Susanne has spent hours freshening up the Pandia Metasearch page.

Metasearch engines are, as many of our readers will know, search sites that merge results from several search engines and presents them within their own interface. The concept was very popular in the late 1990’s and the first few years of this decade as many found that their wide coverage gave better search results.

Metasearch engines may still be used to widen your search, as the databases of the big four search engines are not totally overlapping. Still, quality wise they are not better than the major search engines.

The great advantage of metasearch engines nowadays, however, is that they often provide very useful experiments in alternative ways of presenting search results. Clusty’s clustering technique is a good example of this.

Susanne has added quite a few sites to our list of metasearch engines, deleted a few dead ones (the life expectancy is often low in this line of business) an added links to relevant Pandia articles.

Weekend search engine roundup

Here are some of the search engine related articles we have found interesting during the last week:

• Spokeo

  Phil Bradley on a site that gathers details on all your friends from your various networks into one easy to find place. (Feb 20 2008)

• Text mining search engine SenseBot adds images

  SenseBot uses text mining of web pages of other search engines to generate a summary on the topic of user’s query. (AltSearchEngines Feb 20 2008)

• Bush - Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google

  For years, US President George W. Bush was tops on Google for searches on miserable failure until last year’s Googlebomb “fix” solved his problem on Google. But Bush is back (Search Engine Land Feb 21 2008)

• Google-Funded Lunar X Prize Aims To Put Private Rover On Moon

  X Prize seeks to award $20 million to the first scientific team that can land a privately funded robot on the moon (Search Engine Land Feb 22 2008)

• Underdog Ask.com Grows 20% in January

  Ask had more growth than Google, MSN, or Yahoo last month (MarketingPilgrim Feb 22 2008)

• Google Health Pilot Launched!

  For Google Cleveland is just the beginning and it aims to associate many healthcare providers that will securely send medical records and information via Google APIs at the patient’s request. (PageTraffic Feb 22 2008)

• A pilot with the Cleveland Clinic for health information access

  Google has launched a pilot with a medical institution committed to giving patients access to their own medical records (Google Blog Feb 21 2008)

• AdSense For Video (Beta) Launched!

  Also in competition, and unique to AdSense for video and AdSense video units, are the text overlay ads which are contextually targeted to signals in the videos and on the page where the video lives. (PageTraffic Feb 22 2008)

• Google’s Microsoft Yahoo Internet Doomsday Scenario: Google’s Brin

  Brin emphasszed the need for open standards, Internet diversity and an open OS (SE Watch Feb 22 2008)

• News: Flickr Goes Nofollow! Also, Is This The Future of UGC?

  Flickr, once a popular source of dofollow links for SEOs has recently turned its links to nofollow automatically! (Sphinn Feb 21 2008)

• Kevin Johnson E-mail to Employees of the Microsoft Platform & Services Division

  Microsoft on Yahoo/Microsoft merger: “We believe our proposal is a compelling one and that the combination of Yahoo! and Microsoft creates a more credible alternative to an increasingly dominant player in the advertising industry.” (Feb 22 2008)

• 4 Solutions to SEO problems of using Flash

  4 solutions on how to optimize your website well even if they are running Adobe Flash. (SEO Blog Feb 15 2008)

• The Secret to Becoming an SEO Celebrity

  Tounge in cheek look at the challenges facing a search engine marketing celebrity (Gonzo SEO Feb 21 2008)

• Beyond Linkbait Getting Authoritative Online Mentions

  Online Marketing Blog reports from Search Engine Stategies London (Feb 21 2008)

• Conversations with an Underground Text Link Seller

  A study of what some text link sellers are willing to pay (Problogger Feb 21 2008)

• Better Binoculars

  Ask gives you a peek at sites before you open them (Ask Blog Feb 21 2008)

• How to Track the Evolution of Search Engine Algorithms & Why It’s Important to Do So

  Common questions about keeping up with the search engines’ ever-changing mathematical formulas that rank search results. (SEOMoz Feb 20 2008)

• Google says ISP glitch exposes Gmail data in Kuwait

  At least one Gmail user has had access other peoples’ Gmail accounts (CNet Feb 20 2008)

• Will clever search engines rescue good journalistic writing?

  Reporters at the Times of London are being trained to write “in a way that that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.” (FastForward Feb 20 2008)

• Google as predicted in 1964

  On the “answer machine” of the future, which appeared in the book Childcraft Volume 6: How Things Change in 1964. (Web Owls)