Opinion Searching Category Archive

Google Adds "Top Answers"

After panning Google earlier today for non-search changes like the addition of Play and disappearing search tools experiment, I should give them credit for a potentially useful search results change. Barry reported on SearchEngineLand that for some results from the Google Discussion database subset (web forums and Google Groups), that the results will include a new "Top Answer" tag line that highlights a potential answer to the search question. Searchers may not see this often. Clicking the Discussions database on the left will bring up more, but not all discussion records have it.

In addition to what Barry found, below is an example I was able to find when in "Everything." If you have not looked in the Discussions recently, also take a look at some of the other information that Google makes available on some Discussions results just under the URL like number of posts, number of authors, and date. While this information is not obvious on a quick look, I often find it very helpful in deciding which results to view.

New Google Groups

The old Usenet groups and DejaNews search engine became Google Groups. Now Google is announcing the launch of yet another version of Groups. The beta has a new interface and several new features. New capabilities include the ability for group owners to create a welcome message, upload a group logo, and customize fonts and colors. The new Pages feature lets users create web pages inside a group as well. Overall, it seems to be moving Google Groups further away from its Usenet origins and more towards what Yahoo! Groups offers.

Daypop Down Again

I am sorry to see that Daypop is down again. The error page delivered, dated 5/11/06, gives the following message:

Daypop down until further notice... Sorry for the inconvenience. After adding a bunch of submitted sites, Daypop no longer has enough memory to calculate the Top 40 and other Top pages. If there's no simple fix, Daypop won't be back up until a new search/analysis engine is in place. A new engine will take at least a month to get online.

Daypop Lives Again

Daypop is back up and running at last. If you've been wait awhile to try it out, take a look now. Dan Chan appears to have got it back up late Thursday night, although it may be a bit less dependable than before since Dan posted that "After being spoiled with a big block of IPs for my previous business class line, I had to figure out how to run the servers off residential DSL at my new home in the Bay Area."

Daypop Hiatus

The news and blog search engine Daypop will be unavailable for awhile. "NOTICE: Daypop will go offline starting Oct. 25 for a couple weeks." Apparently, Dan Chan, who runs Daypop, is moving.

BoardReader: A Forum Search Engine

Heard of BoardReader before? It's another search engine to use to try and get at opinions like Google Groups and Epinions. BoardReader covers Web-based bulletin boards and discussion forums. It is an alternative to MessageKing, another search engine for forum postings which I have always found much more difficult to use. BoardReader finds many more postings than MessageKing and it also includes a cached copy, the date, and the number of replies. I'll add it to my Opinion Searching page once I find the time to update that one.

Daypop Back?

Daypop, the recent news and Weblog search engine appears to be back up after being down for several weeks. The front page still says that it is out of disk space, but it is working again. The Top 40 and Top News are not yet functioning, but the search engine is. For more on Daypop and blogging, see my article in the latest issue of ONLINE: "The Blog Realm: News Sources, Searching with Daypop, and Content Management." ONLINE 26(5): 70-72, Sept.-Oct. 2002. And

Deja Acquired by Google

Deja.com is gone. The Usenet news repository and search engine has been acquired by Google and is now available with a completely different interface at Google Groups. The Deja.com and dejanews.com domain names redirect to Google Groups. At this point, posting capabilities are gone as are the advanced search capabilities of the old Deja. Only the past six months worth of Usenet postings (from Aug. 2000 on) are available. The press release implies that more of the old postings will be added. More details are available in the Google Groups Usenet Help file, which also mentions that the current database contains only Usenet postings archived by Google. This implies that none of the Deja database has actually been loaded yet on Google. While it is great to know that search access to the Usenet archives will continue, at this point the database is considerably smaller and the search features much less powerful than we had on Deja last week.