Search Engine News Weblog Archive January 2005

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.

• Archive 2005: Jan Feb March April May
• Archive 2004: Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov
• Archive 2003: Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
• Archive 2002: Jan Feb March April May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
• Archive 2001
• Archive 2000
• Archive 1999

The Google Browser

(January 31 2005) Is Google developing a competitor to the Internet Explorer -- a Gbrowser?

Pandia thinks so, and tells you why in this week's article.

Google adds TV search

(January 26 2005) Google's new baby, Google Video, lets American searchers search the content of television channels such as PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others.

"Users can search the content of TV programs for anything, see relevant thumbnails, and discover where and when to watch matching television programs," says Google co-founder Larry Page, and continues:

"We are working with content owners to improve this service by providing additional enhancements such as playback."

The reason you are able to search the actual content of the programs, and not only a program presentation, is the existence of embedded text content, so-called closed captioning (subtitles for the hearing impaired etc).

Among other features are:

• Preview page: Displays up to five still video images and five short text segments from each program.
• Upcoming episodes: Shows when the program will be aired next.
• Search within the show: Enables searching for specific words within a given program.
• Program details: Offers program and episode information including channel, date and time.
• Change location: Finds the next time and channel where a program will air locally according to zip code.

Yes, this is another beta test by Google, and there is a limited number of channels. At this stage Google does not include text ads on the relevant pages. They will be there, eventually.

Google Video Help

Google's new 32 words limit

(January 23 2005) It seems that most searchers have realized that including more than one word in a Google search query greatly improves the quality of results results.

Very few searchers include more than three or four words, however. Still professional researchers and librarians using advanced Boolean search terms or webmasters doing automated searchers using the Google API, will often include more.

Until recently the upper limit was 10 words. As Google Blogoscoped points out, this limit has now been raised to 32 words.

The blog points out that this change may be useful when you are searching for exact phrases taken from a text, or when you want to exclude a lot of words in order to limit the number of irrelevant results.

New anti-spam tag

(January 20 2005, update January 22) In an attempt to stop spammers from unduly influencing search engine results, several search engine companies, including Yahoo!, MSN, and Google have joined rank to add a new tag to the HTML vocabulary.

Read more about the new nofollow tag.

AOL Search gets a face lift

(January 20 2005) America Online is updating its public search site.

There is definitely a cleaner and more user friendly look: One simple search form and tabs that designate the different search services: web, images, audio/video, shopping, news and local search ("In Your Area").

This is not an original way of doing this, but it is one that works.

According to Internetnews.com and others AOL has added Vivisimo's search result clustering technology, organizing search results into topics.

Unfortunately we haven't been able to produce such clustered results yet. That could be caused by the fact that we are using a Mac, and AOL's search pages are not very Mac friendly.

At the top of the search results AOL has added something they call "SnapShots", which are links to selected sites and companies that can provide relevant information and/or products.

AOL says: "[SnapShots] include images and listings that point to relevant AOL and AOL partner content. Some Snapshots may include paid placement, which is clearly labeled as advertising. They may also include Official Sites for trademarks or brands." "

Official Sites for trademarks and brands"? "AOL partner content"? This sounds very much like advertising to us, and given that the search result pages are already full of pay-per-click text ads, we are not totally convinced that this is a good idea.

It is interesting to note, however, that AOL is working with the Norwegian company Fast on expanding its local search capabilities, and the improved version will be available later this year, as will AOL's desktop search tool.

AOL's web search is powered by Google.

Exalead gets a 1 billion document index

(January 12 2005) We recently reported that the search engine Gigablast had reached the 1 billion document mark.

Gary Price now reports that the European search engine Exalead has reached the same size.

The CEO of Francois Bourdoncle tells Gary that they are working on a two billion page web index as well as a desktop search tool.

It should be noted that size is not the most important factor when it comes to relevance and quality of search results. Size does matter on the search engine market, however, as the old race between Google and AlltheWeb once proved. A 1 billion document index means that you are a player to be reckoned with.

MSN tests RSS feeds

(January 12 2005) RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is an XML text file format that can be used for distributing headlines and information about (and links to) web content. Hence Pandia has its own RSS feed that can be read by so-called RSS-readers. So do many other news services and web logs.

Although RSS feeds haven't caught on with the general public yet, a large number of internet savvy surfers do use them. Given that user friendly services like My Yahoo! now includes RSS display on their sites, it is only a matter of time before such feeds starts replacing newsletters and more traditional forms of news distribution.

