Pandia Search Engine Weblog September 2002

(September 30 2002) From the ashes of TopDog rises the new Search Engine Commando.

Pandia takes a look at this new search engine submission and ranking software.

(September 30 2002) Google has started promoting its pay per click text ad service in Britain. The program is the same AdWords Select you find in the US. However, you may now pay in Pounds Sterling.

Google UK Press release

Yahoo! drops Premium Document Search

(September 29) After only eight months Yahoo! has dropped its Northern Light powered Premium Document Search service.

This fee based feature gave searchers access to content from more that 7000 publications, including Forbes, the Economist, and the New York Times.

The collection is still available through Northern Light.

Google's fourth birthday

(September 29) Google birthday logo (c) Google 2002

Google is celebrating its 4th birthday with a special anniversary logo. This kid surely has learned how to walk!

Gary Price has selected historical links to some of the older versions of Google. For instance, click here for a 1998 version of the world's favorite search engine.

The new Search Engine Showdown

(September 26) Greg Notess has redesigned his Search Engine Showdown guide to Web searching.

There is a new frequently updated weblog. His popular search engine feature charts and analyses of search engine sizes remain.

Search Engine Workshops and Conferences

(September 25) We learn by interacting with colleagues and experts.

Click here to read about upcoming conferences devoted to searching and search engine optimization!

New Google News Search

(September 23 2002, update September 24) The new version of the Google news search is up and running. There is a new online newspaper like front page, presenting some of the major news of the day.

What makes Google's news portal different from others, is the fact that these headlines are generated automatically and not by human editors.

New York Times argues that Google may be alienating its partner Yahoo! by turning Google into a full fledged portal which also includes news services. The paper indicates that Yahoo! may choose Inktomi as its next search engine results provider because of this.

Google fetches news from some 4000 news sources -- a significant increase compared to the previous version of the search engine. The database is refreshed every 15 minutes, and headlines are kept in the database for 30 days.

Ranking is based on freshness, the number of articles devoted to a given topic on a specific site and the relevant news site's "popularity" (Source: Reuters and Internetnews.com).

You can follow the history of a particular topic by clicking the "sort by date" link. This will arrange the stories in chronological order.

There is no advanced search page available. The search engine remains in beta.

European Search Engine Chart

(September 20 2002) The Americans think their search engine landscape is hard to grasp: What search engine/pay per click SE/directory is powering which portal?

Europeans have to live with the fact that each and every country has its own combination of portals and search result providers. Heini at Webmaster World has made a tremendous effort trying to make sense out of it all.

The result, the European Search Engine Chart, lists the search services found in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

The dominating search engine result providers are Fast and Google, while the pay per click market is divided between Espotting and Overture. Google uses its own PPC program.

Espotting wins Lycos in Europe

(September 19 2002) European pay-per-click search engine Espotting has announced a three-year pan-European deal with Lycos Europe. The deal covers Lycos UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy and more.

Espotting will display their Top 4 sponsored listings on all of Lycos Europe's Channel Pages and their Top 3 sponsored listings on all of Lycos' Directory Pages. Their results will be clearly labeled as "Sponsored Links." The implementation will take place this fall.

Search Google by mail

(September 18 2002) The excellent fantomNews newsletter reports that CapeScience lets you search Google without access to the Web.

Send an e-mail with the search query in the subject line to google@capeclear.com. CapeScience will send you the results within minutes.

CapeScience says that it might be useful for "PDAs, mobile phones, offline laptop users, and generally people who have infrequent, low quality access to the Internet." Indeed!

Finding the right keywords

(September 15 2002) A content-rich high quality site will probably not be found by searchers unless you have optimized the pages for the right search queries.

Pandia tells you how to find the right keyword combinations.

New features in AlltheWeb advanced search

(September 15 2002) Resourceshelf reports that AlltheWeb Advanced Search has added a new "document depth limit in result restrictions section" (yeah, you can draw your breath now).

The point is that you may limit your search to according to where a file or webpage is found in a site's directory structure. The idea is presumably that files found further down in a directory structure is less important than others. We don't know about that.

There is also "a new embedded content section" where you may limit your search to various types of content, including images, audio, video, RealVideo & RealAudio, Macromedia Flash, Java applets, JavaScript, and VBScript.

Moreover, you may also filter results by restricting the webserver's IP-address.

HotBot UK switches to Fast

(September 13 2002) Hotbot UK is now using Fast as its search results provider. HotBot has until now been powered by the Inktomi search engine. The German version of HotBot has also started using Fast results.

HotBot US remains in the hands of Inktomi and Direct Hit.

(Thanks to boblington at Webmaster World for this tip.)

Overture in France

(September 13 2002) Abondance reports that Overture has opened office in France with some 20 employees.

Overture France has announced new partnerships with ZDNet and the search software producer Copernic, in addition to those already signed with Club-Internet, Lycos, AOL.fr and MSN France.

Abondance is a French website. We have, however, included a link to an automatic Babelfish-translation of this and other non-English sites in the left hand column of this weblog.

