The Structure of Search Engine Law, by James Grimmelmann. [abstract inside]
posted on Apr 27, 2007 - View this thread

How many me's are there?
posted on Oct 26, 2006 - View this thread

Ice Rocket is a blog spidering search engine that seems designed to allow users to track trends over time (mentions, say, of "pepsi blue" vs "coke zero" over the last 60 days). It's an interesting, if highly unscientific, use of bloggers writings as informal market research. No word on how many blogs are in their index, nor whether they're collecting any available demographic data on the bloggers (where such information is even available, that is).
posted on Sep 11, 2005 - View this thread

Blackhat Search Engine Optimization Techniques. Through the use of a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint, you can have competing web sites thrown out of Yahoo's search index. If you file a DMCA report against a site, Yahoo will quickly remove the "offending" site, leaving no trace of the site in its index. This has led to a rise in so-called "Blackhat SEO," wherein one seeks to become the leading search result not by improving one's own site, but by having competing sites removed through the DMCA.
posted on Jul 12, 2005 - View this thread

Can't Find On Google . Com While many people seem to think that Google can find anything (and knows everything), experienced web surfers know the results are often a bit lacking. So this site allows you to post what you are really looking for and what you punched in to the "Big G" to try to find it. The owner claims to know someone who works at Google that is "always interested in what people can't find on Google" - doubtful IMHO if they will really change anything based on this site. But semi-interesting stuff that highlights the inadaquacy of search engine technology.
posted on Jul 10, 2005 - View this thread

Next Act Won't Be as Easy as the First. Gates once conceded: "Google is still perfect, the bubble is floating and they can do everything. You should buy their stock at any price.” And just this week they affirmed this statement with their release of Google Earth, showing the world that their scope is beyond just websites. But is google growing too ambitious? is this desire to "search all of the world's information" signaling doom?
posted on Jun 30, 2005 - View this thread

I clicked this link today while perusing this MSNBC blog (which is occasionally amusing). It seems that ArticleBot's hackles have been raised, and they are on the defensive against mainstream media (aka MSM). I'm not exactly sure what their point is, but I really hate it when people "overuse" the "quotation" marks in their "unique content". I would have totally left it alone if they had not called attention to themselves by responding in this manner. Plus the assistance they are offering reminds me a little of these MIT geniuses (previously discussed on MeFi here and here) except designed to spider search engines. I'm sure it's completely legal, but the ethics are questionable to say the least.
posted on Apr 26, 2005 - View this thread

What's hot in technogeekery? Match your predictions with Yahoo's ongoing search stats using $10,000 fake dollars as investment capital. Is this how Yahoo is going to steal Google's mindshare - or just another pointless thing to do with search engines?
posted on Apr 4, 2005 - View this thread

Rebirth of the Semantic Web. On the heels of the Technorati taggregator, the Oddiophile bookmarklet, the tag search (new today!) and much ensuing buzz, Jeff Jarvis brings up people tagging. This concept drove Friendster and FOAF, both of which petered out. But with Technorati's elegant synthesis of photo, link, and post tagging, the web may once again tap into networked individualism.
posted on Jan 17, 2005 - View this thread

Search Wars Part XXIV: Yahoo! Video Search.
posted on Dec 16, 2004 - View this thread

A large number of people really don't know the finer points of search. For those people, Google has a suggestion.
posted on Dec 10, 2004 - View this thread

Lexis-Nexis...AlaCarte? Yes, it's true. The giant archive of news, corporate and legal information is now providing a pay as you go service. Queries can be entered for free, without subscription; charges are affixed to downloaded material on a per-document basis. (via Poynter)
posted on Dec 2, 2004 - View this thread

Search Wars The BBC reviews five search engines, including Google and the new MSN beta
posted on Nov 12, 2004 - View this thread

Speegle: search results read aloud. News, too! [Via.]
posted on Nov 7, 2004 - View this thread

Google News Bias. How second tier websites are gaming the Google News Enging.
posted on Sep 24, 2004 - View this thread

Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, others under attack? Despite all the big IPO news about Google, the bigger news today is that it doesn't work. Slap on an age-discrimination suit while we're at it, and potential trouble for the IPO. Have Larry and Sergei finally pissed off the wrong people?
posted on Jul 26, 2004 - View this thread

Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted on Jun 10, 2004 - View this thread

How many systems does Google have? It depends on how you look at their S-1 filing and estimate their buying patterns... any way you look at it there's some serious computing power there.
posted on Apr 30, 2004 - View this thread

