As you have probably heard by now, Yahoo has entered the desktop search fray, planning to release a Yahoo! branded desktop search in January. This now means that there are close to 1 dozen vendors supplying free desktop search.
While this may be great for users - at least users like myself who like cool new applications - it does have implications to those attempting to position their sites on the search engines.
When you have Google desktop search installed on your computer, and you launch a search on Google you will notice that desktop search results appear at the top of the search results page.
While this is handy for the user - it makes it more difficult for the search marketer to gain exposure
When you mention the Big 3 in our industry, you don't think Ford, GM and Chrysler (unless you are an SEM firm in Detroit). If you are in the search industry when you hear the Big 3 you think of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Speculation is rampant out there about who will win the "Search Engine Wars." Many think that Google, with its current mass and indexing abilities will win, while others see Microsoft as the dominant player, with its future integration of search in the desktop. Still others feel that Yahoo! offers the best "all around" solution, combining search with other online experiences.
Google's beta release of their desktop search tool was their shot across the bow of the USS Microsoft Search. Following hard of the heels of promising technology releases from Blinkx and Copernic, Google is staking their claim to the desktop search space. And Microsoft seems to have been caught flat footed, as they continue to push back the deadline for the release of Longhorn, which will integrate desktop search with the operating system. Many seem to think a search related announcement out of Redmond is imminent.
So, if one looks at what's come out of the labs of the major search engines lately, you see a rush of new technologies centered on the ideas of desktop search, local search, indexing of rich media and personalized search. It seems that everything we've been talking about in the past 3 years is suddenly coming on the market in one fell swoop.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- 10/26/2004 -- AnooX the search engine that promises to revolutionize the Search industry, by delivering far more accurate search results and much higher value to advertisers -- than Yahoo or Google, announces that it has passed the 13 Million Web site crawled marker.
How important is this milestone? Very.
Considering that dmoz.org, which is a (Key) source of search information to Google & Yahoo, has at its current operational level about 5 Million Web sites crawled. Hence AnooX at its current crawled level has crawled more Web sites than Google & Yahoo and we are still continuing with our crawling and expect to be at 25 Million web sites crawled by the time we go live. What this means is that AnooX database of information for generating search results will be very deep and complete compared to existing search engines.
It all started when Yahoo! dumped Google earlier this year in favor of its own algorithmic results. I hadn't paid much attention to Yahoo! until then (because if it was in Google, it was in Yahoo!). Sure I knew some things about it. Like getting a directory listing was difficult, to say the least. But when it comes to the finer points about Yahoo!, I was in the dark.
But when they did the switch, I started to pay more attention, obviously. Not just because they account for about 1/3 of most sites total referral traffic, although that's what initially got me looking at them, but because they also had a lot of features that I'd heard about but never used.
At the time they also released a toolbar (in beta) with a measurement called Yahoo! Web Rank, which is similar to Google's toolbar with PageRank.
With all the buzz about a possible Google browser, Google has quietly developed Google Desktop Search.
What is Google Desktop Search?
Google Desktop Search is a program that runs on your Windows computer. It allows you to search your hard disk for files. Google describes it as follows:
"Google Desktop Search is a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks."
For some time now, most companies have been saying that the next big search product will be desktop search. Who was going to come out with it first and how good was it going to be?
Well HotBot, believe it or not, was one of the first. They had an indexer which could index various files on your computer. You could search via the HotBot toolbar, and results would be displayed in a small pane in your internet browser.
It was cumbersome to set up and frankly, difficult to use. If you had to launch your browser every time you wanted to search your desktop, it becomes too bothersome.
We didn't hear much else on desktop search until Blinkx came along, and we felt that it would be the next big thing in search. Soon after came the Copernic desktop search, and just yesterday AOL announced that it would have their own desktop search, maybe even as soon as this week.
As mentioned in our last newsletter, Google is currently rebuilding its index. Rumor has it that Google also tries to fight artificial link manipulation with this update.
People with connections to Google developers pointed out that Google was working on better ways to determine the quality of web site links.
Search engines use automated software programs that crawl the web. These programs called "crawlers" or "spiders" go from link to link and store the text and the keywords from the pages in a database. "Googlebot" is the name of Google's spider software.
Many webmasters have noticed that there are now two different Google spiders that index their web pages. At least one of them is performing a complete site scan:
Sometimes it is surprising to see a new search engine enter the market, considering the current market space. Three search engines account for over 90% of the referrals, while another dozen or so account for about 7%. So when a new one comes out, it is worth telling you about.
Vivisimo has been a company we have been watching for some time, ever since they announced that they were working on their own search. In fact, they were more or less a meta search engine for quite a while.
Then they announced a new type of search - a clustering search engine. In general terms, what they do is find results for your query within clusters, or groups of results.