Privacy and Search Engines

Adam Engst writes about search engines in light of their privacy.

-DD

Crawl Errors

Michiel Heijmans explains crawl errors .

-DD

Who Is Jesus?

Barry Schwartz notes that Google "Google Won't Tell You Who Jesus or Muhammad Are Out Of Respect" in a recent story on how the search giant handles queries.

-DD

False News

Safiya Noble suggests that because search engines (such as Google) focus on the most popular results, accurate results are not always at the top of the list of displayed results.

-DD

Basic Search Tips

"CiteLighter" offers some basic tips on using search engines in a short video clip.

-DD

Making the Best Use of Search Engines from Citelighter on Vimeo.

Best Search Engines

Paul Gil recommends the best search engines for consumers. His list includes:

1. Dogpile
2. Yippy
3. Bing
4. DuckDuckGo
5. Google Scholar
6. Ask
7. Mahalo
8. Webopedia
9. Yahoo
10. Internet Archive
11. Google

-DD

Search Engines

Phil Bradley curates a list of over 100 search engines targeting various special audiences.   Bradley also offers advice for conducting advanced searches of Web resources.

-DD

 

Turn the Search Around To Find Factual Answers

Wendy Boswell serves as search editor of ABOUT.COM. Her tip for finding factual answers is to state the question as a statement, omitting the missing fact.

-DD

DARPA Seeking New Search Engine Technology

Micheal Cooney reports that DARPA's Memex effort seeks domain specific indexing of public web content.

-DD

Google's Top Ten Search Modifiers

Jon Ball, a columnist at Searchengineland shares Google's most useful search modifiers . He explains why they matter, what they are and how to use them.

Ball notes that search products have been engineered to be more relevant over the years, and stores of personalization and localization data are now automatically linked to searches to increase relevance. In the vast majority of cases this is a boon to the user.

In my own experience a search engine's response to these cues sometimes make it very difficult to obtain what I want. For example, I become short tempered when Google adds additional (generally relevant" terms when I enter a search into the address bar.

-DD

YANDEX.COM - The Russian Google

The Russian equivilent of Google is Yandex.com . It offers search of the Web, images, and video, as well as translation and Web mail services.

-DD

Search Is Still In Its Infancy

Zach Miners reports on pronouncements by Google executives.

-DD

Google Removes Over One Million Pages Per Month

ComputerWorld reporter Jaikumar Vijayan reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is complaining that "Google Piracy Policies Are Lacking." Quoting Vijayan:

• According to Google, Microsoft or its representatives have asked Google to remove more than 2.5 million URLs, or a median of 48,700 URLs per week, from its search engine results since July 2011.
• The next highest requester was NBC Universal, which asked Google to remove about 1 million URLs over the same period.
• The RIAA requested that some 416,000 URLs be blocked during that time.
• In all, a total of about 2,400 copyright owners have put in URL removal requests covering about more than 24,300 domains since last July.
• Google noted than it complied with 97% of takedown requests at an average response time of 10 hours or less.

Vijayan notes that the RIAA uses statistics from Google's Tranparency Report listing copyright removal requests. The report lists the major requesting agencies and offending Web domains.

Google also maintains reports on governmental requests for user data, which includes statistics on Google's compliance rate for each nation, and statistics on the number and timing of Google traffic from each major nation.

-DD

Search In Doonesbury

The June 26, 2011 comic strip "Doonesbury" dealt with the impact of ubiquitious search on learning and education. The students portrayed in the comic may have the skills to quickly find facts, but do they know how to wisely interpret information?

-DD

Blekko

Blekko is a new search engine that claims to:

• crawl 3 billion pages of websites selected for quality, and,


• allows users to create "slashtags" that organizes websites around specific topics or from specified lists of credible sources (credible domains).

Those who want to add their own slashtags must open a Blekko account. The primary developer of Blekko was also behind the Open Directory Project, which uses humans to select individual web pages rather than marking entire domains as reliable.

-DD

Top Ten Safe Search Engines

David Kapuler has developed a list of the "Top Ten Safe Search Engines" for use by children, teachers and parents.

_-DD

Web Search Blog

Wendy Boswell, the About Guide for web searching, has a blog available at http://websearch.about.com/b/ which provides news about the latest search engine updates and searching techniques.


-D.D.

UJIKO.COM

UJIKO.COM is a search engine that is supposed to reflect your personal preferences as you use it. The search engine queries data from Yahoo and uses KartOO technology.
A search for Indiana Wesleyan University's Off Campus Library Services retrieved links that were relevant to the library resources and services, though it scraped the graphic image from the university's home page, and not from the library.

_{-D. D.}