Brad Enslen: General Interest

ATW Better Than Google?

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 16:35:40 GMT

AllTheWeb/FAST and Google: In Practice AllTheWeb Best. Google Village Feb 14 2003 0:25AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 14:19:25 GMT

AltaVista expands multimedia index [Pandia Search Central]

Web Surfing Dying?

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 13:31:14 GMT

Statmarket Survey: Random Surfing A Dying Sport. "...over 64 percent of Internet users arrived at sites by direct navigation." [WebmasterWorld] Interesting trend, but search engines and surfing are not dead yet.

The Other Portals

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 12:21:16 GMT

We hear a lot about the two biggest portals, MSN and Y! but what about the others? Search Company Terra Lycos Cuts More than 20% of Staff. Search Engine Optimization Feb 6 2003 1:26PM ET [Moreover - moreover...] In other portal news: The new(ish) MyWay.com portal has added the option of using several search engines in addition to the default Google.

Wired Article on Xupiter

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 15:25:43 GMT

Xupiter Mongers Deal Spam, Scams. The father and son duo responsible for Xupiter -- a 'toolbar' that many Net users say was installed in their computers without their permission -- have made quite a business of spamming and scamming online. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News] I see Xupiter a lot in my referral logs for some of my sites. Beware of this.

SearchHippo

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 17:27:38 GMT

SearchHippo is a smaller search engine that may not quite as small as it appears. SearchHippo has been very aggressive in allowing free use of it's search results via XML. This means that a lot of metasearch engines use SH. Some small directories have also started using SearchHippo's feed as a backfill for their own directory results. On a small budget SH has managed to gain some ground. SearchHippo only spiders the index page of a site, it does take into account some off page elements for ranking in the SERP's. A backlink to SH increases the chance of being spidered into the DB. If you are a small directory developer SearchHippo is worth looking at for free backfill search results since their quality is IMO better than most of the pay-per-click search feeds that might be available. Recent discussions on SearchHippo include: http://forums.spider-food.net/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4469 http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum16/792.htm

SearchGuild.com New SEO Forum Opens

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 16:03:01 GMT

A new SEO forum has been started by Chris Ridings, formerly of Support Forums. The new forum is Search Guild http://www.searchguild.com/ and promises to be a place for people to speak freely.

Search Engine Blog Interview

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 14:26:40 GMT

Interview with search engine expert Chris Ridings - discusses Google, Page Rank and SearchKing. Interview with search engine expert Chris Ridings - discusses Google, Page Rank and SearchKing [Search Engine Blog] This is an excellent interview, although I am saddened to learn that Chris has left Support Forums http://supportforums.org . I really enjoyed his insights there. The interview is well worth reading.

Shopping Search Engines

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:29:28 GMT

Shopping Search Engine Users. BizReport.com Jan 30 2003 4:04AM ET [Moreover - moreover...] Is this the Next Big Thing?

ilectric.com

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 15:08:12 GMT

Paul_UK reported a really cool find in this Spider Food Forums thread. Paul found ilectric.com http://ilectric.com/ . The site is a multi-search platform containing a metasearch, directory, news search and search engine selector. Normally nothing special. However, if you click on the URL at the bottom of each listing you get the Whois and Alexa traffic graph for that site! This is very handy for researching the competition.

Zapmeta.com

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 19:09:10 GMT

I ran across a nice metasearch engine the other day: Zapmeta http://www.zapmeta.com/ Zapmeta is still in beta testing but features a very attractive design and a nice bunch of web engines: AV, goClick, Findwhat, Wisenut*, Yahoo*, MSN*, AOL*, ODP, AlltheWeb*, Hotbot*, ePilot, Gigablast. (* means the engine is a default). Zapmeta also has a mp3 search.

News Aggregators

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 23:22:37 GMT

If you want to get a news aggregator and get headlines from this blog, other blogs and hundreds of news outlets on your desktop check out this article: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php It is a good starting point for explaining the usefulness of having one. And for sending out info in RSS format. Or you can find more free aggregator software, magazine reviews etc. here.

Search in 2003 - The Bigger Boys

Sun, 26 Jan 2003 20:58:33 GMT

Throughout 2001 we saw a continuing collapse of the search engine industry. Snap/NBCi, Excite followed Infoseek/Go.com into oblivion. 2002 saw a consolidation of search marketshare into the few remaining search engines in general and Google in particular. Large general directories like ODP and the Yahoo directory went into decline as users abandoned directories for actual searching. Looksmart quit being a directory altogether. I think 2003 will bring some excitement back into the search engine market. Old warhorses like AltaVista http://altavista.com/ have remade themselves. Upstarts like Gigablast http://gigablast.com/ are starting to step to the front. For a lot of people a lot rests on what Yahoo will do with Inktomi. If Yahoo starts using Inktomi results on the Yahoo portal it will help break the virtual blockade that a PR0 from Google can represent to a website. That will be big news. 2003 ought to be very interesting.