November 2005 Archive

Search Engine Freshness

An interesting preprint of an article to appear in the Journal of Information Science is The Freshness of Web Search Engines’ Databases by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig, and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor. Their research evaluates the freshness of the databases at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search in early 2005. It is a long article, so to quote part of the summary "even pages that are updated daily can reach a very low update frequency in Google as well as in Yahoo. From the results of our study, we can assume that MSN updates its whole index more frequently than its competitors." Also note the following from their abstract: "Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and not only one engine should be used when searching for current content."

Topix Adds 15K Blogs

The news search engine Topix announces the addition of 15,000 "top" Web logs with blog posts categorized into the existing Topix 30,000 local feeds as well as their 300,000 subject feeds. The post says that the "search results now include blog results, and posts should show up on our site and search index within 1-3 minutes of being crawled." Gary has a detailed analysis of the announcement.

Feedster adds Podcasts, News Databases

Gary reports that Feedster, the RSS feed search engine, has added two new "tabs" above the search box for podcasts and news.

Video and Image Changes at Yahoo!

Gary noticed a few changes to the Yahoo! video and image search pages. The video search now gives a choice of grid or list views for results. The image search now offers further limits like MSN for four sizes and for either color or black and white results.

Upgraded Ask Desktop

Ask Jeeves has upgraded their desktop search product. In the blog post about it, the new features include the following:

• Folder Indexing Preferences
• Improved PDF indexing
• Email attachment name indexing
• Improved Zip file indexing
• Enhanced previews for Office files
• Indexing of iTunes metadata
• Search term highlighting
• Full Outlook Express support
• Pause indexing
• Improved stability overall
• Improved status callouts