Pandia Search Engine Weblog August 2003

(August 30 2003) ResourceShelf reports that the reference resource guru Peter Jacso has launched a new metasearch engine that lets you search several of the best online dictionaries in one go.

By using tick off boxes you may restrict your search to a specific selection of dictionaries.

The metasearch engine includes dictionaries like American Heritage, Chambers, Collins, Encarta, Oxford, Random House. The search is restricted to English dictionaries and includes a few that require registration.

We strongly recommend that your limit the search to a few dictionaries at the time, as the "PolySearch Engine" makes no attempt at merging the results from the various search services. Instead it opens a new window for each and every one of them.

Go to General English Dictionaries PolySearch Engine.

Another site that actually merges dictionary search results from several dictionaries can be found at dictionary.com.

Search Engine Marketing Class

(August 30 2003) Mike Grehan and Jim Sterne arranges a new Internet Marketing Class at the Newcastle Business School, UK, on October 1st 2003.

Mike Grenhan, the author of the excellent guide to SEO called Search Engine Marketing The Essential Best Practice Guide, will give introductions on search engine optimization, the use of pay per click text ads, search engine friendly site design, traffic measuring and more.

Jim Sterne, the author of Web Metrics ñ Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success, will talk about how to benchmark web success and how to calculate the return of your investments.

The workshop home page has more.
More search engine conferences and workshops.

Google's Supplemental Index

(August 27 2003) It is all very predictable, really. Overture announces that their AlltheWeb search index has reached a record high 3.2 billion entries (see below), and a few days later Google puts up a new figure on their home page: 3.3 billion.

Actually, the quality of search results is not in itself directly related to the size of the database, although a larger index may help you find some odd pages tucked away far back in the Internet. However, size counts a lot publicity wise, so we expect new record breaking attempts shortly.

Greg Notess reports that not only has Google increased its regular index -- it has also added a new experimental "supplemental" database.

Google says that "Google augments results for difficult queries by searching a supplemental collection of web pages. Results from this index are marked in green as 'Supplemental.'"

Gary Price has done some testing, and found for instance some "supplemental results" doing this query (See the last results on that page).

It is unclear what determines a web page's status as "supplemental", although we suppose these are pages of a more obscure nature.

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization

(August 22 2003) The new Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization was established during the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose (see below).

It is clearly a serious effort. The board of directors includes well known search engine experts like Barbara Coll (Webmama.com), Brett Tabke (Webmaster World), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch) and Fredrick Marckini (iProspect).

SEMPO defines itself as a "non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide." In short: SEMPO is to educate business and marketing managers about the value of systematic search engine marketing.

Membership requires a fee. Nevertheless, even non-members may benefit from the the resources found at the SEMPO site.

Inside Search Engine Strategies, part IV

(August 19-22 2003) Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Strategies rolled into San Jose this week, bringing an unprecedented four days of search engine marketing advice (SEM) and news to more than 1700 attendees.

Andy Beal reports from day 4 of the conference.

See also his reports from day 1, day 2 and day 3.

AlltheWeb announces the world's largest search engine index

(August 22 2003) Overture has announced that the AlltheWeb or FAST search engine index now contains some 3.2 billion documents.

The word "documents" is not defined, but we would guess that it also includes all file formats crawled by the regular AlltheWeb search engine (i.e. not including the FTP, News and multimedia indexes). In comparison Google now claims to have some 3.1 billion "web pages" in its index.

The AlltheWeb index is used by Lycos and other search portals around the world.

Yahoo! is preparing a switch to Inktomi

(August 22 2003) The Yahoo! search engine is at the moment powered by its main competitor: Google. It is no secret that Yahoo! feels uncomfortable with this arrangement, but the company has learned from Google: If you want to get returning searchers, you must give the visitors what they want -- and that is high quality search results.

Yahoo! already owns one alternative, the Inktomi search engine, and is in the process of acquiring Overture with its two search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Hence the use of Google is not caused by a lack of options.

Yahoo! is now performing tests in several countries, including Australia and Brazil, to see if Inktomi can replace Google. According to CNET, Yahoo! is also testing an alternative news search in the US. A Yahoo! spokeswoman tells CNET that the tests make up roughly 2 percent of the search volume in those areas.

