Pandia Search Engine Weblog July 2004

(July 31 2004) A search service for rock and pop music called Musicplasma has silently surfaced, with a graphic interface.

Lars Våge searches for old music favorites.

Lycos to become Korean

(July 29 2004) Boston Business Journal reports that the Lycos chain of portals may have been sold to a South Korean company for at least US$ 95 million.

Lycos is owned by the Spanish company Terra Lycos, but has its headquarters in the US. The portal's search engine is powered by Yahoo.

The Korean site Chosun Ilbo indicates that the buyer is Daum Communication Corp., Korea's largest Internet portal. Apparently the negotiations will be finalized this week. Daum's stock has been loosing value due to the rumors.

Terra originally bought Lycos for US$ 12.5 billion back in May 2000 -- before the infamous dot com crash.

See also InfoWorld, and search the Pandia Newsfinder for more on Lycos.

New tool for measuring web page popularity

(July 27 2004) There is one sport shared by most web site owners: "web site statistics". Most of them will have installed some kind of visitor tracking software, making them able to follow the number of unique visitors, page views or "hits". An important part of this is, of course, to be better than your competitors. But how do you get access to their web site statistics? You don't.

Hence the need for a proxy. One way of measuring the "popularity" of a web site is to make use of the Google toolbar, which gives you the Google pagerank of a site. The algorithm determining this rank is secret, but it is mainly based on the number of incoming links. Links from popular, "authoritative", web pages are more valuable than links from uninformative pages of absolutely no relevance to the topic of your page.

Another proxy is the data fetched by the Alexa toolbar, owned by Amazon. Alexa tracks the surfing habits of all Alexa users, which can give you some idea of how popular your site is. The Alexa users are not representative of the general web surfer, so the numbers are not totally reliable.

A new site called Microsoft Watch has now launched an online ranking tool that gives you the Google PR, the Alexa ranking and the number of Yahoo! back links in one go. It is even pretty good at approximating the number of visitors to a given site get on a daily basis.

The tool is developed by Daniel Brandt. You can read more about him and his tool at the Cre8asite Forums.

US version of MSNBC Newsbot

(July 27 2004) MSN has launched a beta version of its US Newsbot service. The service has been available for some time in the UK and other countries. The MSNBC Newsbot is an news service very much like Google news, and gathers news from over 4,800 online sources -- most of them selected by the Moreover news service -- and presents them on a special "news front page". The selection is done automatically by a computer, not by human editors.

Newsbot will remember the stories you have clicked on and will try to adapt selection of the headlines to your preferences. Hence the MSNBC "front page" will ultimately be tailored to your own taste and interests. In order to be able to do this, MSNBC apparently makes use of cookies. Hence MSN identify you by your computer, and not your name or any other personal information. If you want to see what Newsbot would look like if the company did not track which stories you had clicked on, you can delete the items in your history file.

At the moment there are separate sites for Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland (French and German),United Kingdom, Latin America, United States (English and Spanish), South Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

For more information, see MSNBC on Newsbot which also contains a list of links to MSNBC Newsbots in other countries. See also Resourceshelf post and Search Engine Watch.

Google hit by virus

(July 27 2004) The latest version of the MyDoom virus started spreading by email yesterday. Like previous versions the virus will search your mailbox for email addresses and send them a mail containing the virus.

However, this incarnation will then go to Lycos, Google, Altavista and Yahoo and search for more email addresses from the same domains as those found in your mailbox. In this way the virus gathers even more victims for its rampage.

Due to the virus the search engine servers received a large number of virus generated search queries yesterday. Because of this Google slowed down considerably, and was even -- for some time -- unable to provide search services in parts of the world.

For Google, this is bad news. Although the company can hardly be blamed for the virus itself, the fact that they had to deny some searcher requests on the very day the company gave the price range for its initial public stock offering was unfortunate. Google expects its initial public offering can raise as much as US$ 3.3 billion.

If you use antivirus software (and you should, if you have a Windows machine), this is the time to download the latest signatures.

By the way: The virus does not spread through the search engines. Hence: You will not get the virus by clicking on a link in Google. Moreover, even if someone receives the virus in a mail with your address given as the sender, this does not mean that your machine necessarily is infected. The virus will put in a email address fetched from someone's Outlook mailbox in order to make the virus mail look "real". The virus is not able to use your machine if you are not using the Outlook email software from Microsoft. Furthermore, the attack is limited to Windows machines.

See also: Internet Storm Center, PC World and CNN Money. McAfee has a virus definition.

More headlines on MyDoom from the Pandia Newsfinder.

BBC movie and video archive online

(July 25 2004) BBC Worldwide recently launched the web site BBC Motion Gallery. Right now you can find 10000 movie clips from BBC’s extensive archives on the site – and that’s only the beginning.

Lars Våge writes about the new BBC movie and video site.

