Pandia Search Engine Weblog December 2003

(December 31 2003) We haven't written much about Fast lately, the reason being that Fast has sold its web search unit and the AlltheWeb search engine to Overture.

The Norwegian company is very much alive and kicking, however, and continues to deliver advanced search technology to relevant companies.

The large mobile phone/cellular phone company (different continents, different words) Vodafone is now deploying Fast Data Search as the search platform for its new Vodafone live! services.

The new search facility on Vodafone live! enables customers to use their cellular phones/mobile handsets to search an index of worldwide WAP content.

The service is already live in Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, with the UK scheduled for early next year.

Fast has now been selected as one of the most innovative enterprise search providers on EContent magazine’s “EContent 100,” an annual list of companies that matter most in the digital content technology market.

Google tests book search

(December 28 2003) Google is experimenting on including excerpts of the content of books and publications in regular search engine results. The results are marked with a [Books - Beta] tag,

So far only a few publishers have been included. The result pages include links to the online merchants Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, where you can buy the publication.

To read an excerpt of Neil Gaiman's wonderful children's book Coraline, take a look at this Google Print page. As you will see, the Google URL identifies the book by its international ISBN number.

Google says: "On Google Print pages, we provide links to some popular book sellers that may offer the full versions of these publications for sale. Book seller links are not paid for by those sites, nor does Google benefit if you make a purchase from one of these retailers."

If you want to see how the books search results look like, visit this search result page (thanks to vitaplease at Webmaster World)

Google About Google Print
See also High Search Engine Rankings

FindWhat continues to feel uneasy about the Espotting merger

(December 24 2003) As previously reported in Pandia this summer the American pay per click text ad search engine FindWhat announced that it would buy European Espotting, thus laying the foundation for what could become a new major player in this market.

However, after having reviewed Espotting financials FindWhat changed its views regarding Espotting's strengths and prospects. FindWhat.com argued that, at a minimum, any successful renegotiation of the terms would include "a reduction of the purchase consideration, along with other material changes to the existing Merger Agreement."

The negotiations are not over. A new amendment to their merger agreement now changes the date on which either party may terminate the existing plans, from December 31, 2003 to January 31, 2004. FindWhat.com hopes that it will have a final decision on the status of the proposed merger early in 2004.

Although Espotting is one of the largest pay per click search engine in Europe, it has been loosing market shares to its major competitors Overture and Google AdWords.

It seems that Google's and Overture's tactic of delivering packages that combine text ads and regular results is paying of. Espotting does not own its own regular search engine, and is therefore much more vulnerable.

ah-ha becomes Enhance Interactive

(December 15 2003) During the last few years we have seen a tremendous growth in the number of pay-per-click search engines. Apart from Overture, Google AdWords and (in Europe) Espotting, few of them have managed to make any significant impression.

However, there are a few medium sized pay-per-click search engine companies that have managed to build brands -- among them FindWhat, Kanoodle and ah-ha.

ah-ha has now decided to get a new name: Enhance. Enhance explains that the name ah-ha.com was conceived as the name of a consumer search engine, whereas the company now has evolved into a business-to-business paid listings provider.

Also, the spelling of the name was somewhat confusing to many users (We constantly found ourselves using the spelling of the Norwegian pop group a-ha)

ah-ha advertisers need not to worry, as all URLs and Account Management System features will be updated automatically.

In March ah-ha/Enhance was acquired by Marchex, a company focusing on search marketing, paid inclusion, paid listings and conversion tracking.

Google adds number search

(December 13 2003) Resourceshelf reports that Google has launched several new search by number options for US citizens.

Enter a special "code word" and a number and Google will search the relevant database for you.

The following options are listed at the Google web search feature page::

To see delays and weather conditions at a particular US airport, type the airport's three letter code followed by the word "airport." For example, San Francisco International Airport updates can be found by searching for sfo airport.

InterMute launches text ad killer software

(December 11 2003) InterMute, a company known for software that removes banner ads and pop-ups, has launched a new package that removes sponsored text ads from search engine results. On their home page they have added a picture that shows how a Google result page will look without the pay per click ads.

Google is one of the search engines that clearly designate ads as such ("Sponsored links"). They even give the ads a colored background to set them apart from the rest of the listings. Moreover, they take great effort in ensuring that the ads are relevant to the search query.

In spite of this InterMute seems to believe that these ads reduces the relevancy of results. The slogan is: "Bring relevancy back to your search engine results with AdSubtract's Search Sanity feature."

We find this very disturbing. To develop a search engine like Google takes millions of dollars. To keep it in shape and improve it is also very, very costly. Still, thanks to advertising Google and the other search engines are able to provide their services for free.

