Search Engine Showdown Blog
Search Switching
For some time now I have been speaking and writing about ways of speed searching and search switching. Somehow, I've neglected to add the links to my site. So I'm fixing that tonight, before my presentation on Wed. at CIL 2008. The new Search Switching page includes sections for Search Switching Between Web Search Engines, Geographic Search Switching, Book Search Switching, and other options including another link to my Bookmarklets page (with its search transfer bookmarklets).
See also my article, "Speed Searching," in the March 2008 issue of Online (available for fee at ITI's InfoCentral or free from many library databases such as AccessMyLibrary) and my article, "Switching Your Search Engines," from the May 2007 issue of Online (available from many library databases including AccessMyLibrary).
Related Searches Moving Up?
So maybe I missed this earlier, but today is the first time I noticed Google showing related search suggestions at the top of Google results. In this case, I just happened to run on search for talking heads, trying to get an example of integrated content. While it worked for that, it also gave this one line of "Related searches:" at the very top. This is the first time that I can recall seeing this at the top.
Whether this is just one of Google's many user interface tests that may just run a short time or may continue and be seen at more searches, I don't know. Maybe it only shows up for music groups, although it did not for a few other searches I just tried. So far, the only other search I found that showed "Related searches:" was beatles. Anyone else seeing this?
Language Limit Showdown
In recent months I have been speaking and writing about some of the language search and translation features of the search engines. Which search engine has the most language limits? Which online translator has the most language pairs? And which ones offers translated search? (Exalead, Yahoo!, and Google, respectively). So I've added a new Language Search Tools page, with links to pages about Language Limits, Online Translation, and Translated Search. I have also finally made a major update to my Search Engines by Search Features page and linked the language page from there.
For many searchers, especially those of us in the middle of a fairly mono-lingual part of the U.S., the language tools may have little appeal, but even in the midst of Montana, I still find times that I come across a non-English site, email, or term that can benefit from the use of these tools.
Yahoo! Face Change
The main Yahoo! page has cleaned up and re-emphasized its search box. The whole top inch or so of the page has a new look.
Similar to the cleaner, pared down page at search.yahoo.com, and reminiscent of some other well-known search engine, it is a pleasing change. The main page still has plenty of portal content below the search box:
Contrast that with the old look that had the logo on the left and additional buttons and boxes. See the Google Blogoscoped post for a series of home page screenshots over time. I still wish that News was one of the choices above the box instead of having it hidden under "more." Otherwise I find the new look to be easier to use and cleaner than the old.
Updated Bookmarklets
I've updated my search bookmarklets page due to changes from some of the search engines including Gigablast's new interface, finally changing msn.com to live.com in the code, and the addition of several new links:
- An animated .gif of the search transfer bookmarklets
- Moving the search transfer bookmarklets to the top
- A new bookmarklet for numbering Yahoo! results
- Updating the bookmarklet for numbering Google results
- Gigablast and Exalead search box links
The search transfer bookmarklets are the ones that I use the most to quickly switch from one search engine to another with the same search query. It has been interesting seeing how the bookmarklet functionality changes over time even when I do not change the underlying JavaScript of the bookmarklet. For the past several months, I could use the Yahoo! bookmarklet after a Google, Ask, or Live search, but I could not use any others after a Yahoo! search. Now those bookmarklets work again. So at the moment, I am only have a problem using them after a Gigablast or Exalead search.
Amazon Dropping Search Inside The Book?
I am very disappointed to see that Amazon seems to no longer have the Search Inside The Book feature. Clued into this loss by Marydee's post yesterday, I can no longer even get Marydee's workarounds of going to the Canadian or British versions of Amazon to work. So what's missing?
- No more Search Inside the Book arrows on certain cover shots
- None of the text statistics and ability to search within a book on those books
- A search on a unique term like tilinca which only occurs in the contents of books now gets no results.
- No Look Inside excerpts or any view of the contents of the book
I certainly hope that this is a temporary issue and not a permanent closing of the program. Some of the initial cover shots still have the Search Inside graphic on top as in the following example. But clicking on the link takes me to a page with no ability to view any of the contents.
Searching via the nearly-defunct A9, I was able to get a list of results for books including my search term, but I still could not get inside the books at Amazon. If this continues, it would be a significant and major loss of searchable content in books!
[Update: Just before clicking post, I am starting to see the Search Inside links again. Phew! I hope this was just a temporary glitch and not a major change in policy!]
