So everyone is coming out
with lists, predictions and report cards, at the risk
of being a "me too" I'll post my own opinion of the
Big Four search engines.
First, I divide search engines into two broad
categories: 1. Stand Alone index, this means that the
search engine's own index is big enough and the algo
is good enough that you can use it alone; 2.
Meta-Search quality, the index and algo are not quite
good enough to use as your only search engine but are
good enough to use as part of a meta-search engine.
Major Search
Engines -
Google: Stand Alone. While I
don't thing the index is nearly as fresh or as
relevant as it once was, Google is still the
standard by which all other search engines are
judged. What I do like about Google is that they
still tend to favor what they think are content
sites over commercial sites if possible.
Yahoo: Stand Alone. Yahoo is
the only other search engine that really can be
used alone for searching. Yahoo seems to favor
commercial sites slightly in ranking, which is
good if you are shopping or searching for
products, but can be annoying when searching for
information. Still it is a quality index.
MSN/Live: Meta-search quality.
MSN has one of the freshest indexes and most
aggressive spiders in the search engine world. I
like that they still give significant weight to
on-page factors in ranking, and they are not
totally dependent on link popularity schemes.
Unfortunately, this leaves them open to spam. I
think their quality is slowly improving and
hopefully MSN will find a happy balance between
on-page and off-page ranking factors. MSN is great
to have in a meta-search engine because of the
freshness and aggressive spidering.
Ask: Meta-search quality.
I think Ask is getting close to Stand Alone
status, but their index is still smallish, not as
fresh as I'd like and their spider is much too
timid to deeply spider sites, especially dynamic
sites, so it is missing lots of pages of content.
Still they have not got there in 2006 but I have
hopes they can spider better in the near future.
Minor Search
Engines -
Exalead - Meta-search quality.
This French based engine is impressive and has a
nice interface. Personally I like it a lot.
However, on commercially competitive searches it
still ranks too many spammy sites highly. Good as
a secondary engine in a meta-search.
Gigablast - Meta-search quality.
I think Gigablast should be included as a
secondary engine in any self respecting
meta-search. Gigablast will dig up and rank some
good sites the majors overlook which makes it
valuable.
Wisenut - Meta-Search quality.
Wisenut has good relevancy, but not very fresh
index. Good to have in a meta-search because, like
Gigablast, it digs up and ranks some good sites
the others miss.
Note: I use Ask, MSN, Gigablast and Wisenut
indirectly every day for searching as part of
Clusty meta-search, my default
search engine. Those engines seem to do a good job
for Clusty and other meta-search engines. When I
need to dig deeper into a topic than a meta-search
can provide, I use Yahoo and some directories like
dmoz.org.
The scary part of this whole report card is that with
the exception of relative newcomer Exalead, the
report card is pretty much the same as it has been
for the last few years. I think we might be
stagnating badly in the search engine web index
industry.
Jimmy Wales, the founder
of Wikipedia announced that he is working on a new
type of search engine sometimes called "Wikiasari"
or Wikia Search.
It sounds to me that he hopes to
somehow combine social networking and social
editing like Wikipedia with a deep spidering
search engine. Frankly, despite heckles from SEO's, it sounds
like a noble goal.
Will it be a
Google-killer?
Well the odds are against it, but that does not mean
a worthwhile, usable and commercially self-sustaining
major search engine cannot come out of this project.
A lot of average Internet users, that I know
personally use Wikipedia as a starting point in their
searches so it is not unreasonable for Wikia Search
to gain a following from traffic fed by Wikipedia.
I'm trying to ponder what Wikia Search will look
like. A lot of people think Wikia Search will not
scale, and that is true if you are rely only on
humans to index the web. But if you also incorporate
a unreviewed spidered index and a very good ranking
algo then I think it can scale much better - if you
keep that index fresh.
