Lycos Switched to Inktomi

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Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping search engines on the web, and the first to file an IPO.

"Shopping.com Ltd., which runs Web sites like epinions.com, filed with U.S. regulators on Tuesday for an initial public offering worth an estimated $75 million." - source Yahoo News

SEO News Missed Due to Moving

Mar 8th

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There are a couple smaller SEO news bits I missed during my recent travels.

Quigo got some cash ($5 million) to help build its contextual based ad network.

Soon AdSense will have two competitors. Quigo and Kanoodle will have a ton of work to do to charge the click prices Google can charge.

Some think the Google prices are out of reason. Andrew Goodman, for example, wrote an open letter to Google.

Also from a couple weeks back Froogle now provides a product search for wireless phones

Dipsie

Feb 19th

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More on Dipsie

For a good little bit Gary Price has stated that he would interview Jason Weiner, the creator of Dipsie.
Gary wrote about the interview on his ResourceShelf blog.

Some of the more interesting highlights of Dipsie are:

They intend to be more semantically driven than most search engines on the market.
They claim they will index over 10,000,000,000 documents in their first year.
They will be able to process session IDs and follow forms.
They will honor the meta revisit tag.
They will respider the entire web every 7 days.

Sensis Local Search

Feb 17th

pay per click search engines
other search engines

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Local Search Down Under

Sensis was recently featured in an article which shows how powerful they are in the Australlian advertising market. They believe they will be able to compete with Google for product search due to their strong ability to integrate location with the product.

"The Yellow Pages is a search book. We don't call it that because it's not trendy."

"Our biggest differentiator (from Google) is we have all this local content. So if (you) go to Google today and search for a restaurant in Kew, you might get two restaurants."

Sensis currently combines search results from whitepages.com.au, yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com.au, and cityseach.com.au. One thing people forget is that the Yellow Pages is just a single book or database which Google can easily fold into or bolt onto their product.

Currently Google is not using Local Search that way because it does not add enough value to their product. Mathematics is amazing and search is in its infancy. Google will not likely fall victim to the Yellow Pages. This is a simple question of "Who is really replacing who?"

Queryster

Feb 11th

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Queryster is a new Friendster rip off design for a meta search which allows you to search any one of about a dozen top search engines at any time. They include a graphic overlay which makes it simple to easily view the search results from one search engine to the next.
(found on SearchEngineLowdown)

Search engine toolbars such as Groowe and UltraBar both make this same function easy without cluttering the page element itself. Of course this is a neat tool if you do not want to download anything.

Search Engine Wars: Local Search Heating Up

Feb 10th

pay per click search engines
other search engines
marketing

1 comment

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People use the phrase Search Engine Wars so many times that it's a joke. I think wars are no laughing matter, but the excessive use of "search engine wars" is somewhat excessive and funny.

I feel leftout though, as I have not used the phrase "search engine wars" before this post. I figured that all battles have local fronts. Thus I am extending the "search engine wars" message to the local battle fields. Local search engine wars: "CitySearch's performance-based search advertising program added 24,000 local businesses in its first nine months, parent company InterActiveCorp said yesterday.
IAC said the Los Angeles-based local search service added 3,000 performance-based listings in the last three months of 2003, ending the year nearly halfway to IAC CEO Barry Diller's goal of 50,000 local search advertisers by the end of 2004. Pay-for-performance revenue at CitySearch rose 14 percent from the previous quarter. "
(source DMnews)

Some of the current top competitors in this market are CitySearch, SmartPages, SwitchBoard, and Verizon SuperPages. Big search players like Overture and Google are also going to eat up a lion share of this market. Kanoodle will also sneak into this market, as many of their employees were associated with the formerly highly targetable Sprinks product (which Google swallowed whole.)

More on the local search engine wars from a few months ago:
Search Engine Watch: Local Search Series

Much of the local search engine marketing news is also covered by the Kelsey Group.

Here is a totally random spam which shows how hard it is too trip a spam filter. Note the keyword density of this page for Keasley (and how tired I must have been to have my spelling that far off!)

New Search Engines With Search Filters

Feb 10th

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Meceoo is a meta search engine which searches AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi.

"Its originality comes from the avaibility for users to create their own "exclusion list" in order to exclude from the result pages specific web sites estimated less relevant. Search results might be therefore entirely different from one visitor to another, according to everyone’s wishes.

Meceoo also allows its users to define preselected list of sites in order to launch a search only in their contents. It is, in this way, possible to generate requests on a given "batch" of web sites, for example inside a community of interest."
(from SearchGuild)

SeekScan is a new meta search engine which shows results from many different engines in their own groupings. They have additional tabs that many search engines do not (such as weblogs). Cool as Meceoo but in a different way.
(from ResearchBuzz)

Is Google using a filter on some of its results? Many people say no, but why does 5 htp.cc list at #1 for hyrdoxytryptophan, but is nowhere for 5 hydroxtryptophan?

Why does bicycleattorney.com rank #1 for bicycle attorney, but is nowhere to be found for Oregon bicycle attorney?

Wether you call it a filter or a bell curve, I believe Google is somehow delisting some overly optimized web pages which are not integrated in the associated local community link structure.

Major World Wide Search Engines

Feb 6th

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