SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

November 30, 2006

Goodbye Search Engine Watch & Best Wishes!

Today is my last day with Search Engine Watch, with me heading to my new digs at Search Engine Land tomorrow. I wanted to wish Search Engine Watch all the best going forward, plus help readers understand some of the changes that are happening. To do that best, I thought I'd go all the way back to the beginning, to the birth of Search Engine Watch.

In case you missed it, My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines from earlier this year covers how I got into reporting on search engines in the first place. Information posted as part of my web development work in 1996 expanded and relaunched as Search Engine Watch on June 9, 1997 (that's it in the image above). It rapidly drew more attention and traffic, in no small part due to Eric Ward's fantastic way of getting news around.

Later that year, I was approached by Meckermedia (then renamed Internet.com, INT Media and Jupitermedia) about buying the site. I decided to sell to them on November 19, 1997. It meant the site could grow and I could stay firmly focused on the editorial development, which is my passion. I stayed on, contracted to be editor.

Two years later, the first companion conference to the site was held, Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco on November 18, 1999. I produced the content for that event as a contractor and have since continued to produce the major shows in the US, as the series has grown.

Last year, both the site and the conference series were sold to the current owner, Incisive Media. For 2007, we didn't agree on contract renewal terms, which resulted in me last August announcing my departure from both SEW and SES.

I'm happy to say that further talks resulted in me staying on to do SES show in the US in 2007. I will chair the SES New York 2007 event, then cochair the San Jose show and take part in Chicago at the end of 2007 as a speaker and moderator.

Search Engine Watch was a different matter. I felt it was better for me to go off on my own, which is what I'm going to do. In some ways, I'm leaving my baby behind. But the baby's pretty grown up now!

I joked with my managing editor Elisabeth Osmeloski that I'll likely become one of the top traffic referral sources to Search Engine Watch, since I'll be mentioning stories I've done in the past over here. But it won't be only past stories that I'll be referring to. If there's good content on Search Engine Watch, I'll be mentioning it and talking about it, just as I've always done for any web site even if it might have been seen as a competitor to SEW by some.

As I said earlier this year:

Whatever I do, I've tried to make it a hallmark to always to be inclusive of content, people, web sites or organizations that will help my readers, even if I might technically be competing with them. Whatever I end up doing, you can expect I'll still be pointing at Search Engine Watch as appropriate and wish those that remain a part of it the very best.

That remains the case!

My goodbye is less tearful because writers I've worked with day-in and day-out are joining me at Search Engine Land. Barry Schwartz (he told me to say goodbye to everyone), Phil Bradley (despite having a name that doesn't end in S), Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith and Greg Sterling will be writing with me from December. Chris Sherman joins us in January. I'm naturally thrilled to continue working with them.

Elisabeth, who I mentioned already, stays on here at Search Engine Watch as managing editor and is working on plans with Incisive to take the site into its new life without me at the helm, a new generation for Search Engine Watch. She'll be along later with a post of her own on this.

I am saying a sad goodbye to my days administrating and moderating the Search Engine Watch Forums. In just over two years, an incredible community has sprung up over there, with nearly 15,000 members.

Earlier this week, I said a private goodbye and thank you to the hard-working moderators that have nurtured the community over this time. I'll share part of that to underscore what I said earlier about being inclusive:

I have absolutely no intention of going over to the new place with any type of "us versus them" type of attitude. I've always tried to be inclusive of good content and communities regardless if they might be seen as competitive to SEW. At SEL, I plan to continue the same. If there are good discussions here, I'm going to be pointing at them. If there are good opportunities for the mods with SEW, I honestly want the best for you. By no means do I want anyone thinking that staying on here, or perhaps doing other things with SEW, is somehow something I won't like or perhaps "disloyal" in any way. I don't know if anyone was even thinking like that -- but if so, don't!

That's pretty much it. I'm going to finish my last day doing a bit of blogging, do my last monthly newsletter, then I'm giving Elisabeth a virtual hug and dropping my keys off at the virtual door.

Any comments, please feel free to add them to this thread at the Search Engine Watch Forums, Best Wishes, Search Engine Watch!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:30 AM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Google Buys Birthplace Garage

Google has purchased the garage where the company developed after its initial birth at Stanford University. Actually, they've purchased the home of Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki. Before she became a Google VP, Wojcicki rented the garage attached to her home to Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine from the Associated Press has details about the sale, which was probably in the $1.2 million range. As of yet, Google doesn't know what exactly it may do with the home the article reports. It's already a tourist attraction, it seems.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:23 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2006

Google's 8th Birthday

Google put up a special birthday logo for themselves today, since today is Google's 8th birthday. Or is it? In last years post, we asked Didn't Google Just Have A Birthday? We quoted the When is Google's birthday? from Google's support page, which said back then:

Google's official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we're just getting started. To discover more about Google's history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

Today, it says;

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google's history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

So maybe today is Google's birthday and not on 9/7 or some other date. In any event, happy 8 Google!

Postscript: Google just blogged about the birthday here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Reflecting On Direct Hit, The Google Rival

Perspective: The man who would be Sergey from News.com talks with Gary Culliss, formerly of Direct Hit, on cashing out of search early on. Google and Direct Hit came along at the same time (see Counting Clicks and Looking at Links from me in 1998). Ask Jeeves bought Direct Hit, making the original group involved with it a good chunk of money. But Direct Hit effectively died as a brand and a technology while Google....

I disagree with News.com that in 1998, Google was somehow lumped in with "non-household name" sites while Direct Hit was the shining hope. They both got a lot of attention, but Google very quickly surpassed Direct Hit as the wunderkind to watch. A little bit of history and reflection, in this Q&A.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:19 AM | Permalink

April 17, 2006

My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines

Ten years ago today, I first starting writing publicly about search engines. If we had blogs back then, I suppose I would have been a search blogger. But we didn't. We hand-coded our HTML, walked through the snow for eight miles to FTP files to our web servers, and we liked it :)

My involvement with search engines goes back to my first year as a student at the University Of California, Irvine in 1983. No, I wasn't part of the university's highly regarded information and computer science department. Instead, I was an English major -- and a pretty bored one for my first two months, when I had to commute until getting on-campus housing.

I spent some time exploring the library, having been a big library user since I was a child. The library had a magical electronic card catalog called Melvyl (named for Melvil Dewey, who created the Dewey Decimal System). For fun, I'd do Melvyl searches for broad topics such as history, art or love, to see how many matches would come back. I could routinely crash the search routine by doing this.

The system would diligently try, telling me it would take 50, 60, 80 search cycles, and then the countdown would begin. Some searches would eventually get through all cycles and give me a matching results count. Often, the system would just give up as the countdown approached the teens.

My 1996 Study

Search engines remained fascinating to me when I reencountered them in 1995. I'd left working as a newspaper reporter to go into web development, since I didn't want to miss out what was obviously going to be the future of publishing. As the general manager of Maximized Online, my job was to help get people in the Orange County, California area online. We'd build web sites, get them publicized to search engines and other publicity venues, plus host them.

One of our clients was upset at the end of 1995 that his OC jobs site wasn't ranking tops for a search on "orange county" in WebCrawler. We didn't have a good answer to give him. We'd done the submission, made use of the meta tags the search engines said to use, but why exactly a site would rank well wasn't well known. So I decided to look into it.

I spent January through April 1996 making changes to the InfoPages directory that my company maintained, a search engine just for Orange County web resources, to see if it could rank better in a search for "orange county." I tried putting those words in the body text, the title tag, in the meta tags and also checked to see if spamming helped, if repeating the word over and over would have an impact.

I published the results online, and 10 years on, a lot of the advice remains exactly the same. Don't depend on ALT text. Don't fixate on only one or two terms, because there are many ways people will seek you -- a long tail before we had talk of long tails. Build links, because links can send you traffic. And don't fixate on getting traffic just from search engines. The conclusions from that study are below for those really interested; others can jump past for the rest of this article.

There don't seem to be any magic methods that will make a page appear at the top of every search engines' listings. There's too much fluctuation on the web for any page to claim a foothold, and all the engines handle relevancy slightly differently. However, there are some general tips that do help a page appear more relevant.

  • Have text on your home page: Search engine catalogs contain the text read from the various home pages the engines visit. If a page lacks descriptive text, then there is little chance that page will come up in the results of a search engine query. It's not enough for that text to be in graphics. It must be HTML text. Some search engines will catalog ALT text and text in comment and meta tags. To be safe, a straight HTML description is recommended.  
  • Pick your keywords: Focus on the two or three keywords that you think are most crucial to your site, then ensure those words are both in your title and mentioned early on your web page. Generally, most people will already have those words present on their pages but may not also have them in page titles. Keep in mind that the keywords you consider crucial may not be exactly what users enter. Our study focused on making the InfoPages directory appear high on lists if keywords "Orange County" were entered. The lack of success with some search engines does not mean that the site isn't being found. Many people find the site by entering more words, such as "Orange County California" or "Orange County Web." The addition of just one extra word can suddenly make a site appear more relevant, and it can be impossible to anticipate what that word will be. The best bet is to focus on your chosen keywords but to also have a complete description.  
  • Have links to inside pages: If there are no links to inside pages from the home page, it seems that some search engines will not fully catalog a site. Unfortunately, the most descriptive, relevant pages that are often inside pages rather than the home page. You can also try sending search engines directly to your lower levels, if they don't ordinarily go there.  
  • Forget Spamming: For one thing, spamming doesn't seem to work with every search engine. Ethically, the content of most web pages ought to be enough for search engines to determine relevancy without webmasters having to resort to repeating keywords for no reason other than to try and "beat" other web pages. The stakes will simply keep rising, and users will also begin to hate sites that undertake these measures. Efforts would be better spent on networking and alternative forms of publicity described below.  
  • Network: If your site fails to make the top ten lists, then get together with those that do. Perhaps some might be considered "competitors," but others might be happy to link to your site in return for a link back. After all, your site may appear first when slightly different keywords are used. Links are what the web was built on, and they remain one of the best ways for people to find your site.  
  • Relax: Search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, but they are not the only way. People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, the traditional media, newsgroup postings, web directories and links from other sites. Many times, these alternative forms are far more effective draws than are search engines. The audience you want may be visiting to a site that you can partner with, or reading a magazine that you've never informed of your site. Do the simple things to best make your site relevant to search engines, then concentrate on the other areas.

