Search Engines

; by Alexandra Krasne ; IDG Without the right search tool, the odds that youll find what you want on the Web are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery. ; But a search jackpot has cropped up in the form of a product called BullsEye 2 IntelliSeek. Released last week, BullsEye 2 is a desktop portal and search tool that provides access to 700 search engines and databases. ; BullsEye 2 offers many of the same features as its predecessor BullsEye 1.5, which costs 49.95, but has one major difference the price.

; by Tom Spring ; IDG Consider it a law of nature The Internet is growing by the second. By 25 Web pages each second, say researcherswhich brings todays total to roughly 1.3 billion URLs. That number will double in a year, predicts NEC Research Institute. ; Too bad search engines cant keep up. Even AltaVista, which indexes an impressive 250 million pages, still lags. Yet without search engines were all doomed to be lost in cyberspace. ; Search engine technology is still in its infancy, says Amanda Spink, an assistant professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University.

We may be coming upon a new era for the Internet search. And, despite what you may think, Google is not the only player. New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting. Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks.

I have a love/hate relationship with search engines, though it's skewed more towards hate recently. Most just don't work very well, primarily because their original mission -- finding links to relevant information -- has been supplanted by selling stuff.But I think I've found a workable alternative: search-engine searchers (for more about search engines, see "How to stop searching and start finding," link below) My search tool of choice is Intelliseek's BullsEye 2, version 2.5. Originally for professional researchers, BullsEye 2 is simple to use and incredibly fast and accurate -- it sweeps through more than 800 search engines and sources to find answers.

The maker of a popular weight-loss system filed suit against four search engines this week, alleging that their policy of letting advertisers pay to appear in top-ranked search results violated federal and state trademark and fair-competition laws. Mark Nutritionals Inc., the company that sells the Body Solutions weight loss system, filed suit against AltaVista Co., Kanoodle.com, FindWhat.com and Overture Services Inc. in a San Antonio, Texas court Monday, asking for at least $10 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages from each company.

Lets talk about SEO! I am sure some of you are asking, "What the heck is SEO?" It stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the simplest terms, it is organizing a website and its content to help it rank higher in a search engine such as Google. At CNN, I work with the editors and writers to help them take the great stuff they produce and make it as search-friendly as possible so more people can find it and read it. I also work with the design and development teams to make sure the Web pages are as SEO-friendly as possible.

The No. 1 Internet search engine on Monday was unable to provide search results to a number of Web surfers, probably because of a variant of the MyDoom virus. Users of other popular search engines such as Yahoo and Lycos may also have experienced some sluggish behavior. Google released a statement to CNN at 3 p.m. ET saying the site "experienced slowness for a short period of time early today because of the MyDoom virus, which flooded major search engines with automated searches.

IDG It can be surprising to discover that running the same query on several search engines can yield different results. This is because search engines are sort of like movie reviewers They all have their own opinions. Thats why you may want to use more than one search engine when looking for something. ; Of course, its timeconsuming to run your search at multiple places. Thats where metasearch engines come in. Also called metacrawlers, metasearch engines route your query to several search engines at the same time, then provide you with a single results list.

IDG Part of the folklore of the Web is that its a democratic medium. For a relatively modest investment, you can throw up a site, hock merchandise, publish editorial content and sell advertising, just like the big boys. ;Its a nice theory that, unfortunately, ignores the math. As of January, 43.2 million active domains existed, which is up from 29.7 million one year earlier, according to Network Wizards, a Menlo Park, Calif., communications products company. The noise level is deafening.

The New York Times plans to add a paywall to its website on Monday in the United States. And the internet isn't too happy. People who don't want to pay for the Times' content -- or who believe the internet is and forever should be an endless vat of free stuff -- already have created a few work-arounds that let people continue to read nytimes.com stories without paying for them. The Times has taken note. According to a report in Forbes, the well-respected newspaper company asked Twitter to shut down the @FreeNYTimes Twitter feed, which had planned to post every New York Times story on its page so that people could access stories for free.

You can't Google this. OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to. The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools. The project, called WireDoo, has been two years in the making, said Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. At the conference, he said what will make his search tool better than Google (or, too legit to quit, if you will)

Google has not altered its search engine in Argentina despite a court order to do so because the company has not yet received an official order from the court, a spokeswoman said Thursday. Until Google is served with the injunction, the company will not remove any search results from its search engine or comment on the matter, Victoria Campetella told CNN. An Argentine court this week granted an injunction that blocks the Internet giant from "suggesting" searches that lead to certain sites that have been deemed anti-Semitic, and removes the sites from the search engine's index.

The New York Times plans to add a paywall to its website on Monday in the United States. And the internet isn't too happy. People who don't want to pay for the Times' content -- or who believe the internet is and forever should be an endless vat of free stuff -- already have created a few work-arounds that let people continue to read nytimes.com stories without paying for them. The Times has taken note. According to a report in Forbes, the well-respected newspaper company asked Twitter to shut down the @FreeNYTimes Twitter feed, which had planned to post every New York Times story on its page so that people could access stories for free.

Facebook this week announced a major partnership with Bing. Your Facebook connections now affect the search results delivered by Microsoft's search engine. The update means that a box will be added to Bing search results showing relevant Web links that have been "liked" by your Facebook friends. What's more, when you search for a name, Bing will mine your social network to show people you might know. And yet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a curious tack when announcing the partnership.

Lets talk about SEO! I am sure some of you are asking, "What the heck is SEO?" It stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the simplest terms, it is organizing a website and its content to help it rank higher in a search engine such as Google. At CNN, I work with the editors and writers to help them take the great stuff they produce and make it as search-friendly as possible so more people can find it and read it. I also work with the design and development teams to make sure the Web pages are as SEO-friendly as possible.

Google's move to include social networking information in its searches has gotten personal. The search-engine giant has announced that, with a few tweaks, people using Google can now see search results related to friends, co-workers and other members of their social networks above all other results. The Social Search feature was introduced to a limited number of Google users last year and was made available to everyone in beta status this week. "This is just a first step in our ongoing effort to ensure that Google Web search is always as social as the Web itself," the company said in an instructional video posted to its official blog.

When a racist image of first lady Michelle Obama surfaced from the ugliest corners of the Internet last week to top Google's image search results, the episode shined a spotlight on the mysterious workings of search engines. Google placed an ad near the image, apologizing for its offensive nature. But the company resisted calls to scrub the image from its database, saying its role as a neutral tool for searching the Web means having to live with the results, whether it likes them or not. "We have a bias toward free expression," Google spokesman Scott Rubin told CNN. "That means that some ugly things will show up."

Say you're buying a dog. You know the breed you want; you can picture it in your head. But what was the name? A bull terrier? A pit bull? A bull mastiff? Or what if you're in the market for a new camera? You saw a friend with a credit-card-thin model at a party last weekend. But was that a Canon? A Nikon? A brand you've never heard of? If you're like many people, you'd turn to the Internet for answers. But you type in "dog breeds" or "digital cameras" into Google and punch enter, and a big list of blue links comes up. You don't see the dog you want.

We may be coming upon a new era for the Internet search. And, despite what you may think, Google is not the only player. New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting. Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks.

Within a decade, a dream team of astronomers and computer geeks vows to bring a world-class observatory to every desktop, giving anyone with a PC access to remote galaxies and exploding supernovae. The pledge is the result of a partnership announced last winter between a network of 19 national research institutions and engineers from the search-engine giant Google. Their collective objective is to develop potent software to process the estimated 30 terabytes of astronomy imagery (think 12 billion five-megapixel photos)