Other News Category Archive
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....
Comparing Question and Answer Services
From Technology Review comes this comparison, What's the Best Q&A Site?. The article rates the sites based on a couple of questions and gives points. The search engines compared are Askville, AnswerBag, Live QnA, Wondir, Yedda Answers, and Yahoo! Answers. There are plenty of other services, but I found the ratings interesting, with Yahoo! Answers coming out at the top. Here are the rankings and the number of points each received. 11 Yahoo Answers 7 Live QnA 6 Askville 4 AnswerBag, Wondir, and Yedda Answers I found the concluding comments about these services to be especially perceptive: It's important to...
Interesting Ratings of Consumer Satisfaction with Search
Guess which search engine has the highest satisfaction scores in a J.D. Power and Associates Report? Their 2006 "Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study" surveyed 10,787 U.S. residential Internet users and found several surprising results. "The study finds that nearly 75 percent of Internet subscribers use multiple search engines. Forty-four percent of those customers report using multiple search engines because each one has better sources depending on customer needs." While the study echoes several others in its finding that Google is the primary search engine for a majority (but only 51%), the customer satisfaction ratings give the top spot not...
New AOL Search Beta
Pandia has a report on the AOL Search 7.0 beta and how it compares to Google (from which AOL gets its search engine and advertising). AOL continues to receive a healthy dose of search traffic from its own users, and it does offer different features than Google....
A Comparison of BitTorrent Search Engines and Critique
An interesting blog posting today complains about another well-referenced blog post that claimed Btjunkie is the largest BitTorrent search engine. What's BitTorrent? BitTorrent is a peer to peer file sharing technology often used to transfer large files, sometimes of copyrighted material. Since I am not a frequent BitTorrent user (having only checked it out quickly a few times), I will not give any personal preference to these search engines.What struck me the most about the post is that it has an excellent critique of search engine size studies. Basically, it is easy to get a larger number of hits by...
Northern Light is Back, for Business at Least
Remember Northern Light with its side folders and the combination of a Web search engine with commercial articles? It's back, in part. With some bad ownership changes, the public Web search engine was retired in 2002. Bought back by some of the original owners, it moved forward as a fee-based service only. Today, they announced their return with public access to their Business Research Engine. "Search full-text articles from 1,400 trade journals and 22,000 business websites. A total of over 100 million pages of business research content."...
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...
Wikipedia as Source?
An interesting posting today first claimed that the U.S. Dept. of State shamelessly stole text from the Wikipedia: At this point some of you may ask just what the heck the US Dept. of State was doing, but let's take a moment to clear things up. First, it's obvious the Wikipedia page has been around for quite some time, and has evolved from that older state. . . . the US Dept. of State page doesn't even mention Wikipedia I find this posting fascinating in that some people assume that the Wikipedia is an old, established resource. Obviously, the author...
New Relevancy Study
Danny has a summary of a French relevancy study which compares Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Exalead, Voila, and Dir.com. By one measure (best relevance of top five results), Google and Yahoo! tie for top relevancy scores. Using a different measure (at least one good result in top five), Yahoo! beats Google by a bit with MSN and Exalead not very far behind....
Search Engine Freshness
An interesting preprint of an article to appear in the Journal of Information Science is The Freshness of Web Search Enginesâ Databases by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig, and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor. Their research evaluates the freshness of the databases at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search in early 2005. It is a long article, so to quote part of the summary "even pages that are updated daily can reach a very low update frequency in Google as well as in Yahoo. From the results of our study, we can assume that MSN updates its whole index more frequently than its competitors." Also...
Copernic Desktop Beta 1.5
Copernic announces the release of a public beta of its Copernic Desktop Search 1.5. The new version has added several file types including Mozilla Thunderbird email, Eudora email, networked drive indexing, improved meta data for audio and visual files, 20 other new file types, and the ability to use a wildcard to add custom file extensions....
