Top 100 search terms of the <18 crowd during summer. If you're Glenn Quagmire, don't read this. All others, continue! An article with at least superficial credibility (they admit kids search for porn, etc.) about what kids, tweens and teens search for online. Randomness includes Megan Fox, Walmart, Youtube and Naked Girls. (And Craigslist. What the hell do kids need on Craigslist?)
posted by ShadePlant on Aug 14, 2009 - 75 comments

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted by Soup on Aug 18, 2008 - 56 comments

Le réseau - Starting in the late 19th century, Belgian Paul Otlet envisioned the basics of a human powered Wikipedia and Google. He created a 12 million item database on index cards and accepted queries via mail or telegraph. The article describes his work and the Mundaneum museum in his honor. Be sure to watch the video. There is a full documentary on Otlet as well.
posted by Argyle on Jun 17, 2008 - 8 comments

The World's Largest Database of Frequently Asked Questions. [more inside]
posted by psmealey on Oct 25, 2007 - 58 comments

If Google was designed for Google.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 16, 2007 - 36 comments

The top questions people in China want to ask the internet...
posted by miss lynnster on Jan 13, 2007 - 48 comments

100+ authoritative research sources that are available online. Various topics, real info. Think of it as a kind of do-it-yourself AskMe, or you know, a research library.(via Making Light)
posted by LobsterMitten on Nov 3, 2006 - 19 comments

Internet blows CIA cover The identities of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency employees, many of them operating under cover, have been available to anyone looking for the right information in public records searches. Only problem: The CIA was kind of surprised to find this out. (Site may require registration for some. Use BugMeNot.)
posted by emelenjr on Mar 12, 2006 - 41 comments

Google Zeitgeist 2005
World Affairs Nature Movies Celebrities Phenomena
posted by Mwongozi on Dec 20, 2005 - 25 comments

Factbites is a new approach to web searching - the results make sense! Factbites offers users meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results. For example, durian.
posted by crunchland on Nov 7, 2005 - 19 comments

Google blacklists CNET reporters? An article about privacy issues that highlighted the potential for abuse if logs of search terms linked with IP addresses are combined by search companies with address and phone data, angered Google CEO Eric Schmidt enough to blacklist CNET reporters for a year, at least according to the bottom of this CNET story. The article begins with information about Schmidt found via Google searches, and goes on to "question Google's ability to adequately balance the heavy burden of safeguarding consumer privacy rights with the pull toward intermingling and mining data for ever more lucrative targeted advertising."
posted by mediareport on Aug 7, 2005 - 18 comments

Grokker. It's powered by Yahoo! search, but the results are presented in a very different way, a visual map [example]. There's a few tools to refine the output. It's different, a bit slower than a "normal" search and requires a bit of patience. There's an affiliated weblog, with an entry explaining their philosophy, "Moving Beyond the Algorithm."
posted by gsb on May 19, 2005 - 31 comments

Toogle Google image search represented in ASCII. [via Hot Links]
posted by DBAPaul on Aug 19, 2004 - 17 comments

Mining the Deep Web. Google indexes 4 billion pages, but there are hundreds of billions of documents out there in the Deep Web that are effectively unreachable by search engines because they are locked in databases or are unsearchable media. It looks like Yahoo is going to start giving us a peek by providing unified access to a wide variety of sites that are ordinarily only searchable by their own custom search engines.
posted by badstone on Mar 2, 2004 - 12 comments

Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait. [NYT] It's nice to see the NY Times take a stab at helping normal folk become better at searching the web. They point to Gary Price's resourceshelf.com, Greg R. Notess's searchengineshowdown.com and Danny Sullivan's searchenginewatch.com and Tara Calishain's researchbuzz.com.
It's just nice to see a story that's not All About Google for a change. Somewhat related articles: One over at O'Reilly On How To Build Your Own, and one at CNET on Nutch, an open-source web search engine.
Anyone have any favorite search engine tricks to share?
posted by Blake on Aug 22, 2003 - 3 comments

