Category: Of Note in Search Biz

What with Yahoo pointing to Nutch as one of the centerpiece projects in its new Labs, perhaps the stars are aligning for open source search. I recently got wind of another project in the works. It’s called Sprawler, and it’s in “pre-alpha” over at SourceForge. The man behind Sprawler is Eric Anderson, who is a systems analyst at a large unix installation in Austin, and came to search via an interest in physics. It’s early – Anderson does not expect to start indexing until later this Spring – but its good to see more and more interest in the space.

It was bound to happen – Yahoo announced today its own research labs. The labs live here. Seems this is the old Overture research warmed once over, their too-short list of research projects include Nutch, which was supported by Overture (I wrote an early piece on Nutch here). I’ve been on Yahoo for a while, even back before the Overture days, to take a leading role in search and internet technology innovation. I’m not entirely wowed by this unveiling. The second project, Cluster Graphing, linked to a 404 error. The “Concept Discovery” research is important, however. Let’s hope this is more than just a press release…though at first glance, it kind of looks that way.

Google Labs, for comparison….

Check out Topix, another new news aggregator (in Beta), this one from a handful of DMOZ and Netscape refugees. What makes Topix special? From an email sent to me by Rich Skrenta, one of the founders:

Our project is a news aggregator that reads all the news, everywhere, and sorts it into thousands of categories depending on what the stories are about. One kind of sorting we do is geographical, so we produce an online news rollup for each of 30,000 towns and cities across the US. We also track every mention of a celebrity, sports team, health condition, country, music group, public companies, and some other stuff…

The geographic sort makes Topix a local news player, which is potentially a major source of revenue once local search gains full traction. Take note, media investors.

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David Weinberger today reports on Findory, a personalized news site that requires no registration and no personal information, it simply watches what you read and builds a profile via your information habits and those of others who also have viewed the same articles as you. Very cool idea. No idea if it works, but worth a pointer….

Relatively deep in John Markoff’s piece “Plaintiffs Say Microsoft Still Behaves Badly” these charges are related: In a separate report, filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, which is the lone holdout from the antitrust settlement, stated that its investigations “portend badly for the efficacy of the Nov. 1, 2002, judgment.”

“We have continued to receive and review indications that Microsoft is engaged in troubling business behavior,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Glenn S. Kaplan.

The Massachusetts report said that the state was reviewing allegations that Microsoft is “engaged in a campaign against various Internet search engines similar to the campaign it previously waged against Netscape’s Navigator browser.”

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Dex, the newly named Yellow Pages unit (formerly of Qwest/US West), announced Friday they have made all 240,000 of their listings – covering a major swath of the midwestern and western US – searchable online. Said Dex President and Chief Executive Officer George Burnett, rather defensively, “We think our product is better than any portal.”

MediaPost has a story on it here.

This piece (via Forbes.com) explores the idea, which Google does not deny or confirm. Says Google may do its own branded email service.

From the piece: Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.
Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN’s Hotmail.
“If they were to go the e-mail route they’d have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation,” said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001.

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimizers,” an oft-maligned class of businesses who specialize in helping companies rank better in organic – aka “pure” – listings. In other words, these are the folks who will help your site get in the first page of results in Google, as Google is (for now) the only game in town when it comes to pure results. And as we all know, getting on the first page of Google results can mean a massive amount of traffic and business to your site. Plus, you can avoid having to spring for paid listings.

Now, SEOs have a long and rather mottled history, and it’s not my goal in this post to revisit it. Suffice to say that many SEOs use tactics which fail the integrity sniff test, and most observers of this space would agree that the overzealous use of search-engine optimization has created a massive spam problem for Google – crap results which clog up otherwise relevant SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, it’s not at all uncommon to call the dance between SEOs and Google’s programmers an “arms race” – wherein Google will shift its algorithms to thwart obvious SEO deviousness, and the SEO community will respond with new and ever more crafty techniques to foil Google’s algorithms.

But many SEOs perform a honest and valuable service – they play by the rules, and they help sites organize themselves so they rank just about where they reasonably ought to. Optimizing for Google is not a new idea – nearly every good site does it, from CNet to Amazon. The SEO industry recently took a major step toward becoming an industry with standards and practices when it self-organized SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (though I can’t yet find the equivalent of SEMPO Member Guidelines, which I imagine is still a pretty hot potato within that nascent community).

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Chris Sherman over at SearchDay (SEW) gives Metrobot, a new kind of local search engine, a rave review today. From his piece: “Metrobot is one of the most useful specialized search services I’ve seen in a long while. It also shows how thinking outside of the (search) box can lead to a creative yet incredibly useful solution to the local search problem all of the major search engines are throwing a lot of resources at. Here’s hoping they all take a close look at what Metrobot has to offer.”

I tried the San Francisco search, and was not impressed – I searched by “type of business” and could not find a bike shop or a dry cleaner. New York was better populated. The service is very new and the CEO promises to add listings as fast as they can. I’m inclined to listen when Chris or others at SEW say nice things about a new approach to search, and the map feature is really cool (here’s an example here). It’s surprising, in a good way, to see local businesses in context of what else is on the street nearby.

Wired News rounds up the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) today, going so far as to quote Danny saying “this is not news.” More proof that anything related to Google gives editors the urge to assign a story. However, one can always find something of note buried in me-too news – for example:

According to Kelsey Group program director Gerg Sterling, ‘2004 is going to be the Year of the Search’…”

2004?!! I better get my book done and quick….

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