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| By Bill Slawski, on June 14, 2010 Interested in what people were saying the day after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008? Or how people reacted on the Web to the Chicago Whitesox winning the World Series in 2005? Or the early news on the Gulf oil spill on April 20, 2010? When you search at Google, you can click on “more search tools” in the left column, and enter a “from” and “to” date in the custom range section. If you want to see what pages were showing up on Google on a search for Barack Obama on the day after the election, you can enter 11/4/2008 in the from and to fields. To see what pages were ranking on Google on the day after the Whitesox series ended, entering 10/28/2005 into the date range text boxes. 
If you click on any of the results that appear, you see versions of pages listed in the results as they appear today. If you click on the Google cache links for those entries, you see the most recent cached versions of those pages. But, what if you saw a copy of the page as it appeared within the date range selected? What if Google decided that it would create an archive of the Web, where it showed older copies of web pages, and used the custom date range to help you find those pages? Continue reading Google as an Internet Archive? By Bill Slawski, on January 12, 2010 You may be familiar with the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that appears under the search box on Google’s home page. Enter a search query into the search box, and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and Google will deliver you to the top result for your query. That button has been on the front of Google since the very early days of the search engine. A patent granted to Google this week would have added an “I’m Feeling Bored” button on Google Calendar. An image from the patent shows the button at the top of a page where you can perform an event search, specifying keywords, a geographical area, and a time period. If you click the button without entering any of that information, the event search might try to find events for you based upon your past query history. 
Under the process described in the patent, when you search for an event, that event might be one that Google found when crawling the web, in a news article, through a syndicated feed, or from other sources. Events can cover a wide range of activities, including artistic performances, sporting events, lectures, and auctions. Continue reading The Lost Google ‘I’m Feeling Bored’ Button By Bill Slawski, on December 21, 2009 Search engines have evolved tremendously since they first started appearing on the Web more than a decade ago. I thought it might be fun to take a look back at some of popular search engines of yesterday, and spent a little time at the Internet Archive traveling back to the earlier days of search. I remember visiting these pages when I put my first site up on the Web, and decided to share some screenshots. The dates after each search engines’ name are when the pages were captured by the Internet Archive. AltaVista
October 22, 1996 The sister of a friend used to work at DEC, the company where AltaVista began, and one day she sent him an email with a link to the search engine they had launched the week before. He forwarded the email to me, and I found myself using Altavista for most of my searches for the next year or two. Continue reading What Did Search Look Like a Decade Ago? By Bill Slawski, on August 23, 2009 Can looking at how many times rare words appear in a search engines index give us an idea of the size of the database for that search engine? About a week ago, I wrote about some of the most common English words in the indexes for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and Google Caffeine. I took a look at 50 words that are amongst the most frequently appearing words in English, and estimates from those search engines about the number of times that those words showed up. Comparing the number of results between the different search engines for those common words really didn’t tell us anything about the relative sizes of the indexes for those search engines for a number of reasons. One is that the number of results shown are rough estimates only. It’s also possible that the way that estimates are calculated from one search engine to another are very different. Some of the pages listed among those results are likely duplicate pages at different URLs, or may have contained misspellings of the words. Some of the words may be abbreviations or acronyms, as well (such as “it” being an abbreviation for information technology). Continue reading Using Rare Words to Estimate Search Engine Index Sizes By Bill Slawski, on June 15, 2009 In my last post, I wrote about how Google may be incorporating Sentiment Analysis into the snippets that they showed for some search results. Another new feature that was announced at Google’s Searchology was the display of user ratings for products on some pages. We were told that these reviews can be found in “rich snippets” which show up under the title to a page in a search result, and above the snippet, or description for a page. A recent patent application from Google explores the topic of ratings, assigning quality scores to raters, and discounting or eliminating ratings for dishonest or malicious raters. It made sense to look a little more closely at the ratings that now appear in “rich snippets” and spend some time with the patent filing to see if it might impact how ratings might be shown in the future. In a search for [new york seafood restaurants], I found one result from Yelp that showed an overall ranking, number of reviews, and an indication of how expensive the restaurant listed might be: Continue reading How Google May Rate Raters By Kimberly Saia, on June 4, 2009 I’m Kimberly, Bills ball and chain. Bill is letting me play on his SEO big people playground. I am newly addicted to all things #bing, @bing, Bing related. The more I use Bing, the more I gotta have Bing. I call Bill Bing by mistake. I Bing morning. I Bing noon. I Bing night. Ask Bill. He tried to Google me. Continue reading Bada Bing! By Bill Slawski, on May 28, 2009 When you run a large portal site that provides updated information on a regular basis, one of the goals you have is keeping people on your site so that they can see your content and your advertising. When you run a search engine, one of your goals is helping visitors find what they want quickly, showing them relevant advertising while they use your service to find other pages. Yahoo is in the interesting position of being both portal and search engine, and that may provide some interesting challenges to what they have to offer. A recent post at the Yahoo corporate blog (Yodel Anecdotal), Making new Yahoo! homepages your own, reflects a number of ways that Yahoo will likely use in the future, including a “My Favorites” section where you can place links to your favorite pages regardless of whether they are on Yahoo or not, a number of new applications, and new ways of looking at older applications such as your email. Local personalization will also be a feature of the home page, where you can see news and applications that are geared towards your location. The post tells us: For example, the new homepage in India will include a Cricket app and a whole host of others that are India-centric, while the UK site will include apps such as underground alerts, news from the BBC, and more.
Continue reading Problems with Portals: Yahoo on Keeping Visitors Around By Bill Slawski, on May 1, 2009 Do you have a favorite search engine? Is there a particular reason why you use the search engine that you do? Do you use more than one search engine regularly? Have you switched from using one search engine regularly to another one? If you ran a search engine, you would probably want to understand why people shift from one search engine to another, either temporarily or permanently. And you might be interested in seeing if you can identify why and when these shifts take place, and a way to predict when such a changeover might happen. Microsoft has been exploring why people switch search engines, and have filed for a patent on predicting when someone might switch from one search engine to another. It seems like an odd subject for a patent application, and they even tell us that one behavior might indicate such a switch might be when someone submits a query for “Google” in Microsoft’s Live Search. The patent filing describes studies that Microsoft has conducted where they collected information about searchers switching to different search engines, and provides some details on how the ability to make such a prediction can be used by a search engine in a number of ways… Continue reading Should Search Engines Refer Searchers to Other Search Engines? Page 2 of 22«12345»1020...Last » | Change Language
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