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The Pandia Post Newsletter No. 9July 2001
In this issue: EDITORIALThe dot com crash has finally taught the Internet companies that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The search engines are adding pay-per-click listings to their search results (read: ads). Many of them are also trying to get you to pay a fee for spidering your site at regular intervals. Pandia Search World has the story about Microsoft's new tactic for integrating GoTo pay-per-click search results in the Internet Explorer Browser (http://www.pandia.com/sw-2001/40-explorer.html). As the online ad revenue is shrinking, more and more online services have started charging customers for their services. The same Microsoft has decided to close the popular ListBot email discussion group and newsletter distribution service (http://www.listbot.com/schedule.shtml). Instead its offering the quite expensive List Builder service for small businesses. Pandia has been using ListBot for the distribution of the Pandia Post, and we have now been looking for a new home for our newsletter. We finally decided on running the newsletter from our own website, becoming truly independent. This is the fist issue of the Pandia Post distributed through the new
system. Hopefully everything will work fine, but if you notice any irregularities,
you now know why. Please send us a mail if you feel there is something
we ought to know ( There are also a few changes at Pandia:We have added an extra weather search facility for our American and Canadian friends at http://pandia.subportal.com/cgi-bin/weather/hamweather.cgi . The rest of us can find a updated list of alternative weather sites at the Pandia Newsfinder page at http://www.pandia.com/news/. The Resource section has got two new pages that should interest webmasters and search engine optimization experts. At http://www.pandia.com/resources/seo-articles.html you will find a list of online articles on search engine positioning, including links to sites like Search Engine Watch, Rank Write Roundtable and 1st Search Ranking. If you want to learn how to optimize your pages for good search engine rankings, this is the place to go. By the way, the page also includes a link to an early paper by Brin and Page, the founders of the popular Google search engine. It is a bit technical, but it gives a fascinating insight into the logic that rules Google's link popularity based ranking system. If you know of other articles that ought to be included, please let us know! We have also included a short guide to what to look out for if and when you want to hire a search engine optimization expert. Whether to do your optimization work yourself, or to ask someone else to do it for you, is a question of time, money and degree of optimization. Time, because this kind of work is very time consuming -- maybe you should focus on building a content rich site instead. Money, partly because time is money, and learning search engine optimization takes time. On the other hand, if you are on a shoestring budget, you may not be able to afford an SEO expert, which brings us to the third item on our list: the degree of optimization. SEO experts often spend a lot of time designing special doorway pages, tracking search engine rankings, calculating keyword density and so on. You can, however, get a long way by doing some general optimization work on your site, thus improving your chances for a good ranking. Read a guide to SEO, and design your pages with search engine ranking in mind. You may not get as impressive results as some of the experts, but if you make a content-rich quality site (and that is an important "if"), we can guarantee that your traffic will climb. To read more about hiring a search engine optimization expert, go to http://www.pandia.com/resources/optimization-company.html. To find books and ebooks on how you can do this yourself, go to http://www.pandia.com/bookstore/search-engine-promotion.html. Again, if you know of useful books and ebooks that ought to be included in our Resource section, pleas let us know. If you add some words on why you like it, it's even better. And yes, we welcome information from authors and publishers too. Best regards, Susanne and Per Koch |
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PANDIA SEARCH WORLDAnd then they were three...
