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The Search Industry Blog

Yahoo Mindset
By Nathan Enns on Friday, May 27th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
A very cool tool called Yahoo! Mindset. It allows you to tweak your results according to the type of information you are looking for.
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AnooX Challenges Google and Yahoo to a Competition
By Nathan Enns on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
AnooX believes it has more relevant results than Google or Yahoo and is challenging them both to a relevancy competition. You can read about it here.


My thoughts:

1. It would probably be a bad public relations move for Google or Yahoo to accept a challenge from AnooX or from any other search engine for that matter. They may or may not win on some of the tests but why risk bringing a smaller search engine a bunch of traffic or risk the chance of a loss?

2. I tried a few search queries at AnooX and it may not be the most relevant for all search queries. You can see for yourself but AnooX does not return the official websites for any of the following queries as of this writing: “Google”, “Yahoo”, “MSN”, “FyberSearch”. When I tried those same search queries at Google and Yahoo I received the official websites for each one.

3. Not that FyberSearch is perfect, but a search for “AnooX” at FyberSearch currently returns www.anoox.com as the first result but a search for “FyberSearch” at AnooX doesn’t return www.fybersearch.com anywhere in the results.

4. It really doesn’t matter if Google or Yahoo accept the challenge to AnooX. If they do then AnooX gets a BUNCH of traffic (AnooX are already getting a little press just because they made the challenge). If Google and Yahoo reject or don’t respond to the challenge then AnooX gets to claim that Yahoo and Google were too scared and therefore must have less relevant results.


Just for the record, I have no problems with AnooX. I think that they have a nice engine going that does return relevant results for many queries.

Good luck guys! I would personally love to see Google, Yahoo or other major search engines accept the challenge.
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Ask Jeeves to be Renamed?
By Nathan Enns on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
It looks like it will be after they finalize the acquisition with IAC.
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Official BitTorrent Search Engine
By Nathan Enns on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Here is a quote from the story from Wired News:

"SAN FRANCISCO -- Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen's popular BitTorrent protocol.

The free search tool will be the first large-scale commercial offering from BitTorrent, a five-person company headed by Cohen that so far has drawn most of its revenue from T-shirt sales and PayPal donations."
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Ask Jeeves Acquires Excite Europe
By Nathan Enns on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Here is a quote from the press release:

"OAKLAND, Calif., May 20, 2005 -- Ask Jeeves, Inc., a leading provider of information retrieval technologies, brands and Internet advertising services, today announced the acquisition of Excite Italia B.V., the operator of Excite Europe, a network of pan-European portal properties, from Tiscali, S.p.A. Ask Jeeves acquired the U.S.-operated Excite.com portal in March 2004."
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Google Desktop Search for Enterprise
By Nathan Enns on Thursday, May 19th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Here is a quote from their product site:

"Google Desktop Search for Enterprise helps you easily manage the ever-growing mountain of information located on your computers and includes key standards-based administrator features that provide enhanced security, centralized configuration and easy company-wide deployment. Perhaps best of all—it's free."
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A9 Update
By Nathan Enns on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Check out their Whats New page. Here is an overview of the update list:


1. More Intuitive Search Column Selection

2. Location Search

3. Personalized Tools on the Home Page

4. Faster Site

5. Single Column Mode

6. Drag and Drop Changes

7. Opera 8.0 support
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Programs Using the Yahoo Search Developer Network
By Nathan Enns on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Check out some cool programs written using the Yahoo Search Developer Network.
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Final release of the product formally known as MSN Toolbar Suite with Desktop Search
By Nathan Enns on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Go check out the post at the MSN Search Blog.
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Google's First Shareholder Meeting - Somewhat Lonely
By Nathan Enns on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
It looks like everyone wanted some Google stock but many of those same people decided not to visit Google for their first shareholder meeting. I find it kind of strange more people did not attend...
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Funny Site
By Nathan Enns on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Check out this site that pokes fun at Google.
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One More Way to Access Local UK
By Nathan Enns on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Here is a quote from the Google Blog post:

"We were on a roll after we launched Google Local UK last month, and went on to build a mobile web browser version of Google Local for our UK users. Users can now access Local on their mobile by going straight to the Local homepage or the Google UK homepage."
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Not Everyone Loves Google Web Accelerator
By Nathan Enns on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
As many of you know I was not a big fan of Google Web Accelerator. I decided to do a little more reading about it tonight to see how things were going for Google. It didn't take long to find out that people were haivng problems.


Here are some of the articles I found:

1. Much Controversy Over Google's Accelerator

2. Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast

3. Google Web Accelerator Raises Worries


By thw way, Google is not allowing anyone to download the program anymore. Just take a look here.
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Yahoo Video Search Out of Beta
By Nathan Enns on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Accourding to the Yahoo Search Blog their video search engine is no longer in beta.
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RustySearch
By Nathan Enns on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Rate your search results with RustrySearch.
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How do you Keep America from Taking Over World History?
By Nathan Enns on Monday, May 2nd, 2005 at 12:00 AM
Make sure Google Library has competition.

Here is a quote from a story relating to this issue by iafrica.com:

"Nineteen European national libraries have joined forces against a planned communications revolution by internet search giant Google to create a global virtual library, organisers said on Wednesday.

The 19 libraries are backing instead a multi-million euro counter-offensive by European nations to put European literature online."
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