Del.icio.us is a great service, but their search options leave something to be desired. When you search through your bookmarks, you are only searching through tags, titles and descriptions, not the page content.

Del.izzy is a simple, web based search tool that lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks. It works fast and you can choose how many search results you want displayed.

Del.izzy is still in beta and it is clear that they haven’t spent big money on sleek web design, widgets and other Web 2.0 stuff. But it works well and meets a real need.

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• Google Offers Up Gears Geolocation API To Make Web Sites Location Aware

  Google thinks it would be valuable to have any Web site you visit — whether on your phone or PC — know where you are. (Information Week Aug 22 2008)

• Google’s speech-to-text technology is huge search advance

  A new speech-to-text technology from Google in which you type in a word or a phrase and it searches through YouTube videos to find all the instances where someone said it. (Stamford Times undated Aug 2008)

• Survey Says: Google Leads In Consumer Satisfaction

  dAge.com reports that Google not only is leading in the University of Michigan and ForeSee Results in American Consumer Satisfaction Index, but is also “surging” in growth. (SE Land Aug 19 2008)

• Google Launches Enhanced 404 Widget

  Google has launched a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows Webmasters to create custom 404 pages. (SE Land Aug 19 2008)

• Shopping Search Tactics

  Learn how content from your e-commerce or merchant site can - and should! - be included in shopping search engines. (SE Roundtable Aug 19 2008)

• Google Tops Nielsen’s July Search Share Rankings

  Google once again leads the pack garnering around 4.8 billion searches of the total 8 billion searches conducted for July in the U.S. (SE Journal Aug 20 2008)

• Yahoo Search Launches iPhone Safari Version

  In short, the mobile Safari version gives you almost all of the features the normal Yahoo Search gives you (SE Land Aug 21 2008)

• Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

  Search Roundtable reports from the SES conference (Aug 20 2008)

• SES San Jose: Social Media Marketing

  Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies (Online Marketing Aug 20 2008)

• Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose

  Tips on making blogs more search visible (Online Marketing Aug 21 2008)

• How Microsoft Can Improve My Live Search Experience

  Microsoft should improve the help function and provide more info on search (SEO Theory Aug 22 2008)

• iNet Acquires Search Marketing Standard Magazine!

  On the future of the search engine marketing magazine (PageTraffic Aug 20 2008)

• Google Finally Speaks About the Ranking Software Blockade!

  Matt Cutts on Google blocking rank checking tools (PageRank Aug 18 2008)

• Yahoo Site Explorer Gets a Makeover

  Yahoo redesigns its toolbox for webmasters. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. (Y Search Blog Aug 21 2008)

• The 8 SEO Essential Plugins to Optimize Your Wordpress With!

  Plug-ins for search engine optimization for Wordpress blogs (PageTraffic Aug 22 2008)

• The Future of Search? It’s Here.

  Stephen Arnold: I’m on record for my assertion, “Enterprise search is dead.” Web search is now a monopoly resting firmly in the claws of Googzilla. (Alt Search Engines Aug 17 2008)

• Mygazines copyright infringement or good idea?

  Mygazines which is a social website that allows access to magazines. (Phil Bradley Aug 18 2008)

• Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath?

  Just as we seek knowledge from Google, so Google gleans secrets from us. (Guardian Aug 17 2008)

• delizzy - del.icio.us Bookmarks Search Engine

  delizzy will grab all your delicious bookmarks, create a small little universe of the content and allow you to search through it (Phil Bradley Aug 21 2008)

• Powerset as Antigen: Can Google Resist Microsoft’s New Threat?

  Microsoft will use the Powerset / Xerox PARC technology to exploit Google’s inability to deal with tailoring a search experience to deliver a better search experience a user. (Beyond Search Aug 20 2008)

• What’s your website worth? (And why librarians want to know)

  Phil Bradley presents tools that helps you value your site (Aug 21 2008)

• Is Google really the best search engine?

  Wendy Boswell presents alternative search engines for special needs (About Aug 20 2008)

• Ask TV – a great search engine strategy unveiled at SES-San Jose!

  Ask.com’s newest application of semantic search technology, searchable TV listings

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How it works

Inquisitor replaces the current search bar functionality in Safari with a search drop down menu.

According to David Watanabe, who developed Inquisitor, it is like Spotlight for the web: Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with suggestions to refine your search. Click on a suggestion for a refined search and by default a page with Yahoo search results will open. (Spotlight is the search engine included in the MacOS.)