A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines

Along with the study, I also published a collection of documents called "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines." My goal was to help site owners better understand the essentials of being found plus identify which search engines really mattered. Knowing who mattered was crucial when you'd have some search engines like Galaxy forcing your through a three part, multiple question submission process to be included in their directory. Was spending all that time worthwhile? (For Galaxy, the answer was no!).

The guide provided links to the FAQs of each search engines, along with my own observations about whether how each search engines said it worked actually lived up to reality. There was a guide to which search engines I considered to be "major" or most important to site owners and searchers alike. I had a "Strategic Alliances & Victories" chart to show which search engines had deals with the Netscape or Internet Explorer browsers and which had gained positive reviews in magazines.

The information I published quickly generated a lot of positive feedback, both from site owners and searchers such as librarians. At the same time, the web development company I worked for closed, so that the parent firm could concentrate on web software development. I hung out my internet consultant shingle and kept maintaining the Webmaster's Guide on a part time basis, sending out a newsletter update (The Search Engine Report) twice that year, along with making further site updates.

In 1997, I moved to the UK from California, so my wife could be closer to her family. I also began spending more and more time on the site, as well as writing freelance articles on search for various publications. In the middle of the year, I rebranded the site as Search Engine Watch, which generated more attention. By the end of the year, Mecklermedia purchased the site from me, and I continued on as editor of it.

The Search Revolution

Ten years on, I remain as fascinated with search engines as ever. I've been fortunate to help chronicle the birth of an entirely new advertising medium. Equally important has been the birth of an entirely new way for people to seek out information.

I knew search engines were important when I decided to write about them. The journalist in me could see they were a good story, especially when you realized that under the hood, they weren't doing things like crawling as often as people widely believed. But a study by Keen in 2001 especially resonated with me. Search engines (as a whole -- we weren't Google obsessed yet then) were the single most likely way people would seek information.

The study was small, but the findings were still stunning. In only about five years, search engines had ousted things like friends, family, books, magazines, libraries and other perfectly good resources for seeking answers.

Some of this was bad. I'd personally watched people when doing search training spending ages trying to find a phone number, when a call to telephone information would have found much faster. Old but still useful search strategies were abandoned in favor of the magic search box.

Lots of this is good. Search engines remain amazing tools that get us the right answers quickly in many circumstances.

Looking Ahead

Will I still be doing this in 20 years? Almost certainly not, at least not in the daily grind format I've been doing. I'd like to keep writing about search issues, but eventually I'll move away from the regular day-to-day coverage to perhaps focus on less frequent but deeper looks at particular search issues.

I'm also thinking a lot about doing a book these days. I'd always wanted to do a book on search, indeed the exact type of history that John Battelle did a fantastic job with in The Search.

Since that's come out, I've thought more and more about doing a more personal retelling of web search history -- the evolution, developments and trends I've seen from having been in the trenches of covering them over the years.

I'd also like to do a separate one talking to various search marketers, spotlighting them and focusing on how that medium has evolved over the years and where it will be going. The most fascinating book idea remains the impact of search on our everyday lives, how people make use of them, how habits have changed, our laws are starting to account for the power of search and many related issues like that.

Someday! What I can say is that for the near future, I expect to remain working on the site and coverage as I have, bringing some of our standing content back up to date, which I know has been neglected due to the need to cover the news that continues to flow in. My original Webmaster's Guide helped many understand search engines, and I very much want to ensure Search Engine Watch remains as a leading resource doing that in the years to come.

Looking Back

I don't have a succinct list of big picture items or "high order bits" to offer. A lot of this has already been covered in things I've written, so instead I'm going to spend some time recapping pieces I think are most important below. These are either big trend pieces I've done or big shifts in the search landscape I think worth noting.

I know -- I KNOW -- I've left some things out. My apologies, if so. It's a bit easier for me to cover all the things I've written that what me or Chris Sherman both have done, and he's clearly covered tons himself. Plus, skimming through 10 years worth of writings means I'll accidentally miss stuff. If you want to go poking yourself, I'll give more tips after the summary.

The biggest overall theme in doing the recap is how that big old wheel keeps spinning around and around, with people often buying hype because they don't remember things have come before -- or marketers making errors because they don't understand issues that were explored already in the past.

I've definitely felt myself getting more and more jaded. Part of that's bad, because there are cool, new things that I don't want to be blinded to. But then again, you go through the list below and tell me if you don't emerge feeling a big jaded about some ideas and concepts that are retreads.

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

  • WebTop Search Rage Study: Study sez we depend on search engines so much now that we'll get enraged if they don't give us the right answers quickly.  
  • Bush's Dubious Victory At Google: Google's link system takes another blow as the number one result for motherf***r is the official George W. Bush campaign web site.  
  • The End For Search Engines?: A look at why so many search engines were on the ropes or dead by this year but how paid listings gave hope and life for new ones.  
  • Internet Top Information Resource, Study Finds: Search engines and the internet found to be the top information resource.  
  • Being Search Boxed To Death: Google and other search engines today are struggling with how to best tell people about the many vertical search results they have. It's a long-standing problem, as this story looks at.  
  • Google Acquires Deja Newsgroup Service: Google gets its first real heavy dose of criticism after Deja junkies freak out when Usenet features get lost temporarily after the acquisition.  
  • Search Engine Marketing Finally Getting Respect: Despite search being an essential marketing strategy for years, finally more traditional outlets begin to "get it" and give search marketing some resepct.  
  • Avoiding The Search Gap: Search is one of the most popular web activities, yet most sites don't get the majority of their traffic from search? What gives? It's the search gap and key to understanding how search makes an introduction that can lead to a lifetime of visits.  
  • Fourth Time Lucky For AltaVista?: "AltaVista could give Madonna a run for her money in the changing your image game. Earlier this month, the service once again significantly changed its look and feel, the fourth such redesign in just over a year." That was 2001. And in 2000, there were another four designs, rather than just improving the results. Perhaps they should have changed the name to MSN Windows AltaVista Live Search.  
  • Make Room For Teoma: A different twist on link analysis, but more important, a new search voice worth taking seriously -- and Ask Jeeves did, buying it later that year.  
  • Consumer Group Asks FTC To Investigate Search Ads : Perhaps those "featured listings" popping up everywhere through payment should be better labeled as ads, the FTC is asked.  
  • Desperately Seeking Search Engine Marketing Standards : Another push for standards in SEO falls into issues of knowing what exactly the rules are.  
  • Search Engine Marketing: You Like It, You Really Like It -: I suggest the term "search engine marketing" as an umbrella term to encompass search engine optimization (the act of getting better free listings on search engines) and search advertising (paying for listings). Readers like it. FYI, today I use the term "search marketing" a bit more.

2002

2003

  • Yahoo To Buy Inktomi: Hmm. Maybe Google's not our friend and we should own our own crawler-based technology to protect ourselves. So thinks and acts Yahoo.  
  • Overture To Buy AltaVista: Hmm. Maybe Google offering both paid and unpaid results really is an advantage and we should own some technology to produce crawler-based editorial results. So thinks and acts Overture.  
  • Overture To Buy FAST Web Search Division: Hmm. Maybe we should by FAST as well and keep competitors from getting the technology.  
  • Ending The Debate Over Cloaking: Perhaps we could skip past defining spam by techniques and look instead at intent and results? Techniques like cloaking doesn't always indicate a harmful results for search engines -- and some of them certainly allow it with approval.  
  • Google Throws Hat Into The Contextual Advertising Ring: Later to be called AdSense, Google starts an entirely new economy of bloggers and publishers depending on its ads -- plus ironically begins funding a lot of the same spam that screws up its search results.  
  • Google And The Big Brother Nomination: Is the Do No Evil company really evil in terms of spying on us? A long, long look at accusations and verdicts.  
  • Search Privacy At Google & Other Search Engines: Search privacy wasn't (and isn't) just a Google issue, as this article explained.  
  • Coping With GDS, The Google Dance Syndrome: An entire generation of search marketers was now online knowing nothing but Google Google Google and freaking over each "Google Dance" that altered the results.  
  • Yahoo To Buy Overture: Hmm. Maybe we should own our own search ad system, thinks and acts Yahoo.  
  • Microsoft's MSN Search To Build Crawler-Based Search Engine: Hmm. Maybe Google's going to eat us for lunch, so we should own our own search technology. So thinks and acts Microsoft.  
  • Searching With Invisible Tabs: How search engines are going to automatically deliver the right vertical search results, even if you don't click on the right "tab."  
  • Florida Google Dance Resources: A huge Google Dance shakes the results for site owners large and small, and an entire new generation of search marketers gets reeducated about how search engines are fickle creatures that you should never, ever build your entire business around.

