Recently in Search Engines Category

A lot has been written about cloud computing in the last year and each day seems to bring news of a new player in the cloud arena. So what does the cloud have to offer search engine companies like Hyperix? Well that depends on how deep our pockets are. After all, we need a lot of bandwidth, processing power and data storage to run any real search engine. And as we don't have deep pockets, nor an angel or venture firm backing us we've had to be find creative solutions and innovate where possible.

Up to this point we've been focusing solely on the technology we're using that will differentiate ourselves from any other vertical search platform entities out there. We've got our own small web crawling cluster setup which we've used for some time to test different web crawlers, collect and parse data and measure a variety web crawler values which determine how many CPU cycles, RAM, bandwidth, and storage is necessary to create the vertical search indexes we want. We've also been focusing on the quality of the data we're crawling, the algorithm which ranks the pages crawled, the parsing engines, and the results pages.

It's cool to be Cuil today. Cuil Inc. launched their new search alternative to Google today. Cuil pronounced Cool has received lot's of press today and it helps when it's in the right places. And if it we're not for the fact that the principals have a history of producing value add to existing search products like Google search, then this roll out would be hardly noticed.

But the fact that they have a track record, worked at Google and are boasting that they have an index bigger than Google, is newsworthy. Cuil is led by Anna Patterson a former engineer at Google.  Along with her husband Tom Costello, a search expert in his right, Cuil aims to take on Google. No small feat.

But having a bigger index doesn't mean you're better. And only time will tell if they have what it takes to carve out a piece of the big search pie. They claim to be able to search across 120 billion web pages compared to an estimated 40 billion Google has. Google officially does not reveal how many pages it indexes but others sources suggest that they keep an index of around 60 billion pages. As well Google says that not all of the pages it crawls are indexed because many are duplicates. Working in this industry I can concur that there is a lot of duplicate content out there.

For Cuil to take some market share away from Google it will take more than the boasting of a bigger index. Reality is, with enough hardware and money a startup can build an index that is big, even huge as Cuil has. The test of whether Cuil can succeed will be if the public and business users find more relevant search results through Cuil. Being as big or fast as Google is not enough. You have to be able to change people's search preferences. And that's not easy.

What is noteworthy is that Cuil says they've developed a faster, better way to index pages and just as important use less hardware. Less hardware is important as the cost to index, store and serve up results can be prohibitive. The ongoing downward costs of hard drives, CPU's etc. helps. However even though RAM prices have come down, the price of RAM still is one of the most expensive aspect of creating a searchable index.

In my initial tests of Cuil I was both pleased with the results and disappointed. Some common searches resulted in no results. I'll attribute that to first day bugs. But I also found that sources like Wikipedia were heavily weighted, sometimes in favor of the actually site that I was looking for.

It's public day 1 for Cuil and they have people's attention. Let's see if they can keep it and build some momentum. In the meantime I'll give them a try and report back with my thoughts in the near future.

People are lazy. They don't bookmark sites they're interested in and so on a continuous basis they type the sites name in a Google search field and search for the address. And voila Google serves up the address. But what they're really interested in is some information from that site. Google calls this phenomena "teleporting".

Based on this phenomena Google has introduced "search within a site" feature to their search engine results. So for certain queries you'll be presented with a second search box that searches just that site. This is pretty cool, but there's more to it than that. Below is an example. Say for some reason you wanted to search the New York Times but didn't have the address, fire up Google and it's the first result. But also notice the search box offered.

And now do your search within the 'search nytimes.com' field and get results only from the New York times site. Experienced users have known you could do this for some time. What's new is two things; first the ability to have that search box show on the Google search results page and second you will notice that targeted sponsored links show up on the right of this second search creating what John Battelle calls the "second click". The second click offers publishers highly targeted ad space and Google ultimately more revenue.

What are your thoughts on this new feature?