Inquisitor will auto complete your words. You can add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Inquisitor supports eight languages beyond English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Recently, Inquisitor was acquired by Yahoo. In the latest version, 3.2, the search results component is rebuilt around the new Yahoo! Search BOSS platform.

Is it any good?

Inquisitor looks good and it is adds functionality (suggestions for refining your search) to Safari’s search bar.

It can be customized in Safari’s Preference pane, where you choose the number of search results and suggestions you want. You can choose to search Google or Yahoo in a number of languages. You can also choose to add shortcuts to the drop-down menu that will search for your query on e.g. Amazon, Flickr, and Wikipedia.

Inquisitor is good and it makes searching in Safari easier and more fun.

For more Safari add-ons see Pimp My Safari.

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The tools try to determine the value of domains or web sites by combining information like back links, the age of the domain name, Alexa ranking etc.

It is a long time since we tested them, and we were of course eager to know whether we can sell Pandia and retire to the Bahamas.

Smart PageRank told us that Pandia is worth US$ 1,330. This is, to put it bluntly, very disappointing.

Cubestat has a slightly more positive view of our site’s commercial potential: US$ 26,293.

We choose to believe that dnScoop is the most accurate of the three, simply because it values our site at US$ 143,704! Now we are talking!

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Not all search engine improvements have to be groundbreaking. Several baby steps may ultimately become a large step for mankind…

Well, let’s not get carried away here.

It is a fact, though, that Ask has not yet given up the attempt at attracting new users through innovation. That’s a good thing, as big companies like Google and Yahoo! need competition to keep on innovating themselves.

Ask already has the best search result page layout on the planet. Now they have added separate TV program listings to the search results.

In the Ask blog they say that:

Our Ask TV listings uses our patent-pending technology DADS (Direct Answers from Databases) to answer queries and questions from structured data feeds and databases. DADS provides highly accurate answers to queries which are relevant to a given topic. Instead of using traditional keyword search algorithms, our technology can deliver much deeper, more precise search results based on understanding of a query meaning rather than syntactical text matching.

This means that you can use the regular Web search form when searching for TV programs. Ask’s algorithm should be able to understand that this is what you want to do.

Ask TV search is still limited to the US, but the coverage is impressive: 10,000 distinct stations and over 100,000 shows.

Boolean is a search syntax used for composing more complex queries in search engines. (See out Goalgetter tutorial for an introduction).

Now the NOT operator is gone in Yahoo!, and searchers will have to stick to the “search engine math” operator to achieve the same effect. Put a minus-sign directly in front of a term that you want excluded from search result (meaning that Yahoo! will exclude pages that has that term in their text).

Yahoo! has also dropped support for the AND operator. This is not equally serious, as Yahoo! will do an AND search by default.

The OR operator still works, but nesting with parentheses fails.

Yahoo! has apparently come to the conclusion that since so few uses Boolean anyway, they may as well not support it. That is a mistake. Power-users like librarians, journalists and researchers use them, and they are exactly the kind of people that influences the public opinion in these matters.

Bring back Boolean, Yahoo!

Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator. Still, as Notess says: “Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.” Hm. Interesting. In this area Microsoft is the search engine winner!

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InSuggest is a Swedish company specializing in personalized web recommendations. This summer they launched a service based on Delicious.

InSuggest has had a service for recommending web sites based on URLs you provide. They also have a similar service for suggesting images. Their new tool doesn’t require you to type in URLs to get recommendations. All you have to do is add your Delicious user name.

InSuggest loads your bookmarks in one column, your tags in another and list recommendations in a third.

The recommended sites are represented by a thumbnail, a title, a URL and some tags. The interface is easy to navigate and it looks sleek and cool.

If, like me, you have a large number of bookmarks in disparate categories, refining your recommendations by tag will provide more interesting results. You can even combine tags for more advanced Queries.

Is it any good?

InSuggest is fun to use and the recommendations are mostly good.

However, only part of my tags were displayed, which made filtering by tag less than optimal.

And tags like social_networking are split, so I’m left with “social” and “networking”. It’s still a lot of fun, though, and once these bugs are fixed, InSuggest will be a great tool.

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• Big Update to Webmaster Tools

  Live Search has launched a significant update to the Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta (Live Aug 6 2008)

• Has Google Blocked WebPosition Ranking Software for Good?

