September 2001 Archive

Contentville Closes

The eclectic search engine for full-text from books, articles, transcripts, dissertations, and more has shut down, unable to find sufficient profit from its model.

Excite@Home Bankrupt

Excite@Home, the parent company of the Excite search engine announces the sale of its broadband business to AT&T and that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Yahoo! Remodels

This week Yahoo! has modified the way its results are displayed. They have reduced the number of category matches displayed to just few with links to the other category matches. This ensures that entry matches will be displayed on the first page as well. In addition, the category labels have been shortened and no longer necessarily represent the full taxonomic hierarchy, at least in the search results display. Choosing the category will usually bring up the full hierarchy at the top of that page. Read more about it at SearchEngineWatch or Web Search at About.com.

Google Buys Outride, Inc.

Google announces the purchase of Outride, Inc., a small relevance technology firm. According to its Product Technology page, "Outride's technology is based on pioneering research done by the company's founders at Xerox PARC in the fields of data mining, pattern recognition, natural language semantic analysis, artificial intelligence, and information search and retrieval. Ultimately, our Outride Relevance Builder technology and the products on which it is based deliver real-time personal relevance." How Google will incorporate this, if at all, remains to be seen.

New CEO at AltaVista

AltaVista announce the appointment of James Barnett as new CEO. Formerly president of MyFamily.com, Barnett fills the post the Rod Schrock left last October after AltaVista's portal play failed. In the same press release, AltaVista reiterated its emphasis on an exclusive search focus and announced a repositioning of their comparison Shopping.com shopping service to become more of a search functionality.

Teoma Bought by Ask Jeeves

Teoma has been bought by Ask Jeeves. According to the Ask Jeeves Press Release, Ask Jeeves will use Teoma's technology across its Web properties (which include both Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves), and Teoma.com will continue as a pure search engine.

Site Updates: AllTheWeb, WiseNut

Several site updates. I have separated the Fast Review from the AllTheWeb Review, and added the new AllTheWeb features. The WiseNut Review and other mentions have been updated with the new feature and changed usage from WISEnut to the new WiseNut. WiseNut has also wisely dropped the difficult to read white on red for the WiseGuide categories. It is now white on black.

WiseNut Launches Out of Beta

WiseNut has officially launched with a new logo, redesigned site, and a new feature. The new feature is the [Sneak-a-Peek] after the result. In Internet Explorer, clicking [Sneak-a-Peek] will bring up an abbreviated, scrollable window just below the search result which contains the actual Web page. In Netscape, it just brings up the result in the same window like clicking the title. The new red color scheme makes the WiseGuide categories difficult to read.