January 2004 Archive

MSN Search Toolbar

Joining most of the other search engines, MSN announces the launch of a beta version of a toolbar. It offers search, keyword highlighting, pop-up blocking, and access to basic MSN services.

Google Site Field Search on Own Now

As noted at ResearchBuzz, Google's site field search no longer needs to be combined with another word. Previous, to search Google for all pages at whatever.com required using a search like whatever site:whatever.com since the site:whatever.com search would give an error result. Now site:whatever.com will work.

MSN Drops LookSmart

As announced last year, MSN Search no longer uses results from LookSmart as the first results for most queries on its simple search. Instead, the search results are primarily from Inktomi, which used to follow the LookSmart results. Some internal MSN content (and ads) may show up before the Inktomi results.

AltaVista Loses Archive

The AltaVista News database used to be one of the few that offered searchable access to news stories on Web sites older than the past month. Recently, AlltheWeb News and AltaVista News merged their databases, but now Gwen Harris reports the down side of that merger. AltaVista News no longer finds any stories older than 30 days ago.

New Logo and Updated Database at Gigablast

Gigablast announces a modified logo and the addition of a new slogan, "Information Acceleration." Its database has been updated and is now at about 250 million records. It can also now default to an AND search, like all the major search engines. However, to get it to do that, you have to append &rat=1 to the end of the URL after a search. While the technique is impractical for most searchers, we can hope that the default AND will become an an option within a preference page and/or an advanced search choice sometime in the future. Hopefully, the advanced search page will also have a section for displaying meta tags in the results set as well.