The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 8

May 2001

The Pandia Post is the bimonthly newsletter of the Pandia Search Central, your online guide to Internet searching.

EDITORIAL

More changes in the world of Internet searching

The end of Infoseek
These are exciting times, indeed, 2001 becoming the annus horribilis of the search engine industry. In March Disney reduced the Go portal to nothing but a shadow of its former glory. The good old Infoseek search engine was put in the dustbin of history, being replaced by Go's old enemy, the GoTo pay-per-click search engine.

The end of NBCi
Then NBCi decided that it is going to close the NBCi directory sometime this summer. We are not quite sure what is going to happen to the NBCi directory (formerly known as Snap). We are told NBC is trying to sell it, which will not be easy in an atmosphere were so many investors have lost their faith in the dot com miracle.

The end of Excite?
If this wasn't enough Excite@Home is getting increasingly worried about the search engine part of their empire. Rumor has it that the company is planning to keep its broadband Internet connection services, but that it is trying to sell the Excite and Webcrawler search engines.

"We are considering the sale of certain narrowband media assets," says Alison Bowman, Excite@Home's director of communications according to Search Engine Watch. "Which assets and when and if they will be sold has not yet been determined. We will make an announcement when there is more to report here. The company is continuing to refine its focus on the broadband opportunity and will consider ways to focus our media efforts on broadband."

Given the number of visitors to Excite, it should be possible to sell the Excite portal and domain. We are not so sure they will find a buyer of the search engine technology, though.

This means that by the end of this year we may face the loss of no less than three major search engines and directories: Infoseek, the NBCi directory and Excite. This is bad. No search service covers more than a part of the Web, nor do their databases overlap as much as many may believe. This means that we will be loosing significant parts of our common map of the World Wide Web.

The survival of AltaVista
Is there more? Well, search engine discussion forums have been rife with speculations about the AltaVista search engine. The quality of search results have seemed to deteriorate rapidly during the last few months, and the site has been through a lot of changes.

As reported in Pandia Search World, we actually think AltaVista is on the right track as regards its new design and features. The fact that search results have been improving during the last few weeks, may indicate that the recent search result turmoil is caused by a rather extensive fine-tuning of the algorithms deciding the ranking of results. If this is the case, there may certainly be hope for AltaVista, also in the long run.

The uncertain future of Inktomi
We will also keep a close look at the Inktomi search engine. Not only has Canada.com abandoned it in favour of GoTo. MSN.com -- one of the major portals of the Web -- is fetching more of its search engine results from the LookSmart directory, making the Inktomi listings less important. It also seems that the iWon portal is abandoning Inktomi for paid clicks from GoTo.

Inktomi was once Yahoo's source of secondary search results, meaning that Yahoo! would list results from the Inktomi database if it could find none in its own directory. That place has been taken by Google, an increasingly popular search engine that continues to grow in strength. So does the (relative) newcomer, Fast, which has now become the provider of search engine results for the Asian part of the Lycos portal network. Fast is already powering the American version of Lycos, although not the European sites.

We guess that Google and Fast will survive the present search engine storms, as will Yahoo! and Northern Light. However, given the latest developments we are not sure about anything any longer.

Pandia Search World on the developments of AltaVista:
New changes at AltaVista: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-27-altavista.html
AltaVista Launches News Search: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-15-altavistanews.html
More changes at AltaVista: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-11-altavista.html

There are also a few changes at Pandia:

Best regards,

Susanne and Per Koch
Editors

PANDIA SEARCH WORLD

Metasearch results or advertising?

Search Engine Watch has made an interesting survey of the metasearch engines' use of pay-per-cick results.

Metasearch engines are search engines that do not generate their own database, but gather results from other search engines and directories. Pay-per-click search engines are search catalogues where advertisers may buy rankings for particular keyword phrases or queries. What appears to be search engine listings, are in fact adverts.

In principle we have nothing against pay-per-click results, as long as they are marked as advertising and does not dominate the result pages completely. After all, the search engines have to make a living. The Search Engine Watch survey shows, however, that on some metasearch sites the paid results have taken over completely. At the moment AltaVista will show two or three paid results per result page.

Out of the search engines queried by metasearchers Dogpile and Mamma, more than 50 percent are pay-per-click search engines. Some 30 to 40 percent of the search engines used by Metacrawler, qbSearch and Search.com are paid. In comparison Vivisimo.com uses none, and -- by the way -- nor does the regular Pandia Metasearch engine!