More Caches: Japan and China
So after learning yesterday that the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс) cached pages, I started looking at a few other well-known, non-English search engines. Baidu, the Chinese search engine has just expanded into Japan with a Japanese Baidu. Both of these also have cached copies of pages. At Baidu, look for the 百度快照 links after the URL (similar to Google's placement). For the Japanese version, the cache linked is キャッシュ in a similar location.
For us non-Chinese and non-Japanese speakers, is there any use in these? Well, they are one more source for archived versions of pages, including English-language ones. For example, a search on library of congress (in English) finds hits at both. Here is a screenshot the Chinese version with the cache link in gray at the end.
And here's the Japanese version, with the cached link again in gray at the end. I'll be adding both of these to my Finding Old Web Pages page.
A Russian Cache
I do not usually spend much time with country-specific search engines, especially those in languages I do not speak. Even with English-language country-specific search engines, the general search engines usually have more comprehensive results and better search functionality. So when Phil posted about the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс), I just thought I'd take a quick look. Something piqued my curiosity, and I tried a few of the links. Sure enough, Yandex caches copies of many of the pages that it indexes. Look for the Сохраненная копия link at the bottom left of a search result record as in the screen shot below.
Yandex's cache does not include a date, at least that I could identify, but from a few tests, it seems that the cached page may be quite recent (the day before) to several months old. I've added Yandex to my Finding Old Web Pages page.
Yahoo! Adds Del.icio.us in Search Results
TechCrunch discovered that for some Yahoo! searches, they have added in links to (Yahoo!-owned) Del.icio.us bookmarks. 
Yahoo! does not use the Del.icio.us name. Instead, the Del.icio.us logo is followed by number and "people bookmarked this page under" whatever tags they used. See the two lines outlined in red in the screen shot.
While not all Yahoo! results have been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, this is a great combination of information from the two services. Click on the number to see what comments and notes people have written about the site when they bookmarked it. While I wish the comments would appear when I mouse over the link, it is still an incredibly easy and quick way to see what others have said about a Web page before you visit it. So how do you get Yahoo! to show the Del.icio.us information?
Google Stop Word Message Gone?
At SearchEngineLand, Barry noticed that Google is no longer alerting searchers that stop words are not searched. Previously, stop words in a query that was not in phrase marks would usually find Google prompting searchers that the stop word in the query is "a very common word and was not included in your search." Does this mean that Google no longer has any stop words? Based on a few of my tests with a small retrieval set, comparing a search with a stop word and another search with a + in front of the stop word, it does seem that Google will on occassion still ignore some stop words.
AskEraser: Privacy Potential
Forgot to mention my Newsbreak article from last week, AskEraser: Privacy Potential. In working on that article and looking at AskEraser, one issue occurred to me that I did not cover in the piece itself.
I received email from Ixquick about AskEraser even before I saw anything from Ask. press release. In that email, Ixquick claims that
there is one crucial element Ask overlooked and did not address. It reduces their privacy offering to near zero: As can be read in their privacy policy under ''Third Party Providers'' they continue to send the ''users search activity data'' to these third party providers, one of which is .......Google! In other words: Even with Askeraser ON the user gets the same privacy as with .......a Google search!
OK, Ask uses ads from Google. To display context-sensitive ads, related to the actual query, they have to send at least the query string to the Google ads server. While I could not get a definitive answer from Ask about what specific data elements Google sees, given Ask's commitment to privacy with AskEraser it seems likely that not much more than the query is sent. Even so, I was curious to see how Ixquick funds its service, and sure enough, it uses Google AdWords as well (under Sponsored Listings). So how is their privacy better than AskEraser?
While neither Ask nor Ixquick gives complete privacy, nor do they claim to. I credit both of them with raising the search privacy issue and providing at least some tools for helping protect searcher privacy. Since the vast majority of searchers pay no attention to such issues, I'd rather see all the search engines providing better privacy options rather than just criticizing their competitor's attempts.
Scholar Down, Books Up
Dean posted a scathing review of Google Scholar's performance over that past year based on a 32% decline in unique visitors according to ComScore data. More data on the changes at various Google properties between Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2007 are available in a TechCrunch posting. While I am sure that this data does not fully reflect actual Google traffic (and at least one comment on Battelle's Searchblog post says "a staff member from Google . . . tells me that ComScore has some of their numbers wrong"), I still find it fascinating. To no one's surprise, Web search is by far the busiest Google property. Google Directory traffic went down, which is not surprising since Google has made it so much harder to find. But the huge declines in Product Search (down 73%), Scholar (down 32%), and the Video Search (12% decline) surprised me. Book Search on the other hand has grown significantly in visitors (up 55%).