RSS feeds can be used for any kind of information dissemination involving web links. Now MSN is testing RSS feeds for its new test search engine.

On MSN Search's own weblog, Brady Forrest, writes that this is an experimental alpha feature that is still under development.

However, people are even now encouraged to test the service. Here is how you can use it:

• run your web or news search on the MSN Search Beta
• add the text &format=rss to the url
• copy the full url into your RSS Reader.

RSS news readers and RSS compatible web browsers can be used to display these RSS feeds, giving you -- for instance -- the latest headlines on the Ukrainian conflict. You decide how often the reader should refresh the results.

MSN Channel 9 Wiki page for comments.

Yahoo! launches desktop search tool

(January 11 2005) Yahoo! has launched its desktop search tool. Like all its rivals the Yahoo! Desktop Search lets you search for files and emails on your own computer.

Read more about Yahoo! Desktop Search.

FexIT -- business oriented search service

(January 11 2005) Iceland has given us a new online business portal and search service.

Lars Våge has more on the site which combines a business metasearch engine with a web directory and more.

MSN's gradual transfer to new search engine

(January 10 2005) MSN has for some time now been testing its new search engine technology at an open beta test site.

Microsoft's confidence in the new search engine is clearly increasing, as the company is now slowly giving more and more regular searchers -- i.e. the ones using the MSN portal -- results from the new search engine.

These searchers are normally given results from an index delivered by Yahoo!

However, as the MSN Search blog explains, the new search engine remains in beta status and MSN will officially launch this service when it is ready.

Answers.com -- new free reference search service from GuruNet

(January 9 2005) GuruNet has decided to make their reference search service available for free at Answers.com.

Lars Våge has more on the search engine that gives you quick facts instead of a long list of links.

Gigablast now indexes 1 billion pages

(January 8 2005) The Gigablast search engine, the little sibling of the big majors, has launched a new index containing some 1 billion web pages.

The new database has also been significantly updated as regards freshness of content.

Gigablast was founded by Matt Wells in 2000, and is now powering several search sites, including Clusty, Snap and Blingo.

The company recently launched two free services for webmasters:

Gigablast Site Search lets you use the Gigablast index to build your own site search engine. If you add your root url via the site search addurl page the pages it directly or indirectly links to will be indexed right away.

You may also use Gigablast to build your own topic search engine based on selected web sites. Pandia's search engine topic search engine is powered by Gigablast

Search Engine Showdown's review of Gigablast

Google to establish charity foundation

(January 8 2005) Google plans to establish a foundation this year based on 1 percent of its stock (equals some US$500 million at the moment).

According to AP Google also plans to divert manpower to a cause selected by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

CNET reports that Cindy McCaffrey, Google's previous vice president of marketing, will work part time with the foundation. The company is now looking for a director to head it.

Blinkx desktop search for Mac

(January 7 2005, update January 11) The upcoming versions of the Apple Macintosh operating system. OS X Tiger, will include a new desktop search program called Spotlight.

Apart form this there are not many alternatives for doing a complete search of files on your computer.

The German company x-dot GmbH has developed a desktop search tool called x-friend based on Java, which runs within the Web browser on Windows, Linux, OS2 Warp, Sun and Mac machines (see our article on alternative desktop search tools).

However, neither Copernic, Google Desktop Search or the MSN Toolbar Suite are available for the Mac.

Still, on Monday the desktop search tool Blinkx 2.0 was made available for the Macintosh.

One original aspect with Blinkx -- which is already available for Windows -- is that it uses the content of the documents you are currently working on to narrow down search results.

Blinkx also includes so-called smart folders, which are created on the basis of existing normal folders or a search query defined by you. Blinkx will automatically fill and update the smart folder with similar documents from your PC, news articles from the Web, TV, radio or video clips etc.

Blinkx for the Mac will index Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel worksheets, Adobe Acrobat documents, HTML pages, Text documents, Eudora emails, PDFs, zip-files, MP3s, QuickTime files and JPEGs, as well as many Mac only applications, including files from the Safari browser and the Microsoft Entourage e-mail client.

See also Internetnews.com: Blinkx Brings Desktop Search to Macs
News.com: Blinkx launches desktop search for Mac

Everything I know about web marketing I learned from my local gas station

(January 6 2005) How do you design a site and a search engine strategy that actually sells?

Jeremy Swiller learns web marketing from his local gas station.

Go to search engine news for December 2004

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