Search Engine News Weblog Archive February 2004

Below find older entries to the Pandia search engine news weblog.

For the latest search engine news, go to the Pandia Search World page or the Pandia Search Central home page.

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Google remains No. 1

(February 24 2004) According to a survey made by Nielsen/NetRatings, 39 percent of active US Internet surfers (59.3 million unique viewers) searched the Net using Google in January.

Right behind come Yahoo (30 percent) and MSN (another 30 percent). Next came AOL (15%) and Ask Jeeves (8%).

However, given that Google is no longer powering Yahoo's searches, this has really been a month of falling ratings for Google.

CNET has more.

Yahoo! dumps Google

(February 18 2004) It has finally happened. US Yahoo! is no longer using the Google database for its default search results.

Instead it is presenting results from a database gathered by Yahoo! Search Technology, which has results from the Inktomi search engine at its core.

Yahoo! has apparently also learned from the search teams it acquired when buying Overture -- i.e. the teams behind the AltaVista and AlltheWeb search engines -- although the three search engines have not been merged into one -- at least not yet.

Search Engine Watch reports that the Yahoo! search engine will index the full text of web pages, up to a 500K limit. In comparison Google will index no more than 101K. The Yahoo! search engine does, like Google, also include PDF and Microsoft Office documents.

Like Inktomi before it, the Yahoo! search engine, will index the keywords metatag. To what extent this information influence the ranking of pages is unknown, but the effect is probably small.

To search the new search engine more easily, go to the Yahoo! Search page.

Yahoo!s image search continues to be powered by Google, although we expect it to be replaced by the AlltheWeb index search engine in due time.

Most of the non-US Yahoo! sites will switch to Yahoo! Search within a couple of weeks.

Search Engine Watch: Birth of a New Machine.

Google at Mach 4

(February 18 2004) As reported by Resourceshelf, Google has now officially broken the 4 billion document barrier. This means that their database now includes information about 4,285,199,774 web pages.

It does not mean that they have indexed the content of all these pages, however. Some of them are listed as unindexed pages, meaning that Google know that they exist (due to links from listed pages). Hence the distance to the next runner is probably not as impressive as the numbers may indicate.

AlltheWeb, owned by Yahoo!/Overture, reports that they are currently searching 3,151,743,117 web pages.

Does size matter? Only to a certain extent. If you are looking for some obscure information hidden away in the backwaters of the Internet, a huge database may be useful. However, in general the quality of the search algorithm, i.e. the search engines ability to find relevant pages of high quality is much more important.

A page will be of no value if it is listed as number 12367 in your search result list.

In addition to the web pages Google has listed some 845 million Usenet messages, and a large selection of book-related information pages.

"Google Image Search has been significantly updated," says Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of Technology. "We've doubled the index to more than 880 million images, enhanced search quality, and improved the user interface."

Lycos to become "social network"

(February 17 2004) Lycos US is to abandon its goal of being one of the most most important portals on the Web. Instead it is to become a "vast social network" for people connecting online.

The Internet Advertising Report adds that Lycos will shortly relaunch its home page as a "hub for personal connections", gathering communities for dating, business, family, health and more, in addition to, for instance, weblogs.

It is not known whether Lycos will abandon its regular search engine, which is now powered by Overture's AlltheWeb search engine. We guess not, given that one of the main sources of income will be text ads. Lycos will also ask users to subscribe to selected services.

How will it look? Maybe a little bit more like European Lycos?

FindWhat acquires Espotting

(February 11 2004) As reported by Pandia last 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, as soon as FindWhat got the chance to take a closer look at Espotting's financials, they got cold feet , and asked for a renegotiation of the deal.

That process is now over, and the Espotting has signed an of an amended agreement to merge with FindWhat.com.

Daniel Ishag, founder and CEO of Espotting, says: "A critical component of both companies' strategy is to understand the specific, cultural needs of each market we serve, and we are extremely excited about the opportunity to create one company that has such local expertise on three continents."

Indeed, what makes the deal attractive to both parties is that it gives American FindWhat and European Espotting a chance to compete with the pay-per-click giants Overture and Google AdWords on both sides of the Atlantic.

The new merged company will have a chance giving the giants some competition. Espotting has partly lost out to Google's and Overture's combined packages of regular search results (Google/AlltheWeb) and pay-per-click results in Europe. However, FindWhat is doing well in the US, and has reported record financial results for the last quarter of 2003.

Reuters on the merger
Press release

Search Engine Watch Awards 2003

(February 7 2004) Search Engine Watch has presented its awards for outstanding achievements in web searching.

The winner of the "Outstanding Search Service Award" is Google. Search Engine Watch argues that although the quality of the search results seems to be slipping, much more often than not, it continues to help you locate what you are looking for.

Google also takes the awards for best news search engine, best image search engine and "most webmaster friendly search provider".

Among the other winners are Dogpile (best metasearch engine), Yahoo Shopping (best shopping search engine), Google AdWords (best placement service), Google and Groowe (best search toolbar).

4th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards.

Microsoft's plans for a new search engine technology

(February 5 2004) Guest Writer Andy Beal talks to Robert Scoble from Microsoft about the future of search engine technology, Google and how search will be handled by the next incarnation of Windows.

Go to the interview!

A new issue of the Pandia Post is out now!

(February 1 2004) You can read the latest issue of the Pandia Post bimonthly newsletter here at the Pandia site now!

This issue includes:

• A review of Nancy Blachman's Google Guide site
• The new features of the Gigablast search engine
• The MSN toolbar
• and more...

You can also read Gary Price's comments on Google. Google has problems to fix, he argues.

Read search engine news items for January 2004

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