New Bookmarklets Page
Now that I use bookmarklets more and more for quick access to the search engines, I decided to share some of my favorite, and most frequently used ones. The new bookmarklets page includes very basic information about bookmarklets along with a few varieties specific to search engines. The Transfer Search ones, especially, make it extremely quick to compare results from different search engines....
Northern Light to Return
Northern Light announces the return of a search product, but this time it is a Business Research Library available by subscription, first to businesses in January and then to individual in March. It sounds like no free Web searching and no pay per retrieval options, at least at this point. Paula Hane has more details in her report....
FindArticles Relaunched, Expanded, and Integrated
FindArticles.com has relaunched and expanded to covering 700 publications with full text articles from Gale, up several hundred periodicals from its previous version. Along with LookSmart's announcement, the FindArticles database is now accessible as a tab directly from the LookSmart site, which should raise its prominence. The new LookSmart and FindArticles interfaces have three tabs for searching -- the LookSmart Directory, the Web (Wisenut), and Articles. They have changed the default operation to AND and continue to support phrase searching and the - as a NOT operator. FindArticles is still a small database compared to the large aggregator databases offered...
Search Content of 120K+ Books
Yesterday, Amazon introduced a major new searchable database, called Search Inside the Book. Covering over 120,000 books, the full text is searchable with the pages that match an Amazon book search query also being displayable. Then you can view two pages forward and back of the matching hit. This is a significant resource for many information needs from finding books in a local library collection that have specific information to finding references and quotations. However, the Author's Guild has raised concerns about this new database possibly infringing on authors' rights. Also, for the information professional, it takes a bit of...
Invisible Web Directory Disappears
I just noticed that Intelliseek's InvisibleWeb.com directory of hidden or invisible Web databases and resources now just redirects to Intelliseek's ProFusion meta search engine. It looks like they may have made the change on Aug. 13 or earlier. While the directory had not been updated in awhile, it was a useful as place to look for some hidden Web resources, especially databases. Some of those databases are still searchable within ProFusion's search groups, but it was the directory function that was most valuable. For a replacement, try Invisible-Web.net from the book by Gary Price and Chris Sherman or CompletePlanet instead....
Dealtime + Epinions = Shopping.com
Shopping.com has launched anew as a combination of the old Dealtime and Epinions sites. This newly relaunched shopping search engine includes the price comparison features and product meta data from Dealtime and consumer reviews from Epinions. Both of the other two sites will continue to operate separately. The shopping.com search gives narrowing options for price, brand, and product-specific features. It also offers several sorting options such as price, rating, relevance, and store rating. These narrowing and sorting options are a welcome change from the most general Web search engines that offer no such sorting capabilities. The site is most useful...
Search the Wayback Machine with Recall
The Internet Archive has released a full text search capability via its new offering called "Recall." The basic interface is available at web.archive.org while the advanced search is at recall.archive.org. The advanced search adds date limits. This is a beta offering, so it may not always work. It claims to search a huge portion of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine database covering about 11 billion pages. Note that the Wayback Machine offers browsing by URL access to 30 billion pages....
FindWhat To Buy Espotting
FindWhat, another ad bidding engine like Overture and Google AdWords, is buying up Espotting, an ad bidding engine that has focused on Europe, for about 8.1 million shares of FindWhat.com stock and about $27 million in cash for a combined valuation of about $163 million according to their US press release. The combination of the two may help FindWhat become a more serious competitor for the search engine ad space to the two big companies: Overture and Google....
Free xrefer Dead
As announced last month, xrefer's free showcase is now gone. In Sept. 2001 I wrote a column "Ready-Reference Collections: Bartleby and xrefer" that reviewed its capabilities. Now alas it is only available to institutional subscribers, not individuals. Fortunately, there are a few similar reference resources that continue to be freely accessible: Bartleby's reference section and InfoPlease....
Image Search at AOL
AOL Search now has an Images tab for image searching. It has no advanced search and only a single query box. While it certainly appears to be based on the Google image search, the AOL version often has fewer results, a more strict adult filter, and may have a different ranking than at Google....