Google back in China

(September 13 2002) According to Financial Times Google is again accessible in China. AltaVista remains blocked according to their sources.

AlltheWeb includes Macromedia Flash files in search engine index

(September 13 2002) AlltheWeb is the first search engine to index Macromedia Flash files, a format used to produced more advanced animations, multimedia presentations and Web interfaces.

Pandia takes a look at what this means for Webmasters and surfers.

9/11 anniversary

(September 11 2002) Gary Price of Resourceshelf has prepared a compilation of September 11 anniversary resources. Take a look! See also Researchbuzz' 9/11 page.

Lycos.com redesign

(September 11 2002) Lycos has altered the Lycos.com home page. The search box now gives direct access to the Web, news and shopping search facilities.

The home page has also a direct link to the Lycos 50, a list of the most popular people, places and things Web users are searching for online.

Interestingly enough, Lycos US has not decided to go for the more modern and elegant design of the European "Lycoses".

On this day of remembrance, Lycos.com also opens up a black splash screen, giving access to a special memorial page.

Google abandons the original Adwords

(September 11 2002) Google has made a huge impact with its pay-per-click Adwords Select text ad program. Originally, however, this was not a pay-per-click, but a cost per impression service.

The old Adwords program has now been closed, and the customers are given a US$ 50 credit if they move over to the new version of Adwords.

The Search Engine Search Engine

(September 8 2002) Newcomer Search Optimization Search Forums (which looks more like a resource site than a discussion forum to us) has launched a search engine search engine.

You may use this feature to search for news articles on search engines and SE marketing published by sites like Search Engine Watch, Traffick and Pandia. It is possible to add new sites to the index.

The Google Infospace metasearch deal

(September 7 2002) Metasearch company Infospace and Google has made a deal, allowing Infospace to include Google listings in its metasearch results.

Pandia fears the move may weaken the metasearch industry.

Google banned in China

(September 3 2002, update Sept. 4 and 7) The Chinese government has blocked Chinese access to the Google search engine."Not everyone should have access to this harmful information on the internet," says foreign ministry spokesman Kong Qua to BBC. "The whole world now is exploring a way to manage the Internet and China is also working on this."

The problem is, of course, that when most people talk about "harmful content", they think about brutal p/o/r/n and criminal activities. Still, if free thinking is a crime, the Chinese decision makes a sick kind of sense.

Google is very popular in the Peoples' Republic, as it offers strong support for the Chinese language. Chinese surfers may still access the Google database, however, through Yahoo!, AOL and others. The authorities will have to block all search engines for this ban to work.

It is our guess that the Communist Party will never be able to control the flow of information on the Net. Their ultimate objective is for China to become a rich, industrialized and technologically advanced nation. The Internet is an integrated part of this development.

They have ample reason to fear the Internet. Free access to information is the foundation of true democracy, and easy access to Western media was one of many factors leading to the downfall of Soviet communism.

Google says that the company is working with Chinese officials to get the full service restored.

The latest: The Chinese authorities have now also blocked the AltaVista search engine. As BBC notes, the move is probably linked to the forthcoming Communist Party Congress, which will also discuss the party leadership.

Most Chinese have not access to the Internet. Still, the number of Web surfers is growing daily, and among the 45 million using the Internet, you find influential business people, government officials and intellectuals.

To see how this affects ordinary Chinese, read the Webmaster World discussion

Fast's new experiments

(September 4 2002) Here's one we missed this summer: Fast is experimenting with new ways of presenting search results, the Norwegian site digi.no reports.

In one prototype the searcher is presented with three pull down menus in addition to regular search results. The pull down menus will give you a list of relevant person names, organizations and topics.

digo.no did a search for the soccer player "Beckham". They got a list of other soccer players under "persons", soccer clubs and associations under "organizations", while the "topic" menu gave them soccer tournaments and more. It is all done automatically.

Fast-boss John Markus Lervik tells digi.no that they have developed a technology that recognizes person names and geographical locations in all types of documents. He does not tell them if and when the new technology will be implemented at AlltheWeb, however.

AltaVista no longer supports the keyword metatag

(September 2 2002) Planet Ocean reports that AltaVista is no longer indexing the meta keyword tag (i.e. hidden code used by webmasters to indicate the content of a page).

The search engine continues to index parts of the the meta description tag, however. And yes, optimizers should note that the title tag remains as important as ever.

The Search Engine News newsletter has more (subscription required).

Vivisimo drops Google powered sites

(September 2 2002) Virtual Acquisition reports that metasearch engine Vivisimo has stopped querying several Google-powered sites for its search results. The sites that are dropped are Yahoo Search, AOL Search, and Netscape Search.

Google proper has for a long time denied metasearch engines the right to include results from the Google search site in aggregate metasearch results. Google argues that these queries put a heavy burden on their servers.

The very popular Vivisimo metasearch engine now includes results from AlltheWeb, MSN, Looksmart, and OpenFind, a new Chinese search engine containing some 3.5 billion webpages.

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive September 2002

Search Engine Commando Resurrected

Google promotes AdWords in Europe