2004

2005

2006 (To Date)

As I said earlier, I know I've missed stuff. Unfortunately, there's no easy way for me to see everything written on Search Engine Watch over the years in one single list. For those who wish to explore, the Search Engine Report archives are probably the best thing to review. Each month, there's an issue of the Search Engine Report that recaps virtually everything of importance that was published on the site. You can also see the SearchDay archives and the SEW Blog archives, though material from both of those places is integrated into Search Engine Report mailings.

Thanks

Finally, some thanks....

  • Ken Spreitzer, my college friend who brought me on to do his web development company, getting me firmly going along a path that led to Search Engine Watch. Plus thanks to all those I worked with at Maximized Online: Tom, Joachim, Steve, Geeman (5 minutes!) and Michelle. I learned tons from all of them.  
  • Glenn Fleischman, former moderator of the now defunct Internet Marketing Discussion List that helped educate me and many others about internet marketing when it was just developing.  
  • Eric Ward, who freely provided guidance to many people looking to learn more about link building in the early days, including myself. Plus, he was Search Engine Watch's very first subscriber, coughing up a donation when I asked people to consider the site as shareware and help support it.  
  • Jupitermedia (which acquired the site as Mecklermedia, changed into Internet.com, then INT Media until taking its current name). Having someone take over the advertising and technical side of Search Engine Watch was a huge relief, allowing me to focus firmly on the editorial. Chris Elwell in particular was a rock of support and wisdom over the years. Incisive Media now owns the site, of course, and remains as welcomed in leaving me to focus on the editorial.  
  • The search engines, and in particular the many employees who I've spoken with over the years, who have shared ideas, thoughts, theories and more. I won't name any individuals, simply because I fear I'd inadvertently leave some off -- plus it would be a huge list. You all play such an important role in this still developing field; keep doing great stuff.  
  • The search marketers, who remain largely unsung heroes. You get people found; you get held to unbelievably high measuring standards yet still deliver; you help subsidize and make possible the search engines we all depend on. You also serve as a check-and-balance on the search engines. If they're playing favorites or doing something odd, you know it and spread the word.  
  • The searchers, and in particular those who read the site to learn to search better. Your questions have inspired articles; please keep them coming. You're also what this is all about -- delivering up content to serve you better.  
  • Search Engine Watch readers. There have been plenty of long days when I've written a long piece about some issue, then wondered if anyone cares. Then out of the blue, I'll get a word of thanks -- and that means the world to a writer.  
  • Search Engine Watch members. For the longest time, I asked people to consider SEW as if it were a shareware site. A few sent in donations, then even more did when I opened a special members-only area. During the dotcom downturn, members helped ensure the survival of the site. We thrived because you helped fund us directly. Thanks to all of those who've shown support in this way, and I look forward to expanding benefits for you in the coming months.  
  • The Search Engine Watch team. Chris Sherman's been my partner in search crime here on SEW since 2001, and I couldn't have been luckier in having him come aboard. He's been a great person to work with and produces wonderful content day in and day out. Elisabeth Osmeloski helped build our SEW Forums up from nothing to nearly 10,000 members now, and I'm excited to have her launching into doing more with the site overall. Gary Price is no longer part of our line-up, and we do still miss him -- but Barry Schwartz has been welcomed and doing a fantastic job. Plus my thanks to Jennifer Slegg and now Brian Smith for picking up their areas on our SEW Blog, along our many SEW Forums moderators who help keep things running over there.  
  • My wife and my boys, who've missed me through too many dinners while I've had to finish and article or a newsletter or had to see me disappear to take a call about some last-minute product launch.

Want to comment or discuss? There's a thread going at our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:05 PM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

LookSmart's Zeal Directory To Close

Once a potential rival to the Open Directory, LookSmart had decided to close its volunteer-driven Zeal directory at the end of this month. LookSmart acquired the service in 2000. Though the Zeal site itself is still accepting registrations, here's the closure message LookSmart's sent out:

Dear Valued Zealots and Contributors,

Thank you for being a part of the Zeal community and contributing your time and knowledge to the Directory. After trying to put the deserved resources behind Zeal, we have made the conscious decision to shut down Zeal.com. On March 28, 2006 Zeal will no longer be available. We are not selling Zeal.com and have no future plans for it at this time.

We think that avid Zeal users will appreciate the large, interesting and vital community at Furl.net (www.furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps you save information that?s important to you, share it with others and see what others are saving and find important.

With Furl you can:

  • Save Web pages to a personal, permanent archive with 5GB of storage
  • Revisit the full text of your favorite Web pages
  • Share articles and information with friends and family members with simple email pass-along tools
  • Use Furl as a platform for social networking and discovering useful information
  • Share articles and information with people that share common interests using RSS feeds
  • See what other Furl members are saving and sharing
  • Save your favorite Zeal content

Whether you are browsing the Web, travel planning, recipe sharing, house hunting or researching, Furl is a wonderful tool. Join the thousands of people that are using Furl every day to find, save and share information that is important to them.

Postscript: Chris Fillius who was involved with Zeal early on shares some thoughts on its demise in Zeal.com, R.I.P. at his Search Lounge blog, plus Guest Obituary for Zeal, by Alice Swanberg there has some further thoughts on the closure.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:31 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Paul Flaherty, A Founder Of AltaVista, Passes Away UPDATED

Sad news that Paul Flaherty, one of the founders of AltaVista, passed away on Friday. I don't have more details at the moment, other than that there was to be a wake and funeral for him today. The news came to me from Jeff Black, a former general manager of AltaVista. I'll postscript more below as I hear. FYI, Richard Selzter has a nice guide to some early AltaVista alumnus here. An old home page for Paul is here. Chris Sherman has some early history of AltaVista here.

Postscript: More information on funeral arrangements, Paul's background, family donations can now be found here.

Postscript by Barry: On March 26th, the KTLA posted this update on Paul Flaherty.

AP also has coverage here.

Want to comment or express condolences or thoughts? You can also visit our SEW Forums thread, An AltaVista Founder, Paul Flaherty, Passes Away.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:02 PM | Permalink

February 26, 2006

Ask Jeeves Gets New Menu Sidebar, Maps; Retires Teoma Chris Sherman will have a more formal write-up later in SearchDay about new changes you can now spot up on Ask, in particular a "Search Tools" navigational sidebar that lets you jump between things like web and image search. New on that sidebar is a Maps area, where you can get traditional maps and aerial views. Ask has also announced that the Teoma search engine has been retired. Teoma.com now redirects to Ask Jeeves. The Teoma search technology is being rebranded as ExpertRank, something we predicted back in November.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:45 PM | Permalink

February 20, 2006

Farewell, Mr. Jeeves

Jeeves, the butler mascot for Ask Jeeves, is retiring, with the search engine slimming down to its long used but little promoted ask.com domain name. More about Jeeves' retirement, including highlights of his career, in today's SearchDay article, Jeeves Retires.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:16 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2006

Report: Lycos May Have Laid Off Most Its Search Team Go

Battelle over at Searchblog reports that two sources have told him that Lycos may have let most of its search team go and will keep just a skeleton crew in place to run the service.

For the search historians out there, the Lycos crawling technology was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then entered into an exclusive licensing deal with CMG@Ventures on June 20, 1995. Here's the original press release. The news release credits Michael Maudlin as the lead developer of the Lycos spider. He is also listed as the inventor on two U.S. Patents. An interesting read by Maudlin from 1997, "Lycos: Design choices in an Internet search service," is available here.

Postscript: If you would like to read more early web search announcements, here's a compilation of them I put together several years ago.

Postscript by Barry: Loren Baker reports that Lycos Responds to Rumors of Abandoning Search. Where he reports on a letter received by Jim Hedger from Lycos stating; "Lycos has had a recent restructuring, which did involve members of the search team. But Lycos is NOT divesting in Search and has not abandoned search." More information at Search Engine Journal.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:34 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2006

Lack of Search Marketing During Christmas Season Hurt FTD's Bottom Line, Head of Marketing Replaced

For your, "the importance of search marketing folder."

An article from DMNews: FTD: Online Search Misstep Cost Sales, points out that FTD (the flower delivery people) said that not doing more search engine marketing during the Christmas season caused the consumer end of FTD not to do as well as they had planned. The comments were made on Wednesday when FTD announced their quarterly earnings.

From the statement (full text here): The consumer business's order growth for the 2005 Christmas season was below expectations [because of] our decision not to pursue high-cost order volume associated with online search," FTD president/CEO Michael J. Soenen said in a statement. "In anticipation of continued competitiveness in the online search environment and to better manage the consumer segment business going forward, we have made management changes within this segment including the replacement of our head of marketing."