Australian Web Archive
The National Library of Australia has the Pandora archive, which is a national version of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The focus is on the archiving of Australian network resources. Unlike the Wayback Machine, it is keyword searchable....
Can Users Recognized Ads?
A transcript from "Building Trust on the Web," Consumer WebWatch's First National Summit on Web Credibility with Eugenie Prime from Hewlett-Packard among others makes for some interesting reading. For example, "And even well-informed or savvy Web users are finding it difficult to discern what's paid, what isn't, is it relevant, is it pure." says Leslie Marable with Consumer WebWatch....
Northern Light Assets Bought by Seuss
David Seuss, former CEO of Northern Light, bought back the Northern Light assets from divine at their bankruptcy auction. According to Seuss and the press release, he had not expected to win the bidding, and other sources report that he won at a bid of $81,000. The auction was held at the end of April. Northern Light's SinglePoint Market Research Portal will again be available, and they plan to release the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, which is a 64-bit enterprise search solution Northern Light's taxonomy and classification capability. No word yet on the fate and future of the public...
Free xrefer to Shut Down
The very useful free xrefer showcase announces that it will no longer be available after June 17, 2003. xrefer provided free searching of dozens of subject dictionaries and other reference books. At least Bartleby's reference section and InfoPlease remain available for free....
Not Quite Dead Yet
As of March 7, Northern Light sites all were dead or redirecting to divine. But it looks like it has a few more gasps of life in it. The news database is updating (sporadically) and searchable again, even though the "Today's Headlines" section is not. Even the Web database is searchable again. However, don't expect it to last too long....
Northern Light Going, Going, Gone
This week, Northern Light and NLResearch have been dying bit by bit. Now, all most all of the Northern Light and NLResearch URLs point to divine pages. The few that do still go to old Northern Light pages no longer have a search form that works. Northern Light News had one last gasp of content on Monday and then stopped updating again. So it looks like a final farewell to an old friend, and a search engine that had features as yet unduplicated by the survivors. Their custom folders, the taxonomy behind them, the truncation capabilities, and the combination with...
MyWay Goes to Multiple Search Engines
The MyWay.com portal launched back in Oct. 2002 has expanded from just using Google for their search engine to offering four others which can be chosen as a default or used as follow-up search engines via tabs at the top. The additional search engines are labeled AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, AlltheWeb, and LookSmart. But Ask Jeeves is really just their Teoma database. AlltheWeb is the FAST database. And LookSmart is a combination of LookSmart directory entries and the Inktomi database. The "sponsored listings" continue to be ads from Google's AdWords program. Unfortunately, no advanced search forms are available except for Google...
FAST at Espotting and Espotting at AlltheWeb
FAST announces an agreement with Espotting (a paid ranking search engine like Overture). FAST will provide the general search engine results at Espotting's site after the paid ranking results. Also, the press release notes that "Espotting will provide their top three paid listings on AlltheWeb's European search results pages." So European searches will get Espotting "Sponsored Results" while the rest of the world will continue to see "Sponsored Results" from Overture. These are separate from teh regular search results at AlltheWeb. Apparently, the searcher location will be determined by top level domain origin of the searcher, so it will not...
Northern Light Withers Further
divine, Inc. seems to be driving the nail even further into Northern Light's coffin. The once-important search engine was officially shut down at the beginning of 2001, but at least the Current News search and the pay per view Special Collection continued. (And the Web search engine also remained available via NLResearch.com.) But now, Northern Light states that "Effective January 1st 2003, divine has discontinued the sale of its special collection articles on a pay per view basis." Gary Price has also confirmed that their very useful Current News search will soon be shut down. Their Alerts have already stopped...
