September, 2006 Archives | Homepage
Does Size Still Matter in Search?
Earthtimes.org reports that Google claims its index is three times larger than its competitors like Yahoo. However, Google will no longer display the size of its index on its homepage -- instead they are asking users to search and decide for themselves which search tool is best based on the search results they get."We believe that we have an index that is three times larger (without counting duplicate pages). We are asking our readers to test for themselves," said Google spokesperson Marissa Mayer. The company is celebrating its seventh anniversary this September.Earthwatch.org also reported statements from Yahoo and MSN that indicate that quality is becoming more important the size. With demand for more up-to-date information from web surfers timeliness of the web content found in search results may become more important as well.
Earlier, Google had claimed to search 8 billion pages. To be one up, Yahoo, in August, went to town that its search database covered 19.2 billion Web pages. Google rebutted this claim with the contention that its best experts and a number of other independent experts could not replicate this and so Yahoo's assertion smacked of pumped up figures.
But this time round, Mayers refused to put a number to the revised search database. "Absolute numbers are no longer useful," she said.
Posted on September 29, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Ask Jeeves is Dropping the Butler
The BBC reports that Ask Jeeves will be showing the butler to the door in the near future. Apparently, the company believes the butler is confusing people who come to use the popular web search provider. Jeeves was inspired by the knowledgeable butler character from P G Wodehouse' novels.
Citing "user confusion" over what the butler character represents the search site has said that Jeeves will soon be phased out.Without Jeeves will the company just become Ask or Ask.com? Symetri says the butler dumping is part of rebranding strategy to help the company better compete with AOL, Yahoo and Google.
There is no firm date for when the character will disappear from the Ask site, but it will soon stop being the brand's most prominent icon.
No decision has been made about a new name for the Ask search site.
Posted on September 27, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Yelp Offers User Reviews of Places and Services
Yelp is an online community that allows members to write reviews of places and services like restaurants, dentists, dance clubs and salons. Yelp has review entries for dozens of U.S. cities which can be easily searched from Yelp's search bar. Daily Candy calls the community review site part CitySearch, part Epinions:
Welcome to Yelp, an online community that’s one part CitySearch, one part Epinions, with a dose of Friendster thrown in for good measure. Here's how it works: You create a personal profile, then write reviews of your experiences at places in San Francisco and beyond (those you love and hate), or just browse through the thousands of irreverent reviews - and reviewers - already on the site. Invite your friends to do the same (the more people involved, the more suggestions for everyone).
Posted on September 26, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Hurricane Rita Blogs and Links
Our BloggersBlog.com website has a special Hurricane Rita section offering links to blogs and coverage about the storm and what bloggers are saying about it. It is similar to the ongoing blog coverage we have been providing for Hurricane Katrina.Posted on September 22, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Opera Browser Goes Ad-Free
TechNewsWorld reports that Opera has announced that they will no longer charge for an ad-free version of their browser. Web surfers can now download the ad-free full version of the Opera browser from the company's website for free.
Opera was previously available free of charge with an ad banner. Users had the option of paying a licensing fee to remove the ad banner and receive premium support.
The move comes just two weeks after the Norwegian company celebrated its 10th anniversary: On August 30, Opera gave away complimentary registration codes for its browser for 24 hours.
Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox told TechNewsWorld that the company had a fairly good response to its anniversary promotion. "The response to Opera's free offer was probably a catalyst in this position," he said. "It may have confirmed a strategy that the Opera folks were already thinking about."
Posted on September 21, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Web Surfers Are Building the New Web
BusinessWeek has an interesting article that says the new web is being built by you -- the web surfer. The article talks about websites that are powered by users like MySpace.com, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Meetup and Wikipedia.And this time, it's Your Web. No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives. With its longtime tagline, "The network is the computer," Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) made the case that computing transcended hardware. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz thinks another crucial shift is under way: "The network is now your computer."The article also says that the web will continue to develop more services like the ones mentioned above and new programming tools will make the web even more user-friendly and customizable.
At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software. By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They're producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.
"The Web isn't so much a place anymore," explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, "They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs."
Posted on September 19, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
RawSugar is a New Social Bookmarking Tag and Search Tool
RawSugar is a new social bookmarking type of tool that allows people to share and tag favorite webpages. RawSugar also allows these tagged pages to become a personal searchable webpage. The site also has other features like rss feeds, top ten lists, linkblogs and importing from delicious. The best place to learn about new RawSugar features is on the site's blog. (Via TechCrunch.com)
Posted on September 18, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Google Debuts Google Blog Search
Google has launched Google Blog Search, a specialty search engine that searches only blogs. Google's goal in to include every blog that has a webfeed and Google uses feeds to index the blogs. Like Google News the blog search can be sorted by date. The search can also be used to find out what blogs are linking to a particular article or blog post. Google's Blog Seach will compete with other blog search engines like Technorati, BlogPulse.com, IceRocket.com, Feedster.com and Bloglines. Our BloggersBlog.com website which reported the launch of Google's Blog Search also has a collection of links to blog search engines on the left side of its homepage.Posted on September 15, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Search Engines Help Locate the Missing
The New York Times has an article about search engines that are helping to find people missing after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city of New Orleans.Lycos, the 10-year-old search company based in Waltham, Mass., searches at least 20 bulletin boards and missing persons Web sites every four hours to capture data for its service (lycos.com/katrina), while Yahoo retrieves information every hour from 15 large sites and many smaller ones for its engine (news.yahoo.com/katrinahelp).The Times article mentions the Lycos tool and the Yahoo tool. Google has also created a special section for missing people located at http://www.google.com/katrina.html
Engineers for Lycos said they started the site Aug. 31 after noticing the proliferation of places for posting such information. Users initially had to go to each site and conduct a separate search, said Steve Quince, a director of engineering for Lycos. "We're not so much trying to solve the fragmentation as we are trying to accommodate it," he said.
Posted on September 13, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
What Sites Do Mobile Web Surfers Use?
A new study by found that only about 5% of mobile phone users actually surf the Web and when they do they access information like weather, email and sports data. They also check their email. Forbes.com reports on the study's findings:Mobile-research firm Telephia, which surveyed mobile phone users in June, reports that Yahoo!'s mail, search and driving directions sites were the second, sixth and tenth most popular destinations, respectively. The most popular site: The Weather Channel, presumably for cell-phone users who hadn't yet left their homes or offices. Other highly ranked sites: Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's search page and The Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.The screen is small and mobile phone surfing can be slow so it may be a while before people use their phones to surf the web for large blocks of time.
Posted on September 12, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Technorati Launches Blog Finder
Technorati has launched a new Blog Finder tool that makes it easier for people to find blogs. The site sorts blogs by tags that are created by the owner(s) of the blog. For example, the Gossip category shows blogs that have been tagged for gossip and the Autos category shows blogs tagged for Autos. A list of other blog directories can be found here.Posted on September 8, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine
Rollyo is developing a new search tool that allows users to build their own search engine. Users can select with blogs or websites they want to include in Rollyo and Rollyo will search these websites. The site is currently only in beta testing. NextStepsCorp blogs that Rollyo was started by Dave Pell of
Davenetics.com.
Posted on September 7, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |
Hurricane Katrina Resources
We have set up a large collection of Hurricane Katrina resources on our BloggersBlog.com website at http://www.bloggersblog.com/hurricanekatrina/. The Hurricane Katrina resource includes blogs, citizen journalism, media websites and search tools. We will also post updates with new links and information on that site.Posted on September 1, 2005
Permalink | Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | Technorati |