The chart showing which Google properties get the most visits is interesting as well. Web and Image search dominate and are both growing. After those two comes Gmail and Google Maps, which both rank higher in visitors than Google News. Given its increased prominence on the Google News page, I was also surprised to see how few visitors ever went to Blog search.
For Google users who visit many of their services, this is a telling lesson about how others use or do not use so many of Google's search services and applications. I also agree with Dean that Google Scholar's drop in visitors (if that is indeed accurate) comes in part from their failure to improve the service. I have found general Web searches often more effective than Google Scholar searches for at least some scholarly documents.
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.
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.
Link Searching at Live
Back in March, Live turned off access to link searching commands (link:, linkdomain: and inurl:) due to their abuse by automated data mining tools. Since Google limits the functionality of its link: search due to similar concerns, that left only Yahoo! with robust link searching commands. And while I hesitate to post this for fear of this trick being turned off, Karen Blakeman has posted a way to get all three to work again. Searchers just need to put a + in front of the command. It's a clever trick, and one that Karen told me has worked since June, at least. While Microsoft has said that they hope to bring the commands back in one form or another, this provides a way to use the commands now against their existing database. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Updated Cache Sources
A recent posting at ResourceShelf introduced two new sources of cached Web pages and reminded me to update my list of sources for archived/cached pages. I've added several other sources that I'd run across and not added to that page over the last few months, including Alexa, Healia, and WebCite, along with the ones mentioned by ResourceShelf: DiplomacyMonitor and ZoomInfo. I've moved IncyWincy to the former sources at the bottom, since I can no longer find cached links there. That makes at least 14 sources for finding copies of old pages.
Flash SearchMash
A new Flash version of SearchMash was found by Google Operating System. I haven't seen many major changes in Google's experimental site, especially since the Google Universal Search launch back in May. The Flash version is a significant change. It includes includes options for tracking a search history (see the left side hidden panel for this and other options), results screen shots from Snap, and access to all the databases available from regular SearchMash. One additional database added to this Flash version is Maps.
Microsoft and Yahoo! Update Search
For an overview of some of the recent changes at Live Search and Yahoo!, see my Microsoft and Yahoo! Update Search Newsbreak article.
WiseNut Defunct
Gary noticed that WiseNut, the search engine that has done next to nothing for several years, is now defunct. Owner LookSmart, a long time bit player in search engines and directories now has no Web search engine or directory. Its only two remaining properties now appear to be Furl and FindArticles.
Salaries, Overlap, and the Perils of Phrase Searching
Summer's over, so it's time to start posting and updating SearchEngineShowdown again. I'll start off with yet another screencast of unique results found at only one or two search engines, but this search is also an example of the peril of relying too heavily on lengthy phrases for finding the best answers. The story: I ran a quick search at Google in response to a question at the reference desk about the starting salaries in engineering. I found a site with data from a 2005 NACE survey. Since the NACE site only makes its data available for a fee, I thought I'd try a phrase search for the most recent report. Unfortunately, "nace salary survey fall 2007" found nothing at Google. Yahoo (and a few days later, Live) was the only search engine I tried that found some results, which gave the information for which I was looking. Yes the lesson from this example was more than just to be sure to check more than one search engine. There is also the lesson about relying too heavily on phrase searching.
Book Searching Page Added
I've been meaning to add a page to help keep track of some of the book search engines -- those that search the full text of digitized books, not book store searches -- and now I have finally added a book searching page. You can also view my presentation on book searching that I gave last week at the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference in DC. I plan on expanding the analysis and trying some more in-depth comparisons of these tools in the future.
Google CSE Interview and Complaints
There's an interview today with the product leader for the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). I always find numbers interesting:
We have more than 100K registered Custom Search Engines, and that's growing pretty rapidly.(Although it will be far more interesting to see how many of these are getting any traffic several months from now.) Since I just put up my Customize Your Own Search Engine page and built a State Libraries: Custom Search page, I might as well mention a few of my complaints with Google's CSE.
Customizing Search Engines and Searching State Libraries
For one of my upcoming columns in Online, I compared the various custom search engines and other tools for building a topical search engine from a subset of a major search engine's database. Tools like Gigablast Custom Topic Search, Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros, Swickis, Rollyo, and Yahoo! Search Builder. I compared a number of features (including the maximum number of sites, whether they support subdirectories, and if they have usage statistics). This information can now be seen on my new Customize Your Own Search Engine page.
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