Wayback Machine Now Compares Documents
The Wayback Machine has announced the official launch of its "document compare" feature which uses DocuComp technology to compare two historical Web pages and highlight the differences. Look for the "Compare Archive Pages" in tiny print in the upper right hand corner after the search box on a search results page to try out this feature. See their FAQ for more information....
Torture Test Results
Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman have published the results of their search engine torture test, or as they now call it, the "Perfect Page Test." For even more details, see their Criteria and Detailed Results page. It is a fascinating analysis, but bear in mind that the is only measuring results for one kind of search -- where there is one perfect page for an answer. Many searches do not have such an answer and the relevance of the results from any search engine could be quite different on those searches....
Wayback Machine Behind
I have been disappointed for awhile that the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive has had no new pages included for most of this year. In today's TVC News, Gary Price reports that he got a reply from them saying that "they are about six to eight months behind in adding data to the archive. But they expect to make pages from the first half of 2002 available during the next four weeks."...
AOL Announces New Search
Now completely moved from Inktomi and Overture to Google and Google AdWords, AOL introduces their "New AOL Search." AOL also notes that Google results are included on several AOL properties: "now available within the search areas of Netscape, AOL.COM and CompuServe, and for members in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Australia and Canada." On all of these, the search results may include a few links to specific material from AOL sites as well as the Google results....
Ask Jeeves Toolbar
Ask Jeeves announces its toolbar, which like Google's only works with Internet Explorer (IE) and Windows 98 or better. The toolbar installs under the other IE tool bars and offers links to a variety of Ask Jeeves searches including News, Dictionary, Market, Weather, and saved searches....
Direct Hit Dies
With the Ask Jeeves' big launch of Teoma on Monday, what has happened to Ask Jeeves' other search engine, Direct Hit? It is no longer available at directhit.com. Instead, the old Direct Hit URL redirects to Teoma....
FirstGov Redesign
FirstGov, the U.S. government portal and search engine has launched a new design today. It certainly looks much better and now prominently features three gateways: Citizen, Business, and Government. The search engine appears to be the same for now, although the initial search box has changed a bit. There is still no directory and some government sites are still missing. They have a brief announcement and a survey available....
iLor Switches from Google
iLor announces that as of today, it will begin using Ask Jeeves databases rather than Google's for its search tools. Initially it will be using Ask Jeeves' Direct Hit database but it will be switching to Teoma later this year....
Search Engine Use Drops
A WebSideStory StatMarket press release reports that according to their analysis of HitBox use patterns, the majority of Web users now arrive at their destinations via bookmarks or other direct navigation as opposed to using search engines. In Feb. 2001, the found 46% used bookmarks or direct navigation compared to 53% using Web links or search engines. Then in Feb. 2002, the two switch, with 52% using direct navigation and 48% using search engines....
Scirus Expands and Redesigns
Scirus announces a redesigned site that is supposed to be easier to use. It also notes that the database has been refreshed and expanded to include sites like the arXiv physics preprints collection....
divine Acquires Northern Light
divine, inc. has acquired Northern Light. See the Northern Light press release or the divine press release. This explains why Northern Light dumped their public search engine, since divine "acquired certain assets." The public search engine was seen as a liability and thus divine did not want to burden itself with that aspect of the company....
Northern Light Closes Door on Web Search
The search forms at Northern Light now only offer access to their Special Collection documents. Searchable access to the general Web is gone, as announced on Jan. 8....
Letter from Northern Light CEO
Jan. 11, 2002: David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light posts a Letter from the CEO about the decision to shut down Web searching at Northern Light....
Northern Light to Discontinue Web Search
Jan. 8, 2002: Northern Light announces that as of Jan. 16, 2002 it will "will no longer be providing free Web search capabilities to the general public." However, their Special Collection, free News search, and their Special Editions will continue to be accessible to the general public. They will also continue to market their products to enterprises....
New Top Level Domains
My article "The Top-Level Domain Game" from the Jan. issue of ONLINE is now available online. Read about the new top level domains and how they can impact searchers....