Researchers have created a 3D search engine. Sketch the object you're looking for and the search engine will attempt to find it.
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

From the creators of the OpenDirectory Project comes their new effort: a classifying news crawler : Topix.net. They've got some cool text processing that allows them to classify each story in terms of content and geographic location. Very cool ideas in agreggation!
posted on Jan 13, 2004 - View this thread

Googlearchy: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the Web. [pdf file] Political communities exhibit winner-take-all properties. Surprising?
posted on Jan 8, 2004 - View this thread

Spears Reigns Again on Internet . Lycos, America Online and Yahoo! all have their top ten of '03 lists out. Google Zeitgeist wasn't mentioned in the Hollywood Reporter Article, but it's always worth a look.
posted on Dec 21, 2003 - View this thread

Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted on Oct 27, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

Searching MSN for the phrase "Linux" yields some pretty amusing (but yes, unsurprising) results. The first site seems moderately legit - Amazon stuff related to linux. The second one - MSN has a tech section about Linux? Not exactly. It doesn't really have much linux content at first glance. The third link is most amusing - see for yourself.

Comparatively, a google search for "linux" yields much more useful results.

This makes me wonder: should ethics be taken into consideration on search engines? MS has every right to have whatever they want come up when you type in "linux" - but they are willfully contaminating search results, which makes one wonder what other search terms Microsoft might want to rig the output of, and also, which they might have overlooked...
posted on Jun 30, 2003 - View this thread

Is Grub out of control? Barely more than a week old, the distributed search engine is already causing headaches. It does not properly follow the Robot Exclusion Standard and thus spiders sites against their owners' wishes. Because it is a distributed client run by thousands of volunteers (and therefore connects from many different IP addresses), it is non-trivial to block. The Wikipedia project, for example, is experiencing slowdowns because of it. Let's hope they can solve these problems, as the idea seems to be quite cool.
posted on Apr 23, 2003 - View this thread

Nationalise Google? "Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is - a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest." Bill Thompson from the BBC tells me that Google puts a cookie on my computer that can't be deleted till 2038: "This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes." Are they "a secretive, hyper-competitive company with no respect for the personal privacy of its users"? Are other search engines better behaved? And is this the beginning of search ethics?
posted on Apr 14, 2003 - View this thread

Google.ac is some kind of fake Google site that seems to return nothing but sponsored results. Is it supposed to fool somebody?
posted on Mar 28, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Mar 13, 2003 - View this thread

It's Googlefight!! Enter two keywords and let them battle it out! I'm almost excited!!
posted on Oct 4, 2002 - View this thread

Search Engines come into fashion and search engines go out of fashion, but only one Search Engine will be there for you when Great Cthulhu rises slowly from the Pacific waters, his slumber of a million years finally at an end!
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
link via the diary of Farq Q. Fenderson at K5.
posted on Sep 12, 2002 - View this thread

Google makes another killer app? Rackmounted servers devoted to googling your own intranet or website. Just look at those specs and features. Google is selling 1 server, retail $28,000, and they are marketing especially for corporate intranets. But imagine the power that would be at the fingertips of archivists, students, and researchers everywhere with a dedicated, customized Google for their own website. Imagine being able to do a detailed search that would literally comb the content of every page published by Project Gutenberg. In seconds, you could call upon thousands of years of writing for any and all information on any specific subject. What kind of implications will this technology have long-term for students, researchers, and archivists?
posted on Aug 21, 2002 - View this thread

Google Labs is a public beta testing area for some pretty cool things they are currently working on: an amazing glossary, voice search by telephone, search results navigated without the mouse and finding additional items to sets defined by words you enter.
With every new feature, they seem to be getting even further beyond the competition. Even though Google is very likable company: is a monopoly on web search a good thing?
posted on May 21, 2002 - View this thread

Teoma takes on Google?
Ask Jeves launched its new search engine yesterday aimed at challenging Google for the best search engine on the web. Teoma offers options to narrow your search using "subject-specific popularity." For example, if someone searched for the name "Bill Clinton," Teoma offers ways to refine your search, showing links to topics related to your search, such as "Clinton Scandal" and "Monica Lewinsky." Will this search engine replace Google as the SE of choice for the Internet savvy? Also, what other search engines do you use?
posted on Apr 2, 2002 - View this thread