I wonder if the now replaced head of marketing received some flowers to make him or her feel better? (-:

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, FTD's Head Of Marketing Replaced Over Failure In Maximizing Search.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:06 AM | Permalink

January 19, 2006

Google Updates Company Milestones Page

Those of you who track Google's each and every move might be interested to learn that the company has just updated their Google Milestones page that serves as a brief corporate history with more key events from 2005. They've also already added few events from 2006 (Google Video Store, Google Pack, and Larry Page's keynote at CES).

Posted by Gary Price at 11:08 AM | Permalink

January 3, 2006

Happy 10th Birthday To Dogpile

Today, metasearch tool Dogpile begins celebrating its 10th birthday. Congrats! Here's the Dogpile home page from December of 1996 and a USENET announcement from its original developer, Aaron Flin.

A decade is a long time both for technology and for me (I had a lot more hair on my head back then). These days, as many of my posts reflect, I'm a strong believer in meta/federated search concept and what it can potentially offer the searcher. It's still far from perfect but the technology from various providers is getting better all of the time.

To celebrate their 10th birthday, the Dogpile team has put together a page of their "favorite combinations." It's a fun list and they invite users to submit their favorites.

Examples: Spoon + Fork=Spork Turkey + Duck + Chicken=Turducken

Posted by Gary Price at 2:16 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2005

A Look Back as Google's Library Project Passes the One Year Mark

Tomorrow, the Google Library Project will be one year old. It's been quite a year of news and controversy. Here's a link to our first SearchDay article about the Google Library Project from December 14, 2004. In this article, I made sure to mention other digitization projects like Project Gutenberg that have been around since 1971.

What's crucial to remember is that Google Print (recently renamed Google Book Search) itself was around before Google's announcement to digitize the full or partial holdings of five large university libraries.

Let's review.

Google Print for books (materials direct from publishers) was opened "widely To publishers" on October 6, 2004. However, the existence of Google Print goes back even before that to December 17, 2003, when Google began offering book searches. The original Google Book search indexed, "only a small excerpt from each book, typically taken from the inside cover, jacket reviews, author biographies or the book's introduction.

To this day, Google Book Search (the material direct from publishers) and the Google Library Project are frequently confused. SEW BLOG has tried to make the differences clear since day one. Recently, Danny did a great job of explaining the important differences in his post: Once Again -- The Difference Between Google Print & Google Library. This post also contains links to many other articles about the project, digitization, and opinion about copyright issues.

The remainder of this post will offer a few key posts about the project (yes, I could have included more), a timeline of sorts, from the past year, along with links to some other Google Print/Book Search/Library Project related documents.

+ Questions & Answers Recap On Google Library This Info Today article by Barbara Quint is loaded with details about the project.

+ France, Google & The Need for Digitization Project Cooperation

+ Copyright Questions On Google Digitization Project

+ Some Publishers Not Happy With Google's Library Digitization Program

+ Google Library Digitization Agreement With University Of Michigan Now Available

+ The Digitization Of The Library

+ More On Publisher Concerns On Google Library Project

+ Google Gives Publishers Opt-Out From Library Scanning Project; One Group Still Not Happy

+ More Publishing Trade Groups Weigh In On Changes to Google's Library Scanning Project

+ Legal Experts Say Google Library Digitization Project Likely OK; Will It Revolve Around Snippets?

+ Breaking Down The Google Print 5 Libraries An article from Digital Libraries.

+ Google's Library Scanning Project Heads to Court

+ A New Alternative to Google Print Say hello to the Open Content Alliance!

+ Google Print Press Review & Just A Bit About Search Inside the Book This post includes a link to Eric Schmidt's op/ed column in the Wall St. Journal.

+ Association of American Publishers Sues Google over Library Digitization Plan

+ Great Google Print Controversy Bibliography Includes link to, "The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography" by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Impressive!!!

+ Microsoft Announces MSN Book Search; Joins Open Content Alliance

+ Google Gears Up to Resume Book Scanning

+ Google Print Now Publishing Out-Of-Copyright Works Gained Through Library Scanning Program

Yes, it has been quite a year and I could have listed more reports. I'm sure year two will have as many, if not, news stories, court hearings and events as the The Google Library Project's first 365 days.

Postscipt: I've recently posted about two other services, currently available, that offer the full text (no limit on how much you can read) called ebrary and NetLibrary. Looking for public domain full text books? Visit, "Public Domain Books: More than 25,000 Full Text Books in a Single Database."

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Google's Library Project One Year Old Already.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:50 PM | Permalink

December 10, 2005

Web Search History: Before Google Answers and Yahoo Answers There Was "Answer Point" From Ask Jeeves

How about some web search industry history? Long before two major search engines, Google and Yahoo offered Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, their human powered question answering services and/or communities, another major engine offered something very similar. It was called Answer Point and came from Ask Jeeves. It existed (it's long gone) around 1999-2000. This page (via the Wayback Machine) has it looking similar to what we see today from others.

Answer Point appears to have been a free service to ask questions and with the help of other people have them answered. The service had its own logo and used the slogan: "The Ask Jeeves Answer Point is the place where you can ask and answer questions. Have a question? Post it! Know the answer? Post it!"

Subcategories were moderated.

The last archived version of the site I could find in Wayback was from late 2001. Answer Point also allowed users to register to become Answer Point "enthusiasts" and receive points and rankings for how many times they posted. Something we recently said is not the best idea. You could even personalize with "My Answer Point."

Before I go any further, I'm well aware of other question answering services involving humans. This post is not to recollect about all of them. My point here was just a bit of web history and to note that another large web search company was doing something similar years ago.

I've sent a note to Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at AJ, and asked if he could provide a bit more background about the service itself. What kind of usage (not much would be the answer I would bet on) did AP receive? Why and when was the plug pulled? If Jim, sends a note back, I'll add it as a postscript.

I would like to encourage you to take a look (if you haven't already) at my post about "other" question answering services that discusses what libraries of all types offer "virtually" in terms of question answering without having to visit the library itself. In many cases we're talking 24x7 access.

Finally, a point I failed to make in that article was the recent launch of a nationwide "virtual reference service" in the UK called "Enquire."

More about it here. Click the Enquire button. Enquire is part of The People's Network. Btw, Australia also has a national virtutal reference service named Ask Us. Again, more about these services and others in my other post. Postscipt: Well, it seems the Jim Lanzone from Ask Jeeves reads his email on the weekend. What follows are his comments about Answer Point.

Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint operated from early 2000 through May '02. AnswerPoint wasn't a failure, nor a smashing success. At that point in Ask's turnaround we simply had to make choices, so we shut AnswerPoint down (among other things) to focus our energy on things like Teoma and Smart Answers. The user base of AnswerPoint was actually pretty upset about it: they were a very small, but very loyal group, which made it a difficult decision for us. Ironically, as I recall, Google Answers launched the same week that we shut down AnswerPoint. I commend Yahoo for joining sites like Wondir in trying the free model again. Beyond the obvious issues like spam, I can share a few challenges with community-driven question-answering that we experienced. First, as a free service, there was little incentive for people to answer other people's questions. I think the dynamic of question-answering is/was different than other user-generated content. With user reviews, like those found on Amazon, TripAdvisor or Citysearch, people are playing "critic", a long-standing model from newspapers and magazines. With Wikipedia, participants are creating specialized content, in one centralized location, for the masses to consume. With De.icio.us and Flickr, tagged items are made public, but the initial motive is borne at least somewhat from self-interest: organization of bookmarks and photos. With question-answering, on the other hand, it takes a true good samaritan to spend the time to provide answers to one-off questions for people you don't know. (And an even better samaritan to perform this good deed repeatedly, over time, for free.) Meanwhile, if you do it for ego, your answers get lost in the system pretty quickly. So neither motive was that compelling. We observed that only a small group of "experts" took the time to answer questions for others. Secondly, if not enough people provide answers, then you can't answer enough questions. This is a problem when search has such a long tail of queries, as we showed at Web 2.0. Most searches are unique. This is why search engines are so useful, even though relevance is far from perfect: we can cast a very broad net. The notion of waiting for an answer is also in conflict with one of the biggest user needs in search: speed. Most things that people search for are things they want an answer to, or a solution for, almost immediately. In theory people will put in more effort to get a better answer, but in practice they seldom do. For example, 30% of users surveyed say they want advanced search, but only 1% of them ever use it. The same thing applied to AnswerPoint. It was usually just faster and easier for people to search normally, iterating on their searches, than to submit a question to the community and wait for an answer. Lastly, there's the reason we created Smart Answers in the first place: people like to search from one box. Getting them to head to a different part of our site for results is always an uphill battle for any engine. It's true that there are subjective answers out there that search engines are not (yet) able to respond to accurately. And sites Yahoo's own Groups product, started by our own Mark Fletcher, have proven that communities can generate valuable information in search. It will be interesting to see if and how community-based "answers" search can evolve to plug the gaps that exist.

Note: In many situations the "good samaritan" Lanzone writes about might be the subject expert (via an AskA service or a librarian (via a virtual reference service).

Postscript 2 (from Danny): Along the same lines as Ask Jeeves, LookSmart Live was an online answer service that was born in 1999 but quietly died. More about the service from when it launched is here, LookSmart Live Looks-Up Answers.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:09 PM | Permalink

November 18, 2005

Andrei Broder Joins Yahoo

Andrei Broder, former vice president of research at AltaVista and until recently Distinguished Engineer & CTO, IBM Research, is joining Yahoo as research fellow and vice president of emerging search technology at Yahoo Research, according to this News.com article.

