Search Engine Update
By Notess, Greg R
Ask added links to its privacy policy on its front page. It bought Lexico, which runs Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. The source for map and satellite data for both Ask Maps & Directions and AskCity is now Microsoft Virtual Earth. With this switch, some search features disappeared, such as the search- enabled drawing tools and the ZIP code business search. Exalead has updated its desktop search program, one:desktop, to version 4.6. New features include a rich preview of most documents, right column personalization tools for refining results including an optional tag cloud display, and tabbed integration with Exalead web, image, video, and Wikipedia search.
Flash Earth, the search switcher for several sources of satellite imagery, has dropped Google maps (at Google’s request) from its data sources. It continues to have Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo!, NASA, OpenLayers, and Ask.
Google changed its related searches algorithm to update the suggestions more quickly. The aim is to provide more relevant suggestions for searches on topics of current interest. Textual content within Flash files is now indexed more fully by Google’s crawler, so Flash-based sites should be easier to find. A link to Google’s privacy policy is now available on its front page, 2 weeks after Ask did the same. Google Finance now has realtime quotes for stocks traded on both the NASDAQ and New York Stock exchanges. Google has launched Google Site Search, a hosted site search based on its Custom Search. It is a fee-based service with the price based on the number of pages indexed. The commercial version includes the ability to define custom synonyms and adjust the sorting of results to prefer newer documents. Google Trends has added the ability to download trend data to a spreadsheet.
Google News changed its clustering algorithm. Previously, similar news stories were grouped together as long as they had been published within 3 days of each other. Now, similar stories will show up in the same cluster if they are from any time within the 30- day window of stories that Google News has in its index.
Live Search has abandoned its Academic and Book Search efforts. Both are now offline. Microsoft says that books and scholarly publications will continue to appear in the web search results but not in separate databases. Microsoft has bought the natural language processing search engine startup PowerSet. Another recent Live Search initiative is to provide financial incentives for searching (www.searchandgive.com). You can support schools, health research, or charities-with Microsoft donating 1 cent per search. Sign up, choose a charity, and search via the site (results come from Live Search) . Live’s Cashback program (linked in the upper right-hand corner of the regular Live Search page) lets searchers who also shop online earn cash back for certain purchases.
Me.dium (www.me.dium.com) has launched its Me.dium Social Search in alpha. Based on the browsing habits of Me.dium Social Toolbar users, along with records from Yahoo!’s, Me.dium tries to mine the wisdom of the crowd. The relevance ranking pushes recent frequently visited pages (for example, news stories or popular YouTube videos) to the top of the search results. Me.dium adds icons to the left of some search results that represent how popular a page has been recently. It also offers two search choices. The default search includes records from viewing patterns of Me.dium Social Toolbar users (the “crowd”) along with Yahoo! results. Clicking the “I’m feeling social” button returns only the Me.dium crowd results. However, when searched this way, each record shows additional information about the result including Crowd Rank, Velocity, Crowd Level, Recent Activity, and Average Visit Duration. These are all measures of popularity within the crowd.
Wikla Search no longer sports an “alpha” tag and now allows all users to edit and filter search results. Any user can edit the title or summary of a record, add a picture to the top background, comment on results, add other suggested searches, spotlight a record, or add additional URLs to the results. Other options include deleting (or undeleting) results, annotating records, and rating results using a scale of five stars. Popular searches sometimes have editable “mini- articles” at the top of the results. Also near the top are links to results from other search engines, and users can add additional search engines that will only appear for others on that particular search. Searches that have been edited will show a history of the edits on the right side of the display under “Search history.” The IP address or Wikia username is recorded for each change made. Previously, Wikia Search had several distinct databases from which a searcher could choose and compare results. Now, there is just the one database, which is considerably smaller than the other search engines.
Yahoo! is busy opening up its database for others to use. Two initiatives-SearchMonkey and BOSS-let people use the Yahoo! database or results set in new and different ways. Web developers can use SearchMonkey to share structured data with Yahoo!, build SearchMonkey applications, and customize search experiences. Searchers can browse some of the resulting search applications in the Yahoo! Search Gallery (http://gallery.search.yahoo.com). Yahooi’s Build your Own Search Service (BOSS) is aimed at helping companies set up new search engines without having to build their own databases. Yahoo! calls BOSS a “search infrastructure.” BOSS partners (two examples are Me.dium Social Search and Hakia) can rerank; blend results; have unlimited queries; use results from the web, news, and image databases; and can present the results in any way they wish. Note that Yahoo! does not require that the results be branded with the Yahoo! name or logo, so it may be difficult to identify future BOSS-based search engines. On the regularweb search side of its business, Yahoo! has improved its indexing of textual content within Flash files to make Flash-based sites easier to be found.
Greg R. Notess (greg@notess.com; www.notess.com) is reference team leader at Montana State University and founder of SearchEngineShowdown.
Copyright Information Today, Inc. Sep/Oct 2008
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