May 2003 Archive

Google Wins SearchKing Suit

SearchKing had sued Google in Oct. 2002 due to a loss of PageRank and a subsequent drop in ranking for its site at Google. On May 27, 2003, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma granted Google's motion to dismiss. Although the court case had always seemed to many to be without merit, at least SearchKing deserves some credit for being willing to posted the decision on its own site.

AlltheWeb Spelling Suggestions

AlltheWeb has added in suggested spelling corrections. See for example a search for assumpion. One nice touch is that suggestions appear for languages other than English such as German and French as well as for names such as vivenddi.

Australian Web Archive

The National Library of Australia has the Pandora archive, which is a national version of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The focus is on the archiving of Australian network resources. Unlike the Wayback Machine, it is keyword searchable.

New Freshness Showdown

I have posted new results from a comparison of the freshness of the search engines' underlying databases. With data from May 17, there is a wider spread of crawling this time. AltaVista had the most recent page, from the same day as the comparison, followed by Inktomi and AlltheWeb. Google's most recent page was two days old. And althought AlltheWeb still has a few extremely old pages and even Google has some stragglers from over five months ago, most of the records show that the crawling was primarily from roughly one month before the comparison. Note that all the results used for this comparison all linked to pages with the current day's date.

Can Users Recognized Ads?

A transcript from "Building Trust on the Web," Consumer WebWatch's First National Summit on Web Credibility with Eugenie Prime from Hewlett-Packard among others makes for some interesting reading. For example, "And even well-informed or savvy Web users are finding it difficult to discern what's paid, what isn't, is it relevant, is it pure." says Leslie Marable with Consumer WebWatch.

Northern Light Assets Bought by Seuss

David Seuss, former CEO of Northern Light, bought back the Northern Light assets from divine at their bankruptcy auction. According to Seuss and the press release, he had not expected to win the bidding, and other sources report that he won at a bid of $81,000. The auction was held at the end of April. Northern Light's SinglePoint Market Research Portal will again be available, and they plan to release the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, which is a 64-bit enterprise search solution Northern Light's taxonomy and classification capability. No word yet on the fate and future of the public Web search engine and the public's access to the old Special Collection documents.

Free xrefer to Shut Down

The very useful free xrefer showcase announces that it will no longer be available after June 17, 2003. xrefer provided free searching of dozens of subject dictionaries and other reference books. At least Bartleby's reference section and InfoPlease remain available for free.

Gigablast Corporate Growth

Gigablast has moved beyond being just a one person operation. They now have a management team page with a new Chief Management Officer and Chief Scientist. I hope this means they have some funding and can expand the Gigablast database to include more pages and to refresh them much more frequently.

Blogstats, Meta Tag, and Expansion at Daypop

Daypop has been busy in recent weeks. Today, it announced an expansion to include 19,000 more blogs to its database. On May 7, Daypop rolled out Blogstats which can show a blog's ranking in terms of Daypop's citation scoring and also shows similar blogs based on link patterns. And back on April 22, Dan announced the addition of support for the blogring meta tag.

Blog Searching at Google?

Reuters reported on May 5 that Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that "soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs." Andrew Orlowski then interpreted the comment to suggest that blogs may be separated into a distinct database. It is too early to call that anything more than a guess, but it will be interesting to see what Google ends up doing. In the meantime, Daypop, Feedster, and others listed on my Other Internet Search Engines page provide very useful searchable access of blogs.

HotBot Review and More

I finally got several pages updated on the site, including a revised HotBot Review reflecting the current version, in particular how it handles Inktomi. I also updated the search engine chart and the search engines by features pages, removing Openfind and NLResearch and updating the HotBot and MSN lines.