search engines

cuil not cool?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:27:18 -0400

It seems cuil is not so cool after all. :)

Cuil is cold

Garett Kopczynski — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:23:17 -0400

I wanted to believe, I really did. When I first saw the buzz about the new alternative to Google, Cuil, I looked into it optimistically. Cuil states a mission of not wanting to invade your privacy on searches, and touts very intelligent search functions, but so far in toying with the engine I feel unsatisfied. That is a poor place to start for a web searcher looking to combat the Colossus that Google represents.

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I can't be the only one perpetually disappointed with Technorati

Adam Gaffin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:24:57 -0400

Just now, I typed in a blog URL in the search box on Technorati and got back a 404 error page. What? A "page not found" error for a results page on a search engine? Not good at all.

More to Findability than Search...

dankeldsen — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:34:24 -0400

Hi Jon - great article, and thanks for the reference to our upcoming Market IQ on Findability (archived webinar is available, free report coming out by mid July). Interesting that Microsoft and Yahoo! have been working to compete on the free end, yet Microsoft spent $1.2 Billion on FAST, and is in their insane acquisition frenzy trying to acquire Yahoo! against all common sense. For the needs of enterprises, the desire to buy Yahoo! for their web search and advertising reach seems an awful distraction. I'm writing more on that front in the next 24 hours regarding their Powerset acquisition. On the free front, let's not forget that commodity search comes along with SharePoint, and there is always Lucene (and variants) on the Open Source front.

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The changing realty business

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:59:31 -0400

As usual this artcle is simply over-simplified. Online search capabilities for consumers to find homes for sale is one good thing, but it has little to do with the real role of REALTORS(R) in concluding one of the most important transactions in an average citizen's lifetime -- the real property they purchase to live in. Real estate is not day trading; it's not stocks and bonds, or insurance, or airline tickets. It is a little piece of the earth that is not going anywhere (global warming notwithstanding). And that transaction requires educated and sophisticated management of all contract negotiations, contingencies, inspections, and closing documents, not to mention personal service through your settlement.

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Nuance Speech Capabilities on iPhone

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:20:42 -0400

With all eyes in the mobile world on Apple this week I thought the time was right to talk about what we believe is the best way to conduct a mobile web search on a device like the iPhone ... a device with a rich, full screen, touchscreen only. Namely: Voice search. You say it, our speech recognition (running on a server) produces text, the text automatically dumps into the search engine that’s the subscriber’s choice (Google, AOL, MSN, etc.), the search engine returns results. Or via voice, search for any content from your local iTunes playlists.

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Ozzie says Yahoo isn't important to Microsoft search

Microsoft Subnet — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:54:15 -0400

If a merger with Yahoo made sense a few months/weeks ago, it would still make sense today, at least from a market share perspective. But perhaps the inside look at how the two corporate cultures would clash and crash is what is making Microsoft executives exclaim their desire for Yahoo to be dead. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie joined the bandwagon of those from his company saying that Microsoft doesn't need-no-stinkin'-Yahoo to become a force in the search engine market.

Some kind of deal with Yahoo was hinted at, but in a cool sort of way, a story from IDG News Service reports. Ozzie instead thinks that disruptive technology is the way to beat Googe, such as semantic search.

Microsoft? Search??

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:12:07 -0400

Anyone who has used Microsoft's knowledgebase knows that Microsoft doesn't have a clue as to how to return relevant search results! Maybe they should start at home.

Google AdWords Frustrations

chikt — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:43:25 -0400

Yet again my Google Adwords account is being moved to a new set of account reps, my third set in 4 months! I'm starting to feel like a ping pong ball, my business and optimization needs keep being batted around from one group to another now. First moved to a new group in late December, by February finally having them on the same page and understanding our needs only 5 days later to be moved to a new rep. and have to start the process all over again! A month goes by…Then I get the word my account is being moved to yet another account rep group this time we’re given 866 numbers and the general Google email addresses! I feel like I’m dealing with Yahoo!, I don’t particular care for their customer service either.

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RE: Malware now hiding in search results

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:53:02 -0500

Yet another reason to *not* run Windoze.

When it's time to say good-bye to an app

Adam Gaffin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:25:23 -0500

Our current site search engine is an ancient copy of Ultraseek running on an even more ancient Sparc box - the only one of its kind left in our server farm. It's served as long and well, but as our site's grown, both in terms of visitor traffic and number of documents we post each day, the box has gotten wheezier and wheezier - it simply can't keep up with the load anymore (fortunately, doing a search still works pretty quickly; it's more the back-end indexing of articles that falls farther and farther behind).

