold’s most recent study–Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work–is now available from the Gilbane Group. (Beyond Search April 15 2008)

• Google Releases Updates to Google Earth; Includes Street View

  The most anticipated update is the addition of Street View, previously available on Google Maps. (SE Watch April 16 2008)

• 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber

  Previously a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, then a senior vice president at Amazon and Yahoo’s chief scientist, Manber is now vice president in charge of search quality for Google (Popular Mechanics April 16 2008)

• Alexa Introduces New Ranking System : Beyond the Toolbar

  With web traffic and popularity measurement startups like Compete.com and Quantcast breathing down Alexa’s neck, the Amazon.com owned company has finally taken steps to rework their ranking system (SE Journal April 17 2008)

• More On Microsoft Live Search News

  The new service automatically shows you top stories grouped into topic on the home page. (SE Land April 17 2008)

• Google’s Q1 2008 Grows 31%; Sticks it to comScore

  While the research company had Wall Street in a panic, with its 1.8% paid click prediction for the quarter, Google tore that number to shreds with a whopping 20% growth in paid clicks! (Marketing Pilgrim April 17 2008)

• Microsoft confirms purchase of Farecast travel site

  Microsoft bought Seattle-based airfare prediction and travel site Farecast earlier this month for around $115 million (The Seattle Times April 18 2008)

• Another Google Video Redesign

  Google Video redesigned their US homepage again (Google Blogoscoped Aril 18 2008)

• Bigreds Sues Yahoo Over Click-Fraud For $1 Million

  Bigreds, an internet retailer has decided to sue Yahoo for $1 million over click fraud starting back in 2002. (SE Roundtable April 17 2008)

• Google Analytics out of Beta version

  The old Urchin web metrics software is finally out in a new version (PageTraffic April 17 2008)

• Yahoo! & Google Test Successful. A Giant Leap for Y! Google Partnership?

  Google is delivering ads to Yahoo! search result pages (PageTraffic April 18 2008)

The SEO dream team!

This week Microsoft launched a news version of its news search engine. Actually, for us it was a bit hard to notice the changes at first.

We live in Norway, and our Live insisted on delivering the old news search home page for news.live.com, and that page doesn’t even contain the word “news” in the headline!

We did find a page with a list of the most popular news topics to the front page, as well as a list of popular queries. There were no pictures, though, and no news summaries.

After much huffing and puffing we did finally manage to track down the page we believe to be Live’s new news home page — the US version that is, and not the UK one:

As you can see, this is a true news portal with story headlines, text snippets and images — a bit like Google News in fact.

According to the Live Search Blog these are the most important changes:

• Aggregated news: Live now pulld in up-to-date news headlines for users to browse, which include top stories and category-specific articles. Breaking news is clearly identified and up to the minute when it happens.
• Local news from US states.
• Multimedia content, including images and videos with smart-motion thumbnails.

We like it a lot. The design is clear and easy to read, and even less cluttered than its Google counterpart. The news selection seems relevant for a US audience.

(We do wish they wouldn’t start playing videos without us asking for it, but you can’t have everything.)

You get to the search result pages (SERPs) if you click “more on this story” or type a search into the search box.

The SERPs now include:

• Filtering based on your location,
• Or you can filter by the dominant categories of your search.
• Live suggests related searches.
• You can now sort articles by date.
• When they are available you get videos directly in the results.

This is great news for searchers. We have often been pretty harsh towards Live here at Pandia, most of all because we believe Google needs more competition from better competitors and partly because we find it hard to understand why Live has been unable to deliver better search services. Microsoft is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The bid for Yahoo! proves that there is no lack of capital and we know there is a lot of talent within the company.

Well, the new Live News shows us that Microsoft can deliver. And what’s more: This is not the end of it. Live promises us RSS support and blog search in the near future.

You are on the right track, Live. Keep on in the same direction!

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