Warmest Greetings,

Doing The Search Engine Chicken Dance  

:: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 ::

Since Yahoo! dumped Google, acquired Alta Vista, assimiliated Inktomi and married Overture, I found myself tired of caring about what they did next.

It's like watching a friend experience a relationship, breakup, they find another loser, that ends up in despair, and after awhile, you stop wanting to watch because it's too painful. I've not visited Yahoo! in ages because I no longer understand who it is I'm dealing with.

Danny Sullivan examines the Yahoo! situation in Yahoo Reawakens The Paid Inclusion Debate


     "Yahoo views payment as one of several ways to correct its problems. Yahoo's new paid inclusion programs allow site owners to pay for guaranteed inclusion of their URLs and to get regular revisits. Can't afford to pay? If you're a non-profit organization, Yahoo may provide this solution for free.

Google believes payment has no role to play in fixing its crawler problems. It views any payment linked to its crawler-based results as potentially tainting those results. Instead, it seeks to solve its flaws purely through unpaid means."

Meanwhile, new search engines are being dreamed up every day. Whatever it is that Google and Yahoo! aren't doing right, someone else is studying and trying make it better.

Google is said to be throwing money into KnowItAll. According to Search engine tackles tricky lists,"The US Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, and Google, are so impressed that they are providing funding for the project."

This new search property, Mozdex claims to be "a search engine that uses open source search technologies to create an open and fair index.". The owner has invited public input on Mozdex at Cre8asiteForums, where he states, "Mozdex is my approach to solving one of my biggest concerns – the lack of transparency and insight into search results, technologies and concepts."

A new meta search engine, introduced to Cre8asiteForums in Meceoo, a new search engine is another example of what's being developed. Olivier Andrieu, of Meceoo, explains, "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."

To which I would exclude all paid listing first, because paid for placement has never meant paid equals quality or even paid equals relevancy.

There's many, many other new search engines. Two good places to learn about them are Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Guide

But, with all these new search properties in the R&D stage, or newly launched for public review and consumption, how many of them can we possibly be using?

It's like relationships go. Many of us stick with what's comfortable and working fine. If I want some eye candy, I'll go to the beach. But, trying something new has a bit of risk to it.

As Yahoo! is still discovering.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 5/18/2004 10:40:29 AM

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