The idea is in part to determine if Inktomi is now, in fact, as good as Google, so that visitors will not abandon Yahoo! in favor of Google when the switch takes place.

To ZDNet Australia Yahoo Australia search producer Peter Crowe says that they will switch to Inktomi "if the Inktomi results are better for Australian users". The Australians are particularly concerned about getting search results that are relevant to the local market.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference (see below) Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search, said that Yahoo! has every intention of deploying Inktomi globally. Hence it is not so much a question of if Yahoo! will switch to Inktomi, but when.

New Overture Site

(August 20 2003) Resourceshelf reports that Overture Research has launched a new web site.

The site includes information on research projects, staff members, reports and more.

The reports are a little bit more complicated that the average Pandia article. We noticed titles like " Improving quotient cuts with max flow" and " Mining the Peanut Gallery: Opinion Extraction and Semantic Classification of Product Reviews"!

Overture Research was established as a separate department of Overture Services in 2002. Overture says that "the companyís expansion into multiple commercial products and multiple business units clarified the need for a department that researched solutions to foundational problems in our industry".

The Overture Research division must not be confused with the Overture Web Search Division, which unifies work done by the AltaVista and AlltheWeb teams on developing a new, powerful and unified search engine.

The AltaVista search toolbar

(August 18 2003) The new AltaVista toolbar is an add-on to the Internet Explorer browser for Windows and gives you direct access to the AltaVista search engine from the browser-window.

Search Engine Marketing Done Right 4

(August 17 2003) In his series Search Engine Marketing Done Right, Pandia Guest Writer Steve Winkler takes a look at how to turn visitors into buying customers.

Read about how to close the deal.

Upcoming search engine conferences

(August 17 2003) The best way of learning efficient web searching and search engine marketing is through discussions with experts and colleagues.

Read about upcoming search engine conferences and workshops!

The future of AltaVista

(August 15 2003) In an interview with IDG News Service Phu Hoang, Yahoo's senior vice president for engineering, says that it is "entirely possible" that they keep the AltaVista site to "serve a particular niche of users." Yahoo! is to take over Overture and its AltaVista and AlltheWeb search engines later this year.

It seems that Yahoo! may use AltaVista as a showcase search site for advanced users, much in the same way as Fast used to use the AlltheWeb search engine.

Hoang says about AltaVista: "I think that there may be opportunity for us to try new search features and new capabilities that are a little bit on the edge, that we are not yet ready to show up in the mainstream." And indeed, AltaVista is working hard, developing new technologies.

Nothing is said about the future of the AlltheWeb search engine and site.

It seems that the main reason for acquiring Overture was that Yahoo! realized that Web search was an essential component in any profitable portal business. Overture has proved that you can earn money on search. Yahoo! will now include Overture's pay-for-performance search throughout Yahoo's network, including areas like sports, real estate and autos.

The main problem for Yahoo! right now is that many portals may stop buying search services from its newly acquired search engine units, including Inktomi, AlltheWeb and AltaVista, as they see Yahoo! as a major competitor. German T-Online has now dropped Overture/AlltheWeb because of this.

The large MSN portal is powered partly by Yahoo!'s Inktomi search engine. "We would love to keep MSN, and we aim to keep them," Hoang says, "but when we did the deal with Overture, we did the calculation that we would do the deal even if the contract with MSN does not continue." Unless MSN fail in developing its new search engine, Yahoo! will definitely loose that contract.

Overture selects Quigo for text ad targeting

(August 14 2003) Pay-per-click search engine company Overture (now the proud owner of AltaVista and AlltheWeb), is competing with Google for search engine text ad customers.

As some of our readers will now, Overture is also experimenting with serving text ads to other Web pages -- apart for search result listings -- in the same way as Google's Adwords.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that Overture has chosen the Israeli start-up Quigo to provide the technology needed to analyze the content of the pages that contain the ads. By doing this Quigo may help Google serve adverts that are relevant.