Excite Dies
The old Excite is gone. The site remains, and its personalization capabilities remain, but their original search engine is gone, replaced by InfoSpaces Dogpile, a meta search engine which starts out with Overture results. The Excite review remains to document how the search engine used to work....
xrefer Launches xreferplus
xrefer, the free reference search engine, has announced the launch of xreferplus, a larger collection available for a fee. It includes more than 100 reference books from 21 publishers....
Scirus Includes Academic Press
Scirus announces the inclusion of Academic Press journals that are hosted on the IDEAL platform. These are now searchable at Scirus....
Wayback Machine Debuts
The Internet Archive launches their Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. The Wayback Machine provides access to Web pages the way the used to look, and how they looked on particular dates when the Internet Archive visited them. This is like the Google cache on steroids, since it contains not only text but images from the past as well. And rather than just archiving one version of the page, it contains multiple versions. The entire archive is not keyword searchable. Instead, access is by URL and then by date....
BullsEye 3.0 Released
Intelliseek announces the release of BullsEye 3.0 New features include SurfSaver integration, report formats including XML, and a new government agent....
CompletePlanet Expands
CompletePlanet, BrightPlanets directory of Invisible Web databases and search engines, announced that it now has nearly tripled its listings to almost 90,000. These resources are organized by subject using more than 7,000 terms....
Contentville Closes
The eclectic search engine for full-text from books, articles, transcripts, dissertations, and more has shut down, unable to find sufficient profit from its model....
Excite@Home Bankrupt
Excite@Home, the parent company of the Excite search engine announces the sale of its broadband business to AT&T and that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection....
LexiBot 2.0
BrightPlanet announces the release of version 2.0 of its LexiBot desktop client search tool. Version 2.0 can search among 2,000 databases considered to be part of the invisible Web (or deep Web as BrightPlanet prefers to call it)....
NBCi to GoTo
NBCi now only searches GoTo, instead of the way it used to be with Inktomi for its search engine and its own directory....
Excite to Kill Most European Versions
According to a story in The Times, Excite will be shutting down many of its European portals, such as the French, German and Spanish ones. Excite UK and Excite Italia are to remain open....
Northern Light Joins with Search4Science
Northern Light announces a partnership with Search4Science to launch an enhanced online search service that aims to focus on the needs of scientists. The partnership brings Northern Light's Custom Search Folder technology to Search4Science's Dynamic Search, which encourages users to add more query words by showing synonyms and other words to further refine a search. The current Search4Science Dynamic Search shows this, but the direct search still retrieves results from Google....
iWon Changes
iWon seems to have dropped Fact City, their Advanced Search page, and merged GoTo and Inktomi results under the heading of Partner Search Results. No total number of results is given and only one page per site is available in the Inktomi results. iWon Review updated....
iLor Evaluation
Lately, iLor (Internet Lore), has been getting good press for the additional features it adds to a Google search. Some of these features are indeed interesting and will be useful for some: the pop-up box with the choice to Open in Taskbar, Open in New Window, Put in My List, and Go Now Anchor Here. However, there are several points which should be noted as well. iLor does not work for all browsers (requires IE 5 + or Netscape 4.73 +) They have not licensed the full Google database, so searchers get less results with iLor than Google iLor does...
NBCi on the Block
It sounds like NBCi is about to disappear. They have announced that NBC will re-acquire NBCi. While the service continues to operate and the press release says that its future will be decided in the coming months, but it looks likely to go the route of Go. The search engine component may be one of the first to be dropped....
Northern Light Adds Experts
In a new twist on its Special Collection, Northern Light has added Sopheon's database of experts. Available on the Power and Business search pages, use the "expert biographies" limit to see some examples. These are also integrated into regular Northern Light searches. See the press release for more details....
