Pandia Search Engine Weblog October 2002

(October 30 2002) ClickTracks tells us that they are looking for a few good beta testers for the ClickTracks Analyzer site metrics software. They're especially interested in beta testers with search engine optimization or search engine marketing experience.

Interested consultants and companies should e-mail beta@clicktracks.com or call US 877-773-2249 to enroll in the process.

AlltheWeb adds new skins and becomes XHTML compliant

(October 30 2002) Fast AlltheWeb will allow searchers to choose between several designs or "skins" for its search engine. The site will also follow the latest standards for Web page coding.

Read about AlltheWeb's new offer.

The new Gimpsy directory

(October 29 2002) Given the present dot com blues, it is good to see that someone continue to believe in the future of directories.

Gimpsy is an action oriented directory of hand picked sites. By action oriented we mean that while most directories categorize sites according to subject, Gimpsy focus on the service a site provides.

Hence you search for sites that can help you do something, not for information in a more abstract sense. You do not search for "computers", but for "buy books on computers" or "learn about computers".

Following the same logic, the catalog structure is not divided into categories like "shopping" or "the Internet", but according to action terms like Compare, Create, Download, Find, Buy, Play, Visit etc.

It is all quite unfamiliar, but it works.

Submissions are free, but it is also possible to bid for a higher placement.

As a registered Gimpsy user, you will be able to maintain your own collection of favorites, get access to an internal discussion Forum, and communicate directly with the Gimpsy administrators. There is also a preference panel that lets you give priority to sites in specific languages or regions, exclude sites that requires payment or registration and more.

For more information, see I Help You Forums and SEO Support Forums.

The new MyWay.com portal

(October 29 2002) The Excite network has launched a new search portal powered by the Google search engine. MyWay.com has no banner ads or pop-ups, but do include pay-per-click text ads from Google AdWords.

The site features a directory (ODP), news, sports, email, weather, finance, fashion, TV, movies and is fully customizable.

If you lament Google's lack of portal features, this might be for you. If not we see no reason why you should use MyWay instead of Google.

Search engine damage control

(October 29 2002) Google and other search engines will boot anyone using spam tactics to get high rankings. Should Web masters fear these threats? You better believe it!

Paul J. Bruemmer takes a look at spamming and how to get back into the search engines when booted.

Google censorship

(October 25 2002) According to a new report from Harvard Universitys Berkman Center Google has removed some 100 controversial sites from their German and French sites. These are mainly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or white supremacy sites. The filtering does not apply to the Google.com site.

The sites in question are definitely not a great loss to us. We detest sites based on this kind of stupid bigotry. Still, we are more than a little concerned about where Google will draw the line. What some people will call offensive, others will call free speech.

"To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law," said Google spokesman Nate Tyler according to CNET. These sites were probably delisted because of a complaint from the German government.

Google spokesman Nate Tyler argues that they remove sites from Google search results pages that may conflict with local laws to avoid legal liability. From an economic point of view, this might make sense, but we are left with a foul taste in our mouth. Is Google not willing to risk being dragged into court in order to defend its right to deliver uncensored search results?

Now, Germany is a democracy, but will Google be just as "understanding" towards countries like China?

It needs to be repeated: Google is not publishing these sites, they are providing a search facility helping searchers find what they want on the Net. If you want censorship, attack the sites, not Google.

CNET News.com article on "Google excluding controversial sites".
See also the original paper Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide, by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School. See especially the part on localized Google search result exclusions.

SearchKing sues Google

(October 23 2002) As soon as Google realized that the PR Ad Network had started selling text ads on the Searchking network of sites based on Google PageRank, it started reducing the pagerank of the sites involved.

Google has not commented on this, but the main reason is clearly their wish to protect their search results algorithm from outside manipulation.

PageRank or PR is a "popularity" measure assigned to Web pages by Google. The PageRank of a page is mainly based on the PR value of pages linking to it.

By pricing ads on the basis of the PageRank of the ad-carrying Web pages, the PR Ad Network clearly believed it would be possible for advertisers to gain a higher Google ranking.

SearchKing says the downgrade has reduced the affected sites' ranking in search results and reduced traffic to the Searchking network. As a result, the lawsuit asks for an injunction and damages in excess of US$75,000.

