August 2006 Archive

Yahoo! Blog Search Gone

Tara has noticed the Yahoo!'s blog search seems to have disappeared. I think that I'd seen this awhile back as well. I rather liked the way it was integrated into the news search so that after searching their news database I could expand into blog coverage. On the other hand, about half of the time I tried it, I did not find helpful blog posts. For news stories, I have the same problem at other blog search engines since so many blogs comment or link to a story, but finding the few that have comments which interest me or add more information can be more difficult.

The New Google Homepage Layout

In another incremental change, Google has changed the layout on the Google home page. The links above the search box connect to some of Google’s other databases. Their version of the Open Directory used to be there before it was demoted. Today, Groups and Froogle have been demoted and no longer are visible links on the home page. Video (with a NEW! tag) has replaced them. In a sense, Groups and Froogle are still available on the home page, but only via a click. The more >> link at the right now gives a pop-up menu of other choices for Froogle, Groups, Books, and "even more."

But a user must click the more >> link to see these choices pop up. The "even more" goes to other Google database. For academic researchers who are not on a campus where Google automatically displays a Scholar link, the one major absence from the new Google page remains Google Scholar.

Google Censors Badware

In conjunction with StopBadware.org, Google now sometimes censors results. See the PC World news report for more details. Basically, Google gives a warning page when a searcher clicks on certain results. The warning page has a link to the StopBadware site along with a "Or you can continue to . . . " with a link to the potential malware site. I can get it to work for the asta-killer site with a search like asta-killer. On mousing over the title, Google shows the link URL of http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://asta-killer.com/ in the status bar. However, the sub-site links under the URL do not have the interstitial warning link. Nor does Google give the warning on a search that might take me to a particular section of the site such as winzip registration code.