Vividence has a semi-annual report on the search industry. PDF link to report. In its May report Google received top rank for customer experience and satisfaction, and last for ad activity. Customer experience and satisfaction rankings: GoogleYahoo!Ask JeevesLycosMSN Ask Jeeves and MSN had a similar pre-search brand image, but MSN did not deliver the same post-search experience. 75% of users say they have one primary search engine. "Although actual search results returned by the leading five search engines do not differ substantially by some measures, Google users reported a higher perceived rate of success and satisfaction with search results."…
Medicare.gov has a new comparison shopping search engine for prescription drugs. Search by zip code for prices for persons with or without Medicare benefits. Robert Pear and Milt Freudenheim of the New York Times profiled the new site today….
Amazon's search engine, A9, launched in beta. Also includes yet another toolbar. Pages are cached and you can view Alexa data directly from the results page. You can log on using your Amazon account and view search history as well. "You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page."…
I added a link for each post to its Tecnhorati cosmos. I followed the howto detailed by Dave Sifry. You want to change the ampersands to XHTML compliant of course. Why is there a blank rank parameter? Omitting this parameter seems to work fine, so I took it out. Most links will probably lead to "Ouch! No results found." but it is still a good thing to have and more powerful than a TrackBack….
Wired News : "Scirus is a search engine for scientists that allows them to dig through not just scientific journals, but also unpublished research, university websites, corporate Internet sites, conference agendas and minutes, discussion groups and mailing-list archives."…
Rick Skrenta's latest blog entry comments on the scalability of Google's service offerings. "[T]he story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else."…
Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform. We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer. MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it's very, very close….
Obviously an April Fool's joke, but Google is hiring for their new lunar center. Lengthy for a prank. "The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson." "What happens to PageRank in the proximity of a black hole? Is there distortion that might result in link relevancy reduction or popularity warping? Could this somehow be harnessed to generate more dates for engineers?"…
"imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images." You draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek returns thumbnail views of the best matches. Written in Python….
Google Labs has released its latest project: personalized search. I created a profile, selecting things like California, rock music, and soccer. When I search for "Dublin" my top results are now Dublin, California and not Dublin, Ireland….
Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. "There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task."…
Eric Schimdt talked about Google's social networking service, Orkut, at PC Forum today. News.com covers the speech. He noted that most products at Google stay in beta for about a year. Google hopes to help provide better searches for people through social networking software. "We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information." Three engineers are currently working on the service….
KartOO is a search engine aggregator that focuses on the relationships between your search results. Graphical representations are shown in Flash. (via Scoble)…
Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search is a database of all 3150 Calvin and Hobbes strips published with complete references to the books and pages they're published on. All searchable by keyword. Very cool!…
On the front page of today's Washington Post is an article by Yuki Noguchi about Google's proficiency at locating confidential documents that may have publicly revealed themselves for only a brief moment in time….
Scoble might be taking a break from his weblog, but Andy Beal of Search Engine Guide posted an interview with him today. The article focuses on WinFS and some specific issues such as metadata for photographs and contacts….
Sunday's New York Times took a look at the upcoming search war between Microsoft and Google. There is no doubt in my mind that Internet search will be built-in to Longhorn. Google will offer their deskbar, and you may even be able to choose your default search technology similar to your media player, instant message client, browser, etc. today. Google will change once it enters the public market. Employee perks will be scrutinized, and there might be some employee shuffle. Google and Yahoo! are the first names techies think of when it comes to search, and MSN Search will have…
Eurekster is a new search engine, currently in beta, that uses your defined social network to rank search results from Overture based on the search history of you and your network of friends. The social networking technology comes from RealContacts and the personalization technology is provided by SLI Systems….
Spidering Hacks is now available for pre-order around the world. $20 adds these 100 tips and hacks to your library. 400 pages. Currently ranked 432,937 at Barnes & Noble. ISBN is 0-596-00577-6. UPC is 636920-00577-3. ASIN is 0596005776. As previously mentioned, I wrote a hack using Java to gather traffic statistics from Alexa. It will most likely come out in November, not October, but it's still cool to see it hit the virtual shelves as a pre-order….
I have been busy over the past week writing for a new O'Reilly book. Look for me in chapter 4 a to be released book named Spidering Hacks, part of the O'Reilly Hack Series. Interestingly enough I was the only person to author to use Java. I have a feeling this is going to be a book full of a lot of Perl. There is only one Python example. I wrote a hack that gathers data about Alexa toolbar users traffic to your Web property on a daily basis. Alexa collects subdomain information as well as property rankings, and I…
Amazon.com has filed patent 6,564,213 for search query autocompletion strings. A search term is "preferably biased to favor the database items that are currently the most popular." The idea seems similar to Google's spelling correction but with partial strings. If I am on Amazon's wireless site I can see the advantage of typing "Pearl" in the music category for a Pearl Jam CD, but the implications for not discovering Janis Joplin's CD could make the whole thing dangerous….