Broder has been involved in a wide-range of research activities related to the web and information retrieval, including the famous "bow-tie" study of web size and connectivity, and the web archaeology project together with other-well known researchers Krishna Bharat (Google news) and Monika Henzinger (Google research).

Postscript from Gary: Here's a list with a few research papers and articles that Broder has authored or co-authored that might be of interest.

Title: A Taxonomy of Web Search Author: Andrei Broder Source: ACM SIGIR Forum 8 pages; PDF Abstract: "Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the socalled "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs."

Title: Sampling Search-Engine Results Authors: Aris Anagnostopoulos, Andrei Z. Broder, David Carmel Source: WWW 14 Conference (2005) 12 pages; PDF. From the abstract: We consider the problem of efficiently sampling Web search engine query results. In turn, using a small random sample instead of the full set of results leads to efficient approximate algorithms for several applications, such as: ? Determining the set of categories in a given taxonomy spanned by the search results; ? Finding the range of metadata values associated to the result set in order to enable ?multi-faceted search;? ? Estimating the size of the result set; ? Data mining associations to the query terms. -- Title: Sic Transit Gloria Telae: Towards an Understanding of the Web's Decay Source: WWW 13 Conference (2004) Authors: Z. BarYossef, A. Broder, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins 10 pages; PDF. From the Abstract: "The rapid growth of the web has been noted and tracked extensively. Recent studies have however documented the dual phenomenon: web pages have small half lives, and thus the web exhibits rapid death as well. Consequently, page creators are faced with an increasingly burdensome task of keeping links up-to-date, and many are falling behind. In addition to just individual pages, collections of pages or even entire neighborhoods of the web exhibit significant decay, rendering them less effective as information resources. Such neighborhoods are identified only by frustrated searchers, seeking a way out of these stale neighborhoods, back to more up-to-date sections of the web; measuring the decay of a page purely on the basis of dead links on the page is too naive to reflect this frustration." -- Title: Towards the next generation of enterprise search technology Authors: A. Z. Broder and A. C. Ciccolo Source: IBM Systems Journal (2004) Abstract: "Unstructured information represents the vast majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises. Exploiting this information requires systems for managing and extracting knowledge from large collections of unstructured data and applications for discovering patterns and relationships. This paper elucidates the differences between search systems for the Web and those for enterprises, with an emphasis on the future of enterprise search systems. It also introduces the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and provides the context for the unstructured information management (UIM) papers that follow." -- Title: A technique for measuring the relative size and overlap of public Web search engines Authors: Krishna Bharat and Andrei Broder Source: WWW 7 Conference From the Abstract: " Search engines are among the most useful and popular services on the Web. Users are eager to know how they compare. Which one has the largest coverage? Have they indexed the same portion of the Web? How many pages are out there? Although these questions have been debated in the popular and technical press, no objective evaluation methodology has been proposed and few clear answers have emerged. In this paper we describe a standardized, statistical way of measuring search engine coverage and overlap through random queries."

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:25 PM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

Yahoo's Ass Kicking Statue Controversy

This was one of those, "should I skip it" decisions, but I did find it interesting. Phillip at Google Blogoscoped in Yahoo in Battle Mode summarizes how Yahoo's mail team was given a statue (yep, there's even a picture) for "kicking an enemy's ass." That would be Google's bottom being whacked, specifically.

Phillip then points to Google's Kevin Fox having long commentary on the statue. Kevin used to be at Yahoo, and he does a compare and contrast feeling that Google's about making better products while Yahoo's focused on "how to beat Google" and finds the competition goes too far with the statue's comparison to Britain fighting Nazi Germany.

The comments after Kevin's post go all over the place and are fun to read -- pro-Yahoo, anti-Yahoo, pro-Google, anti-Google. Phillip also points to two Yahoo employees who comment on the statue as well (Ryan Kennedy suggests a toned-down description for the statue; this employee prefers the "be humble" approach).

Yahoo's new email interface is way, way cool (double verified by checking with my wife, who is a regular user) -- but honestly, the old system was already kicking Google's butt for the simple fact that anyone could sign-up for it without getting someone to send you an invite or having to get text messaged a secret code. When Gmail's freely open to anyone, then let the weigh-up really take place.

Speaking of statues, how about Yahoo putting a little message on the Bob's Big Boy statue that Chris and I came across in one of the Yahoo buildings when visiting this summer. I'll see about getting the photo off Chris's phone -- I made him stand there and take it. But it looks just like this, except the hamburger was replaced with the Inktomi logo.

Bob's an old friend I remember well, from my days of visiting Inktomi. He was in the lobby, and I'd sit next to him waiting for someone to come meet me.

If memory serves, Inktomi founder Eric Brewer bought him to represent the serving/caching service that Inktomi used to provide. When Yahoo bought Inktomi, Bob came over -- and apparently was nearly tossed out until someone gave him a home.

He deserves a better home and maybe his own message devoted to the Yahoo web search team -- those from Inktomi, plus the AltaVista and FAST/AllTheWeb vets. They assembled a great product that directly rivals Google's core search results. Heck, put Bob out in the main entrance of Yahoo! Just make the message praising the efforts without dissing the competition, and I suppose everyone will be happy.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:58 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

British Pathe Digital Archive Celebrates 2nd Birthday

Happy Birthday to the British Pathe Digital Archive!

Two years ago, Chris wrote this great introduction: British Pathe Develops Huge Historic Picture Archive, of the newly digitized archive of British Pathe newsreel content.

From SearchDay: British Pathe is offering free access to a digitized collection of more than 12 million historic photographs from its 20th century cinema newsreel archive. Archivists and technicians at ITN, which now operates the British Pathe library, have created the images by re-scanning the newsreel's 3,500 hours of 35 millimeter film. Images are displayed as a "storyboard" of thumbnails. Since the images were digitized from motion pictures, a full page of thumbnails represents about 50 seconds of material from a video clip...The site offers free search and preview storyboards for anyone to view. To save a preview image, simply right click it and save it to your hard drive. Preview files display a large copyright notice, but can be used for personal or educational purposes. Enhanced high resolution versions of the images are also available for web publishing and use in power point presentations for a fee.

So, Happy 2nd Birthday to all involved. Here are a few stats about how things have been going in the first two years:

  • 15 million page views, and the average visit lasts nearly 11 minutes
  • In total there have been around 750,000 clips viewed for free, and tens of thousands downloaded by the public and for use in schools and education.
  • In addition to the 3,500 hours of digital moving images, there are 12 million stills taken from the British Pathe archives.

If you've never visited the British Pathe archive, it's more than worthy of your time, attention, and use.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:43 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog

Yesterday, I wrote of how search engines could do a better job of query refinement and indeed did so in the past, especially because there was more human involvement in the search process. That drew out Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves, who sent me an email raising a good point that humans haven't gone away just because of the expense. Humans also have a "scale" problem. More comments from Jim on that are below, along with a further look at the scale issue and the need for the Google Generation to rediscover query refinement.

I agree with both Jim and Christopher Coulter, who commented on Robert Scoble's reference to my blog post:

Yeah well the Yahoo Human-Edited model couldn't scale, so you get Google Pagerank automational noised chaos. It's back to 1996 all over again. And the best 'search' is with a database

Indeed, humans haven't scaled well in terms of helping us gather content from across the web. Crawlers do a great job of that. I used a library metaphor on my ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories post earlier this year to explain why directories, after some promise, went away in the face of crawlers.

In short, imagine you go into a library and can use one of two card catalogs to find books on a topic you are interested in:

  • The human-compiled card catalog looks only at book titles and short human-written descriptions of the books, maybe 25-75 words in all.  
  • The crawler-compiled card catalog will let you scan every word on every page of every book in the library.

The crawler-built catalog is far more comprehensive. It's also far more up-to-date. Remember, in the library of the web, the books often rewrite themselves or add pages in the way books in a physical library do not. Humans simply can't keep up with that activity.

The key, of course, is that the crawler service isn't just comprehensive but relevant. It will find not just all the matching pages but often rank them so you are getting the very best ones.

While humans don't scale well in the info gathering and retrieval side, they can play a role. More on that in a moment, but first, here's what Jim said in response to my post:

To say that the problem with human editors was due to it being "expensive" is true, but I don?t think it goes far enough to explain the problem.

Sure, Ask had great relevancy, but only for a single-digit percentage of the overall query stream. That is not how people search, and neither you or I or any number of Web Search Universities is going to change that for the vast majority of searchers.

Algorithmic search was the only solution to that problem because only an index of billions of pages could meet the user need that exists across the long tail of rare queries.

At its peak, the Ask Jeeves "knowledgebase," as it was known internally, matched on about 85% of searches. That was a lot. However, it was only picked 20-25 percent of the time, despite having premium placement at the top of the page.

Sure, some searches resulted in far higher pick rates than this. But the vast majority did not. Therein lay the problem. And due to the exquisite overpromise made by the premise of question-answering and the butler, this had consequences for the Ask Jeeves brand.

The brand was lucky, on the other hand, to gain a foothold in the market early on, and to hold on to millions of users because of it. But at the end of the day, people use a search engine to find what they need - quickly. That foothold would have become more tenuous had we not bolstered our ability to answer searches (questions or keywords) more accurately, more quickly, and more easily, than the original Ask product could deliver.

