Search Engine News Weblog Archive November 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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Search Engine Reading

(November 30 2002) The New York Times has written an article on how the search engines may be used as a cultural trend barometer. The business community is clearly interested in information on what the world is thinking about.

Mi Islita.com has published "A Study on PageRank Values of Paid-Result Search Engines". Pandia has not had the time to study the text thoroughly and will therefore not comment on the validity of the report.The report discusses legal and marketing implications of Google PageRank technology for the rest of the industry, and is clearly critical about how Google practices the PageRank system. The debattants at Cre8asiteforums seem to conclude that the paper is both unscientific and wrong.

Resourceshelf refers to an interesting online audio PBS report on search engines featuring Sergey Brin of Google, Skip Battle of Ask Jeeves, Marti Hearst of U.C. Berkeley, and more.

Google has published their own guidelines for search engine optimization.

Most of the paragraphs contain pure common sense, although the sentence "You should never have to link to an SEO" did startle us quite a bit.

As Pandia is a site devoted to search engines and search engine optimization we have a lot of links to "SEO". The point seems to be, however, to avoid links to "free-for-all" lists, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines; i.e. that you should not have to link to a certain page. We won't argue with that.

Still, the document has cause quite a stir in the SEO community. See for instance the comments made by the Fantomaster. He points out that the recommendation "You should ask how long a company has been in business and how many full time staffers it employs" is tantamount to a "declaration of war on the vast majority of the SEO industry". After all, a large number for SEOs are one man/woman companies. See also the relevant Webmaster World discussion..

How to write search engine friendly Web page copy

(November 25 2002) Guest writer Kalena Jordan tells you how to write good copy targeting the right search keywords.

On the future of paid search engine listings

(November 24 2002) Guest writer James Beriker takes a look at the recent discussion on paid search engine disclosure. Is this a golden moment for the search engine industry -- or a missed opportunity?

Read on...

KartOO launches English metasearch site

(November 23 2002) French KartOO has launched an English version of its metasearch site.

Unlike most metasearch engines, KartOO presents results in a graphic map where each site is given a node in a Web. The size of each "ball" is proportional to the relative "importance" of that site. A short description is shown when you point at the ball. KartOO maps can be navigated, browsed, filtered, saved and sent.

The European Espotting search engine provides pay-per-click results. Espotting's Top 3 results now also appear on eresMas and Telepolis, the Wanadoo-owned Spanish portals.

New Inktomi Web Search 9

(November 21 2002) Inktomi, the search engine that powers MSN.com and HotBot.com has announced an upgrade called Web Search 9.

Among the major changes are:

• Inktomi Web Search now refreshes the entire index every 10-14 days. Paid inclusion content is revisited every 48 hours, as before.
• Inktomi Web Search technology is designed to discover and analyze over three billion Web pages (in their press release Inktomi claims that it is currently "deploying a search of more than 3 billion documents", whatever that means). If the search engine database actually include three billion Web pages (and not "objects", i.e. Web pages plus images and other files) it is by far the largest in the world.
• The search engine apparently analyzes the user intent of the query to return one of three types of page summaries or descriptions: contextual (computer-generated page fragments containing keywords), editorial (synopsis written by a human editor) or custom (description submitted by a paid inclusion subscriber).
• Inktomi now recommends spelling corrections.
• The database now includes Acrobat PDF and Microsoft Office files (.doc, .ppt, .xls). It is unclear whether these are included in the 3 billion "Web pages" mentioned above.

Hotbot and MSN will probably implement at least some of these features shortly. Search engine marketers should note that:

• Sites that pay for inclusion may limit their listings to specific regions.
• Paid inclusion customers can tune and customize summaries that are returned with their query results. This is very important as a well written page description is more likely to lead to click-troughs.
• Paid inclusion customers can feed product catalog and other types of dynamic-site data directly into search index.

Last week Inktomi sold its enterprise search unit to Verity for US$25 million in order to focus on the delivery of search results only. Inktomi clearly hopes that paid inclusion is going to get it out of its present economic problems.

Inktomi Press Release

How searchers search

(November 19 2002) A new study made by iProspect. indicates that searchers all in all feel good about their search engines.Here are some of the highlights:

• 16 percent of searchers only look at a few search result listings
• 32 percent read the whole search results page
• 23 percent go to the second page
• 56.6 percent of abandon their searches after the first two pages
• 52.1 percent usually stick to the same search engine or directory
• 35 percent use more than one search engine
• 13 percent use different search engines for different types of searches
• 45.9 percent feel that their searches are successful almost all the of the time
• When they are unsuccessful, 27.2 percent of the respondents switch to another search engine, rather than refining the search query

Sources: Resourceshelf and CyberAtlas.

Google restores SearchKing's ranking

(November 18 2002) Google has restored SearchKing's ranking in search results, but not its PageRank. SearchKing will not give up its lawsuit, however.

Pandia has more.

Overture will serve paid results to Yahoo! Japan

(November 18 2002, update Nov 19) Overture has signed a non-exclusive agreement with Yahoo! Japan. Overture will serve Yahoo.co.jp pay per click ads for the next 18 months.

Overture will launch its Japanese service in December.

Overture has also made deals with Infoseek Japan, NTT-X (which operates the "goo" portal), as well as Lycos Japan. In addition, Overture and MSN have agreed to an initial test of Overture's search results on MSN Japan.