According to Quigo their so-called AdSonar technology enables online publishers and licensees to serve contextually targeted advertising that achieves greater relevancy. Overture has licensed AdSonar and will combine it with contextual solutions built "in-house".

The Google calculator

Pandia has more on the Google math.

T-Online switches to Google

(August 12 2003) The large German Internet service provider T-Online has abandoned the Overture AlltheWeb search engine in favor of Google search results.

T-Online has also switched from Overture pay-per-click text ads to Google AdWords.

One reason that has been mentioned is that T-Online has stopped using Overture and AlltheWeb results as these will now be owned by Yahoo!, their main competitor.

Have you started your Christmas search engine campaign?

(August 12 2003) As your business settles into the third quarter of 2003 it's tempting to believe that there is plenty of time left before you need to think about your company's Christmas marketing campaign. Think again!

Andy Beal prepares for Christmas with a to the point search engine optimization reminder.

More new search engine development

(August 11 2003) Just as we thought the world risked ending up with two major search engines, Google and the forthcoming Yahoo!/Inktomi/AltaVista/AlltheWeb search engine, the Web seems full of new search engine projects.

Marketing Forum Watch

(August 8 2003) News Now (see below) is not the only site on the net to offer search engine news headlines. Internet marketing expert Michael Wong has launched a new service called Marketing Forum Watch. Unlike News Now he is not focusing on news sites. Instead he tracks most Internet marketing and search engine marketing discussions forums.

First of all the home page gives you a list of the latest interventions on some of these forums. However, there is also a search engine that lets you search for specific topics within these discussion boards, including the very attractive alternative "All forums".

He has covered the most important search engine marketing forums, from various Jim World forums via Webmaster World to the brand new High Rankings Forum.

You may customize your own "search engine forum portal" by selecting the forums to display, number of latest posts, and your local time zone. The page refreshes every five minutes.

New "democratic" search engine

(August 5 2003) California gave birth to Google. Now a new search engine is being prepared for launch in San Diego.

NetNose is based on a new and original approach to site ranking: the public voice algorithm. All users of the search engine are asked to contribute by voting on selected sites. Hence the site that gains the highest number of "quality points" based on this voting, will be listed first.

It sounds like an open invitation to spammers. However, you cannot select the site you are to vote for yourself. NetNose will open up a Web page for you along with a pop-up window listing a number of related search terms. You are then asked to what degree these terms accurately describe the site. You may trash low quality sites by clicking on a trash can icon.

A site will have to be rated before it is included in the search engine index.

Jason Dunn of NetNose says that they think that NetNose is already becoming relevant for numerous general searches; however, for specific searches they need more data: "We openly encourage people to submit their favorite web sites and search terms to gather more of this specific data," he says.

"Other search engines concentrate on indexing everything rather than what the general public thinks is important," he argues. "This causes irrelevant information to creep into search results."

In order for NetNose to succeed it will have to encourage users to vote. This has apparently not been a serious problem so far.

NetNose is currently in its beta testing stage, and it is too early to evaluate the quality of its search results. It supports a few Boolean operators (and, + and -) and allows you to limit results to certain types of sites (e.g. kid safe sites, entertainment and shopping).

More about NetNose
NetNose FAQ
SearchGuild discussion

Google adds search for synonyms

(August 5 2003) Google now allows you to extend your search to synonyms. Enter a tilde before a keyword, and Google will include pages that includes words that have a similar meaning. Google may also include variations of the same word (plural, ing-form etc.)

Resourceshelf reports that the tilde operator only works in the English language and when you are searching for Web pages and similar documents. Hence it does not work when searching for newsgroup messages or news.

Google gives the following example: To search for browser help as well as browser guides and tutorials, enter browser ~help in the search field.

We know from experience that some users will find it hard to find the ~ character. On our Norwegian Windows-keyboard you hit AltGr and the relevant button and then hit the space bar to make the character visible.

By the way, Google News is now ready in a French version.

The new wotbot search engine

(August 3 2003) There is a new search engine in town. The child's name is wotbot and the search engine is currently in alpha testing mode.

Search Engine News Weblog Archive August 2003

New dictionary metasearch engine