June 2006 Archive

MSN Drops Yahoo! Ads

According to Yahoo! itself, MSN Search will drop Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) ads as of July 1 and start using its own.

Amazon Missing at Google?

Here's an interest report from John Battelle about Amazon not showing up as result on Google when amazon.com is the query. Danny adds some comments along with a report for the same event happening with Digg.

More Problems with Google site: Search

Here's another report of Google problems with the site: command and a partial fix. The problems have been with host names containing punctuation like your-university.edu and with including a trailing slash after the domain name as in site:university.edu/. The first has reportedly been fixed, but the trailing slashes are still a problem.

retrievr: Image Search by Color and Pattern

For a different type of image search, try the retrievr - search by sketch / search by image. Rather than searching for images using words, search retrievr using either its sketch pad or by uploading (or just pasting the URL) of another image. The underlying database is a small collection of Flickr images. It seems to work best with color matching and pronounced shapes. It does not match subject matter as well as text-based image search engines. But when looking for images with specific color patterns or overall shape combinations, this is the tool to use. It is still an experimental project, launched back in Dec. 2005, so it is nice to see it still running. It would be even more useful with a larger collection of images. Gary has mentioned several other similar projects.

Blogs & Feeds on Ask

With Ask's acquisition of Bloglines, it is about time that Ask has beefed up the Bloglines search capabilities. Previously, the Bloglines search was seriously broken, finding results no more recent that Dec. 2004. Now, not only is the Bloglines search fixed, but Ask has added the Bloglines search at Ask as a Blogs and Feeds search. It is listed in the right hand search tools as well as on the top of the search box on the results pages.