The complaint argues that "due to the high value associated with Web page rank, the purposeful reduction of SearchKing and its related Web sites' page rankings has damaged SearchKing's reputation and diminished its value."

We find it hard to believe that SearchKing will get anywhere with this lawsuit. Google's obligation is towards the searchers, not the Web site owners, and Google has clearly not guaranteed any site a specific ranking in search results.

The search engines are constantly struggling with the concept of spam -- i.e. sites trying to manipulate their way up to the top -- and they must be allowed to do something about that.

One could argue that the PR Ad Network does not spam the Google algorithm, but to deny Google the right to adjust the PR value of Web pages, would hinder its attempts to punish real spammers. Ultimately this could mean that Google would have to abandon the PR system all together, leading to poorer search results.

See our interview with SearchKing/PR Ad Network's Robert Massa and our August article on PageRank for sale.

See also the Internet News article on the lawsuit. SearchKing's own comment on the matter can be found at www.searchking.com/news/sknews.htm

Yahoo Sweden adds Express service

(October 23 2002) Yahoo! Sweden has followed in the footsteps of its Nordic siblings in Norway and Denmark and added an Express pay for review service.

Web sites may pay SEK 1950 to get their Web site reviewed for inclusion by the Yahoo! editors within ten days. If it is accepted it stays. There is no annual renewal fee as in Yahoo.com.

Non-commercial sites will probably prefer to make use of the free Yahoo! Standard submission procedure. However, Yahoo! will not guarantee that these sites will be reviewed.

Unlike the American Yahoo!, this search site does not default to Google results. Searchers will first be presented with results from the Swedish directory, making such an investment more worth while.

Yahoo! Sweden's Express service is administered by the Danish company Notabene.net.

Note also that Yahoo! Sweden has changed its front page lay out, indicating that all Yahoos eventually will make use of the new American lay out.

Search Engine Freshness

(October 22 2002) Search Engine Showdown has presented a new survey of search engine freshness, i.e. on how often they respider and update their search results listings.

Both Google, MSN (powered by Inktomi), HotBot.com (Inktomi) and AltaVista will include pages that are no more than one day old. The most recently updated page on Fast AlltheWeb was five days old. (However, if you go to the AlltheWeb news search engine you will find stories only a couple of hours old).

Search Engine Showdown has also tried to calculate a rough average for how often pages are revisited. The Inktomi powered search sites are the best, with an average of two weeks, next is AlltheWeb with three weeks, Google with one month, and AltaVista with three months.

For all the numbers, see the "Freshness Showdown".

The 2002 London Pub Conference

(October 19 2002) Finally, here is the report from the Webmaster World London Pub Conference.

The Internet Business Promoter

(October 19 2002) Axandra, the producers of the Arelis resiprocal links software, has launched their own ranking program called the Internet Business Promoter.

According to Johannes Selbach of Axandra - Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH the new software includes a ranking checker that checks the ranking of your web sites on more than 250 search engines.

It also creates PDF and HTML ranking reports that can be given your own design. Selbach says that they are also going add more features and functions to IBP in the near future.

Drive holiday sales with search engine marketing

(October 19 2002) The 2002 holiday season is fast approaching, so it's time to ensure that your website ranks well in major search engines and directories.

Guest writer Paul J. Bruemmer tells you how to get good search engine listings.

Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally

(October 17 2002) Pandia guest writer Steve Winkler takes a look at the development of a search engine marketing strategies.

He points out that the most common of all online marketing mistakes is to have no clear understanding of the order in which strategies should be implemented.

Google remains the largest search site in the World

(October 14 2002) OneStat.com, provider of website analysis software, reports that Googleís global usage share continues to rise.

Googleís share has risen from 53.2 percent to 55.1 percent during the two last months. Yahoo's global usage share remains stable at 20.6 percent.

Next come MSN Search (9.4%), AOL Search (3.5%), Terra Lycos (3.0%), AltaVista (2.4%) and metasearch engine Ixquick (1.7%).

Yahoo.com goes for Google

(October 10 2002) The wait is over: Yahoo! has decided to continue its relationship with Google.

