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Home Search Central Powersearch Metasearch People Search Newsfinder Radio Search Tutorial Bookstore Resources Newsletter |
The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 5 Go to go to the Pandia Post home page for more information on our free newsletter (http://www.pandia.com/post) No. 5, October 2000 The Pandia Post is the newsletter of the Pandia Search Central, your online guide to Internet searching. EDITORIALMore search engine news at Pandia We know that we have a lot of teachers, researchers and librarians among our subscribers, people who need to be kept up to date on the development of Internet searching and search tools. We are now turning Pandia Search World into a one-stop gateway to search information. We have redesigned our own news messages, giving each of them a separate page, making them easier to find, bookmark and distribute. The daily news update from Moreover.com is still there, but we have also added short presentations of relevant online articles of special interest to researchers, teachers and librarians. These are fetched from Magportal, a new site devoted to article searching. You will also find links to other valuable sources of search engine news, including Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch, Tara Calishain's Researchbuzz and Greg Notess' Search Engine Showdown. You will find Pandia Search World at Click here to recommend Pandia to a friend: SEARCH TIPSThe iWon search engineOK. We admit it. We are prejudiced. We have had a hard time taking the iWon search site seriously. It has a cluttered interface with a bleak colour scheme. It actually looks like the search site equivalent of a tabloid or "yellow" newspaper, or maybe a cheap mail order catalogue — and in many ways it is just that. Its main attraction seems to be the fact that you may win money by searching there. Yes, you heard us: You can earn up to 100 free sweepstakes entries a day for chances to win up to 10 million US dollars if you use the search engine or click on any of the links on the front page. iWon gives away about $27 million in prize money a year In September Mary Johnston of Kenmore, Washington, USA, became the 11th person to collect a million-dollar prize from iWon. Johnston raked in an extra $1 million for signing up for a long-distance telephone promotion with Sprint Corp. In September Rosemary Burgio of Franklin Square, New York, logged on to iWon.com and was led to a page containing a message from Mario Scirica, her boyfriend of three years, asking her to marry him. iWon.com claims this was the first time a marriage proposal has appeared on a top-five Internet portal for all its users to see. We believe them. If this wasn’t enough, iWon is now teaming up with Hollywood Squares, the American TV game show, to create a sweepstakes called the iWon & Hollywood Squares Celebrity Sweepstakes. Enough said. What about the search engine? Is it any good? Well, there’s actually nothing cheap about it. It is, like HotBot and NBCi, based on the Inktomi database. Inktomi is a company that provides search sites with data. It is up to the search engine, however, to decide how to use this index. Hence the search results may vary from site to site. Unlike some of its competitors, iWon is using the complete Inktomi data set -- the so-called Gen3 database -- together with data from the Direct Hit popularity-based search database, the LookSmart Web directory and the Moreover news service. Greg Notess of Search Engine Showdown tested the search engine this summer, and found that for 33 specific, single word queries, iWon's Advanced Search found more hits than any other search engine. Google, with its recently announced 560 million page index, came in a close second. Inktomi-based HotBot and NBCi (then called Snap) were lagging far behind. Hence iWon is one of the largest — if not the largest — search engine in the world! Obviously this makes it interesting as a source of information. It is not too bad at advanced searching either. It does accept some true Boolean searching (search terms like AND, OR, AND NOT). You can also use search engine maths (+,- and "phrases"). Hence to search for pages containing the words "search" and "engine", write: search AND engine or +search +engine To search for pages containing the word "apple" but not the word "computer", write: apple AND NOT computer or +apple —computer To search for pages that contain one or both of the words "web" and "directory", write: Web OR directory (this cannot be done with search engine maths, as the search engine defaults to an AND search) There is a page for advanced searching based on pull down menus. You may select whether a search query should, must or must not include a specific word or phrase. However, you cannot use this page to build more complex, nested, queries. Moreover, the advanced search form will only query the Inktomi database. iWon accepts wild cards (truncation). The asterisk * symbol can be used at any point in your search to look for a string of unknown letters or characters. Hence Pand* will cover both Pandia and Panda. The question mark ? can be used at any point to search for a single unknown letter or character. However, words cannot start with a * or ?. iWon has also some support for field searching (what iWon calls "metawords"):
General Web searches are case sensitive if one or more (but not all) letters in your search are capitalised. If you search for words by mixing both uppercase and lowercase letters, you will only get websites that contain those words just the way you have typed them. If you search for words using either all lowercase letters or all uppercase letters, your search will be treated as case insensitive and you will get websites that contain your words regardless of capitalisation. You can also use natural language search (plain English) to ask a question. In addition to this iWon is serving data from Fact City. You can find facts and statistics by entering your search into any normal iWon Search box. If your search terms are specific enough, you will find the relevant facts displayed toward the top of the search results page. Given the search site’s strong populist tendencies, it may come as a surprise that iWon has one of the most powerful search engines on the Net. It is not in the same league as Alta Vista and Northern Light when it comes to tools for advanced searching, but its wide coverage means that it is good at fetching obscure and hard-to-find information. It is not as good as Google in answering simple queries with accurate and relevant results, but the inclusion of data from Looksmart, Direct Hit, RealNames and Fact City should increase the accuracy for the average, "non-Boolean", searcher (although some may be confused by the large number of result sources). Hence all in all iWon has become a very valuable addition to our search toolbox. iWon was launched in the fall of 1999, and is backed by the US television network CBS. By some measures (number of page views, not visitors), iWon is now the second most popular search portal in the world, Yahoo being number 1. People living outside the US should note that sweepstakes is offered only in the United States and its territories to legal United States residents at least 18 years old. The search engine, however, is open to anybody! iWon.com Offers Cash Prizes And a Marriage Proposal (Yahoo) iWon and Hollywood Squares Ink Joint Marketing and Promotion Agreement (Yahoo) In The Slippery Space Of Portals, iWon Sticks (TechWeb)
