Month: November 2006

Dr. Peter Jacso, of the University of Hawaii, has a good analysis of the interruptions in logic of Google Book Search. Among others, the dear beast has trouble conforming to the Boolean OR operation: with keywords searches on arrogant OR arrogance producing more results than the combined number for each phrase alone. Some of these results, in his ongoing analysis of GBS stand, in bleak contrast to the sophistication of the main search engine. This is perhaps because Google is attempting to use its web index algorithms to retrieve the data, as Battelle suggests, against the grain of typical information retrieval and structured search systems. Perhaps these are bugs in designing that system?

Jasco also compares GBS to Amazon’s book search, with devastating results. Bottom-line:

“Beyond simple keyword searching, Google’s software seems to be cognitively challenged, to put it nicely, and hinders access to the content, which would deserve at least a functional and half as smart software as Amazon has.”

Gary Price, who always appreciates the proper acknowledgment that book digitization began before Google, has more.

Turn, a well-backed search service run by the former CEO of Alta Vista, is set to launch at the Web 2 conference Tuesday. But AdWeek has the story a bit early…

San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn in recent months has attracted $18 million in venture backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. Turn has about 1,000 advertisers in its system, which displays ads on approximately 30 sites.

Unlike Google, which charges advertisers on a per-click basis, Turn relies on a cost-per-action scheme. It charges advertisers only if users take desired actions, such as filling out registration forms or closing on sales.

David Sifry gives his bi-annual report here.

Yahoo! Slurp announces additional sophistication that allows webmasters greater control in directing a bot’s path with the robots.txt file.

Product manager Priyank Garg writes, “I was going through my notes from Danny Sullivan’s Open Feedback sessions during the ‘Meet the Crawlers’ panels at Search Engine Strategies conferences. One of the items on my list was a request for enhanced syntax in robots.txt to make it easier for webmasters to manage how search crawlers, including Slurp, access your content.”

The two new variations are ‘*’ –which will identify a sequential string of characters, and ‘$’ –which will denote pages with a given ending in their file name. These can be used to tell the Slurp bot, for example, to follow (or ignore) any pages in the directory with the phrase ‘_print’ (‘/*_print*.html’). As well, their combinations work–for example, to disallow ‘.gif’ files (‘/*.gif$’).