September 2004 Archive

Clusty from Vivisimo

Vivisimo has launched a new search site called Clusty which provides another look at Vivisimo's clustering capabilities. A nice, new design, with tabs for Web, News, Images, Shopping, Encyclopedia, and Gossip, the underlying databases are not new or original. What is new is that packaging. For those that like the clustering, meta-search approach, Clusty is well worth a visit.

Updated Yahoo! Search Review

After realizing that the filetype: prefix did not work in Yahoo! any longer, I was digging around to find the proper prefix for the file types not included on their advanced search. Instead of filetype:, they are using the old Inktomi prefix of originurlextension:. So after verifying that it does work, not only for PDFs and other file types on the advanced search page, but also for .ps and .wpd and other extensions. So I also checked many of the other old Inktomi prefixes and found that more than I thought still worked (and more than when I checked last time). So I've updated the Yahoo! Search review to include stem:, domain:, feature:homepage, feature:index, feature:meta, and the region: limits. I'll be exploring these more in the future.

And yes, it has been a long time since my last post in April. I've made some small updates to the site during the interim. I plan on backfilling that time with some of the most significant (to me at least) of the search engine news from those misssing months.

Yahoo! Defaults to Only 10 Results

After many years of defaulting to 20 search results, Yahoo! now defaults to only that measly 10 that Google and others give. Thanks to Danny Sullivan for noticing the change. And I agree that it is a real shame. It was an easy way to try to get searchers to look beyond the first ten. Certainly, individual searchers can change the default through the search preferences link. I prefer the 100 results at a time, but for those that do not change search preferences, it is even less likely that they'll look at anything beyond the first few results.

Teoma 3.0

Ask Jeeves announced the official launch of Teoma 3.0 search technology at both the Ask Jeeves and Teoma sites. The upgrade includes

• "Increased Relevance by enhancing its "ability to classify content in order to better assess authority."
• Improved Freshness "including daily crawls of popular, news, and other important sites.
• An expanded database with over "2 billion English-only Web documents" and a plan to get over 2.5 billion by the end of the year.
• Support for double-byte Asian languages, "enabling the recent beta launch of Ask Jeeves Japan (Ask.jp), the first non-English based Teoma index."
• New search features announced but not yet available includecached pages, related searches on Ask Jeeves, the ability to restrict by file types (PDF and Flash).

Ask Jeeves Adds Personalization & Local

Ask has announced its new MyJeeves services which, once you have registered, allows for saving and organizing search results (and searches) as well as sharing the results with others. This is an interesting new direction that may well appeal to frequent searchers. In addition, Ask Jeeves Local (beta) is now available offering yellow page records along with user ratings from CitySearch. These Local results will also appear sometimes as a SmartSearch answer at the top of regular web results.

Amazon Launches A9 Search Engine

Amazon has now launched a search engine known as A9 at A9.com. The Web and Image searches use Google databases. A9 also has some other unique features. It includes access to the Amazon product database, of course, along with movie information from the Internet Movie Database and reference sources from GuruNet. And for those who log in with their Amazon user ID and password, it also keeps track of search histories, has a Diary for keeping notes about Web pages, and offers a bookmarking capability. There is also an A9 toolbar. Their press release notes that "A9.com, Inc., a separately branded and operated subsidiary of Amazon.com, opened its Palo Alto, California office in October 2003 to research and build innovative search technologies." The beta of A9 launched April 15, 2004.