A little ahead of schedule,
Yahoo,
AOL and
Bing have released their lists of items most often searched for in 2010. Google hasn't released their list but you can see popular searches using their
Insights program.
posted by morganannie
on Dec 2, 2010 -
53 comments
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 by jonson
on Sep 11, 2005 -
12 comments
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 by nlindstrom
on Jul 12, 2005 -
15 comments
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 by RonZ
on Jul 10, 2005 -
36 comments
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 by merc
on Jun 30, 2005 -
22 comments
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 by shoppingforsanity
on Apr 26, 2005 -
89 comments
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 by Sparx
on Apr 4, 2005 -
6 comments
A large number of people really don't know the finer points of search. For those people, Google has a
suggestion.
posted by Mick
on Dec 10, 2004 -
46 comments
Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted by o2b
on Jun 10, 2004 -
53 comments
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 by condour75
on Oct 27, 2003 -
29 comments
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 by twiggy
on Jun 30, 2003 -
44 comments
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 by Eloquence
on Apr 23, 2003 -
7 comments
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 by theplayethic
on Apr 14, 2003 -
60 comments
Google.ac is some kind of fake Google site that seems to return nothing but sponsored results. Is it supposed to fool somebody?
posted by hammurderer
on Mar 28, 2003 -
14 comments
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 by insomnyuk
on Aug 21, 2002 -
21 comments
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 by c3o
on May 21, 2002 -
45 comments
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 by DragonBoy
on Apr 2, 2002 -
36 comments
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 by tranquileye
on Feb 4, 2002 -
14 comments
"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 by Tubes
on Jan 14, 2002 -
5 comments
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 by mrbula
on Dec 5, 2001 -
14 comments
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 by HeikoH
on Oct 8, 2001 -
11 comments
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 by gleuschk
on Sep 4, 2001 -
14 comments