Over at the Yahoo! Search blog Sharad Verma recaps WebmasterWorld's Pubcon. I could not attend but it sounds like I missed a good conference and relevant keynote for Hyperix. It's nothing new to me but it's nice to see other people talking about it.

Noteworthy Keynote

I thought that Richard Rosenblatt's keynote on Wednesday delivered sound insight. According to Richard, most content online today is about sports, politics, news, and other common topics, leaving long tail topics underserved. He emphasized that there is significant demand for quality content in the long tail and therefore an unaddressed opportunity to create content and capitalize on the monetization opportunities. Susan Esparza at Bruce Clay, Inc. lived blogged from the address, where Richard revealed, "The old model was about owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don't care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail."

As I've said before vertical search is where it's at these days and while I work on a couple of products of my own I'll take the time to recommend someone else's product.

Recently I've had to do some research in the health area for a particular rare condition and I've been trying various search engines. So when I came across Kosmix's Beta search for health I was pleasantly surprised at the results. So if you need health info give Kosmix a try.

Yahoo has updated its search index which of course is relevant to any online business. So I had a quick look to see how SpaceRef did in this update. For our most important keyword/phrase we stayed the same, in the top ten results on page 1. For a couple of secondary keywords we went down a bit and up bit. In other words status quo. Overall I'm happy with this. Of course it's only recently that I've started paying more attention to this and actually working on improving our rankings. It's all about available time. Of note, our competitors remained pretty much the same as before except for one who fell out of the top 50 for what I consider the top keyword in our business, ouch.

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update:

We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Those who follow these weather updates may have noticed that they are occurring more frequently; this is the result of improvements to the indexing system.

Just a follow-up to my post last week on Del.icio.us, Yahoo has added it to their toolbar. No surprise there since Yahoo acquired them recently. It will be interesting to see what affect this has on referrals.

New Tools in the Toolbar: "

We've been working hard on the Yahoo! Toolbar for IE and Firefox so here’s a quick update for you all.

Deliciousness
Speaking of changes, you must have heard about del.icio.us by now! People use del.icio.us to save and share web favorites. We've just created a del.icio.us button for our US users. You add it to your IE or Firefox toolbar to get easy access to your del.icio.us account from anywhere on the web. If you already have toolbar installed, you can add it with a click, otherwise, find it on the Add/Edit Buttons page in the 'Personal Tools' section.

(Via Yahoo! Search blog.)

Google quietly launched this week a new service called Google Analytics primarily for those web site owners who need to track their advertisers campaign effectiveness. And it's free to those web sites owners who have less than 5 million monthly pageviews. Or if you have more than 5 million pageviews but use the Google Adwords service it's free for you as well.

I was little disappointed today when Google launched it's new Instant Messaging and free Talk service. The client program only works on Windows. Considering that Google itself is a fan of Apple computers you have to wonder why they would not have a client for Mac OS X.

The one saving grace is that if you have Mac OS X Tiger installed you can configure iChat to IM with people using the new Google Talk client. But you're out of luck if you want to use Talk feature.

Since I use Vonage for Voice Over IP (VOIP) and am happy with the service I don't think Google's new offering would interest me anyway.

Ok, so you're headed out of town and you want to shop at this particular store at your destination and you know where on the map it is but have no idea what the sore looks like and the area around it. No problem, Amazon's A9 new map service can help you out. In fact to make this work Amazon had people drive around 22 cities in the States with camera's hooked up to GPS enabled laptops to take all those pictures. Now that's cool.

A9 Officially Launches Maps Service; Block View Imagery Added for More Cities: "If you've come across the story today about A9 launching a map service and it sounds familiar, it just might be. About 6 weeks ago I blogged a couple of comments about the service becoming available and included a link to an overview by Greg Linden. So, what's really new at A9 today? 'Block View' imagery has been made available for a few more cities: Salt Lake City, UT Sacramento, CA Long Beach, CA Reno, NV..."

(Via Search Engine Watch Blog.)