July 2002 Archive

AOL Announces New Search

Now completely moved from Inktomi and Overture to Google and Google AdWords, AOL introduces their "New AOL Search." AOL also notes that Google results are included on several AOL properties: "now available within the search areas of Netscape, AOL.COM and CompuServe, and for members in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Australia and Canada." On all of these, the search results may include a few links to specific material from AOL sites as well as the Google results.

Ask Jeeves Toolbar

Ask Jeeves announces its toolbar, which like Google's only works with Internet Explorer (IE) and Windows 98 or better. The toolbar installs under the other IE tool bars and offers links to a variety of Ask Jeeves searches including News, Dictionary, Market, Weather, and saved searches.

SpyOnIt Turns Off

As of today, the free SpyOnIt alert service has been turned off. Their home page states that " We regret to announce that the Spyonit service is on hiatus effective July 26, 2002. However, we do intend to bring it back online after a significant upgrade and the addition of several exciting new features." They hope to have something back up by late Fall 2002.

AlltheWeb Supports FTC Advisory

FAST announced today their support of the FTC advisory about the disclosure of paid listings. AlltheWeb now has a special page offering information about their results.

New! GigaBlast in Beta

GigaBlast launched in beta today. While much smaller than the recently launched Openfind, it offers some nice advantages. It includes cached copies of the pages it indexes, like Google. It includes an advanced search, date sorting, field searching, and excellent reporting of both the date spidered and the last modified date. It does lack full Boolean, truncation, and other advanced search features. See the Search Engine Showdown review for more on its search features.

Double Databases: Ask Jeeves and Google?

In an initially surprising partnership, Google has announced that it will provide advertisements from its AdWords database to Ask Jeeves and Teoma users. Ask Jeeves will continue to use the Teoma database for its search engine results, but the ads will come from Google.

AlltheWeb Alchemist

AlltheWeb announces their AlltheWeb Alchemist tool for customizing the design and the look and feel of AlltheWeb through cascading style sheets (CSS).

Inktomi Nabs Quiver

As Inktomi tries to refocus on their search business, they are acquiring Quiver, known for its taxonomy and automatic categorization software products. In the press release David Peterschmidt, Inktomi CEO is quoted saying "Our enterprise search customers have been actively pursuing solutions for organizing information, and seeking direction from Inktomi in selecting the leading categorization products that meet their business requirements. The combined solutions from Quiver and Inktomi will provide the strongest suite of information retrieval solutions available."

OpenFind: New Beta Search Engine

OpenFind is a new search engine in beta. It claims a 3.5 billion record database, but it includes many blanks and duplicates such as www.searchengineshowdown.com and searchengineshowdown.com. Also, while phrase searching sometimes works, it is not dependable. On at least one search, it found my two terms adjacent but in the opposite order. It is very much a beta product with no documentation, but it does have some very interesting features such as sorting by date and size, and a proxy link that highlights search text in the actual page.

Silverstein Interview

Slashdot has an interview with Craig Silverstein, Google's Directory of Technology in which he answers 10 questions from the Slashdot Linux-loving community.

AltaVista Default & Prisma

AltaVista now really defaults to a Boolean AND on their basic search. After many previous changes of the default operation, including automatic phrase recognition, AltaVista has joined all the other major search engines and switched to a default AND operation for multiple word queries, at least mostly. The automatic phrase recognition still seems to be in force and certain phrases will automatically be searched as a phrase. Check the fine print at the bottom to see which phrases, if any, were automatically searched.

They have also launched a new interactive search initiative called Prisma which provides a broad range of suggested terms for refining a search query. It includes broader, related, and narrower terms. Only available for English search terms at present, they expect to expand to additional languages soon.