The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 12

March 2002

• The new Pandia Metasearch engine
• What now, AltaVista?
• Google indexing https-pages
• Espotting becomes European pay-per-click champion
• On the RankWrite Roundtable search engine marketing newsletter
• How to stop your kids from finding offensive material on the Web
• First Internet Marketing Bar Conference a big hit
• 5th International Internet Marketing Conference, Canada
• Search Engine Workshops, US
• Planet Ocean's Search Engine News Newsletter
• Buyer’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization & Positioning Services

EDITORIAL

The new Pandia Metasearch Engine

We are just back from the Internet Marketing Bar Conference in Irvine, US, getting a refill of search engine friendship, rumours and marketing tips. We can hardly explain the feeling of entering sunny California after having driven to the Oslo airport through a blizzard. Yes, we know, our climate does bring Norway a lot of Olympic gold medals, but it is not worth it, really!

Our stay in the US has not stopped us from renewing Pandia. Those of you who uses the Pandia Metasearch engine will have noticed that we have added two new search engines to our portfolio: Wisenut and Ask Jeeves' Teoma.

Wisenut and Teoma are search engines that follow Google in their interest in advanced ranking algorithms that take account of page popularity (i.e. how many and what type of websites that link to a certain page) . Moreover, Wisenut has one of the largest search engine databases in the world, containing some 1.5 billion webpages. Given that we already include search results from Fast, this gives our Metasearch Engine wide coverage, indeed.

Nevertheless, there are lots of serious searchers out there that doubt the effectiveness of metasearch engines. The main reason is that it is so hard to use more advanced Boolean searching when using such search sites. This is true, and we would actually not recommend a metasearch engine for complex search queries, as the query language of the various search engines vary.

If you are doing a more general search, however, to get a feeling for what is out there, metasearch engines may be very efficient. Moreover, there is actually not a large overlap between the databases of the various search engines, meaning that metasearch engines may give you the best of many worlds.

The fact that metasearch engines have to query several search engines to gather a list of results, means that they normally are slower than regular search engines. Our Metasearch Engine can definitely not compete with for instance Fast AlltheWeb as regards speed.

This is why we have made two variants of our metasearch engine.

If you select the Fast Metasearch option, you will (at the moment) get results from a small selection of sites (AltaVista, Yahoo including Google, Fast AlltheWeb and Wisenut). The fact that the metasearch engine only has to query four search sites, means that you get the results pretty fast.

On the other hand, if you really need to make a broad sweep of the Web you may use the Extenisve alternative, which adds the Open Directory, Direct Hit, LookSmart, About and Teoma to the engines and directories above.

The search technology underpinning the Pandia Metasearch Engine is developed by an American company called Anaconda.

PS: If you are looking for the Pandia Awards 2002, they will be presented in a special issue of the Pandia Post to be published by the end of the month.

Per & Susanne Koch
editors

The Pandia Metasearch Engine can be found at http://www.pandia.com/metasearch/.

Pandia Post No. 10 has more on Wisenut: http://www.pandia.com/post/post-010.html#wisenut