Discuss: Is it really ethical to earn money on a product that reduces the income of these companies and undermines their ability to provide free searching?

Infoworld: AdSubtract to snip paid search results
ResearchBuzz: New Software to Block Sponsored Ad Results

The new BrainBoost search engine answers your questions

(December 11 2003) The new BrainBoost search engine tries to analyze the meaning of regular questions and match the query with web pages that include sentences that (hopefully) give a relevant answer.

Pandia has more on this new natural language search technology.

AskJeeves says yes to Europe

(December 10 2003) According to Netimperative, Ask Jeeves plans to go on an "acquisition and partnership spree" in Europe next year. It is unclear what search engine companies AskJeeves has in mind.

Ask Jeeves' UK director of strategy Myles Runham says that "We are clearly focused on growing the business to increase market share.... We have no specific acquisitions in mind at the moment but we want to extend our international reach beyond our core focus on the UK and US markets."

Most of the major European search engines and portals are already in the hands of one of the majors. The Norwegian AlltheWeb search engine was, for instance, bought by Overture, which in their turn was acquired by Yahoo!

Ask Jeeves may go looking for a pay per click search engine (PPC), although representatives for the British Ask Jeeves says that that is unlikely.

The best PPC text ad candidate, Espotting, will probably merge with American FindWhat, although FindWhat is not to happy with the deal. They might possibly consider a profitable alternative.

It is our guess that Ask Jeeves will look for national portals that they can give the Ask Jeeves brand and power with their Ask/Teoma technology.

LookSmart leaves Britain

(December 8 2003) LookSmart, the search company that started out as a Yahoo!-like directory and ended up as a pay-per-click search engine, is closing its UK offices.

The reason is that the company looses its main customer, MSN, on January 15 next year. From that day on MSN will no longer include LookSmart listings in its search results.

The UK version of the LookSmart site will remain and LookSmart has decided to keep the current listings in that directory. The company will not charge for clicks beyond January 15, however.

The US offices of LookSmart will not be affected.

On Google's stemming of search keywords

(December 8 2003) As several search engine experts have pointed out, Google has started "stemming" search keywords.

This means that if you are searching for a specific term, Google will also look for variations of the same word.

As Google puts it: "If you search for 'pet lemur dietary needs', Google will also search for "pet lemur diet needs", and other related variations of your terms." Included are also variation of verbs, including -ing forms.

However, as Greg Notess points out, it is not always obvious when this occurs. "The stemming does not seem to occur on single word searches or on phrase searches," he says.

This means that you can use quotation marks to override the automatic stemming. You may also put a plus sign in front of words you would like Google to leave untouched, like this: car +park

Greg Notess: Google Starts Auto Stemming Searches
Danny Sullivan: What Happened To My Searches On Google?
Google on stemming

New Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago

(December 3 2003) Search Engine Watch reports that search engine expert Danny Sullivan & Co will arrange another Search Engine Strategies Conference at the McCormick Place, Lakeside Center, in Chicago on December 9 to 11.

The conference features speakers from search engines like Ask Jeeves, Google, Inktomi, LookSmart, Overture and Yahoo, and interventions from search engine marketing and optimization experts.

Among the topics covered are search engine advertising, search engine friendly design, link building, affiliates, search term research, server issues, dynamic web sites and more.

Search Engine Strategies and Expo Chicago

The new Google filter

(December 2 2003) The latest Google topic debated in search engine optimization circles is the new Google filter. Is Google really "punishing" sites with search engine savvy webmasters?

The story goes like this: After Google's search engine index update of November 16 webmasters discovered that quite a few optimized webpages dropped dramatically in search engine ranking.

However, this was clearly not a general penalty, i.e. a drop in PageRank (the boost Google gives to pages due to its "popularity", i.e. the number of relevant inbound links).

Instead the pages seemed to suffer when you searched for particular keyword phrases, while the pages remained as popular as ever for other search queries.

As MakeMeTop puts it: "It was as if Google were checking to see if external links to the site included the phrase, on-page optimization was being done for the phrase and even if the domain included the phrase."

In other words: It seems Google is dampening the effect a clever harvesting of keyword relevant inbound links has on the ranking for selected search phrases, in particular popular commercial search queries. The purpose for this may be to promote sites that are truly content-rich, authoritative and relevant instead of cleverly optimized sites.

Google, of course, does not comment on their ranking recipes, and the complexity of such search engine algorithms makes it impossible to find the true cause for the changes.

It is always useful to remember that Google does not owe webmasters anything, and that there is no such thing as a permanent top ranking.

Barry "MakeMeTop" Lloyd: Making Sense of Update Florida
Danny Sullivan: Google Dance Syndrome Strikes Again

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive December 2003

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