AskJeeves grows in importance

(July 20 2004) AskJeeves has increased its number of visitors by 150 percent from May to June. The number of monthly unique visitors was 15.7 million in May, 39.3 million the month after, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Although AskJeeves remains the "little brother" among the major search engine companies, the increase is a clear signal that the company does not plan to go the same way as so many other search companies, i.e. into oblivion.

It should be noted that the increased is not due to more surfers visiting the AskJeeves site. The company recently acquired Interactive Search Holdings, which owned several portals, including banner free MyWay, the "lottery" search site iWon, old timer Excite and the search gateway MySearch.

Nor does the increase mean that the number of searchers using the AskJeeves/Teoma search technology and search index has more than doubled. None of the acquired sites uses the AskJeeves Teoma search engine technology by default. Excite is a metasearch engine that mixes results from various search engines, MyWay and MySearch let you choose between various search engines (AskJeeves/Teoma included), while iWon continues to be powered by Google.

Google starts giving away image software

(July 19 2004) Google recently bought the Picasa digital photo company, and has started giving away their image management software for free.

Picasa lets you transfer photos from your digital camera, organize and search for pictures, edit, print, and share photos (for instance on blogs), create slide shows, order prints and more. It is a bit like Apple's iPhoto really.

The acquisition of Picasa is probably another part of Google's plan to conquer our desktops. Google is also planning a desktop search appliance.

Microsoft to integrate Lookout email search technology

(July 19 2004 Update June 29) Like Google (see above), Microsoft has its own plans for dominating people's desktops. They are preparing a search facility that will combine the forthcoming MSN web search engine with search on your own network and PC.

One part of this plan is improving the quality of search for local emails.

Google's answer to this problem is to use Google search technology in their new GMail online email program (to be launched shortly). You search your own mailbox as you would search the web.

Microsoft sticks to its own Outlook email program. Outlook has an advanced, but hopelessly cumbersome, search interface. Microsoft is now planning to improve Outlook search by integrating the Lookout search technology.

Lookout's software is currently an add-on to Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program -- a toolbar that lets users search their e-mails, contacts and calendar information. The Lookout program can also be used to search other parts of a PC.

Lookout will no longer be developed as a separate program. The present version can, however, be downloaded for free from the Lookout site.

Google wins google.no domain

(July 15 2004) google.no sunglasses

The Norwegian company SMSFUNN has for some time been selling "google.no" sunglasses at the google.no domain.

Google brought them to court and lost the first round. Now, however, an Oslo court has ordered them to transfer the domain to Google Inc. within 14 days.

Google knows the value of its trademark, and will do all it can to protect it.

Google to launch audio and video search feature?

(July 15 2004) The New York Post reports that Google is planning to include technology that enables you to search the Net for audio and video clips.

This was apparently revealed during a talk that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had with investors and media executives.

Both AltaVista and AlltheWeb (owned by Yahoo!) and AOL already offer search for audio and video clips. As more and more web surfers have sufficient bandwidth to enjoy multimedia online, it might be necessary for Google move in the same direction to keep their position as market leader.

The main problem with online audio file search engines has been that so many of the files available online are illegal MP3 files. Any company providing access to such files risks angering the record companies. However, the establishment of new paid services like the Apple Music Store should make it possible to make a "legal" search engine worth while.

Also, Google recently bought the company Picasa and so got their hands on technology that lets the user administer and exchange digital photos.

This technology will be used to facilitate the publication of photos in Google's web log service Blogger. But it can easily play a role if Google decides to launch a multimedia feature.

AskJeeves gets smarter and shows thumbnails of web sites

(July 12 2004) AskJeeves, the search engine with the third largest search index has some interesting news.

Ask Jeeves adds "smart" links and thumbnail previews of result pages.

HURISEARCH - specialized search engine for human rights

(July 12 2004) A different kind of search engine was relaunched recently - a specialized search engine that only indexes web sites containing information about human rights.

How to get your RSS feed listed in the Yahoo! search engine

(July 6 2004) Sometimes the Yahoo! search engine will add a link to a relevant RSS feed beside a regular search result -- provided, of course -- that the site has its own RSS feed.

Pandia tells you how to get your RSS feed included in Yahoo's search engine results.

MSN and Yahoo! make some changes to their search engine sites

(July 2 2004) MSN lets you test drive its new search engine. At the same time both MSN and Yahoo! present more user friendly versions of their search sites and search engine result pages.

Pandia has more on the recent search site changes at MSN and Yahoo!

Upcoming search engine conferences, Part 3

(July 2 2004) The Search Engine Workshops company reports on several new venues for search engine optimization oriented men and women in the US and the UK.

Directory of Open Access Journals now has freetext searching

(July 2 2004) The University of Lund in Sweden is making a web catalog of free online electronic periodicals. It is now also possible to search the text of articles.

Lars Våge has more on the Directory of Open Access Journals

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive July 2004

The Musicplasma visual music search engine