Today, with a combination of algo search, structured data search (Smart Answers), and unique tools that help people find things faster (Zoom, Binoculars), we are delivering against user needs exponentially more than we did before.

At the end of the day, this is about playing defense, not offense, against that wide and vast stream of searches. Most people are going to do what they want with that little white box, and will not have the patience of learning how to "search better" or set up a bunch of parameters ahead of time. The minute we understood this and started intuitively responding to their searches with better results and options, the more loyal those users became to our search engine.

Again, I agree with much of what Jim says. Historically, we know that searchers don't read help documentation, don't make use of options, don't do anything much beyond put a word or two in that black hole of a search box and get sucked in to click on whatever seems like the first "normal" result that comes up. Put a bunch of refinement links/suggested searches in front of them, and they're likely to just ignore those as being "weird" and move down toward the real results.

Solutions? First and foremost, do break the habit! I've taught search classes for many years, and people are amazed that when they look a bit past the standard 10 listings, there are options and suggestions that are useful.

In fact, we'll be doing a "Pimp Your Search Engine" or "Bling Your Search Engine" series shortly via SearchDay to try and help many readers understand some of the many features that are offered to you on your own favorite search engines that habit just may have blinded you to. Get 100 results at a time! Pop open new windows from search results! Discover easy ways to refine your queries!

Beyond that, let's see the search engines do more to make use of both humans and automation. I do want a human-created knowledgebase at Ask Jeeves and elsewhere to return.

Maybe it has to be much smaller and serve only the very most popular queries. But why not make it that if I type in hotels on Ask Jeeves, the automatically-generated "Narrow Your Search" options off to the right-hand side might be determined to make more sense to show up in the main part of the results, to better help people narrow in.

Moreover, look at what I get now at Ask Jeeves in that Narrow Your Search section:

Why not step beyond the automation and for this type of broad, common search, come up with some human-generated suggestions, such as:

  • Find a hotel by price, location or other options Find the official site of a hotel chain
  • Find reviews of particular hotels

Those aren't perfect solutions/options, but I think they make the point. There ought to be more the search engine can do to have an actual dialog with people in the right cases.

I know, the risk is the less Google-like the results are, the more likely people are to feel uneasy or unsure about using a search engine. Well, the Google Generation needs to be smacked upside the face.

Honestly. Google has been an absolute, horrible failure in helping people refine their queries. It's no wonder people today may not even realize there are query refinement options out there beyond Google and before it existed, given that the major leader in the space hasn't made use of these. Let's see all the search engines dare to experiment more with these features and applaud them with they do.

By the way, speaking of applause, notice this over at Yahoo for hotels:

Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About

That's listed right above the first search result. I checked it out AFTER making my suggestions above, and you can see Yahoo's hit two of the three things I thought made sense. Great work, Yahoo! OK, cynics will say these links just help push people into Yahoo's own travel search areas. Yes, but they are good areas. People should be checking them out!

Why might you miss these links? Because they still don't look like the "regular" results that are numbered. So maybe they need to change. Maybe instead of being like this:

Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About
  1. Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block
It needs to be more like this:
  1. Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals The Yahoo Shortcut links above will take you to our special travel search areas designed to let you scan the web for hotel prices and information. You can sort by price, location, amenities and more.  
  2. Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

Again, top of my head stuff. But I think it makes the point of the "dialog" being presented in a more listings-style format. Maybe, maybe, that might help users see stuff they're missing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:50 AM | Permalink

September 30, 2005

Clusty Celebrates Its First Birthday

It was a year ago today when Chris and I published our introduction to Vivisimo's new metasearch/dynamic clustering product for the consumer market named Clusty, yes, Clusty. Since then, I've posted about Clusty offering a government search, job search (with Indeed.com), and its blog search capabilities. Also since its 2004 debut, Clusty began providing access to cached copies of pages via the MSN Cache and The Wayback Machine. Finally, Clusty's clustering capabilities received an honorable mention in the Best Search Feature category during our 2005 Search Engine Watch Search Awards. This press release from Clusty looks back at some of the reactions the name, not the technology, received a year ago today. A Happy B-Day to everyone at the Clusty HQ in Pittsburgh!

Posted by Gary Price at 9:41 PM | Permalink

September 27, 2005

Didn't Google Just Have A Birthday?

No, you aren't losing your minds. Just earlier this month, Search Engine Watch and a wave of other sites wished Google a happy 7th birthday on September 7. What's going on with Google having another 7th birthday today?

The wishes earlier this month were sparked by this page from Google's Help Center. It's now gone, but here's what it said:

Google's official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we're just getting started. To discover more about Google's history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

For the time being, you can see a cached copy of the page yourself here.

So what's the deal? How does Google get to have two birthdays in the same month? Google's Marissa Mayer told me when I asked her about this earlier this week that Google internally has often celebrated the birthday on various different days in September over the years. It's now settling on Sept. 27. Google the Virgo becomes Google the Libra!

Honestly, it's hard to not have a cynical eye that settling on this date was also a convenient news peg to hang the new size announcement. But now that there's this new official date, I guess there's no going back from it.

For those unaware, Queen Elisabeth II has both her "real" birthday and an official one that the United Kingdom celebrates. The Netherlands does the same thing, as other countries no doubt do, as well. It's sort of like how Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays used to be holidays of their own in the US, until it was more convenient to have an official Presidents' Day holiday always happening right against the weekend.

So as Gray Hat News points out in is humourous The Queen of Search Engines post, whatever Google's real birthday was, we've not got a new official/observed one to follow.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Happy 7th Birthday Google?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:46 AM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Happy 7th Birthday, Google!

Threadwatch notes it's Google's official birthday today. How old? That would be 7. Happy Birthday, Googlers!

Postscript from Gary: If you feel like reminiscing about the early days of Google with a walk down memory lane, here's a compilation that I put together a few years ago that has links to plenty of "early" Google resources, pages, and papers. If you're looking for early announcements from other engines, take a look at this compilation.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:38 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2005

Battelle Excerpt: Google Goes Public

Second Book Excerpt: Google Goes Public is the latest excerpt from The Search that John Battelle has posted on his blog, from his forthcoming book. It looks at the lead up to Google going public. See also The Boys Versus The Adults: Google Goes Public Story that we blogged about earlier this year, a great read on the same theme from GQ.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:15 AM | Permalink

August 7, 2005

Battelle Posts Excerpt from "The Search"

As Danny pointed out a few weeks ago on SEW Blog, John Battelle's new book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, is due out next month. I was fortunate enough (thanks John) to have been asked to review a couple of chapters and when I get home from SES, the completed manuscript (thanks again JB) is waiting for me. A few hundred words have already been excerpted in Wired and John is now beginning to post excerpts on his Searchblog site. The first excerpt, "focuses on [Bill] Gross's [Overture, Snap, etc] early insights into market economics.

Btw, it's already a busy time for for search books. Of course, not to be missed is our own Chris Sherman's just released, Google Power. Also of note and also already available is Ran Hock's, Yahoo to the Max.

Battelle's book is due in about one month followed about six weeks later with the release of David Vise's book, The Google Story. Happy Reading!!!

Posted by Gary Price at 9:34 PM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Battelle On The Birth Of Google

The Birth of Google at Wired, spotted via Google Blogoscoped, has John Battelle recounting how Google came to be. Larry Page and Sergey Brin found each other obnoxious at first. Page was fascinated by the math the web represented and how who was linking to whom might be useful. That led to the precursor of Google, Backrub. Brin joined up and together the rank calculation system dubbed PageRank (the Page coming from Larry's last name) was born. Fast, easy read and tantalizing glimpse of John's The Search book due out in September, from which its excerpted.

Postscript (from Gary): Many of the underlying concepts that Brin and Page used to formulate PageRank (aka link analysis) have been around for prior to when Sergey met Larry. This blog post takes a look at Dr. Eugene Garfield, the father of "citation analysis" which has been used be academics and librarians since the 1950's. Also, not to be forgotten is the pioneering work of Dr. Jon Kleinberg and the IBM Clever team. Take a look at this paper by Kleinberg and the Clever team. The "Web Analysis and Search: Hubs and Authorities" section of Dr. Kleinberg's home page yields even more interesting reading. One paper, "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment" is even cited by Brin/Page in their "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper. Battelle interviews Kleinberg here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:28 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2005

AltaVista Founder Louis Monier Moving To Google?