The NBCi directory is still accessible at http://www.nbci.com/dir/0,668,home-0,00.html?st.sn.fd.t.srh, but you cannot search for sites. There is no longer any point in adding sites to this directory. Pandia Search World has more: http://www.pandia.com/sw-2001/39-nbci.html This means that there are only three major search directories left: The Open Directory Project (which feeds the Pandia Plus, AOL and Netscape directories), LookSmart (which provides data to MSN and AltaVista), and -- of course -- Yahoo!. This does not mean that there aren't enthusiasts out there that are trying to build new alternatives. Editors from the now defunct Go Guides Directory are for instance trying to build a new directory called JoeAnt at http://www.joeant.com/. Search engine duopoly? Think not!NBCi and Go are -- for all practical purposes -- dead as unique search sites, while Excite, AltaVista and Intkomi are in big trouble. Does this mean we will end up with a search engine duopoly, Google and Fast dividing the world between them? It may look that way, but then again: maybe not. It is interesting to note that the winners are the newcomers to the search engine field, while the old timers are having difficulties adapting to new technologies and new ways of thinking. Google and Fast may also eventually grow complacent and end up in a technological "lock-in", meaning that their technologies and mentalities will find it hard to adapt to new demands. There is an undergrowth of new search engines, waiting eagerly for their turn. In a couple of years one of these may be the Google of the day. We will take a closer look at them all in due time, but do visit Teoma, a search engine heavily influenced by link popularity, and Wisenut, a site that claims to have an index of 1.5 billion pages, making it the largest in the world. http://www.teoma.com/ Google ZeitgeistGoogle has added a separate page revealing some of the habits of Google searchers. The Google Zeitgeist page gives you the top 10 gaining and declining queries, top 5 misspelled queries and more. http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.htmlBritannica ends free accessBritannica.com has put an end to the free access to its Encyclopedia. You may still search the directory for free, but be prepared to pay USD 5 a month to access complete articles. Life in the Fast laneThe Norwegian search engine Fast is definitely becoming one of the big players in the Internet search world. Fast will soon power all the Lycos search sites, and the company is hungry for more. The search engine will be completely refreshed every nine to twelve days, and the regular index will include more than 70 million multimedia files. Go to Pandia Search World for some more tantalizing news about this search
engine: London Internet Marketing Pub ConferenceThe first ever Internet Marketing Pub Conference took place on July22nd at the Cittie of Yorke pub in London's legal district. It was a big hit, and members of the Webmaster World forum is already planning a new one in Boston this fall. Pandia was there and Search World can tell you more about the event: |
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SITESEEINGSearchHippo
SearchHippo.com (http://www.searchhippo.com/) is a fully functional search engine, based on a rather small database of high quality search engines. It's a neat trick actually. The SearchHippo robot "Fluffy" spiders the major search directories for listings, and as directories like the Open Directory are edited by human beings, the sites have to have a certain quality to be included. In addition, SearchHippo adds some of the sites that are linked to by the sites included in the directories. Results from the spidered sites are ordered based on a variety of factors include link-to frequency, clicked-on frequency, and URL directory depth. It is possible to submit new sites. Marcus is currently Chief Software Architect at a large Internet company.
Prior to that, he attended the University of California at Riverside,
where he created the OKRA net.citizen directory service in the mid nineties.
He tells Pandia that he has currently no plans to monetize the Hippo site.
"Money always gets in the way of having fun. It gets in the way of
passion. It just gets in the way. So for now at least, I'm focusing on
product." When explaining the real reason for making the search engine, Marcus says that he could not get a fast DSL connection where he lives. Instead he brought a superfast T1 connection. "While it's nice for surfing of course, I figured that I needed to do something with it since all my reports told me I was using 0.1% of the bandwidth." The connection is put to good use. SearchHippo is definitely a fast search engine. Marcus encourages anyone with a website and some programming skills to adapt the search engine to their own needs. For those of you who are into Internet acronyms, we can tell you that he offers PHP, ASP, XSLT and XML feeds. See http://www.searchhippo.com/partner.php for more information on partnership deals. SearchHippo ignores case and treats both upper and lower case characters the same. It does not support Boolean searching or "search engine math" (+, - and "" signs). SearchHippo will automatically search for all the terms you enter (stop words like "and"," or", "the" and "a" included). According to Marcus Searchhippo uses a "funny selective algorithm" to decide how to do phrases: quotes don't matter. That is, when you run a query, it first tries to do phrase matching for you, then does "word matching". The phrase matching is not perfect, but more of a heuristic. On top of our wish list we will put some form of advanced searching (at least search engine math), and Marcus is indeed considering adding the minus operator. The search engine does support some forms of field searching, though. For instance, there is a domain restriction, so you can run a query like /dom:ucr.edu physics to limit your search to pages on physics at ucr.edu. Or you could do /dom:ca wine for wine in Canada. We would also like to see better site descriptions. The best would be if the search engine fetched the meta tag description from the relevant webpages. Marcus is working on that one, too. All in all this is a fine search engine. SearchHippo: http://www.searchhippo.com/ |
