December 2004 Archive

Gigablast Expands Site Search

Gigablast has expanded its site search offering that it first introduced in Sept. 2002. The new addition is the ability to get your pages added to the Gigablast site search index.

Customized Topical Searches from Gigablast

More innovation from Gigablast! Create your own mini-Gigablast search box that just searches sites (up to 200) that you specify. The sites can include a path to limit the search to just one directory tree of a specific site while include the full results from other sites. See the Custom Topic Search page for full details.

Video Searching Now at Yahoo!

Finally, Yahoo! has brought the video file search ability that has been available at AltaVista and AlltheWeb to Yahoo!. It is in beta, but it offers file type limits for AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real formats along with other limits including file size, duration, site/domain, and adult content.

Ask Jeeves Jumps Into Desktop Search

Now Ask Jeeves has announced a Desktop Search product as well. Their beta version indexes Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), simple text files, Microsoft Outlook email messages, and image, music, and video files. Technical requirements are Windows 2000 or XP, Office 2000 or higher, and Outlook 2000, XP and 2003. It requires a minimum of a Pentium III computer running at 400MHz with 128 MB RAM.

MSN Desktop Search

MSN Search Beta now has a desktop search product available within its beta MSN Toolbar Suite with Desktop Search. Chris has a review.

Suggest from Google Labs

New from Google Labs is Google Suggest which performs a standard Google search, but as query terms are entered, a drop-down box presents a listing of up to 10 suggested searches that begin with the letters already typed. The suggestions often contain multiple word queries. In addition, a very rough (and very inaccurate) number of results for each search is displayed. Don't pay too much attention to the numbers since they are even more wildly inaccurate than Google's usual estimates. To use Google Suggest, Javascript and cookies must be enable, and it only works in newer browsers.