Pandia Search Engine Weblog February2005

Google and Yahoo in unholy alliances.

(February 27 2005) For several years the Chinese regime has been oppressing their citizens by censoring what they get to access online. Now internet giants like Google and Yahoo help facilitate this oppression in order to gain access to the Chinese market.

One of the strategies of the Chinese regime has been to cut off access to international search engines like Google and Altavista from time to time.

Now they also censor in a way that makes it impossible to get results for certain search phrases. This is not only the case with government approved search engines like the popular Baidu.com.

The scary thing is that the regime has succeeded in putting such pressure on global search engines like Google and Yahoo that they have conceded to make certain information inaccessible in some of their Chinese versions.

Read the whole story by guest writer Lars Våge, from InternetBrus.

Google movie search operator

(February 24 2005) Google has added another operator to its search syntax. Add movie: to a search query in order to get to webpages covering the cinema, when using the regular Google search engine.

The Google blog gives a few examples that show that you can go beyond searches for particular movie names (movie: Matrix).

Hence you may search for movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball, movie: awesome car chase or movie: good chick flick. (Yep, these are Google's examples, not ours!)

In the US you may also use movie: followed by a U.S. zip code or city/state to find theaters and show times in your area.

Yahoo! Images reaches 1.5 billion pictures

(February 23 2005) Yahoo's search engine for images now contains some 1.5 billion pictures, a step ahead of Google, which has a database of 1.1 billion graphic files.

Yahoo! will also include fresh pictures from Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Movies.

As Search Engine Journal points out, this new version of Yahoo! Image will try to interpret your search queries in a better way, guessing -- for instance -- that the query "black and white pics of tiger" means "black and white images of a tiger".

If you are using the regular Yahoo! Web search engine instead of the image search tool, you may add words like photos, images, pictures or pics to your query to get results from the image database in addition to regular search results.

Yahoo! Images info page

Picsearch powers MSN image search engine

(February 22 2005) The Swedish company Picsearch is to powers MSN's new image search engine at MSN.com, the company says in a press release.

"MSN is proud to team up with Picsearch to offer a vast index of high-quality images that are relevant to our consumers' queries," says Justin Osmer, product manager at MSN.

As Gary Price has pointed out Picsearch has actually delivered pictures to the MSN Search beta since November last year.

Picsearch also powers the image search services of Ask Jeeves, Lycos Europe and others.

Pandia Search Engine Awards 2004

(February 21 2005) The Pandia has presented the Pandia Awards for 2004.

These awards are given to sites that provide exceptional tools for Internet searching, and to sites that give useful information on Internet searching and search engine optimization.

The winners for 2004 are:

The Pandia Post has more on the award winners and other recommended sites and publications.

About.com is for sale

(February 10 2005) About has always had its own special approach to internet guidance, being a combination of a directory guiding visitors to relevant sites and a content provider in its own right. About has for instance a special section devoted to search engines and searching that is rather good.

The amount of advertising, however, is staggering, which makes it a little bit hard to use at times.

The New York Times reports that About is now for sale, and that no less than four search related companies are among the final bidders: AOL, Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. If anyone doubts the victory of the portal concept, this should prove that the search engines, at least, want to become broad based content providers.

Ask Jeeves' interest in About is probably part of a larger strategy of expansion. Indeed, Steve Berkowitz, the CEO of Ask Jeeves Inc., has stated that the company's strategy is to "build or acquire differentiated, next-generation and best-in-class information products or technologies."

The company recently bought Bloglines.com, a service that lets users publish weblogs as well as search blog content. Google already has its own blog tool, blogger.com, as does MSN (Spaces).

About.com, Primedia's Web Venture, Is for Sale (New York Times)
Ask Jeeves Adds Full-Featured Bloglines (Yahoo! News)

(February 18 2005) It turned out that none of the search engine companies were able to get hold of About. Instead the New York Times bought the site for US$ 410 million.

See also The Register: NY Times buys About.com for $410m cash.

News on Google Images and Google Maps

(February 8 2005) Google has announced that its Image Search now includes more than 1.1 billion images, a record high. There is now a special link to this service on the Google home page.

The company is also experimenting with including images with regular search engine results, if Google finds them relevant to the search query. Hence a search for sunsets may (or may not) bring up photos of the setting sun.

By doing this, Google is going away from its principle of making results pages as fast loading as possible (i.e. by not including images). It could be that Google now reckons that the reach of broadband is so extensive that they may bend this rule a little.

If users click on these images, they will be directed to the website that contains the original image. There is also a link named "Image Results" that brings up more relevant images.

Google is also experimenting with a new online map service called -- you guessed it -- Google Maps. The home page brings up a map of the US and a set of search fields that lets you find cities, streets and businesses.

You can click and drag maps to view adjacent sections. If you give Google Maps and address the service may plot the route for you, displaying it on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions for getting there.

It does not work in Opera, but seems to working in Firefox. FAQ for Google Maps

Shell does some dodgy search engine optimization

(February 5 2005, update February 6) A discussion at threadwatch.org has revealed how dangerous dodgy search engine optimization techniques can be, also for large multinational companies.

Shell has apparently hired a Danish search engine marketing firm that has become too creative (and -- shall we say -- incompetent) in their attempts at improving Shell's web search exposure.

Hence up till Saturday 5 a search for Shell at Google Denmark brought up the search engine marketing company as number one. On the other hand, Shell.dk was listed under the Danish word for search engine optimization: søgemaskinsoptimering.

This was definitely not the intention. The marketing company has probably set up a alternative shadow domain at shell.dk in order to redirect visitors to the Danish section of shell.com. This is how it works now.

However, originally the company must have made a mistake, directing visitors to the wrong site.

Needless to say, the search engines are not fond of companies that use such redirects to improve their search engine standing, even if they work!

Does Shell know what this search engine marketing company has been doing? Probably not. Hence, this story proves how important it is to have some knowledge about SEO, even when you are buying such services.

Shell should take a look at our search engine marketing tutorial and our guide to sites that have been banned by Google.

Introducing the Yahoo Y!Q search tool

(February 3 2005) Yahoo! has launched a new search tool that lets you use a large amount of text to generate a search query.

Pandia has more on the Y!Q search tool and its web browser plug ins.

Microsoft starts using the MSN search engine

(February 1 2005) Today the MSN abandons the Yahoo! search engine technology for good and starts using its own at MSN.com

Pandia has more on the new MSN search engine.

Google switches to Answers.com

(February 1 2005) The Unofficial Google Weblog reports that Google is no longer using Dictionary.com for definitions. Instead it is getting its definitions from Answers.com.

The definitions are normally found by clicking on a link on the blue bar near the top of the page. For example, if you search for the word "marketing", Google will include a link to this page on Answers.com.

As Pandia reported in January Answers.com recently switched from a subscription model to a model based on advertising, meaning that its services are now freely available to everyone.

Answers.com offers excerpts from trusted online reference sources.

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

Search Engine News Weblog Archive February 2005

China's search engine censorship continues