  Google has finally closed its doors on one of the most popular search engine ranking software (PageTraffic Aug 7 2008)

• How to start a multilingual site

  Advice from the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Aug 7 2008)

• Google Stops Crawling Blog Posts Not on Blogspot.com?

  It seems that blogs on private domains aren’t being crawled and indexed (PageTraffic Aug 8 2008)

• Yahoo’s Response to Congress on Targeting May Not be Enough

  The Internet giant’s announcement today that it will allow users to opt out of behavioral targeting on its site only applies to the ads users see. (BusinessWeek Aug 8 2008)

• Blinkx Moves To Acquire Miva Advertising

  Blinkx, the video search engine and video search technology firm, is moving to acquire search advertising and contextual ad firm Miva (SE Journal Aug 8 2008)

• Google Offers Guidance on Starting a Multi-Lingual Site

  Do the Beijing Olympics have you thinking global? (SE Watch Aug 8 2008)

• Yahoo To Enable Opt Out Feature For Customized Ads

  Yahoo has announced that they will begin giving their users the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. (SE Land Aug 8 2008)

• The Difference Between Crawling and Indexing

  The terms crawling and indexing (and indexing’s cousin, caching) are frequently used together, but you should not consider them synonyms. (SEO Speedwagon Aug 8 2008)

• Searching For Olympics News And Video

  One of the unofficial competitions is among the search engines and companion sites to offer scores, updates and coverage of the games. (SE Land Aug 8 2008)

• Search the Life Sciences with VADLO

  Vadlo is brought to you by two biology scientists who wish to make it easier to locate biology research related information on the web. (Phil Bradley Aug 7 2008)

• Google’s Universe Is the Schrodinger Cat’s Meow

  PageRank can be expressed in terms of a wave function obeying a Schrodinger-like equation. (BeyondSearch Aug 8 2008)

• The AOL flub has analysts revisiting Google

  Following an announcement by Google that its $1 billion stake in AOL has lost significant value, analysts on Friday debated whether Google’s larger strategy beyond its core search business is faltering. (SFGate Aug 9 2008)

There are many ways to use the powers of the social web for search. You can encourage voting and commenting like Scour does, improving the index of Yahoo by voting like Sproose does or index the bookmarks of your users like Nsyght does.

50 Matches combines human indexing with machine indexing by crawling only sites that were bookmarked, “dugg” or “reddit’ed”.

The people that use Digg, Reddit, Delicious etc. act as smart agents and generate big databases of the most liked sites on the web. No company could compete with the man hours people put in saving and tagging their bookmarks and by indexing only sites that have previously been saved and tagged, 50 Matches has a relatively spam free index.

Is it any good?

The concept is a good one, but the search results are decent but not excellent.

For instance, the results for “search engine news” does not include Search Engine Land (or Pandia…). The reason for this might be that 50 Matches hasn’t indexed enough bookmarks or have chosen the wrong bookmarking services to index (they do not provide information about which sites they index). Or it might be that they need to adjust their algorithm.

I would also love to see 50 Matches utilize more of the information available from the indexed sites. it could be useful for searchers to see how the web sites in the search results have been tagged or how many people have bookmarked them.

And there are absolutely no ways for visitors to 50 Matches to contribute (for instance by ranking listings or commenting on results). Visitors to a social powered search engine will have a more than an averagely high interest in contributing and could add value to the site. Nsyght does this better.

50 Matches has a good concept but they’ve got some work to do.

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Google has made quite a few acquisitions lately, and one of them — the DoubleClick acquisition — brought them a search engine marketing company on board as well.

Google has been heavily criticized for this. A search marketing company will have search engine optimization as one of its main objectives, and people will soon begin to suspect that a company that is owned by Google will have certain advantages when it comes to insight into Google’s algorithms.

It is the ability to understand the ranking methods of Google that counts most in the search engine marketing business.

The French Publicis Groupe will now take over the DoubleClick Performics search marketing business from Google.

According to the press release Performics now employs nearly 200 search marketing specialists with employees in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Singapore and Beijing.

The business will report to Curt Hecht, President of the VivaKi Nerve Center, a part of Publicis.

Google has kept one part of Perfomics, namely the affiliate marketing business, turning it into a competitor of heavy weights like Commission Junction.

We believe Google has made a wise move. To keep the affiliate marketing business makes sense, as it broadens Google’s advertising portfolio. To offer search marketing services, on the other hand, is too much of a conflict of interest.

See also Read/Write Google Sells Performics Search Marketing Business to Publicis Groupe

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