I'm a directory guy and while I recognize directories
are fast becoming obsolete I have always thought that
combining a human edited index of quality sites with
a spidering engine on a large scale would be
interesting proposition. Of course, Yahoo and NBCi
used to do this years ago, but if you can actually
spider the pages of the sites that have been human
reviewed and broaden the participation in the human
review process from just a few editors to a bigger
base it might help. But it depends on how you do it:
back in the old days when Searchking was trying to build a
real search index it relied on human voting to
determine relevancy, but since only a tiny
percentage of users ever voted it rendered that
ranking scheme almost useless. The lesson there is
that most people just want to get find their
information and leave in as few clicks as possible
so very few are going to stop and vote of edit
unless it directly benefits a basic need. That is
something the Wikia people need to keep in mind
because it almost invites spammers to game the
system. Chris Sherman has more on
social search.
I think the bottom line is, we still need some
innovation in search engines, and we still need more
major search engines with their own indexes than just
the Big Four. Five major search engines would be
better and six would be better still, especially if
that will siphon off users from Google which controls
too much of the search traffic right now. If Wikia
Search can do it then I'm all for it.
Source: SEORoundtable
I hope you all have a very
Merry Christmas!
My father, who has had some major health problems
this past year, is coming over to spend the weekend
with me. I'm happy he's still here and that he is
well enough to come and spend Christmas with me.
Christmas was always his favorite holiday so I hope
to make this a good one.
Things are quiet now but I expect it to get busy
around here later with me preparing a roast (hey I
don't cook!), relatives stopping by to visit and me
picking up some sugar free pies from the bakery. Yum.
I hope to do a little more blogging this weekend but
if I don't, once again, have a Merry Christmas.
Listening to ''Peace On Earth/Silent Night'', by Dean
Martin (Play Count: 20)
So I'm in the middle of
moving into a new house and three people have told me
that this is a good time to get rid of old furniture
and start new. All stated that they had hung on to
old stuff before when moving and regretted it later.
Hmm. This makes me think maybe it is a good time to
ditch my old couch and get something new. The old
couch is still serviceable but starting to look lived
in and ratty. Heh. Maybe I will price out a new couch
after Christmas. It's something worth thinking about.
Update:
Okay I thought
about it and ended up ordering a new couch. The old
one goes. Gosh I hate doing this stuff.
You can now create and
download your own free SEO trading cards
at
SEOTrumps.com. Here is one I created of myself.
I kind of get amazed at what Gurtie and Chris
of GHN can come up with and
how fast Chris can code and Gurtie can design. My
hat is off to them both. Anyway SEOTrumps is great
fun and a good laugh. I might just have to buy a
color printer to print out my own set.
Source: SearchGuild
Webmailer makes your web based
email your default program on your Mac computer.
So when you click on a mailto: link on a website
Webmailer opens your webmail account in your
default browser. It's free.
This is great. I use Yahoo mail for 98% of my work
and it always irritates me that my computer would
always look to a email client like Apple Mail or
Eudora (whatever was default) to send emails. This is
a great little utility that I will be installing on
all my Mac's.
Source: TUAW
Oh, goody, I thought it
was only me, but Danny Sullivan helps
explain that most site owners
see 70% or more of their search engine traffic
coming from Google. That too has been my
experience across most of my sites, although I
have to admit as time goes on I actually do less
and less optimization on all my sites, the numbers
for Google traffic remain at about 70%+. Sigh.
In my own experience, traffic from general
directories has almost disappeared. Years ago there
was a time when Dmoz and Google directory delivered a
lot of traffic in their own right. I still get some
traffic from niche directories but I'm wondering if
niche directories aren't also becoming just a
sideline. Surprisingly I still get a goodly amount of
direct click traffic from all those link pages that
webmasters build on their sites and that most SEO's
claim are worthless. Search engine's might discount
those pages but people still find them useful.
Finally I still get fair traffic to my various niche
portals from StumbleUpon, so obviously surfing
is not dead.
(Note: None of this applies to this blog or this
domain (talmir.info) which I don't do any promoting
or optimizing for and which I let spread strictly via
WOM. That is pretty much on purpose just to see how
traffic grows organically.)
