Pandia Search Engine Weblog January 2004

(January 28 2004) The search engine industry is all about human capital, i.e. the engineers, scientists, researchers, designers and marketers that makes innovation possible.

A research team is more than the sum of its part, however. You need to develop a culture that can function efficiently, where people thrive and feel that they take part in something meaningful. In spite of all the cyberspace hype, this normally means that the researchers must be located in the same place, i.e. they should be able to drink coffee together.

So what do you do when the people you are looking for have their families on the other side of the world? And no, they are not willing to move.

The answer is that you compromise. You do establish a second research unit, even if it situated far away from your main canteen.

Hence Yahoo!/Overture has researchers in Oslo, Norway, even if that can be considered a cumbersome way of doing things. And because of this Google is now establishing a new research center in Zürich, Switzerland.

According to Google the European engineering center will "focus on improving our language-specific offerings in ways that will benefit all of our global services, while ensuring that Google's usefulness in each of the major European languages is unsurpassed."

Google has another center in Bangalore, India.

Google Europe is hiring
Google kommt nach Zürich (NZZ)
Webmaster World discussion

The future of search engine technology

(January 28 2004) "Instead of looking at what will happen this year, perhaps we should look at what must happen in the search engine space if Google, Yahoo and MSN are truly able to revolutionize search and enhance the user experience."

Andy Beal takes a look at radical new search engine innovations that might change the way you are searching.

Fast launches new enterprise search engine

(January 27 2004) Fast has launched a new search engine technology for large companies. Why should that interest you? Well, it adds a new interesting twist to information retrieval.

Espotting strikes back

(January 27 2004) Espotting has been in dire straits lately. The European pay-per-click search engine has lost important parts of the European market to Google and the new Yahoo!/Overture/AlltheWeb conglomerate.

Given the fact that it does not have its own regular search engine -- and can therefore not deliver a complete search package, text ads and all -- it has lost many of the search portals and sites that would like to make use of such services.

It must therefore come as a relief for the company that Espotting has now won the contract for delivering pay-per-click text ads to one of Germany's main telecommunications companies: freenet.

Espotting reports that under the new deal, Espotting's top five German listings will appear on freenet search result pages under the heading 'Sponsoren-Links' (Sponsored Links). Results for freenet's search pages were previously supplied by Overture.

Previously Espotting results have been integrated into freenet's content pages.

Meceoo, a new kind of metasearch engine

(January 19 2004) Metasearch engines are search facilities that combines search results from several search engines. Pandia has, as some reader's will know, its own metasearch engine.

Meceoo is a new metasearch site that adds a few interesting innovations.

First of all, Meceoo allows searchers to define their own "exclusion list". Hence they may ask the metasearch engine to exclude sites that includes specific terms in their domain name.

You may also set up Meceoo in such a way that you search a batch of selected sites only, for instance sites that focus on search engines and search engine marketing.

Behind Meceoo you find people involved in the excellent Abondance site, the French answer to Pandia.

By the way, the name "Meceoo" means "Mais c'est ou ?" -- pronounced "meh-seh-ooh" -- which is French for "But where is it?".

Meceoo includes data from AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi.

Meceoo on the creation and management of an exclusion list
Meceoo on preselected list management

MSN leaves LookSmart behind

(January 19 2004) Microsoft's MSN.com portal has for a long time added LookSmart's directory listings to its search engine results.

Although the LookSmart database does include listings from the volunteer based Zeal directory, most of the results are now pay-per-click text ads.

Obviously someone at MSN realized that the LookSmart results reduced the quality of the overall search results. Moreover, it became hard to distinguish between paid entries and regular search result.

Pandia has previously reported on MSN's decision to abandon LookSmart. Last week LookSmart results started disappearing from MSN-sites all over the world, and will probably be gone in most countries shortly. (In Norway we continue to see LookSmart "Web Directory" results, though).

In the future MSN.com will deliver search results from the Inktomi search engine, and add text ads (predominantly from Overture) marked as "sponsored" and "featured" sites. Later this year, or -- more likely -- next year, MSN will replace Inktomi with its own search engine.

Google adds more search features

(January 13 2004) Google has expanded its arsenal of special searches. If you search for the following items, Google will include special links at the top of the search engine results pages.

US citizens may find it useful to enter a US telephone area code in the search field to get a map of the relevant geographic region.

If you find a universal product code (UPC) on products you buy, you may enter this code in the search field to get more information on the product.

If you enter an airline name or code and a flight number Google will give you links to travel information. Yahoo! has implemented a similar feature.

A Vehicle ID number (VIN) will give you more information on the year, make and model of a specific car.

USPS (U.S. Postal Service Tracking Numbers) will lead you to the USPS web site which gives you the shipping status of a package.

A feature aimed at giving access to more information about the owners of domain names (e.g. whois pandia.com) has apparently been removed.

It is interesting to note that most of the relevant links lead to informational web sites that include Google AdSense text ads.

Internet.com has more. See also Search Engine Watch.

MSN improves advanced searching

(January 13 2004) Resourceshelf reports that MSN has added a few new advanced search operators.

You may for instance truncate search terms by using the * symbol. The star replaces any number of letters, but the search keyword must be at least four characters long (including the "*").

You may use the NEAR operator. A search query like dog NEAR cat indicates that you are looking for web pages where these two keywords appear within eight words of each other.

The Open Directory adds thumbnails

(January 8 2004) The Open Directory -- also know as dmoz and the ODP-- is the largest web directory in the world.

dmoz has now added a thumbnail view alternative to its regular lay out. By clicking on the red ball in the lower right hand corner of a result page, the directory will give you thumbnails -- i.e. small pictures -- of each and every one of the sites or pages presented in that particular category.

Pandia has more about the new thumbnail feature.

Nightmares of a search engine optimization expert

(January 7 2004) Companies can ruin the effects of honest search engine optimization efforts by making the wrong moves.

Guest writer David Wallace shares his experience as a search engine optimization expert.

Yahoo! to drop Google

(January 6 2004) The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo! will stop using the Google search engine index for its regular search results, probably during the next couple of months.

Read Pandia's analysis of Yahoo!'s alternatives.

Google will go public

(January 6 2004) Google has hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to arrange its initial public offering, Bloomberg reports.

It is expected that the sale may raise as much as US$ 4 billion. The stock market debut will probably happen sometime during the next six months.

So far Google has declined to comment on the news.

An introduction to pay-per-click search engines

(January 4 2004) If you cannot get visitors to your site by regular search engine listings, there is another way.

Pandia guest writer Prabuddha S. Raychaudhuri gives an introduction to the use of pay-per-click search engines in search engine marketing strategies.

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive January 2004

Google to open research center in Europe