The list below shows what percentage of the links shown on the first page of results from selected meta search services were paid listings:

Dogpile: 86%
qbSearch: 67%
Metacrawler: 52%
Ixquick: 10%
Vivisimo: 0%

Pandia was not listed, but again, unless some paid listings slips by from the regular search engines, the results for Pandia should be 0%. (The extended search alternative of Pandia Metasearch includes links from the About.com site, which may include links from the Sprinks pay-per-click search engine).

Search Engine Watch: "Meta Search or Meta Ads": http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/05-metasearch.html
Pandia Metasearch Engine: http://www.pandia.com/metasearch/

Google Groups

SITESEEING

iLOR makes Google better than Google

New newsletters on search engines and searching

Chris Sherman, previous editor of About Web Search, is the editor of a new daily newsletter from Search Engine Watch. Like the the Search Engine Watch's monthly newsletter, Search Engine Report, it is free, but it is much shorter, concentrating on one issue every day.

Sherman underlines that SearchDay is not only for advanced searchers. "While I will cover advanced techniques from time to time, one of the things I work hard to do is explain complex topics in language that's easily understood by people at all levels of knowledge and skill," he writes. "At the same time, I try to make sure that there's enough meaty content to satisfy advanced users." What we have read so far, indicates that this will be a "must read".

An essential part of the newsletter is selected headlines from the Moreover news service. These are the same as the ones you find under the "Breaking News" headline on the Pandia Search World home page. Sherman adds that he will be scanning for stories that may not be specifically about search engines, but that nevertheless have important information for searchers.

Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz has separate newsletter based on Moreover headlines, called ResearchBuzz Wire. Unlike Sherman, however, she gives a personal comment to each headline.

Calishain has also added a fee based version of her regular ResearchBuzz ezine. Paying subscribers get no less than three newsletters: 1. The regular ResearchBuzz without the ads. 2. A ResearchBuzz supplement with more reviews of relevant information sites, and 3. A newsletter with a feature article on how to find information on a particular topic. Given the fact that ResearchBuzz Extra costs no more than $20 a year ($15 if you're a student, librarian, or educator), we would say this is a good investment.

Sherman's successor in the chair as editor of About's Websearch site, Kevin Elliot, has relaunched the About Web Search newsletter. This free newsletter returns to a weekly schedule, published every Tuesday. About Websearch is not actually that much longer than SearchDay, one reason being that most of the content leads to longer articles on the About site itself. Kevin Elliott is the president of Computing Strategies 5000, a Web consulting firm based in Alberta, Canada. He is an expert in search engine implementation and search engine optimization techniques.

Read more about these newsletters in Pandia Search World:
On SearchDay and the About Web Search newsletters: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-28-searchday.html
On ResearchBuzz: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-21-researchbuzz.html

SEARCH TIPS

The Boolean AND fallacy

Readers who know the Pandia Search Central know we are fond of "serious" Boolean searching and search terms like AND, AND NOT and OR. We also like to claim that these terms are logical and easy to use.

Well, Boolean logic is definitely logical and actually quite easy to learn. However, if you are trying to teach these techniques to others you should be aware of the logical trap of "the AND fallacy".

When we in everyday language ask someone to look for bottles and cans, we actually want them to find any bottle or can. "By all means, if you can't find a bottle, do bring a can!"

This leads novice searchers to interpret the AND operator in a wrong way. Most newcomers believe that the query 'bottles AND cans' means that the search engine should fetch all pages that contains the words "bottles" and "cans" as well as pages that contain any one of these words. However, if that's what you want, the correct Boolean query is 'bottles OR cans', not 'bottles AND cans'.

'bottles AND cans' will actually bring you the pages that contains both words only. The same applies to "search engine math". The query '+bottles +cans' will actually exclude all webpages that include only one of these keywords.