When AltaVista came onto the search scene, it had all the impact for people in the way Google is thought of today. It drew raves for relevancy, comprehensiveness and came up with plenty of innovations. But it never had the proper respect from owner Digital, then Compaq and suffered further when forced into becoming a portal. Louis Monier was a founder of the service and a driving force who left in 1999: Father Of AltaVista Resigns. He wound up over at eBay as their chief technical officer. Now via SiliconBeat, rumors reported by Om Malik that he's heading to Google to work on the Froogle shopping search engine: After Yahoo, Google takes on eBay. See also Search Memories which covers a panel at our SES San Jose show last year where Louis reflected on the early days of search and AltaVista.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:22 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Search: A Part Of Our Lives

How "search" is redefining the Web — and our lives from the Seattle Times has a nice look at how search engines developed into part of our everyday lives. Some history, observations and a look forward on how they might get even more personal with us.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:57 PM | Permalink

April 20, 2005

Behind The Scenes Of Yahoo Takes On Google

Yesterday I noted a Fortune story giving a behind-the-scenes look at Microsoft waking up to the challenge Google presented. The search engine that could from the San Jose Mercury News (reg. required) does a similar look at Yahoo getting search religion. Seeing the revenue Overture was generating from an initial partnership push got the lightbulbs going off. New CEO Terry Semel helped refocus the company, and it ultimately decided search had to be technology it owned, rather than outsourced. It touches a bit on the issue of uniting search technology from three different players -- plus the brand new rewriting Yahoo said it also did leveraging all the new talent it had purchased.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:31 PM | Permalink

April 19, 2005

Behind The Scenes Of Microsoft Takes On Google

Search and Destroy from Fortune (paid subscription required) has some nice details on the war between Google and Microsoft, with a nice lead-off on Bill Gates wondering why back in 2003 that Google was hiring people with skills not for search but for products similar to what Microsoft makes. "We have to watch these guys," he emailed execs.

Yahoo's also in that war, but Google still occupies the high ground that Microsoft wants. It revisits the much discussed issue of Google as operating system, or at least as a software rival to Microsoft, with more quotes of worry on this from Gates. One reason might be the Microsofties heading to Google, including crashing the invite-only affair when its office near Microsoft was opened last year.

Very nice details on MSN Search's Chris Payne making a pitch back in Feb. 2003 that outsourcing search was a bad mistake for Microsoft to make -- instead, it needed to build its own Google-killer technology. Gates, of course, signed off on the new direction, project "Underdog," it was dubbed.

The story revisits what I'd agree was a bad mistake, not to buy the search technology, causing development to take even longer. Then there are more comments and observations on what a challenge the battle has been so far, and how it is far from over.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:27 PM | Permalink

Past 10 Years Of Online Advertising History Available.

The Decade in Online Advertising 1994-2004 is a new 21 page PDF report from DoubleClick that offers a ton of data about online ad spend over the past 10 years. Check out the nice quarterly spend chart on page 4. Page 12 has a nice pie chart showing search at having 40 percent of online spend as of the second quarter of last year. A short history of search ads begins on page 11.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:39 AM | Permalink

March 6, 2005

Yahoo: Ten Years, 100 Moments, One Page

Last week, Yahoo celebrated its 10th birthday. At SES, Danny surprised Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang with a birthday cake in front of 2000 people, and later that night Yahoo threw a birthday bash at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan (and gave everyone who attended a couple of stylin' engraved martini glasses).

Online, Yahoo has created Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web—a seriously cool single page highlighting key events for the company and the web. Click on a thumbnail image or its description, and a pane opens up showing a larger picture describing the event. It's a fast, easy-to-use and fun way to quickly scan ten years of history.

Hey, Yahoo - how about creating a search result page using the same technology for us to play with? 100 results, all above the fold, showing thumbnails of web pages. Click the thumbnail and show the title and description of the site. Now that would generate some serious attention.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:26 PM | Permalink

February 28, 2005

Yahoo: Remembering The Early Days

As many of you know, Yahoo! will celebrating their 10th anniversary later this week (March 2nd to be precise) and the AP has put together a wonderful timeline with key dates and milestones in Yahoo's history.

I also did a bit of research and found some early posts about Yahoo in the Usenet archive and elsewhere. Enjoy!

+ September 21, 1994 Jerry Yang posts about a directory called Yahoo! to the comp.infosystems.www.misc group.

+ September 26, 1994 Someone on comp.infosystems.www.misc says that Jerry and David should be given a medal of honor and then, "locked in a room and never allowed to get lives."

+ February 1, 1995 An article about Yahoo from the December 1994 Internet Business Journal.

+ The Yahoo! Home Page on March 2, 1995.

+ June 21, 1995 Copy of a Ziff Davis article repoting that Filo and Yang just received VC funding.

+ July 22, 1995 Jerry Yang helps a friend sell an "awesome" car.

+ September 13, 1995 David Filo is scheduled to speak at a Software Forum Internet Special Interest Group.

+ October 31, 1995 David Filo asks for help finding a rack mount case for several SCSI drives.

+ January 17, 1996 Transcript of a television program that aired in October 1995. It includes comments from David Filo and Jerry Yang.

+ February 14, 1996 Jerry Yang is interviewed by Newsbytes about various legal issues.

+ The Yahoo Home Page on October 10, 1996

+ March 31, 1997 The first Annual Report (10-K) Yahoo filed with the SEC. Plenty of interesting history.

+ April 11, 2000 Audio: Jerry Yang speaks to the National Press Club.

Btw, I tracked down all of these links and posted this item while accessing the web (via my Treo phone and laptop) while on a train moving at about 100 mph. Yes, I love the mobile web!

Posted by Gary Price at 2:28 PM | Permalink

February 4, 2005

Search Advertising Comes of Age

John Markoff and Nat Ives from The New York Times take a two page look at search advertising in: Web Search Sites See Clicks Add Up to Big Ad Dollars.

The article says that web advertising has come of age since several Super Bowl advertisers are also Google advertising "regulars."

"In the past, advertising has been hard to track and hard to make accountable," said Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president for advertising sales. Now, he said, advertising has become a dialogue with the consumer.

Also, positive comments about search advertising from a Berkeley professor.

"You're seeing advertising move into advertising that people can seek out, and moving away from mass advertising," said Peter Sealey, a former Coca-Cola marketing executive who now teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "In the context of that shift, this little niche of Internet search will be a huge beneficiary."

Bill Gross, the founder of the first pay-per-click company, GoTo.com (which became Overture and now owner by Yahoo!) tells The Times that he never thought that keyword/ppc advertising would become as big as it is.

"I thought that the Internet was fantastic, and I was sure that it would become the ultimate direct marketing tool," he said yesterday. "But I had no idea that pay-per-click would ultimately be this big."

Gross launched his latest search effort, Snap.Com in 2004.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:36 AM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

Google's Mayer: Searcher Behavior & Google Factoids

If Google's full of smart people, product manager Marissa Mayer's one of the smartest there. She gave a talk at PARC on the user experience at Google. Nathan from InsideGoogle pointed out a nice write-up of this: An Evening With Google's Marissa Mayer.

She covers ground that will be familiar to many SES conference attendees and SearchDay readers on how the Google home page is sparse because Sergey Brin didn't know HTML well or how while no one uses the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, no one wants it removed either.

Below, some similar stories from Marissa via us, along with user behavior revelations from other search engines:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:34 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2005

Google's Usenet Timeline and Early Search Engine Announcements

Slashdot has a thread about a "new" timeline from Google that highlights interesting and historic posts from their 20 year Usenet (aka Google Groups) archive. If you've never seen it, it's a lot of fun. However, as several people including Michael Fagan correctly point out on Searchblog, this timeline has been around for several years.

and speaking of Google's Usenet Archive... Web search history types, take note. In 2001 I used the Usenet archive to build this compilation of early search engine annoucements that I posted on my ResourceShelf site.

The compilation includes: + Martijn Koster Annouces the Availability of Aliweb (11/30/93) + An Early Mention of JumpStation by Jonathon Fletcher (2/27/94) First Mention of McBryan's World Wide Web Worm in the Usenet Archive is this Technical Query (3/14/94) + Brian Pinkerton Announces the Availability of Webcrawler (6/11/94)

+ Steve Kirsch Announces Free Demos Of the Infoseek Search Engine (7/18/94) + Jerry Yang Alerts a Usenet group to the Yahoo Database (9/21/94) + Carnegie Mellon University Center for Machine Translation Announces Lycos (8/14/94) + UC Berkeley Announces Inktomi (9/26/95) + Introduction of Excite (9/27/95) + AltaVista Public Beta Press Release (12/15/95)

Posted by Gary Price at 2:12 PM | Permalink

December 22, 2004

Search Year In Review, With A Laugh

Peter Da Vanzo's 2004: The Search Engine Year in Review article over at SearchEngineBlog.com (soon to gain the rightful tag, The Original Search Engine Blog™) not only gives you a short summary of major events in search with a search marketing perspective but also provides plenty of chuckles along the way, such as...

  • It is strongly rumoured by those-in-the-know that Yahoo will definitely "go Inktomi" soon. Yahoo don't "go Inktomi". Instead, Yahoo confuses the hell out of everybody with a cryptic pay-per-inclusion program.  
  • MSN roll out their search beta, which gets mixed reviews. GoogleGuy helpfully suggests some deconstruction of the MSN algo.  
  • Bill Gates thinks he has the answer to search. It lies in providing answers to questions, like "Why is the sky blue". Amusingly, Google had the answer to that question at #1, while MSN featured an ad for a Casino. Still does, in fact.

On that last point, I have to add that for me, both Google and the current MSN Search (along with Yahoo) show exactly the same page as number one -- a clever online casino site that does provide the answer as a traffic draw, boosted by having apparently having acquired the domain previously used by a non-casino site talking about the blue sky topic. But the beta MSN Search site brings up a nicer page from Sky Watch, so a few kudos to Bill and team (and OK, nice going Ask Jeeves, as well).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:57 PM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

Happy Belated Birthday to AltaVista

A bit of web search history!

Last week, December 15th to be precise, was the ninth anniversary of AltaVista's launch.

+ In 2002, Chris put together a SearchDay article to celebrate AV's seventh anniversary.

