ZDnet has a good article about Big Blue's Web Fountain. Using hubs and authorities (what Teoma uses) IBM plans to create a different type of search product.

The Web Fountain project will be used to track answers to questions such as "what do people think about me?" Its goal is to help people project trends and find answers that would otherwise make no sense to other search engines.

Web Fountain also has an interesting model. Instead of people buying hardware, IBM wants people to lease processor power. Now that is an efficient way to run a business!

Free tips to help you increase your Alexa Rank for your website.

1. Download the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site.

2. Have a few friends download the Alexa Toolbar and surf your site.
3. Shift the focus of your site toward a more webmaster like theme.
4. Participate in many webmaster forums which allow you to place your site in your signature.
5. Write articles about webmaster topics and distribute them around the web.
6. Optimize pages of your site for Alexa and related phrases.
7. Buy ads on search engines to increase your traffic. Your Alexa traffic rankings will increase.
8. Write an article with tips on how to increase your Alexa rankings.
9. Advertise that article on the world's largest network.
10. Join an autosurf network which exchanges Alexa credits. <--- this actually exists and they sell off some of the credits. The problem is that those are credits. They are not real visitors. They are not what you need.

    Direct Hit failed as a search engine because it based a large portion of its algorithm on web traffic. Alexa ranking is highly inaccurate and easy to manipulate.

    It is the quality and quantitiy of traffic to your site and how you convert those visitors that determines whether or not you will be a success. If you need help obtaining targeted traffic read my eBook. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

Allen Webb (Webby) wrote a great article "Becoming an Authority," which talks about how to rank well in search results after Austin and Florida.

Beta! MSN is using distinctive separation between its regular and paid search results on its MSN Search Beta pages.

In the past MSN search was known to be notoriously sleazy by mixing in many paid search results with normal search results which were completely undistinguisable from one another to the average web surfer.

(found on SEL)

In addition some searches are actually pulling data from the MSNbot and MSN search. This is somewhat similar to how Yahoo! was randomly testing Inktomi. I have yet to see the MSN results, but they spoke with Gary Price of Resource Shelf about it.

Recently there have been stories that Google is blocking free hosted websites. The problem with these claims is that they are exceptionally believable. Many free hosted sites are spam.

Google Guy stated "Looks like some redirects on their site interacted badly with us trying to choose a canonical site between www.angelfire.com and www.angelfire.lycos.com." http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/21616.htm

The real cost of free hosting is not one time errors like this, but the more long term marketing effects. It is harder to get people to link to a free hosted site than it is to get links to a paid hosted site. I wrote a small article called "The Cost of Free Hosting."