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What if Google had to be search-engine friendly?

Jason Meserve — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:57:28 -0400

For those that run Web sites, search engine optimization (SEO) is the one of the hot trends of the year (along with Web 2.0 - but that's another post for another day). Well, what if Google had to redesign its own simple home page to make it more optimized for search engines? This site spells it out beautifully. How ironic, eh? Google gets credit for its minimalist front page design yet its own search engine rules make it so most sites have to be so cluttered, they're unreadable to humans.

Google, Yahoo sponsored links don’t pass muster

Layer 8 — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:32:00 -0400

Sponsored links are a money maker for search engines, but a study out today consumers click on sponsored listings fewer than two times out of every 10 searches, suggesting users prefer organic or non-sponsored links. The data for the study was provided by Dogpile, a metasearch engine which combines both types of links into a single listing although sponsored links are clearly labeled as such. Those sponsored links come from Google and Yahoo!

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Search engine returns getting measurably safer: survey

Paul McNamara — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 08:35:40 -0400

Classic good news/bad news results this morning from a security vendor's report on the safety of using search engines. Since we're launching into a new week, let's start with the good:

According to an Associated Press report on McAfee's annual assessment:

The percentage of search results leading to sites that dish up unwanted and/or risky adware and spyware has dropped from 5 percent to 4 percent.

And, while the risks are greater when clicking on the search engines' paid keyword ads, improvement was measured there, too, as the prevalence of risky sites dropped from 8.5 to 7 percent.

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Too lazy to search? Let ChaCha be your guide

Layer 8 — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:12:02 -0400

The Web is a big, scary place and finding things can be quite difficult. And really, who has time to wade through the thousands of search results returned by Google, Yahoo or Dogpile? Now, you can let ChaCha be your guide. As Jon Brodkin reports, ChaCha "provides searchers a personal human guide who communicates with them in an instant-messaging chat room and does the searching, so ChaCha visitors don't have to. (Cha means 'search' in Chinese.)" Here at Network World, we've got our own search Sherpa. Pose question to the editorial staff via e-mail, and Adam Gaffin (of Compendium fame) will instantly have an answer with extensive linking. Maybe Adam should start charging us.

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Google ruined their business (they say), so they've given away the store

Paul McNamara — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:43:55 -0400

These tales of Google giveth and Google taketh away are becoming increasingly common ... and it's always curious to see the range of reactions that they elicit.

According to its own account of the matter, a small London outfit called Wolf Software saw its sales of barcode software plummet so precipitously after a corresponding drop in Google-directed traffic that they decided to simply stop selling the product and release it into the public domain. From their post:

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Should China ban its own search engine?

Adam Gaffin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:59:58 -0400

Ya, I Yee reports that Chinese search engine Baidu recently launched a Japanese version. Unlike the homegrown edition, however, the Japanese Baidu features a rather large index of pornographic images:

According to the theory of Chinese Government,dirty images are not permitted and any foreign websites who provide porn pictures should be censored. So I'm wondering if the Baidu Japan will be blocked one day?

Via Blog Network Watch.

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Yahoo!

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:36:50 -0500

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Let’s play: The Google of (fill in the blank)

Paul McNamara — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:40:23 -0500

All of the reporting for this post was conducted using Google, or, if you prefer, "The Google of Search Engines."

This outburst of Googling was prompted by the arrival of a press release that begins: "The Allen Brain Atlas, a genome-wide map of the mouse brain on the Internet, has been hailed as (the) 'Google of the brain.' "

And no doubt it has been so hailed. Everything, it seems, is the Google of something. In fact, if your company, organization, service or invention has yet to be hailed as "the Google of" its domain, well, chances are you've hitched your wagon to a fading star, say a Lycos or an AltaVista, often mentioned as the Google of its time.

Thousands of examples are but a Google away (and I only culled the first 50 pages of 69,300 entries on Google search for "the Google of," as well as everything current on Google News). In fact, this addition to the lexicon - "the Google of" - is so pervasive that it deserves its own acronym: TGO.

"Has anyone noticed that Wal-Mart is sort of the "Google" of retailing." ... Sort of?

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134 reasons why Google's visitor numbers are surpassing Yahoo's

Paul McNamara — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:55:08 -0500

Actually, it's 135, the extra one is a whopper … and, this is by no means meant to be a complete list.

The whopper, of course, is YouTube: Traffic from Google's $1.7-billion video-sharing binge will be added to the company's totals this year by measurement firms comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings.

The decision "assures that Google will be number one in both worldwide and U.S. visitors," says Danny Sullivan, editor of the SearchEngineLand blog, in an interview with USA Today.

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