The word "non-exclusive" in the Yahoo! Japan/overture deal is due to the fact that Yahoo! Japan will publish pay-per-click text ads powered by Google Adwords as well.

Search engine reading

(November 17 2002) Der Spiegel has discovered Pandia! The German speaking part of our audience may take a look at Besser suchen, wirklich finden, an article on Web search tools.

Searchengine Blog has published two interesting interviews, one with Webmaster World leader Brett Tabke and one with the Belgian "fantomaster", Ralph Tegtmeier.

Tegtmeier belongs to the "politically incorrect" as regards views on cloaking (i.e. the art of feeding the search engine spiders pages that are different than the one seen by human visitors). We do not have to agree with him, but we certainly admire his honesty.

Search Engine Watch has tested the search engines' ability to find "the perfect page". Perfect pages are defined as "obvious" pages that should turn up in the top ten results for their "obvious" search terms. This is, of course, a very unscientific method, but interesting all the same. Google, Yahoo and MSN Search got an A (top score), AllTheWeb.com an A-, Inktomi and Lycos a B, and Ask Jeeves a B-.

Fast and Inktomi united in new paid inclusion program

(November 13 2002) Apart from Google, all of the major search engines now have paid inclusion programs, i.e. services that will respider your Web pages on a regular basis in return for a certain fee.

Lycos, in co-operation with Position Technologies (PositionTech), now offers a new inclusion program called Lycos InSite 2.0, where customers may pay for inclusion in the Fast as well as the Inktomi databases. Fast powers search sites like Lycos and AlltheWeb, while Inktomi delivers results to MSN.com, HotBot and others.

The cost of submitting to FAST is $35 for the first URL and $15 for additional URL's. The cost of submitting to Inktomi is US$39 for the first Web page and $29 for additional URL's.

Reporting features include "granular" click-tracking, enabling a Web marketer to follow the search terms that drive traffic and the average position of sites in the search engines. Position Technologies will also make consulting services available to InSite customers to help improve their search rankings.

By getting a deal with Fast as well as Lycos, PositionTech has probably become the most important paid inclusion service proivider on the Web.

The services provided by Lycos and PositionTech for the Fast search engine, can also be bought from Fast directly, through their FAST PartnerSite program.

Note that although these programs will get your pages included and revisited regularly by the search engine spiders, they will not lead to a better ranking in search results.

They will make it easier to fine tune page content for the search engines, though. Moreover, unless you use spam techniques, all the pages you pay for a guaranteed to get into the search engine database.

Last minute search engine optimization Christmas list

(November 10 2002) Have you optimized your site in time for the holiday rush?

Andy Beal takes a look at last minute search engine marketing efforts.

The new AltaVista look

(November 10 2002) AltaVista has launched its new site, presenting a new and simpler look.

Read more about the new AltaVista!

Fast meets Google

(November 7 2002) The Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reports of a meeting between Fast/AlltheWeb CEO John Markus Lervik and Google entrepreneur Larry Page. Page is on "holiday" in Norway.

Asked whether he would like to buy Fast, Page gave the paper a polite no comment, but added that he thinks Fast is very good at what they are doing. Google now reports some 150 million search queries a day, Fast some 40 million.

Pandia finds it unlikely that Google will ever buy Fast. However, Lervik has already given Dagens Næringsliv the price: 10 billion dollars. And yes, put a "smiley" behind that number :)

On Tuesday Fast presented its third quarter results. Revenues remained flat and Fast reports a net loss of US$ 0.7 million. The result for the year as a whole remains in the black, however.

Unfortunately the company published the results on its corporate Web site before the board had given its final confirmation, and Fast stock was suspended from the Oslo Stock Exchange for three hours. When trading did commence, Fast stock dropped by some 16 percent.

To Aftenposten Lervik says the company is growing. Moreover, he added that he has not given up hope regarding a possible Yahoo! deal.

Google reaches 3 billion pages

(November 7 2002) Google now reports 3 billion Web pages in its search engine database, ahead of Fast/AlltheWeb's 2.1 billion.

As we have said before, the number of Web pages is far from the only factor to be consider when discussing the quality of a search engine, but from a marketing perspective it is significant.

We suppose Fast is preparing a response.

Optimization of Dynamic Sites Requires Precision

(November 5 2002) Paul J. Bruemmer takes a look at dynamic pages and URLs with problematic characters like ? and & and tells you how to get them listed in the search engines.

Click here to learn more about search engines and database generated Web addresses.

Teoma introduces new advanced search features

(November 4 2002) Virtual Acquisition reports that the Teoma search engine (which also feeds Ask Jeeves) has increased the size of its index to 350 million pages.

At the same time it has added several new features for advanced searching, including the possibility of limiting the search to more languages.

They have also added new field searching capabilities to the search syntax, including Site: (restricting the search to a specific domain), Intext: (restricting searchers to the page text itself), Inurl: (restricting searches to the URL or Web address), Intitle: (restricting searches to the title field, i.e. the text you find in the window bar).

Teoma will soon add a spell checker and a new advanced user interface.

See also Search Engine Showdown's updated review of Teoma.

Go to weblog search engine news entries for 2001
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Go to news messages for 1999.
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