Search Engine Showdown on search engine sizes iWon help page iWon’s presentation of its various search features iWon ranks as 10th most visited website (iWon) Eyes on the price — the history of iWon (Fortune)
PANDIA SEARCH WORLDLookSmart takes over ZealWeb directory and search company LookSmart will integrate user reviews and ratings into its website listings through the acquisition of the community-driven directory Zeal. Zeal Media Inc. was founded in 1999 by Brian Goler and Kevin Berk, and is based in Culver City, California. Searching at Zeal yields results that are pre-screened and rated by other users. The highest rated websites appear at the top of every category, giving the searcher direct access to the sites the so-called "Zealots", i.e. the Zeal community members, believe are the best on the Web. Zeal listings will be used in LookSmart's international directory services along with its own listings, professional reviews and selections. On Looksmart Zealot user reviews will be limited to non-commercial sites. Zeal already includes reviews made by the Looksmart editors on the Zeal site. Looksmart is currently working hard to become the major search directory service on the Web. Unlike the present king, Yahoo!, Looksmart is not so much focusing on bringing traffic to its own website. Instead it is lending its database to other sites on the Net. According to LookSmart, its databases currently reach more than 64 million U.S. Internet users through partnerships with Microsoft's MSN, Netscape Netcenter, AltaVista, Excite, TimeWarner, Sony, Macromedia, Road Runner, Cox Interactive Media and US West. LookSmart's search directories are also distributed through BT and other global partners to countries throughout Europe and the Pacific Rim. Looksmart won a major victory in the competition against the Open Directory Project (ODP) this year, by convincing Alta Vista to switch its directory offering from a combined Looksmart/ODP database, to a pure Looksmart directory. One reason for this is probably that Looksmart demands a fee from websites that want to be listed. The Looksmart partners get a part of this. Looksmart.com Zeal Zeal press release Traffick on Zeal 360 Powered with new search technologyThe world of Internet searching is filled with problems. Some search engines may take more than 6 months to register a new site. Then there is the question of file formats. The search engines register regular webpages, like the one you are reading now, they do not index Acrobat PDF-files, Postscript files and the so-called "hidden web", i.e. content in databases that requires you to use a search form to fetch information. Now the Internet and intranet infrastructure company 360 Powered claims that it has found a solution to these problems. 360 Powered claims it has the ability to index every word on every page, every day. If this is true, they are probably on to something big. Pandia Search World has more. Go to http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2000-37-360.html
SITESEEINGNew site devoted to search engines: SearchEngines.comThe world is full of competitors. We don't mind, as long as they offer something useful to the Internet. SearchEngines.com does. Like Pandia, SearchEngines.com offers advice on how to search for information on the Internet and direct access to relevant search engines and directories. Moreover, SearchEngines.com shows how to optimise websites for top search engine rankings, and includes strategies on how to effectively build, maintain and promote a site. "About 85% of Net users discover new sites with search engines," according to Yelena Shapiro, a researcher at SearchEngines.com. "Anyone who is involved with a website knows that high search engine rankings are imperative for success. With so much online competition, this is one marketing strategy that gives an edge over the competitors. SearchEngines.com provides all the essential info for free," Shapiro says. SearchEngines.com boasts of its easy interface and simple navigation. "The site is designed with information formatted to enhance the user experience," according to Don Horne, designer of the site. And the site is actually quite easy to use. In order to fit in as many links as possible without making the pages look cluttered, the site makes extensive use of pull down menus. Searchers should benefit from the site's many search engine listings. Like Pandia, SearchEngines.com offer lists of relevant search engines and search sites. These are gathered in four broad categories called: "General Search Engines", "World Search Engines", "Topical Search Engines" and "Reference Topics". The last category includes list of sites devoted to themes like education, travel and employment. Unlike Pandia, SearchEngines.com does not offer reviews of the major search sites. There are also sites out there that offer more comprehensive lists than these. Searchengines.com has, however, managed to pick out some of the best information sources on the Net, and the lists are very easy to navigate. Like Pandia, SearchEngines.com could therefore be a useful starting point for Web navigation. The main focus of the site remains, however, search engine promotion and Web marketing. Searchengines.com FINALLY...If you are using newer versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape: Enter "pandia" (without the quotation marks) in the address field and hit Enter. The browser will take you directly to the Pandia Search Central. Do you like Pandia? Click here to recommend it to a friend: The Pandia Post is edited by Per and Susanne Koch Pandia Post Home Page: http://www.pandia.com/post/ Send suggestions and comments to: editor@aviana.com Pandia will NEVER make the subscriber list available to any other company or organisation. The Pandia Post is copyright 2000 P&S Koch. All rights reserved. Visit the Pandia Search Central for more information on Internet searching: http://www.pandia.com/ Sign up for our free newsletter today! |