December 2007 Archive

Live Links Lost Again

At least it worked for awhile. The trick of using the plus for getting Live's link searching commands to work again (link:, linkdomain: and inurl:) that has worked since those commands were disable in March has stopped working. It looks like link searching is again unavailable at Live, it continues to be incomplete at Google, so Yahoo! is the best choice for link searching.

While I can understand that problems with "automated usage for data mining" caused Microsoft to disable the command in March 2007, it is really sloppy of Microsoft that all these months later, the advanced search still has a "links to" section that does not work, and their online help still has instructions on how to use this non-functioning "links to" section.

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LiveSearch Turned Off

Yahoo!-owned AlltheWeb had their LiveSearch experiment running for over a year, display suggested search terms as you typed. Now, the LiveSearch address just redirects to Yahoo! I assume that this is because of Yahoo!'s new search assist feature giving a similar experience.

Karen posted about this on Dec. 13, and it is still re-directing, so it seems likely that it is gone for good. AlltheWeb itself continues to work, but remember it is just using some portion of the Yahoo! database.

Yahoo! Stops Numbering Results

I have always found numbered results helpful, especially when I start looking at several of the results and try to keep track of which is which (and when you set the default number of results displayed to 100 like I tend to do). One of my personal complaints against Google has been that it does not number results. Yahoo! has always been good at numbering their results until today. SEO Roundtable reports and shows screen shots of the change.

Why if Yahoo! wanted to follow in Google's footsteps did they not start indenting results from the same site? Now that would be an improvement. Yahoo! was the last of the search engines to remove the numbers from the results list. Numbered results are not available at Google, Ask, Live, Gigablast, or Exalead. At least with the CustomizeGoogle Firefox (or IE) extension, the position counter can be added to Google results.

While I'm complaining about Yahoo!, several months ago, they also dropped the "more from this site" links that used to appear at the end of the record. It was a problem that they showed up after every record, even if only one page from the site matched the search. But to remove them them all is not much of a solution either. It seems that now, to see all the matching results from a site, you either need to run the same search and limit it to the target site with the site: operator or try unclustering the result.

Google Experimental: Ranking

A new Google experimental search option for moving or deleting search results has been spotted at SearchEngineLand and elsewhere. It is not available for everyone, and is not listed on either the Google Labs page or on the list of Experimental Search options page. The help page notes that "To see your changes next time, you must be signed in to your Google account," but I still do not have the option even when logged in.

Phil notes that other services like Eurekster have done this for awhile. Even Google has tried this before. In the first version of their experimental SearchMash searchers could click and drag results to re-organize the list.