Google is an amazing resource, and has changed how many access the web. Some say they did it by not hiding the banana. But for those that are curious, here is the research paper that started it all.
posted on Mar 21, 2002 - View this thread

Search engines sued over pay-for-placement. "The maker of a popular weight-loss system filed suit against four search engines this week, alleging that their policy of letting advertisers pay to appear in top-ranked search results violated federal and state trademark and fair-competition laws." [from CNN]
posted on Feb 4, 2002 - View this thread

"Google effect" reduces need for many domains. Dan Gillmor says effective search engines can and should stop people from freaking out that "Wah! All the good .com names are taken" and compulsively registering all the .biz, .info, .tv, .to, and other .crap domains which the registrars would like us to believe are vital. Bob Frankston agrees, [link via Ev] adding that reducing our dependence on semantic (i.e. keywordy) web addresses will improve the stability and usefulness of the web. (I agree too!)
posted on Jan 14, 2002 - View this thread

Google Year-End Zeitgeist. "From 'Harry Potter' to 'Osama Bin Laden' and 'Florida Supreme Court' to 'Napster,' the Google Year-End Zeitgeist reveals the collective focus of the online mind, highlighting the main events that drew the attention of a global audience"
posted on Dec 24, 2001 - View this thread

Have a business? Want its site listed on Yahoo? From this point on, you have to use Yahoo! Express, which means you have to pay $299 for them to just consider your site. Does this diminish the validity of Yahoo's listings, or is this just the inevitable result of the dot-com decline?
posted on Dec 5, 2001 - View this thread

Did Google go too far when they added a new tool to their website, or are webmasters to blame for lax security?
posted on Nov 26, 2001 - View this thread

Dave's Quick Search Deskbar: A cool little utility to make searches on the Windows desktop easy and (POW!) fast!
posted on Nov 4, 2001 - View this thread

AltaVista's catalog of 500 million Web pages hasn't been fully updated since July. AV used to be my search engine of choice, then (for a short time) Hotbot, and now Google. What will the search engine look like that replaces Google?
posted on Oct 25, 2001 - View this thread

AltaVista to be closed down? I guess their über-portal strategy failed. no big news here. but closing down the search engine entirely? i guess you don't need 100 folks to run the spider and indexing machines.. ok.. there are hardware and network/bandwidth costs associated.. but closing it all down?
no question. there is competition out there. and the googles and fasts are the new benchmarks.
but i sure remember the days when AV was super-fast (also in including submissions into their live index) and super-relevant. but in those days, the internet was much smaller and AV was owned by digital (compaq).
those were the days when infoseek tried to compete and hotbot tried to rise to stardom.
times changed. but i sure would miss AV.
posted on Oct 8, 2001 - View this thread

Movie Review Query Engine Encompassing old-hat IMDB data and scores more sources, the Movie Review Query Engine is estimable. Like ISBN.nu, its scope is vast and it seems to be a single-person operation (here, Stewart Clamen).
posted on Sep 25, 2001 - View this thread

Picsearch is (as the more linguistically adept might have guessed) a search engine designed expressly for images. It's only been live for a month, so it hasn't spidered nearly the volume of google's image search, but it's on the right track. Are there others I don't know about?
posted on Sep 4, 2001 - View this thread

I can't put a serious link up because I don't wanna link it. . . I don't like the fact that if you have your address and number listed in the phone book, suddenly now if someone enters your name into Google along with the city you presumably live in: Your address and phone number come up. I use no other search engines, but I would presume the same happens there. These aren't the days of PENNSYLVANIA-65000 anymore Harrietta.
posted on Jun 19, 2001 - View this thread

From the googlebot FAQ: "For most sites, Googlebot should not access your site more than once every few seconds on average"

I thought it was a mistake at first, but they go on to say that you should contact them if "we are placing too high a load on your site" Do they really hit some sites that hard? If so, is it really necessary?
posted on Jun 5, 2001 - View this thread

According to an Alexa Research report, Web users are morons (entering URLs into search engines to get to sites) and perverts (most popular search term is "sex"). I, for one, am shocked.
posted on Feb 16, 2001 - View this thread

It's become second nature for many of us to head straight to Google when trying to find something, and more people seem to be discovering the site all the time. These days, savvy New Yorkers are Googling for love.
posted on Feb 9, 2001 - View this thread

Find A Grave : Looking for dead people? Early onset necrophilia? This is a good place to start!
posted on Feb 7, 2001 - View this thread