I noticed a link on
Michael's sidebar to the
Snap search
engine, which was enough to
make me give it another look. The results I get on
Snap are actually fairly good. Hmm this deserves
watching. I see there is a way to submit a URL for
inclusion but it is not clear if Snap is
maintaining their own database or using one of
their partners and are really a meta
search engine.
One problem is that the site does not work all that
well with the OmniWeb browser, which becomes a
problem although it seems to be well behaved in
browsers that share the Firefox rendering engine.
Anyway I'll try to test this over the coming months
and give you some sort of impression.
*Snap.com (II) designates the current incarnation of
Snap as a search engine. Originally Snap.com was a
directory several years ago.
I am not flying low enough
under the radar ...
I got tagged by both Michael Martinez
and
Diane Vigil to write 5 things you
don't know about me.
1. I live in a New Urbanist or Traditional Neighborhood
Development.
2. I once met former British Prime Minister, Lord (at
that time just 'Sir') Harold Wilson, who stayed overnight
in my father's house along with his Scotland Yard
bodyguards and his personal secretary, when he
came to speak at my university.
3. Music. I like Classical music, Rock, and
increasingly as I grow older, I like jazz. I also
take a secret guilty pleasure in both punk rock and
ABBA (go figure).
4. I do not dance - ever - full stop (and the world
is a much better place for that).
5. I used to sell computers back in the early 1980's
before the IBM PC and MS DOS became popular. The
first operating system I learned was CP/M.
Now I'll tag:
Gurtie
Chris Ridings
UKGimp (hope he doesn't hate
me for this)
Heather Windsor
(grnidone)
Roger Wehbe (TheFounder)
A new social networking
site: TickMe has launched. So I
joined up and I don't see much difference in
TickMe and what I remember of Google's ill
fated Orkut, both seem to be a
popularity circle jerk. Maybe there is some value
for dating, but I don't see any other benefits
besides ego strokes.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Source: Graywolf
Are you a urban person who
suddenly finds themselves living in a rural setting?
Do the sounds of cud chewing ruminants keep you up at
night? Are the cattle lowing and crapping all around
your garden? Then here is a test to see if you are
loosing your city ways and becoming a true country
rustic.
Just answer this question: How many pairs of green
rubber (or any color rubber) wellies do you own?
Answer: I own ...
0 Wellies: You are safe and do not need to be
deprogramed. You are free to travel even to known
rustic hotspots such as Scotland, Yorkshire, Canada
and the American Mid-West for short periods without
any great risk.
1 Pair of Wellies: Caution is required as this is the
top of a slippery slope into rustic behavior. Best to
start visiting nearby provincial capitals regularly
for shopping, drinking and the arts. However, avoid
extended travel to Scotland, Ireland or the middle
bit of the USA where they raise crops or cattle, talk
slow, are polite and have funny accents. Go to a
coffee house at least three times a week.
2 Pairs of Wellies: Go to London Right Now! It's not
too late. If you are a man buy a business suit (no
tweed) if you are a woman buy shoes with high heels
that are impossible to wear along country lanes.
3 Pairs of Wellies: Full rustic aversion therapy is
needed. Eliminate oats from both your diet and your
thoughts. You must spend a month in New York City
dealing with rude New Yorkers or, if time is of the
essence you can spend two weeks in Paris being
insulted by sneering beret wearing, Gauluoise
smoking, Derrida or Sarte quoting, intellectuals who
hate you because you are a bourgeois Anglo-Saxon.
If you actually wear a pair of rubber wellies in
Paris you have already gone completely rustic and
there is no hope. Just buy some gardening tools and
plant 'taters and chew your cud with your
neighbors.
So my old rather
disreputable "trucker" style cap finally fell apart
due to advanced age, so I thought I would replace it
with a search engine logo cap. I went
looking for search engine gear
to buy from the major search engines and was
shocked 
to find that only Google has
a functioning gear
store! This gives Google a
virtual monopoly on the gear front, not because
they are better but because the other search
engines have dropped the ball and IMO they ought
to be ashamed of themselves.