Elsevier Launches Its Science Search Engine
Scirus, a science-oriented search engine is launched by Elsevier, a major scientific journal publisher. Scirus includes a database of Elsevier articles available for a fee along with a portion of the Fast database. Note the following in its press release [Word format]. "It currently covers more than 60 million science-related pages and is capable of reading non-text files in formats such as PDF and Postscript." I could find no evidence yet that it actually indexes PDF or Postscript files on the Web, but apparently, it is capable of it....
Northern Light Adds NYT & More
Northern Light has expanded their Special Collection again. According to their announcement, it now includes the most recent year's worth of articles from the New York Times along with over 100 newspapers from the Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News service....
Northern Light in Hungary
Northern Light announces in their press release that they have replaced AltaVista on the Hungarian search engine Vizsla....
Infoseek RIP
Infoseek, one of the oldest of the Web search engines, is gone. Bought out by Disney in July 1999, Infoseek became the central search component of Disney's failed Go.com portal. In January 2001, Disney announced that it would be shutting down the Go.com site and that some assets would be sold off. As of today, the Go.com site still exists, but it now uses the GoTo.com pay for placement search engine. The Infoseek technology lives on in the Ultraseek site search technology which is now owned by Inktomi, but as far as I can tell, no global Web search engine...
Excite Offers Zoom Feature
Excite has introduced a new feature called "Zoom In." It is available as a new button, next to the Search button. The new button is labeled "Zoom In." Clicking it causes another window to pop up, even while the search results are being displayed in the main window. The pop-up window gives suggestions for ways to refine the search, in particular by adding more precise search terms. More details are available on the Zoom In Help page....
Inference Find Lost
Inference Find, a meta search engine formerly available at Infind.com has shut down, perhaps just temporarily....
The Demise of Go
Disney announces plans to abandon the Go portal. The site will continue for a time, but the go.com domain name and the Infoseek search engine components will be sold off. See "Disney Finally Gives Up on Troubled Go.com" at Internet World News and Danny Sullivan's report for more details. While I suspect that someone will buy and maintain the Infoseek search engine, I've updated my review, chart, and search engines by features pages with information about the domain limit available in the advanced search in case Infoseek does disappear altogether....
Northern Light Launches SinglePoint Enterprise Portal
Northern Light announces the launch of its SinglePoint product, designed for companies seeking help in creating an enterprise portal. See their press release....
eBay Buys Deja's Precision Buying Service
Deja.com announces that Half.com, an eBay company, has purchased Deja's Precision Buying Service, their rating component. Now Deja.com is once again just the Usenet news search engine it was a few years back....
Northern Light Launches SinglePoint Enterprise Portal
Northern Light announces the launches of its SinglePoint product, designed for companies seeking help in creating an enterprise portal. See their press release....
iWon Simple adds "More from"
At some point recently, the simple search results on iWon added a "More results from [site]" notation after those hits that Previously, iWon's simple search would only give one hit per site with no ability to see any other pages from that site which also matched the search terms. Unfortunately, like on HotBot, every single results has the "More results from [site]" notation at the end, even if there is only one page that matches the search criteria. The advanced search continues to give unclustered results....
New Go?
Go, the former Infoseek combined with Disney portal content, has relaunched its main page. While it has modified the surrounding portal content and search results for popular topics, especially for entertainment terms, the underlying search engine, database, and search features appear to have remained the same. See the Go press release....
New OCLC Study on Number of Web Sites
OCLC has released its annual report on the number of Web sites from its Web Characterization Project. It found that in June 2000 there were 7.1 million publicly available Web sites. There is no estimate given this year for the number of Web pages....
How Big the Web?
HotBot has attempted to introduced the ability to uncluster results. On its advanced search page a new option to disable its "Best Page Only Filter" is supposed to do this. Unfortunately, in my testing, it does not yet work, nor does it make much difference in the search results. For example, "salammoniac" finds 31 hits with our without the "Disable 'Best Page Only' Filter" checked. Yet some of the sites displayed do have additional Web pages available via the "See results from this site only" link. It is a worthy goal, but HotBot needs to make the filter work properly!...
Subscribe