+ AV News Release: Digital Develops Internet's First 'Super Spider' from December 15, 1995, here.

+ The AV home page on May 11, 1996

A couple of passages from:

"Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'. by Peter H. Lewis The New York Times, December 18, 1995

+ Allan L. Jennings, Digital's manager of advanced technology business development, said the company would decide later if it would eventually charge for the searching software, offer subscriptions, or make it available free and recoup its investment through advertising or sponsorship. It is expected that Alta Vista will draw large crowds to Digital's Web site and act as a showcase for Digital's own Internet products.

+ The Alta Vista searcher also enhances its performance by sending out what Digital calls a "brood of spiders," technically known as threads, to scan Web sites much more quickly. A super spider search can consist of as many as 1,000 simultaneous threads.

Mr. Fuller of Digital acknowledged the risk of millions of spiders clogging the Internet and potentially overwhelming the network connections of small Web information providers. He said Digital intends to detect the capacity of each Web site the spider visits and avoid a disabling drain on that site.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:35 PM | Permalink

December 6, 2004

The Once and Future Internet

What did the future look like to the cognoscenti of the information industry in 1993? Mining Google Groups' vast Usenet archive is a great way to uncover informal history that can offer fascinating answers to questions like these.

Today's SearchDay article, The Future of the Internet, Eleven Years Ago, surfaces a Usenet posting reporting on the Internet World/Document Delivery 93 conference, where prominent pundits offered their takes on the future of the Net. It reads like a blog posting, and provides fascinating insights into the time just before the "big bang" of Internet growth that occurred in the mid-90s.

The Net was decidedly non-commercial in 1993, yet there was emerging consensus that online advertising would gradually become an important phenomenon. Remarkably, none of the speakers (even Garrett Gruener, who would co-found Ask Jeeves three years later) directly predicted search as the killer app of the future. Of course, the web was tiny in 1993, but it's still fascinating that such a huge, developing megatrend was all but invisible to the key players in the online information industry of the day.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:34 PM | Permalink

November 10, 2004

MSN Search Technology To Debut (Again) This Week

Rumors are swirling that MSN plans to release its new search technology this week. But why's that big news? After all, hasn't this technology already been released twice now to the public?

Yes, it has. But past releases have been via the MSN Sandbox site, a location really only visited by search marketers, webmasters, researchers and others wanting to play with the new technology.

In contrast, MSN may be planning to release the new search technology in places where the public is more likely to access it. Where might that be?

  • MSN Search Beta is a long-standing testing site that MSN uses. This is more accessible to the public than the MSN Sandbox. However, if released here, the vast majority of the public still won't encounter the new technology. However, it would join the new technology up with the new look-and-feel of MSN or perhaps show some new features we've had glimpses at before.  
  • MSN Search is the flagship MSN site. If the technology goes up there, that's a major change that ousts the current technology that MSN licenses from Yahoo. The Overture paid listings provided by Yahoo would remain.

One way or another, the technology is supposed to go up on MSN Search by the end of the year. That's been promised by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The timeline below provides more details about this.

What's the source of these rumors? MSN is briefing members of the press about the launch, and the news is leaking out. But exact details other than a release is planned are sparse. For coverage, see articles from the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal.

Suffice to say, if there are major press briefings underway by any major search engine, we're generally included those. If we have been briefed on something ahead of a launch, then we'll provide our usual comprehensive coverage when the launch happens. So if there's news from MSN this week, rest assured we'll bring it to you.

Here's the timeline of important announcements and releases in Microsoft's progress toward having its own search engine:

  • October 1997: Rumors of a Microsoft search engine, code-named Yukon, turn into reality when Microsoft announces it will launch its own service. But instead of using its own technology, it opts to license search results from Inktomi. Microsoft executives proclaim the service will be "the freshest, most current index available to consumers."  
  • Sept. 8, 1998: Microsoft finally releases its Inktomi-powered service called MSN Search, after dumping the idea to call it Internet Start.  
  • Jan. 1999: After hailing Inktomi's technology as wonderful only months before, MSN drops that partnership in favor of AltaVista because of a better business opportunity.  
  • Mar. 1999: Before AltaVista's results have even been integrated into MSN Search, the company enters into a new agreement to license LookSmart's human-powered results. These become the "main" or most prominent results on MSN.  
  • Dec. 1999: MSN switches back to using Inktomi's results, dumping AltaVista. However, LookSmart's results remain the main listings on the site. Inktomi results are only shown when LookSmart has no matches.  
  • Feb. 2000: MSN launches its own self-serve, CPM-based paid listings on its site.  
  • Feb. 2001: MSN begins outsourcing for paid listings from Overture.  
  • Feb. 2003: MSN is rumored to have wanted to buy AltaVista, which Overture ended up purchasing. Microsoft then says it was only window-shopping and is still deciding what direction to go in the future: buy, continue to outsource or build search technology internally.  
  • April & May 2003: Microsoft makes decision to invest in search and build technology internally, with a first step the release of its own web page crawler, MSNBOT.  
  • Oct. 2003: MSN hires Overture's chief technology officer Paul Ryan, fueling suspicion that it will develop its own in-house paid listing technology. However, Ryan leaves the company in Feb. 2004.  
  • July 1, 2004: MSN makes major changes to the look-and-feel of its MSN Search site. It also releases a preview of its new web search technology. However, this new technology does NOT power the revamped MSN Search.  
  • Oct. 4, 2004: MSN launches a second tech preview with some changes. We also get inadvertent glimpses of an interesting "Search Builder" feature and relevancy sliders that appear in the works.  
  • Nov. 11, 2004: If the rumors are true, MSN will move its new search technology to either MSN Search Beta or MSN Search on this day.  
  • Dec. 31, 2004: MSN's new web search technology should be integrated into the main MSN Search site by this date or earlier, as promised by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. This is especially likely given that a massive marketing campaign is in the works. It would be odd to have a big marketing push when your search engine remains powered by your rival Yahoo. MSN's desktop search technology is due out by the end of this month or sooner, according to past statements.  
  • June 2005: MSN's agreement to use Yahoo's paid listings from Overture expires.  
  • Dec. 2005: MSN's agreement to use Yahoo's unpaid crawler-based search results expires. The agreement can be ended earlier, if desired.

Want to comment? Visit our forum thread: MSN Search to go Live Thursday, Nov 11th.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2004

Early Web Search Announcements

On the heels of today's SearchDay article: Search Memories, some of you might enjoy reminsicing about the "early days" by taking a look at a collection of early search engine announcements that I compiled for my ResourceShelf site a couple of years ago.

It includes: + Brian Pinkerton Announces the Availability of Webcrawler (6/11/94) + Steve Kirsch Announces Free Demos Of the Infoseek Search Engine (7/18/94) + Jerry Yang Alerts a Usenet group to the Yahoo Database (9/21/94) + Many others

Looking for early Google "memories"? No problem, check out this post.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Memories of Search Engines of Yore

In the mid 1990s, a couple of Stanford graduate students visited the popular search engines of the day, offering to license new technology they had developed. Executives from AltaVista and Excite weren't impressed. Infoseek CEO Steve Kirsch told the duo to "go pound sand." So, with none of the major players interested, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to start their own little company called Google.

In today's SearchDay article, Search Memories, Mike Grehan reports on a panel at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference where veterans of AltaVista, Excite and Infoseek reminisced about the early days of web search and opined about Google, then and now.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

Microsoft 1995: Search Isn't A Business!

Another early search history lesson from one of Excite's founders, Joe Kraus, about when Microsoft considered buying his company. "I remember Nathan Myhrvold nearly yelling that search was not a business; that users would find their favorite site, bookmark them and then never go to search again." And a shy penis syndrome encounter with Bill Gates in the bathroom, as well. More here: Potty Talk.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 23, 2004

Search History: Excite & Bluffing For Netscape Net Search

There was a time when I used to track who had what position on the Netscape Net Search page. If a service was there, it was a sure sign that you wanted to be listed with it. That's because so many people used Netscape that its Net Search page -- and the search engines listed on it -- got a ton of traffic. To quote from one of my charts back in 1996:

The Netscape Factor: Netscape Navigator is the most popular browser software on the market. An estimated 75% to 85% of net surfers use it. Netscape has two "buttons" that users can push to search for web sites, a "Net Search" and a "Net Directory" button. Each button makes a page within the Netscape web site appear. On the page, users can directly enter a query to a select group of search engines or directories. Thousands of people push these buttons daily, making the search engines and directories on the related pages extremely important.

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite and Netscape Net Search alumnus, has a great post on how Excite bluffed its way onto that page: Persistence Pays, Part 2. With less than $1 million in the bank, Excite bid $3 million for entry and won -- but only after a stumble. Great reading.

If you want to track who was on that page over the years when it was important, it's all archived for our Search Engine Watch members here: Past Search Providers & Search Results Charts. As for who is important now, I rely more on looking at traffic figures from various rating services. You'll find stats on that over in our Ratings, Reviews & Tests section. As for the page itself, the positioning of multiple search engines died in 1999, when Netscape shifted over to using Google results: Netscape Search Gets Rebuilt.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 1, 2004

Search Milestones For August 2004 Posted

Time for my regular monthly roundup of notable news and announcements from the web search world. you'll find it in today's SearchDay: Search Engine Milestones for August 2004.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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