Yahoo - first up on the shame list is
Yahoo Gear
Store. Jeez how lame is
that. Forget peanut butter memos, this yahoo gear
store has been closed since before June of
2005! Yahoo, if you want to
compete with Google then you have to work on that
attention span thing and show some pride.
Ask.com - Personally I like the Ask logo. So I was
hoping to find a black ball cap with the Ask logo on
it. Ask doesn't even have a store. Besides it looking
cool I figured having "Ask" on my cap might be a
good conversation flirting opener with
chicks at parties when they ask me what they are
supposed to ask me. 
See there is a whole domino effect
here due to gear failure!
MSN/Live - I searched but found no store. Frankly, I
was not keen on having a butterfly on a cap anyway.
Okay by now I was getting desperate...
Even venerable portals like Excite or Lycos had no
gear, nor did newcomers Clusty, Exalead or Gigablast.
What about the directories? Dmoz.org was a bust. The
little Mozilla mascot might have looked cool but no
dice. So far only Uncoverthenet
has
gear, but no hats.
Man, all I wanted was to buy a cool looking search
engine cap that didn't say Google - is that too much
to ask? Damn. You can't compete if you quit the
field.
Listening to ''I'll Be Home For Christmas'', by Frank
Sinatra (Play Count: 14)
I have been trying
out NetVibes as a personal start
page for the last couple of weeks. So far I like
it and it seems to play well with all my Mac
browsers. Mainly I use the Bookmarks, which I like
having web based so that they are consistent on
all my computers. I find I don't use the web
search much because my browsers all have search
fields. I prefer to use Bloglines to read news feeds
although I may set Netvibes up with a couple of
"Top Stories" feeds from Yahoo and BBC so I can
track world events, but for heavy news reading
I'll stick with Bloglines.
Netvibes was slow to load when I was using dialup,
enough to be annoying, so it is definitely a
broadband only service.
I used to use MyYahoo but I sorta out grew it.
Netvibes is worth trying if you like having a start
page that you can customize.
Well, in case you have been waiting breathlessly for the verdict the Rapidweaver software upgrade is complete. On this site at least things seem to be okay. I use this CMS client to not only manage websites but also to blog so it is important to me. I now have Permalinks, and although they are a bit long they do work so I'm happy because it makes it easier for me and others to link directly to individual posts. Also all parts of the blog, permalink and archive pages now have a more consistent template and sidebar. Hopefully this will all follow through on my other sites.
I manage this blog
with RapidWeaver web builder CMS client.
The software has started nagging me that an
upgrade to RapidWeaver 3.5.1 is available.
Upgrading would add permalinks to the blog entries
so it is probably worth doing. That and there are
some bug issues with my current version.
I do hate upgrading, the last time I did it several
key templates that I was using just disappeared
because Rapidweaver decided not to include them. I
can tell you I was upset: if you are going to
discontinue an old template warn people but do not
arbitrarily delete it without warning! We are
building whole sites around a certain color and look
and I'm not going to change that every time the
bloody software gets updated. I did get those
templates back but the whole experience put me off
upgrading so I have been avoiding it.
So be warned - this weekend I intend to upgrade so if
the whole site goes down you will know
why.
Michael Martinez has a
new SEO blog called SEO Theory which
replaces his previous Google Says blog. I always thought
Google Says was too narrow a topic for Michael,
and I always felt he was too constrained by it.
Michael Martinez can talk intelligently about a
wide range of topics and seo theory is a better
fit, IMHO. It is already an interesting read.
I have listed SEO Theory blog in the
web development directory.
There are two huge signs that a couple is getting old, if you ask me....the other one is putting a ceramic Christmas tree on a table and calling it a day.
I am soo busted.
Link
Obviously, despite their disastrous attempt to rebrand themselves as "Brown", UPS has better service. Hands down. Just saying.