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Pandia -your guide to search engines |
SEARCH TIPSAOL advanced searchWhen we list the most popular search engines and directories on the Net, we normally leave out two of the most popular search sites in the world: American Online (AOL) and the Microsoft Network (MSN). The reason is that they do not have their own search engine and directory databases. AOL will feed you results from the Open Directory and the Inktomi search engine, while MSN is based on the LookSmart directory and Inktomi. The fact is, however, that they have their own ranking algorithms, meaning that although their pool of webpages may be similar to other sites, the final results to a specific query may be different. The mix of search engine and directory results is different, and the order in which they are presented may vary. We'll let you in on a carefully hidden search engine "secret". AOL is actually as good as AltaVista and Northern Light as regards advanced searching, which means that you can use AOL to search the Open Directory and the Inktomi search engine database using Boolean expressions. Although Boolean searching may look difficult, it is actually quite painless, which is why we promote this technique in our Goalgetter search engine tutorial (http://www.pandia.com/goalgetter/). Let us use AOLSearch (http://search.aol.com/) to illustrate this. AOL Search treats upper- and lower-case letters the same, which means that you might as well use lower-case letters only when writing search queries, even when writing names. AOL Search assumes an AND between words, meaning that if you do not tell the search engine otherwise it will only fetch pages that contains all of the words listed in your query. If you want to use a wider net, you may fish for pages using the OR operator. The query dogs OR cats finds documents having either word (although documents containing many occurrences of both words will come to the top of the list). AOL supports the NOT operator: AOL says that NOT "finds documents containing the query word or expression preceding it without containing the word or expression following it." An example given by AOL is "hillary clinton" NOT "bill clinton",which finds Hillary without Bill. However, this example illustrates quite clearly why the NOT operator is such a difficult operator to use. If you filter out all pages on Hillary that does not mention her husband, you will probably not find the information you are looking for. Most writers will include a reference to the former president when writing about the New York senator. Note that AOL uses the form NOT instead of AND NOT. Moreover, you may write the operator in lower-case letters. You may use parenthesis to group or "nest" expressions. (president or george) adj bush finds items containing either President Bush or George Bush. (new adj york) adj (yankees or mets) find items containing either New York Yankees or New York Mets. AOL supports three Boolean operators that are rarely used by the regular search engines, namely NEAR, ADJ and W. As far as we know, AOL Search is the only search site that lets you use ADJ and W. These are all operators that let you define how close the search terms are to be on the webpages fetched by the search engine. ADJ (for "adjacency") is very similar to using double quotes. We normally use double quotes to define a phrase that is considered to be one undividable expression, and indeed, AOL uses double-quotes use to find an exact match to your search, like in "george bush". The query george ADJ bush is similar. It means "give me all pages where the word george is found right in front of bush". However, as AOL points out, the difference is that that 1) ADJ allows matches in word variants (e.g. feed, feeds, and feeding) and 2) ADJ can connect complex expressions: (president OR george OR george w.) ADJ bush finds items containing either President Bush or George Bush or George W. Bush. The proximity operator W finds documents where the right word occurs within a specified number of words AFTER the left word. Hence amphibian W/5 DNA finds records in which DNA occurs within five words after amphibian. The NEAR operator finds words near each other but unlike the W operator the order doesn't matter. dogs NEAR/3 cats finds documents in which dog and cat occur within three words of each other, in either order. AOL Search also has a menu based page for advanced searching at http://search.aol.com/advsearch.adp. You may tick off one out of three options to decide whether the search engine should fetch pages containing "Any of these words" (equals Boolean OR), "All of these words" (equals Boolean AND) or "the exact phrase" (i.e. these words in this particular order and form, equals the use of double quotation marks). You may fine-tune your query by using a separate pull-down menu to select individual words that must -- or must not -- be included. Google special searchesYou may now use the Google search box to search for US street address
and phone numbers. To find listings for a US business, type the business name into the Google search box, along with the city and state. Or type the business name and zip code. Entering the phone number with area code will also return a complete business listing. To find listings for a US residence, type any of the following combinations
