Search Engine News Weblog Archive March 2002

Below find older entries to the Pandia search engine news weblog 2002.

For the latest search engine news, go to the Pandia Search World page or the Pandia Search Central home page.

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CompuServe adds Google AdWords

(March 26 2002) The AOL-owned Internet service provider CompuServe has added Google AdWord text ad listings to its search results. These come in addition to the Overture pay per click search results already included.

It is unclear whether this will have any repercussions for the future relationship between Compuserve and AOL. (See News.com article).

About guides sue Primedia

(March 21 2002) The About topic subsites are edited by "guides" who are experts in their sites' area of interest. Thirtyfour "guides" have now sued the Web site and its owner, Primedia, for failure to pay minimum and overtime wages.

The plaintiffs claim the company has improperly designated them as "independent contractors," and that the About service would not have functioned without their ongoing labor. They argue that they should be recognized as Primedia employees. As guides, some of them have often worked over 40 hours a week, according to the suit.

Yahoo has more...

AltaVista plans new paid inclusion services

(March 21 2002) AltaVista already has a paid inclusion system in place, i.e. a service where webmasters may pay to get Web pages spidered regularly. The search engine is now planning several additions to this service, and has asked customers to respond to whether they would like to make use of the following features (prices US$ per six months):

• Impression reporting for URLs ($10/URL)
• Click-through reporting for URLs ($10/URL)
• Reports showing position of URLs in results by query ($10/URL)
• 48-hour refreshes of URLs ($5/URL)
• Optimization services (how to make your URLs rank and perform better) ($20/URL)

The problem is of course that AltaVista no longer generates enough traffic to legitimize the extra costs. To integrate these features into the regular program is, however, a very good idea.

HotBot drops Inktomi?

(March 21 2002) The fact that HotBot has dropped its add URL page may indicate that the owners of HotBot, Terra Lycos, will start using the Fast database on this search site as well. Most of the Lycos sites are powered by the Norwegian search engine.

To Search Engine Watch Tom Wilde, general manager of search services for Lycos, says that the company will be enhancing HotBot submit shortly. "HotBot will be relaunched this summer, and its going to be terrific," he says.

HotBot has been profiled as the search engine for the professional researcher, as it supports true Boolean search terms. Fast is in the process of developing such a feature, one reason being its wish to "take over" HotBot.

Webmasters who want to add their sites for free to the Inktomi database, may use the UK version of HotBot.

Search Engine Newsletters

The search engine industry is constantly changing. If you want to keep track of the latest development, you will have to subscribe to some of the newsletters devoted to searching or search engine optimization.

Pandia takes a look at some of the search engine newsletters.

New search engine

(March 18 2002) There is a new search engine in town. Admittedly it's in a pre-beta testing stage, but you may submit your site to it and it will spider it pretty fast.

The man behind the Gigablast engine is Matt Wells. In a posting in the Webmaster World forum he writes that he is planning on having a "decent beta" in a couple of months.

The site is not ready for serious searching, but it sure looks promising.

Forthcoming Search Engine Conferences

(March 18 2002) Pandia takes a look at forthcoming events devoted to search engines and SEO.

Google adds separate news search

(March 14 2002) Google is beta testing a new search engine for news stories.

Gary Price reports that the database is refreshed every hour and contains material from over 100 English-language sources. The headlines link to sites like the BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Yahoo!, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Reuters.

You may send Google a mail suggesting additional news sources and other improvements.

Needless to say, Pandia has also its own news search engine which can be accessed at www.pandia.com/news.

Google fixes HTTPS-bug

(March 13 2002) As noted in in our newsletter Google has started to index HTTPS or secure server pages in order to make their search engine index more extensive.

Voelspriet reports that Google discovered a bug in this new feature. According to a Google spokesman this bug prevented the crawler from recognizing robots.txt files on HTTPS servers. Robots.txt files are files made by webmasters telling the search engine robots which files they are not allowed to crawl and include in the index.

Google has fixed the bug and has removed all HTTPS pages from the Google index and the cache.

LookSmart buys the Wisenut search engine

(March 12 2002) LookSmart, the company behind the LookSmart directory, has bought Wisenut, one of the new Google rivals on the search engine scene.

Pandia takes a look at look at the recent search engine takeovers.

LookSmart UK switches to Google

(March 8 2002) All search directories (i.e. search services providing catalogs hand picked by human editors) uses robot-based search engines for secondary results. In a surprise move BT LookSmart UK has abandoned the Inktomi search engine in favor of Google results.

The American Looksmart.com is still providing Inktomi results, though. There is a discussion on Webmaster World.

The end of RankWrite

(March 7 2002) The increasingly popular newsletter on search engine optimization edited by Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd-Martin, the RankWrite Roundtable, has been discontinued. The newsletter has been know for its practical and down to earth advice on search engine marketing as well as its funny and informal style.

RankWrite is replaced by a new newsletter, The HighRanking's Advisor, edited by Jill Whalen. We do not know the cause for this change.

No Boolean at AV news search

(March 5 2002) Gary Price reports that AltaVista News Search, powered by Moreover, does not allow the use of boolean search operators (AND, AND NOT, OR or NEAR) or field searching (e.g. title: or text:).

According to Virtual Acquisition these features will be available this summer. For the time being use search engine math (+ and -) instead.

AltaVista launches reseller program

(March 5 2002) AltaVista will now allow search engine marketers to sell the search engine's paid inclusion services. They may update URLs in AltaVista's Internet index on a weekly basis on behalf of their clients.

The services made available for resellers are AltaVista Trusted Feed (paid inclusion for large corporations), AltaVista Express Inclusion (ditto, for smaller customers) and AltaVista Listing Enhancements (adding logos, links, taglines and icons to result listings).

For more information, go to the AltaVista Reseller Program..

Ithaki with new version of metasearch engine

(March 5 2002) Italian Ithaki has released a new beta version of its metasearch engine. The 2.0 version features a faster search program, new search channels, over 450 sources of information, new design, and more options for customization of searches.

Ithaki provides versions in 14 languages -- relevant local search engines included -- and has more than 35 topics to metasearch. There is a separate Linux section and a WAP and imode wireless metasearch engine.

New issue of the Pandia Post Newsletter out now!

(March 3 2002) Take a look at the latest issue of our search engine newsletter. It is packed with news and articles on Web searching and search engine optimization:

• The new Pandia Metasearch engine
• What now, AltaVista?
• Google indexing https-pages
• Espotting becomes European pay-per-click champion
• On the RankWrite Roundtable search engine marketing newsletter
• How to stop your kids from finding offensive material on the Web
• First Internet Marketing Bar Conference a big hit
• 5th International Internet Marketing Conference, Canada
• Search Engine Workshops, US
• Planet Ocean's Search Engine News Newsletter
• Buyer’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization & Positioning Services

Go to weblog search engine news entries for 2001
Go to news messages for 2000.
Go to news messages for 1999.
Back to the Pandia Search World front page for current search engine news.

Please note: The links on archived search engine news pages will not be updated!