Google: the God that failed? is the title of the article on MSN Slate. All of us know Microsoft is working on a new search engine technology. Till date everyone considers Google to be the Guru. MS obviously doesn't like that, so what it is doing? Well, the same thing it always does - to survive competition, eliminate it. The reasons being given by the article are pretty silly and more aimed at 'faming down' Google.
posted by jayantk on Jul 22, 2003 - 39 comments

This just in! Search Engines help find people, too! Reuters has apparently just figured out that you can google up old acquaintances. As for myself, I find that google has become less useful than these guys for people-searches. So, what is the most obscure thing/person you have searched for, and how did you find it?
posted by ilsa on Mar 13, 2003 - 31 comments

Forget BlogChalking. Go by the globe. A (slightly) simpler cousin of the GeoTags search engine (which I could never get useful information from anyway), the GeoURL ICBM Address Server (by Joshua Schachter of Memepool) pegs sites to specific points on the planet via good old-fashioned coordinates and META tags. While the web supposedly has no borders, many sites - like blogs - have a place at their heart, a virtual (if not physical) home. Now you can see if your site has neighbors. [Via Blogdex - More Inside]
posted by pzarquon on Jan 8, 2003 - 8 comments

"Our goal is to become bigger than Yahoo" "...We don't serve banners or pop-ups...We will not rent, sell or trade your personal information... Out of the gate, we make money through Google's advertisements - Google sells the ads, Dell pays Google and Google pays us....Does it work? Yes. In fact, we will be profitable in our first month of operation." Could this be a Google back-door attempt to begin to move into Yahoo territory, or are they just starry-eyed dreamers? Their mission, and some answers from the founder, apparently the same people behind iWon.com. PS Site really does look like a Yahoo carbon copy. There must be some copyright issues.
posted by Voyageman on Nov 2, 2002 - 28 comments

Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired. I found the link in a newsletter from WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:

1. Information gods amongst mortals
2. The Information Gods respond
3. Information Gods Srike Back

He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted by tbc on Sep 27, 2002 - 12 comments

Domain Surfer is just plain cool. I mean... now I can see if a text string appears anywhere in a domain, and the results are clickable (note to the folks who do those awful WHOIS searches: I don't care who registered it, I care whether it's up-and-running!). Anyway, the link is via Rion.nu who, BTW, has some wonderful photographs of the Tribute of Light. And the link to the photographs came via David Gallagher... another fine photographer, not to be confused with that ijit from Oasis.
posted by silusGROK on Mar 14, 2002 - 12 comments

anti-thesaurus
unhappy with web users who are unnecessarily drawn to your site in the pursuit of non-existent content? does it bog down your bandwidth? solution? write a metadata tag that specifically excludes certain terms from search engine hits by the simply defining them as non-words.
posted by bwg on Dec 2, 2001 - 10 comments

Interesting sellout. About.com has changed the "o" in their name to a Life Saver throughout the site. That's some desperate advertising.
posted by endquote on Aug 3, 2001 - 37 comments

At 21,000 gigabytes of HTML, the web isn't all that large. (?) Is there anything which you can't find somewhere on the web? An entire Yahoo category for Potato cannons?
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 23, 2000 - 4 comments

Somebody found my blog while searching for a 'doctor's surgery webpage'. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos -- has anyone ever found anything useful from any search engine ever? Really? I don't believe you. Never ever has any search engine -- not even lovely, nifty little Google -- given me what I want in any useful way whatsoever. You would not believe how long it took me to find a sodding picture of Steve McQueen smoking the other day. And for God's sake don't get me onto the utterly pointless localised versions or the abyssmal AltaVista picture search.
posted by James Bachman on Oct 16, 2000 - 24 comments

What happened to the Open Directory? Does anyone know why this site has gone down?
posted by fbeach on Sep 28, 2000 - 7 comments

Has Google finally sold out? You may have already seen this via Robot Wisdom - evidence that Google has monkeyed with their search engine to give preference to partner Yahoo!'s pages. I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I'm sad. Anyone know of a better search engine on the horizon that still has integrity?
posted by straight on Sep 13, 2000 - 8 comments