into the Google search box: To use Google to find street maps, enter a U.S. street address, including zip code or city/ state (e.g. 165 University Ave Palo Alto CA), in the Google search box. Often, the street address and city name will be enough. To use Google to get stock and mutual fund information, just enter one or more NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, or mutual fund ticker symbols, or the name of a corporation traded on one of the stock indices. To use Google to find dictionary definitions, enter your query into the search box as you would normally. Any or all parts of your query for which there is a dictionary definition will be underlined in the center text above our search results. Clicking on the link will take you to the relevant definition. Google is found at http://www.google.com/ Google date search
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SEARCH ENGINE POSITIONINGPaid inclusion programsFast and AltaVista are now following in the footsteps of Inktomi, offering paid inclusion to webmasters. In essence they are guaranteeing regular spidering of pages, for a certain fee. Fast will revisit pages on a daily basis, and adds a website search engine to the bargain. Fast powers the search engine portion of the US Lycos search site, and this may be a good deal if your Lycos listings means a lot to you, and you like to fine-tune your pages for top listings in that search engine. On the other hand, the main objective of Fast is to make the largest search engine database in the world. The company is unlikely to drop your pages if you don't pay. Pandia Search World has more on the Fast offer: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/2001-33-fast.html The AltaVista offer is very expensive, and as AltaVista no longer has the reach it used to have, we would not recommend that you make use of it at the present time. Read more about this program and the pros and cons of paid inclusion at http://www.pandia.com/sw-2001/36-altavista.html. LookSmart is combining paid inclusion and pay-per-click features in its new LookListings program. This is primarily a service for large sites belonging to big companies. It includes the old Subsite listings program, which made it possible to get more than five pages listed in the directory. Pandia Search World has more: http://www.pandia.com/sw-2001/38-looklistings.html. Free Search Engine Optimization CourseDo you want to learn more about search engine optimization? In cooperation with 1st Search Engine Ranking.com Pandia can offer you a 5 day free email course on how you can get top rankings in the search engines. Send a blank email to 1stSearchRanking.1000.1072@optinpro.com to subscribe. |
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BOOKSNothin' but Net -- on search engine optimizationThe ebook Nothin' but Net covers the whole field of Internet marketing. This means that the author, Michael Warren Campbell, is not that thorough as regards search engines as some authors, but he covers a lot of ground all the same.
If you need a beginner's introduction to Internet marketing, this is an excellent choice, as Campbell also includes useful information on banner advertising, email and newsletter marketing, shopping conditions, copy writing and more. Like many authors like him, he has a tendency to present search engine spamming as a viable option. Pandia will not recommend "cheating" under any circumstance, but will admit that it might work, if you know what you are doing. Recommending spam techniques to beginners, however, can be compared with giving a loaded gun to a kid. Using so-called "doorway pages" and separate domains in the wrong way, for instance,will get you banned from search engines like Google and AltaVista. We also question the need to establish separate keyword-rich domain names in order to achieve top rankings. If you are going to do the optimization work yourself, we actually believe that it's better to concentrate on producing informative and useful content that your visitors will enjoy -- at least in the long run. On the other hand, it might be useful to know about these techniques, at least if you are going to buy search engine promotion services from an optimization firm. Still, all in all this book is a very useful addition to Internet marketing literature. Moreover, it is more reasonably priced than most of its competitors (USD 38). There is also a printed version (USD 68 + shipping). We hope Campbell will spell out the various URLs in his next edition. Most of us would like to print out a paper copy of a book like this one, and it would be useful to be able to read the Web addresses of the resources he mentions. Download
Nothin' but Net now from Note regarding affiliate programsIn order to pay our expenses, Pandia will take part in affiliate programs relevant to books and ebooks covered in the Pandia Book sections. If you click on a link to the Amazon.com bookstore, Pandia will, for instance, get percentages of the sale, so by using these links you are actually supporting the continuous existence of the Pandia site. We do realize that this policy may lead some visitors to question the independence and neutrality of the editors. However, if you visit the Pandia Books section, you will soon find confirmation of our commitment to give relevant, impartial, and unbiased reviews of the products presented. Pandia Bookstore: http://www.pandia.com/bookstore/ FINALLY...Do you like Pandia? Feel free to forward this newsletter to a friend. Click here to recommend the Pandia site to a friend: http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=328530 Go to http://www.pandia.com/post/ to find information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe. The Pandia Post is edited by Per and Susanne Koch, Sign up for our free newsletter today! |
).
The NBCi directory, formerly known as Snap, is dying. As reported earlier,
NBC has decided to close the NBCi portal. As a first step in this process,
NBCi has stopped serving data from the NBCi directory in their search
facility. Instead you get listings from the pay-per-click GoTo search
engine. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? This is exactly the same tactic
as the one used by Disney, when they closed down the Infoseek search engine
at the Go portal. 
Are you dissatisfied with the state of the current search engines? Why
not build your own? Kevin Marcus did.