Google has for a long time delived search engine results to supplement Yahoo's own directory listings. Now Google results will be even more tightly integrated into Yahoo! search results (see next news item).

According to Search Engine Watch Yahoo! paid US$7.1 million for Google search queries in 2001.

It is no secret that both Fast and Inktomi has been trying to get this account. In the end Yahoo! decided to go for the safe option. Like AOL the company probably figured that the Google brand will strengthen user ties to the directory, not weaken it.

According to Search Engine Watch, Inktomi has not given up hope yet, arguing that Yahoo! may go for a solution with several search engine results providers.

Yahoo! experimenting with default listings

(October 9 2002, update October 10) Yahoo! has been experimenting with the way the company presents its search results.

It has stopped presenting its own directory listings first when someone do a search at the yahoo.com site. Instead the site presents a mix of directory listings and search engine results from Google.

Note that Yahoo! will often change the Google search engine results descriptions to Yahoo! descriptions if the page or site is listed in Yahoo!

Yahoo! will no longer distinguish between "Web Site Matches" (i.e. Yahoo! directory data) and "Web Page Matches" (Google search engine results).

Yahoo! claims it is using its own algorithm for ranking search results. So far, however, the results are very similar to Google's. Yahoo! does include links to the relevant Yahoo! categories, however.

Some have argued that it no longer makes any sense to pay for inclusion in the Yahoo! directory. After all, you can get included in Google for free.

Danny Sullivan points out that Yahoo! continues to present links to relevant categories. Moreover, inclusion in the Yahoo! directory may strengthen your position in Google. We will wait for possible tweaks in Yahoo's algorithms favoring Yahoo! listed sites, before we draw a conclusion.

The change is limited to the Yahoo.com sites. Other national Yahoo's may go for alternative search engine results providers.

See Yahoo! Search Help and Webmaster World discussion.

What's changed with Yahoo! Search (at Yahoo!)

Espotting in Italy

(October 10 2002) European pay per click search engine Espotting has opened office in Milan and Treviso, with Rocco Benetton as chairman.

Espotting Italy has 48% reach in the country as a result of distribution deals with Yahoo! Europe, AltaVista, Lycos and Ciao!

Inktomi reduces staff by 20 percent

(October 9 2002) The Inktomi search engine company is cutting 20 percent of its staff.

"Current economic conditions in enterprise software mandate that Inktomi further adjust its cost structure to move towards cash flow breakeven performance," says David Peterschmidt, Inktomi president and CEO.

"Inktomi's focus remains steady on providing search solutions for the Web and enterprise markets as we continue to see long-term growth potential for our products."

Unless Inktomi is able to win back the Yahoo! account (i.e. as a search engine results provider), the future certainly looks bleak for this major search engine company.

New version of PagePromoter

(October 9 2002) PagePromoter has announced version 5 of their search engine submission and ranking software

Read more about this new SEO tool.

LookSmart to be included in InfoSpace metasearch

(October 6 2002) The search directory slash search engine company LookSmart has made a deal with metasearch giant Infospace. LookSmart will provide results to metasearch engines like Excite, Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler.

LookSmart will continue to provide paid search listings to InfoSpace's meta-search network.

So what does it mean?

All the Infospace sites mentioned are metasearch engines, i.e. sites that mix search results from several search engines and directories. Given the size of these metasearch engines, Infospace will normally make a deal with the search engines they are querying, as they recently did with Google.

Now these metasearch sites will also include "WiseNut powered editorially reviewed Web site results" in their result listings.

By this LookSmart probably means regular directory listings from the fee based LookSmart directory and -- presumably -- the non-commercial Zeal directory.

At the moment it is unclear whether the listings will also include regular search engine results (i.e. listings generated by robots crawling the Web) from LookSmart's Wisenut search engine.

We doubt it. We suspect that LookSmart will use its Wisenut technology to rank the directory results that are to be used by these metasearch engines.

Google considers charging for services

(October 4, update October 10 2002) According to the British Telegraph Google is considering charging for some of its search services, particularly the new news search service.

According to Telegraph Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of Google, says that they may experiment with ways of monetising after they "have got the service right." He says that charging would be one approach: "So far we have found it better to keep the service free and charge for targetted advertising."

