December 2000 Archive

Google Adds Greek

Google announces the addition of Greek as a language limit. It is available in both the Advanced Search and via the preferences.

Northern Light Launches SinglePoint Enterprise Portal

Northern Light announces the launch of its SinglePoint product, designed for companies seeking help in creating an enterprise portal. See their press release.

eBay Buys Deja's Precision Buying Service

Deja.com announces that Half.com, an eBay company, has purchased Deja's Precision Buying Service, their rating component. Now Deja.com is once again just the Usenet news search engine it was a few years back.

InfoSpace Relaunches Dogpile

For the first time since 1996, Dogpile has been redesigned. Improvements include faster loading of the home page and results pages. InfoSpace users should also note that the search box on the main InfoSpace page uses Dogpile for its Web Search.

Google Adds Title and URL Field Searches

Google has expanded its field search offerings. On the revised Advanced Search page, there is the Occurrences option which allows a title or a URL field search. These are also available on the regular Google search by using allintitle: or allinurl: as the field labels. It is unfortunate that Google does not just use the title: or url: syntax of AltaVista and others, but they chose not to. In addition, these field searches can not yet be combined with other search terms. Thus, Google does not provide a way to search for one word in a title and another word that occurs anywhere in the page text.

Northern Light Launches SinglePoint Enterprise Portal

Northern Light announces the launches of its SinglePoint product, designed for companies seeking help in creating an enterprise portal. See their press release.

Database Change Over Time Updated

I have updated my Database Change Over Time with data from Nov. 29, 2000. It compares the same 8 searches run on the five largest search engines at various times from May 1999 to Nov 2000. Most show an increase, except AltaVista which finds less hits than it did in July.