Pandia Goalgetter Search Tutorial: http://www.pandia.com/goalgetter/

SEARCH ENGINE POSITIONING

On the strategic and pragmatic schools of SEO

The webmaster's strive to get good rankings in the search engines has spawned a separate industry for search engine optimization (SEO). SEO Experts will tell you that the science of designing webpages that humour the search engine is so complicated, that you'd better leave it to them -- the experts. Sometimes they present this as an exact science, where advanced calculations of keyword frequency and density may lead you to the holy grail of optimization: a reconstruction of the algorithms that decide the result rankings on the search engines themselves. We call this school "strategic search engine optimization"

Other experts argue that the algorithms of the various search engines have become so complex that there is no way you can reverse engineer them. New factors like link popularity and "term or theme vectors" (the search engine trying to decide what the website -- not the webpage -- is about), make it impossible to reconstruct a number one webpage on the basis of a model of a "perfect" webpage. There is no such thing. Moreover, the algorithms are constantly fine-tuned. What works one month, may not work the next.

Among the proponents of this line of thinking -- "pragmatic SEO" -- you will find people like Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch and Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen of RankWrite.

The search engines are trying to develop systems that reward content-rich sites of high quality, and according to the pragmatic school, this is exactly what you should give them: sites full of useful information that makes visitors return and leads other webmasters to link to your site.

Instead of optimizing so-called doorway pages targeting one and only one search engine, you should optimize all webpages according to certain general rules that will have an effect on most search engines. By using these general techniques you are in no way guaranteed a top ten listing, but in the long run you will get enough good rankings for selected keyword phrases, in some of the search engines, and for longer periods of time. Hence these tactics may be just as profitable as the strategic approach. Moreover, you avoid trigging the spam-filters of the search engines, and do not risk being banned from these sites.

In general pragmatists will tell you to focus individual webpages on one or two keyword phrases (i.e. queries that searchers will use when trying to find this kind of site), and include these phrases in the TITLE-field, H1 and H2 headlines, the first paragraph of text, in image ALT-tags, in metatags (although that is not really that important) and scattered around in the text. You are to avoid images and scripts that pushes the regular text too far down in the HTML-code and provide plenty of text and links the search engine can explore. This is the short version.

Although we do accept that there are times where it can be necessary to spend time and resources on fine-tuning pages to the demands of individual search engines, Pandia definitely belongs to the pragmatic camp. For individuals and small enterprises that cannot afford to hire SEO experts to do the job, this is actually the only realistic approach available. Strategic SEO is a full time job, and anyone who wants to establish a successful Web presence should focus on developing a useful and popular site, not on pleasing the changing whims of the search engines.

You may, however, achieve impressive search engine rankings by following general rules as the ones listed above. You may learn pragmatic SEO by visiting sites like Search Engine Watch and RankWrite. However, beginners will benefit a lot from buying a general introduction to search engine positioning. Pandia will also shortly add pages on SEO books and ebooks to the Resource section.

Search Engine Watch: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
RankWrite Roundtable: http://www.rankwrite.com/
Pandia SEO Resources: http://www.pandia.com/optimization/

BOOKS

The Insider's Guide to Dominating the Search Engines

John Buchanan has written an informative beginner's ebook on search engine positioning called The Insider's Guide to Dominating the Search Engines. Actually, there is so much new and up to date information on search engine developments here, that even webmasters that have diddled with search engine optimization for a while may benefit from reading it. We certainly found it useful to have all this information gathered in one place.

Buchanan strives to present as many techniques as possible, including methods that most search engines would consider spam. Webmasters looking for an easy way out, should read his warnings carefully, though. He says that "because of the vast advances made by the SEs in the last year to two years, many of these tricks will most likely hurt you instead of helping you." Google and AltaVista are currently waging a war against spam, and using some of these techniques may actually get your sites banned from these search engines!

Buchanan covers all the important aspects of SEO, including the distinction between search engines and directories, keywords and keyword density, link popularity, themes, term vectors and hallway pages. There are also up-to-date presentations of the individual search engines and directories and a list of relevant software. Moreover, you get free updates for another six months.

The book is well written and highly recommended. We do wish for a PDF Acrobat version, though, as printed webpages are not always that easy to read. We would also suggest that Buchanan spell out the URLs in the text, thus making it easier to use as a printed manual. As it is now, you will have to open the HTML-version to find the web addresses.

The price is a bit stiff (USD 97), but the package does include some additional bonus reports.

Download the book from SE-Secrets.com: http://www.se-secrets.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/click.cgi?perkoch

FINALLY...

Do you like Pandia? Click here to recommend it to a friend: http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=328530

The Pandia Post is edited by Per and Susanne Koch, . Pandia Post Home Page: http://www.pandia.com/post/.

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