Archive for Search
October 11, 2006 at 12:32 am · Filed under Search
Exalead has just launched a new version of their search engine on www.exalead.com.
I was one of the lucky who was given the opportunity to test the beta version of this release and I am quite impressed. I think they did a great job on the user interface and untill now I’m pretty satisfied with the quality of the search results as well. So, maybe exalead will offer some serious competition for Google.
The improvements basically come down to:
- entirely redesigned user-interface (I personally like the approach to advanced search)
- bigger index (growing to 8 billion pages)
- ability to personalize the homepage
Another feature of exalead that isn’t completely new but what does distinguish them from other search engines like Google and Yahoo is the possibility to choose between three views for the resultpage:
1. text only
2. text and thumbnails (like ask’s binoculars)
3. text, thumbnails and extra info (directory and RSS information)
People who like to use advanced search options should definitively check out Exalead’s advanced features. Proximity search, phonetic search and logical expressions are just a few. I must admit that most users won’t take advantage of these features but it’s very powerful for those who do.
I think Exalead has the potential to become a bigger player in the international search market. Should Google fear them? Time will tell.
October 9, 2006 at 10:34 pm · Filed under Acquisitions, Remarkable, Search, Web2.0
It’s official now! Google has bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (in stock)!
This is definitively the biggest and probably the most important acquirement in the (young) history of Google. It is now Googles turn to show how they will make YouTube profitable.
See Google’s press releases here or here.
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October 4, 2006 at 6:52 pm · Filed under Search
If you are a SEO man (or woman), interested in search engine technology and thus the mechanism behind Google’s pagerank, you should check out the blog of Matt Cutts on a regular basis. As many know, Matt works at Google and often has something interesting to tell us.
In this post, Matt answers some questions about pagerank. I made the following selection of answers that I found interesting:
Will the data centers using the slightly older infrastructure be updated in due course, or will my PR be split by data center for the next couple of months?
The latter. I think most data centers are running the newer infrastructure for things like info:, related:, link: and PageRank, and I believe every data center that has that newer infrastructure has the recent snapshot of PageRank now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at least 1-2 months for the other data center IPs to get the newer infrastructure in some way. (Yes, this is smaller, different infrastructure than the stuff that made site: queries have more accurate results estimates.)
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September 18, 2006 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Search
Just found a way to check which pages of a website are in Google’s supplemental index. Might be handy because if your pages are in the supplemental index, that explains why that don’t show up in the normal results.
For example, see how many pages of digg.com are in the supplemental index:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.digg.com%2F+***
So, how does it work? Just perform this query: ” site:www.domain.com/ *** “
September 12, 2006 at 6:26 pm · Filed under Remarkable, Search
Interesting post over at Google blogoscoped, people have found a blacklist and a whitelist which is probably used for Google’s ’safe browsing’ functionality. All that time I was thinking that Google had this ’smart discovery’ for phishing sites, now it turns out that it is just a good old blacklist!
Oh, but wait, the fact that they also need a whitelist must mean that they do use some auto-discovery. Apparently it works a bit too well occasionaly, so they included a whitelist for sites that are known to be safe. Still interesting though.
Update: more about the lists can be read at the mozilla wiki, might be handy if you plan to use the lists in your own application.
September 8, 2006 at 1:41 pm · Filed under Remarkable, Search
According to australian research, sex and pornography are no longer the most popular search topics on the web. Professor Amanda Spinks from Queensland University of Technology’s says that business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, are currently more popular than sex.
The research was performed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, together they analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile. Apparently they didn’t make use of AOL’s logfiles that were are available online.
A few explanations that Prof. Spinks has:
- “More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.”
- “The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”
- “Back in the 90s, there wasn’t as much business information on the web.”
To be honest, I’m not really convinced. I would love to read a more detailed paper about how the research was performed. Looking at the statistics of one of the major Dutch search engines (where I happen to work at), I can only draw the conclusion that sex does still dominate the search topics.
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