October 12, 2004
October 12, 2004
Is AOL Ready to Launch a Desktop Search App?
The desktop search war continues to heat up.
Michael Worthington at Beta News reports that a desktop search app might be added to new AOL Browser by the end of this week.
AOL Desktop Search is an integrated feature that will allow users to search for a plethora of files including: documents in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as PDF, HTML, WordPerfect, rich text and plain text files. In addition, users can scour through Web pages they have previously seen in Internet Explorer, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) chat logs, locally stored newsgroups and Web logs, as well as digital media and pictures.
More in: AOL Develops Desktop Search.
Posted by Gary Price at 10:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
Google Will Expand Operations in India
During a vist to India by Sergey Brin and Larry Page the company has announced plans to expand their operations in the country.
"We are committed to substantial growth in terms of both manpower and infrastructure at both these offices," Sergey Brin, co-founder of the search engine, told reporters at a press conference here.
He said the expansions are scheduled to take place by the end of the year but refused to give details on numbers or figures.
Google's Bangalore office will focus on research and development while the Hyderabad centre will look after online sales and operations and human resource functions, Brin added.
More in the article: Google plans big expansion in India
Posted by Gary Price at 9:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
An Introduction to Exalead
Eric B. lets us know about a new web engine called Exalead.
This Paris-based company has been around since 1999 and continues enterprise search
technology.
Their "public" search product is a showcase, what they call a demonstrator, of their technology.
You can read more about the company in this Red Herring article. It mentions that AOL France uses the Exalead database and technology. The article also contain a few comments from our own Chris Sherman.
The company plans to enter the desktop search market "soon".
Exalead offers many advanced search features (several unavailable from other major engines) and is worth of a look.
Let's take a look.
What does Exalead offer? Here's an overview of some key features.
* A unique web index containing more than one billion pages. At least this is what their news release says. The total on the home page is much smaller. Hmmm. A page submission form is available.
UPDATE: Francois Bourdoncle from Exalead let us know that the index is currently at 300,000,000 (as noted on the home page) but should reach 400,000,000 by next week. They expect to hit the one billion mark in th next month or so.
* "Basic search" uses a default "and". It also provides automatic stemming if you search with more than one term. Auto stemming is disabled when you place the + sign in front of a term.
* Unlike all other major web engines, Exalead offers a proximity operator (AltaVista used to have one). The NEAR operator finds documents where the query terms are within 16 words of each other.
* Several options to "widen your query" including stemming/truncation (using the * symbol), optional terms, and pattern searching (very cool!)
Syntax
* Limit to a domain with site:
* Limit to words in title with title:
* Limit to documents in a specific language with lang:
The advanced interface offers four "search methods"
* Phonetic search
* Auto Word stemming
* Exact Search
* Approximate Spelling
Exalead indexes PDF, RTF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat files.
Search Result pages offer many features including:
* Related terms (other terms you might want to search)
* Related categories (drops you into the ODP)
* Limit results by format or location
* Limit results to multimedia content (pages that include links to audio and video content)
* Spelling suggestions
* Thumbnail images for all results can be turned on/off. You can also choose to not have a snippet visible.
* You're able to open a result link directly inside a frame on the serp. You can also bookmark pages. Bookmarks can be transported to your IE favorites file.
Bottom Line?
I've tried several searches and while Exalead is not perfect (this is a beta release) the results I've seen aren't bad at all (I've seen much worse). I'm also very impressed with the amount of functionality Exalead offers the searcher. I'll continue to test I'll report back.
Btw, according to this page, you can register to access more advanced search features. I'll let you know what they are.
Posted by Gary Price at 7:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
Profits Triple at Yahoo!
Yahoo's profits for the third-quarter tripled versus the same period last year.
>From a the Bloomberg story, "Net income rose to $253.3 million, or 17 cents a share, from $65.3 million, or 5 cents, a year earlier...Excluding the gain from selling shares in Google's initial public offering, Yahoo said it would have earned $124 million, or 9 cents a share. That matched the average estimate of 9 cents a share from 26 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial."
You can listen to the conference call and read the complete news release here.
Posted by Gary Price at 4:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
FeedForAll For Feed Creation
When I wrote my Making An RSS Feed article last year, I had a few people puzzled about why it was even necessary. After all, feed generation is built into many authoring tools, right? For blog tools, sure. But ordinary web servers? Not necessarily.
That article explains how to make a feed by hand. But reading one of our forum threads today, I came across Nick W's mention of FeedForAll. If you have to roll your own feed, this makes it easy to do using a software interface. It can also help you modify and manage existing feeds.
Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
SEMPO Gets Forum For Members, Wants More Survey Data
Barry Schwartz reports that SEMPO has opened its own forum area for members, a positive move that should help those within the organization better talk about its direction, growth and activities among themselves. Want to discuss? Visit our own forum thread: SEMPO Launches Members Only Forum.
Meanwhile, SEMPO's still looking for more SEM firms to take part in its search marketing survey. More about that here in my past post: SEMPO Search Marketing Survey Opened. To participate in measuring the size of the search marketing space, drop by here: SEMPO Research Survey.
Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
Fathom Keyword Price Index Provides Bid Benchmark
Search marketing firm Fathom Online has assembled a Keyword Price Index to show average bid prices for various industries.
The index looks at the prices for the top five spots for the 500 most queried terms for an industry, as determined by Fathom. Prices include those on major and lesser-known search engines.
For September 2004, automotive had the highest average weighted price of $1.54 per click. Wireless telecommunications came lowest at $1.09. More details here: New Tracking Data Reveals Marked Disparities In Paid Search Costs, Yield.
Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
Problems With Searching By Date
InsideGoogle points us to the FirstMonday article: Internet time and the reliability of search engines.
>From the article, "A large part of the problem comes from the fact that a page might have many dates. Some search engines (AltaVista and Google) can be used to search for information from certain periods of time. However, these "date stamps" are not determined by the first occurrence of these pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated. The "same" Web page may therefore belong to the year 1995 in a data set collected in 2003, while in a data set collected in 2004 it belongs to the year 2003. If used to search with historical dates, search engines represent the results of interacting frequencies of the updating of Web pages and search engine crawlers, and not necessarily the dates of publication of the documents under study."
The article concludes, "This has major consequences for the use of search engines in social science research. In short, search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record or for research that aims to analyze the structure of information at a particular moment in history."
Issues surrounding date searching with general purpose web engines are not new. Back in 2002 I co-authored: It's Tough to Get a Good Date with a Search Engine with Genie Tyburski where we touch on several of them.
Just what is the "date" when it comes to a web page is a major issue. Which date would be of greatest interest to the searcher? Is it the date the page was first crawled? The date the page was first written? First posted? Last updated or changed? What about pages that "disappear" from the index and then get "recrawled" at a "later" date? If a standard was agreed upon would it applied properly?
>From the searcher perspective limiting by date with a general purpose web database is something that should be done only with great care and an understanding of the problems that the article points out.
Finally, limiting to a specific date or range of dates is not an issue with news and discussion databases since this material has a
unique and agreed upon date stamp associated every item in the database For example, the Yahoo News article was published and posted on October 1, 2004 or the Google Group posting become available on September 23, 2004 at 1:04 PM.
Another issue is also in play when it comes to news searching. Most of the major news engines only allow you to limit your search to the last month. In other words, if it the article is older than a month it might no be available. It may be in the main web database depending if the publisher has kept the link live. In some cases the link is still available but there is a charge to read the full text.
As I've pointed out in the past, numerous databases are available that contain deep archives of this type of content. Many times they're available for free from from your local library and also offer subject-based access to the content. Even better is that they're online via the web, no need to visit the library.
Posted by Gary Price at 10:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
Data Mining for Customer Intelligence
While focus groups and market research play an important role in optimizing web sites, SearchDay guest writer Heather Lloyd-Martin calls our attention to an under-utilized source of competitive intelligence that's available to everyone with a web site. Connecting with Customers through Search Market Research reports on a Search Engine Strategies panel that focused on improving customer experience, pinpointing buyers' exact interests and reaching prospects at every phase of the buying cycle by data mining search logs for this crucial market research data.
A longer version of this story for Search Engine Watch members goes into more detail about the process of search market research, presenting the findings of case studies and providing specific, actionable tips and tools for effective data mining and other forms of customer research.
Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
Jeremy Zawodny: Yahoo Search Blogvangelist
Jeremy Zawodny is a Yahoo employee who once worked on the search side and now returns to it, as he explains more here: New Job (Again).
Search is also one of the things Jeremy has touched on in his personal blog, with some of the best reading dings at Google and even his own employer, at times.
That blog, he notes in explaining his new position, has had much to do with his move into the new role of improving search products, communication about search, gathering feedback and recruiting people.
What I find most significant is that the move positions him as the first notable blogvangelist employed by a major search company.
Sure, Google has its own blog, launched in May. Yahoo has one as well, launched in August. It's more active than Google's, completely focused on search and frankly often times more interesting. But both remain corporate blogs. They don't reflect the unfiltered views of an individual.
Microsoft has had this type of blogger personality in the form of Robert Scoble. He's someone who works from Microsoft, is vocal about things there but doesn't necessarily follow the party line. He was also instrumental in pulling together Microsoft's recent Search Champs initiative.
As a long reader of Jeremy's blog, he's always been that way as well -- a personality who speaks his mind, regardless of what his employer may think. With his new role in search, we ought to hear more interesting firsthand accounts of someone on the frontline of the search wars.
Meanwhile, will Google and others feel compelled to find their own search personalities to speak to the blogosphere? Google actually has the longest standing unofficial spokesperson around, in the form of GoogleGuy. However, GoogleGuy has to date only participated in the forumsphere.
Search forums have been a key public relations front for all the search engines, given how search marketers will dissect any move and report on the latest findings through them. Now blogs seem to be opening up as a new PR front to compete in.
A recent Google Blog entry did see GoogleGuy edge into the blog world for the first time. However, he remains anonymous. Lifting the lid on his identity (an open secret among many involved in search marketing) might give Google a search personality of its own.
Postscript: Jeremy provides more thoughts and reactions into his new role: Honesty and Blogvangelism
Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
