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

How many me's are there?
posted by aerotive on Oct 26, 2006 - 70 comments

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 by NickDouglas on Jan 17, 2005 - 23 comments

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 by Smart Dalek on Dec 2, 2004 - 9 comments

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 by mrgrimm on Jul 26, 2004 - 31 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

Googlearchy: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the Web. [pdf file] Political communities exhibit winner-take-all properties. Surprising?
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Jan 8, 2004 - 3 comments

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 by Blake on Dec 21, 2003 - 10 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

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

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

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

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

Dave's Quick Search Deskbar: A cool little utility to make searches on the Windows desktop easy and (POW!) fast!
posted by jakd on Nov 4, 2001 - 19 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

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 by joeclark on Sep 25, 2001 - 6 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

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 by Nothing on Jun 5, 2001 - 17 comments

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 by Aaaugh! on Feb 9, 2001 - 32 comments

Find A Grave : Looking for dead people? Early onset necrophilia? This is a good place to start!
posted by kliuless on Feb 7, 2001 - 3 comments

Altavista redesigns. Again. Seems they're trying a Yahoo/DMOZ feel this time, with LookSmart results as their directory. Didn't they do this once before?
posted by danwalker on Feb 3, 2001 - 13 comments

Where are search engines headed? Paid inclusion seems to be an increasingly popular strategy among search engines and directories. In addition to Yahoo and the ones listed in the article, Go.com and NBCi have recently implemented paid inclusion systems. Should we expect even more search engines to head in this direction? Does this worry anyone?
posted by Aaaugh! on Jan 5, 2001 - 10 comments

Well, it's official. Civilization has now come to an end; drowned in a sea of vapid mediocrity and fad. In five years, will anyone still give a damn about Brittney Spears?
posted by Steven Den Beste on Jan 3, 2001 - 21 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

"Search. It's all we do. Test our results." So, is that braggadocio... or insecurity? Given the spate of "how [they] scammed Google" pieces lately, I find the newest addition to their home page... interesting.
posted by baylink on Nov 3, 2000 - 12 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

Monster.com , careerpath, hotjobs.com etc, etc... While these sites offer tons of jobs, I wonder if I will actually be able to find work through them. Does anyone have experiences they'd like to share about finding internet jobs through the inernet? How about smaller, more focused sites, especially regional ones?
posted by chaz on Aug 2, 2000 - 15 comments

Anyone know of any good lyric sites besides stuff like LyricSearch?
posted by milhous on Jul 17, 2000 - 7 comments

Ever wondered how much it would cost to have your listing pop up on a particular MSN search? According to Micros~1's keywords.com (as of a few minutes ago), you can get sex for $795.20/month, mp3 for $175.66, and Bill Gates for a mere $8.96 a month!
posted by tregoweth on May 23, 2000 - 3 comments

Holy Mother of Google!
posted by bradlands on May 12, 2000 - 2 comments

"When you visit a site, you can't take that information and use it for your own purposes, especially for commercial purposes," the lawyer says. Is it just me, or will this ruling render every single search engine illegal?
posted by jjg on Apr 17, 2000 - 13 comments

Everyone's favorite search engine Google has opened their GoogleStore. They've got shirts, mugs, and bags, some with the "I'm feeling lucky" slogan, but the strangest thing for sale? That'd have to be the Exercise Ball, which I suspect secretly carries Happy Fun Ball-style disclaimers. When not in use, Google Exercise Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Do not taunt Google Exercise Ball. [thanks RasterWeb]
posted by mathowie on Mar 18, 2000 - 4 comments

Steve Champeon, one of my personal favorite Web-type people, has a good article over at Webmonkey called RTFM: A Guide to Online Research. The gist of it is "look it up on the Web before you ask a stupid question on a mailing list", but it goes far beyond that in providing sources one can use to find answers to all sorts of questions.
posted by jkottke on Feb 23, 2000 - 0 comments

Um, does anyone want to venture a guess as to why google's logo is surrounded by threes?
posted by mathowie on Dec 29, 1999 - 3 comments

heh, Altavista left some of their old URLs up after the redesign. Take a look at the top banner, remember how useful the altavista.com page used to be? Thanks to their current redesign, I prefer this version of their search engine.
posted by mathowie on Nov 9, 1999 - 2 comments

A perfect complement to MetaFilter - a weblog metasearch tool. Found this on Scripting News.
posted by triptych on Nov 6, 1999 - 1 comment

Here's a screenshot of a new graphical search engine. Although the interface looks complicated, I have high hopes that this is better than all the attempted visual (usually 3-d) search engines in the past. Hopefully, it will help people find things easier.
posted by mathowie on Aug 18, 1999 - 0 comments

I've always wondered why no one has made a search engine that indexes URL's and nothing more. Network Solutions has just released their dot com search engine, but unfortunately a few test searches came up with some pretty dismal results.
posted by mathowie on Aug 16, 1999 - 0 comments