If Google goes ahead with such a plan, the news search service will have to be strengthened considerably, especially with news sources that are not freely available at the Web. At the moment there are too many free news search engines available for Google news to become an attractive fee based service.

The Pandia Newsfinder stays free!

Addendum October 10: According to Abondance Omid Kordestani denies that Google considers charging for using their search engines.

Optimize your life!

(October 4 2002)

In connection with the upcoming search engine marketing Pub Conference, Pandia has made a new classy T-shirt for the modern search engine optimizer.

Painted by Leonardo, designed by Pandia. Click here to get one!

(And yes, you can get mugs, aprons, bags, mouse mats and other stuff as well. There is even a lunchbox! You cannot leave home without one...)

Google fight and poetry

(October 4 2002) The French answer to Pandia, Abondance, has launched a new service called Googlefight, where you can let related search queries fight for supremacy.

In the match of the month the keyword "hell" has nearly twice as many listings as "heaven". Says a lot about Internet life, doesn't it?

It is totally unscientific and great fun!

On a related note ResearchBuzz has opened a Google Poetry generator that will turn any search into a poem. You select the style!

Here's the "Swedish Chef" rendering of the search query "Norwegian wood":

Norwegian - Book Wood Norwegian of /norwegianwood
The on club Murakami
- Wood Norwegian Wood Haruki Book
Wood bork? of Wood Wood
Wood Haruki - Murakami
Norwegian Beatles Wood www.musiq.no Wood The
Wood NORWEGIAN bork bork bork! Wood Bookreporter.com Book
Wood Book Index nyhet WOOD

Advanced search features at AlltheWeb

(October 2 2002) We have already reported on some of the new advanced search features at AlltheWeb. They are now "official". Moreover Fast has added some more. Here is a summary:

Like Lycos AlltheWeb is now giving users a preview of the context in which their search term appears within the page. These text extracts come in addition to text from the meta description tag. Moreover, they will highlight keywords on the result pages using a bold typeface.

Positiontech sells Fast inclusion

(October 1 2002) Positiontech is the first company besides Lycos and Fast itself that is selling paid inclusion in the Fast search engine index.

This search engine powers Fast's own AlltheWeb site as well as Lycos and a large number of other search and Internet service providers' portals.

Positiontech has for some time been promoting paid inclusion in the Inktomi index.

And yes, Fast will spider Web sited for free. The "Fast Partner Site" service includes, however, 48 hours respidering (which is good if you have a news site or is trying to improve your rankings), click through and impression reporting.

PageRank repercussions

(October 1 2002) In August Pandia published Jono Craig's interview with Robert Massa of SearchKing. SearchKing had started selling text ads on its network of independent portals, with prices based on Google PageRank.

Planet Ocean reports that many of the sites associated with the PR Ad Network (including SearchKing.com) have experienced large reductions in PageRank.

On the Search Engine Forums it is reported that Robert Massa's own site fell from a PageRank of 8 to a PR of 4 after Google's September 27 update.

It may be a coincidence, or then, maybe not. Google may be punishing these sites to discourage others from following their lead. If too many started selling text ads (i.e. links) on the basis of PageRank (a measure of page popularity), the PageRank system could be weakened.

In SEO Support Forum's new interview with Massa, he says that he had to accept the possibility that Google would take this kind of action against him, but it surprises him that "they would penalize hundreds of people who not only provide what could be argued as some of the best topic specific directories on the planet."

The Search Engine Forums discussion also includes some of Massa's (aka "bobking's") reflections on the matter. See also Webmaster World discussion.

Wisenut Revived

(October 1 2002) Chris Sherman reports that LookSmart -- finally -- has revived Wisenut, the promising new search engine the company bought last year.

The search engine has for a long time been hampered by a far too old database. Now it has been refreshed. Still, a lot remains to be done. Gary Price of Resourceshelf has done a test and finds that a significant number of listings are over four months old. To give one example: a listing of the Newsweek front page is dated May 10, and that's a news site! (Cp. "rubble88" in Webmaster World discussion)

The database now contains some 900 million documents. That's still a long shot from Google and Allthe Web, but size isn't everything.

The LookSmart/Wisenut team is doing some interesting work on the search ranking algorithms. Link analysis plays a very important part.

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive October 2002

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