search

Blogs Introduced Into Universal Google Search

GoogleBlog

eWeek is reporting that Google will be adding blogs to their universal search results. Apparently, starting next week, links to blogs will show up next to images, news, books, local maps and video. This is awesome news for anyone that has a blog. Already, I garner quite a bit of search engine traffic from Google.com via search terms and strings. I can’t wait to see if Google adding the Blogs genre to the universal search will help expose this blog and other blogs to even more people.

Universal Search is the fruit of a five-year effort involving hundreds of engineers working to refine the company’s search algorithms and add multimedia content to its search returns to give users richer results.

Blogging is not dead yet!

Steve Ballmer On Search And More

This is a video clip of John Battelle asking Steve Ballmer questions relating to search. Steve describes search the way he and Microsoft sees it. In his outline of a successful search strategy, he pretty much describes the way Google does it. Go figure! It’s an interesting interview that goes beyond search. For example, John asks Steve if they are making money through their deal with Facebook.

Google Image Search vs Iconlet

Iconlet.com logo

Iconlet is a search engine for you guessed it, icons. The front page of iconlet looks as simple as the Google homepage and seems to be just as functional. Iconlet appears to have a large database of icon images but I was disappointed when I only discovered 11 search results for the term RSS. However, other searches for ARROWS and HOME provided me with hundreds of results.

Iconlet Search Results For RSS

If you are looking for something in particular, Iconlet provides an advanced search which gives you the options of typing in an icon name, specified image resolution, .gif or .png extension, and various licensing types. I guess no one uses .JPG as a file extension for icons as it was missing from the advanced search file extension choices.

One of the biggest issues I can see with iconlet is the fact that it has Google Image search as competition. I’ve used Google Image search in the past to locate icon files and it’s proven to be a useful resource for this sort of thing. It also appears as though iconlet has it’s own home grown database of icon files, whereas Google Image search has the entire Internet at it’s disposal. If iconlet can increase it’s database selection while adding additional search features, they may eventually be a compelling reason to switch from using Google Imagesearch. Until then, I’ll stick with Google first,

AskApache 404 Google Fix

Askapache.com Logo

For those of you who are using the ajax powered Google search plugin for your WordPress 404 page that I featured here Add Google Ajax To Your WP 404 Page, you may have noticed after upgrading to WordPress 2.3 that the search results have stopped displaying. A number of others including myself have experienced this problem and the fix is relatively simple.

In your WordPress admin panel, click on the OPTIONS link. Now click on the AA Google 404 link which will load the options for this specific plugin. Where it says Google API Key, click on the GET ONE link. Type in your URL to Google and they will provide you with a new API key. Replace the plugins current API key with the newly acquired one and click the save button. Your 404 search results should reappear.

Microsoft Updates Live Search Engine

MSLiveSearch LogoMicrosoft has updated is LIVE search engine today. The updates were focused around the core search technology as well as the vertical search areas of entertainment, shopping, local and health. Collectively, these improvements mark a quality milestone based on the company’s focus on delivering a better search experience for consumers and advertisers.

Here are some of the updates which were covered.

  • Over fourfold increase in index size.
  • Substantial improvements in understanding queryintent.
  • Significant enhancements to core algorithms.
  • Increased focus on query refinement.
  • New Web data extraction model.
  • Expansion of Rich Answers.

Additional improvements to the service include a new, cleaner user interface that makes the results pages easier to read and use; a more robust Answers platform that provides instant access to information from trusted sources while increasing relevancy; and organization of results pages based on the high-interest search verticals of entertainment, shopping, local and health on one page.

Web 2.0 Search Engine And One Thousand Links

Web 2.0 Search Engine Logo

Web 2.0 Search Engine is exactly what you would think it would be. Use the search engine to search for any Web 2.0 specific terms such as Ajax, mashups, blogging, viral videos, tagging, ect. The web 2.0 search engine even provides their own definition to the term although we all know O’Reilly has that claim. I decided to give this search engine a try and just for fun, I typed in Jeffro2pt0. Unfortunately, there were no results found.

The search engine also provides a link to their top 1,000 web 2.0 sites and services, organized by categories. An insane resource of Web 2.0 goodness, all on one page.

Let me know what you discover by using this search engine.

Cagora – Interests Groups 2.0

Typically, if you want information on a particular subject, you fire up your favorite browser and type in your search terms into Google. Depending upon your method of searching and the popularity of the specific topic you are searching for, Google may or may not provide you with the most helpful results. Cagora hopes to change this by creating a site where hundreds of communities and special interest groups will be able to provide you the information you need.

Disabled Hotlinking Protection And Other Stuff

I disabled hotlink protection today after discovering that the HTML email subscription emails were not displaying images. After today, all images used within an article should now show up if your viewing the HTML version of the email.

Tomorrow, I will be going through the archive and properly tagging items that haven’t received any tags due to the plugin being installed  after a certain amount of posts were already published. This should help make discovering those older articles a bit easier.

I will also try to figure out why the search function of this site doesn’t seem to be finding things I think it should be. I’m also going to try to get a hold of the author of the SEARCH EVERYTHING plugin, to see if I can get that to work, so users can search within comments and various other parts of the site that are not covered by the built in WordPress search.

Just wanted to pass those updates along.

Solving The SUPPLEMENTAL Problem

Image Highlighting A Supplemental Result

There is quite a bit of discussion going on across the net about this SUPPLEMENTAL INDEXING problem that so many people seem to be having. In this article, HowToSpoter explains what their particular situation is and describes the steps they took to put their supplemental pages back into the original Google index.

What is a Supplemental Result?
Supplemental results are generally pages that Google has determined to be secondary to other, more relevant pages that Google has indexed on your website. In effect, supplementary results are actually a secondary database of results that are only called upon when the most obscure queries force Google to check all its indexed resources.

It’s definitely a good read, especially if your dealing with this problem yourself. I have heard through the grapevine that Google is planning to get rid of their supplemental index, but I have yet to confirm this rumor. At any rate, I tried to find a supplemental result for HowToSpoter.com and apparently, they have fixed their problem as I couldn’t find any.

*TIP* To see if any of your sites pages are listed in the supplemental index, type site:www.mydomain.com *** into Google. Replace MYDOMAIN with your actual domain name. Let us know how many results you find by leaving a comment.