Archive for January, 2008
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
I do not usually spend much time with country-specific search engines, especially those in languages I do not speak. Even with English-language country-specific search engines, the general search engines usually have more comprehensive results and better search functionality. So when Phil posted about the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс), I just thought I’d take a quick look. Something piqued my curiosity, and I tried a few of the links. Sure enough, Yandex caches copies of many of the pages that it indexes. Look for the Сохраненная копия link at the bottom left of a search result record as in the screen shot below.
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Sunday, January 20th, 2008
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Sunday, January 20th, 2008
At SearchEngineLand, Barry noticed that Google is no longer alerting searchers that stop words are not searched. Previously, stop words in a query that was not in phrase marks would usually find Google prompting searchers that the stop word in the query is “a very common word and was not included in your search.” Does this mean that Google no longer has any stop words? Based on a few of my tests with a small retrieval set, comparing a search with a stop word and another search with a + in front of the stop word, it does seem that Google will on occassion still ignore some stop words.
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Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Forgot to mention my Newsbreak article from last week, AskEraser: Privacy Potential. In working on that article and looking at AskEraser, one issue occurred to me that I did not cover in the piece itself.
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Friday, January 4th, 2008
Dean posted a scathing review of Google Scholar’s performance over that past year based on a 32% decline in unique visitors according to ComScore data. More data on the changes at various Google properties between Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2007 are available in a TechCrunch posting. While I am sure that this data does not fully reflect actual Google traffic (and at least one comment on Battelle’s Searchblog post says “a staff member from Google . . . tells me that ComScore has some of their numbers wrong”), I still find it fascinating. To no one’s surprise, Web search is by far the busiest Google property. Google Directory traffic went down, which is not surprising since Google has made it so much harder to find. But the huge declines in Product Search (down 73%), Scholar (down 32%), and the Video Search (12% decline) surprised me. Book Search on the other hand has grown significantly in visitors (up 55%).
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