coop search

Why are search engines so different

2007-07-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

The Jux2 Meta Search engine which provides results based on the results of google,yahoo and MSN provides a rather surprising statistic showing how much these major search engines differ in the top queries results.

Is it because the indexing method is different for these search engines? Or just a result of the type of use by the users of the searchers! I mean, do some results move up due to that being clicked upon by many users.

The rate of re-indexing will also be different, which can lead to the differences in the results. All this aside, the algorithms used by these engines should be different leading to these differences.

Coop search is now on yubnub

2007-07-18T03:37:00.000-07:00

Using the Yubnub command line, the required search engine can be found. To find a coop search just type"fcop query"

So to find music CSE's just type fcop music and it will show u the list of all music CSE's.Try it by clicking on fcop music.If you have not tried Yubnub, give it a try, its useful and so much like the Unix shell, u don't need to learn anything new.

Yubnub has got a huge collection of commands and u can add ur own too.

Veronica-a search engine for gopher protocol

2007-07-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Gopher protocol is now used very rarely if at all. But Veronica was one of the first indexing engines. The latest version known as(Dont click on this link with internet explorer-use firefox or other browsers that support the Gopher protocol) Veronica-2 is still active. It is of interest as it does not index the contents of the files.

If you click on Search Veronica-2, a dialog box will appear where you can provide your query. The list of gopher servers that have the word(s) will be listed.Try using "SRS" as the query. It refers to the the servers with protein and nucleic acid sequences.

The latest addition to the search engines is VISHNU(Search VISHNU (experimental)), it arranges the results based on the folders in which the files are stored. It also shows the number of files in that folder. To begin with the indexing engine should have these basic features. Better features can be added later.

Asian Cinema Search engine

2007-06-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Asian Cinema

Contribution: [Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Its claim to fame "Asian Cinema Search includes sites with coverage of East Asian cinema. Whenever possible, sub-sections of individual sites are included with separate tags to make search refinements as focused as humanly possible.".

You get a large number of result refinements. Refine results for doom:
Reviews	News	Trailers	Forums
Blogs	Wikis	Databases	Links
Distributors	Official Sites	Interviews	Articles

You can compare the results from the Japanese Cinema CSE with google.

Try it:Asian cinema search

Reviving the meta tags

2007-06-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Meta tags have been used for describing a website and its content. But the use of meta tags has declined so much so that they are considered dead. Very few sites seem to have retained the meta tags on their sites.

The new buzz word is bookmarking. So why not use meta tag data for bookmarking?

The main argument against meta tag content was that it included more keywords than the data contained in the site. The idea of bookmarking is that the user makes sure that the site actually contains that data. The user has to type in all the tags before bookmarking. Here is a greasymonkey script to find meta keywords and description and provide a simpy this link on top of the page.

Simpy this meta data

The user can choose which keywords are appropriate and which are not. And the user is spared the burden of having to type in the tags and description.

Google results with a time line

2007-06-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

Google has introduced a new experimental method to list results using a time line. The results such as this one on "nanotechnology"will show the results based on the word and the date it is related to.

The idea works fine with the examples they have given, but for some of the newer words created post google, they better use the information as to when it was cached. If the cache is not backed up, its hight time they started recording the dates on which new words were found by the google bot. This has many advantages to the casual linguist and also provide a more reliable time line for the future.

I wonder whether the site map can have data which can be used to build the time line. The map view is more of a browser version of google earth.

Mahalo-human powered search

2007-06-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Recently a search engine "Mahalo" was launched in alpha version. Its claim to fame "Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine"

It makes use of "Guides" who are human to sort through content and remove spam. I came across a guide by name "Nicole Gustas" who has created as many as 227 results!! Converting that into google coop's will mean nearly 227 search engines.

The results are marked as "Warnings , Guide's Choice , and What is? icons". Although google coop does not allow for showing warnings sites can be excluded. "What is" seems to be an equivalent of the answer.com results shown in Google, may be slightly better.

The rules for selection are rather stringent..They don't want any sites that have too many advertisements, sites which are younger than one year and so on.You can find details at their FAQ.

I compared the result for the word "Advertorial" from Mahalo with that from google . Although the first result is from wikipedia in both, which reminded me of Search engine nightmare. The search refinements in Mahalo are rather unique, the refinements provided by google dont recognize the context as well as mahalo as they are "not human crafted". May be a better algorithm would do the job for google.

But how do they plan to generate money from this endure? by selling the search results to search engines or by ads or the other means?

I almost forgot you can create an account and add sites, suggest sites to be included for a particular result.A lot of similarity between mahalo and google coop.

Christian Bible Study search engine

2007-04-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Christian Bible

Contribution: Does not accept volunteers

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Searches a whopping 2342 sites.Compared to the " Biblical Studies Search" which searches just 95 sites. The plus point of this CSE is the guide that can be found at the corresponding blog.
You can try the query "heb" in Bible study search and Google.The refinements are given as below

Refine results for Heb:
commentaries	sermons	books	articles_essays
quick reference	texts	bible studies	web pages
video	audio	people	summaries
places	word studies	Q & A's	basic theology

Try it:Christian Bible Study search engine

Add to blogspot button-widget creation and add button

2007-03-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

With the new blogger you can allow fellow bloggers to add widgets that you have created onto their blogs. You can see the help pages at blogger help.

In this post i explain how i made a button to add the custom search engine search to your blog. The widget therefore is the search engine itself.The title i gave is "Coop search". If you are here to see what coop search is--It is a search engine to find other search engines. You can ind search engines built and customized for any topic.If there is known available you can make your own as well.

The widget is safe to use as far as my knowledge. It simply adds the code that google coop gives. You don't need to know any html or javascript to do this. Just keep clicking the buttons. And you are done. If you still have problems just comment below and i will get back to you.

Indonesian blog search engine

2007-03-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Indonesian blogs

Contribution: They seem to have 20 contributors and cant add more.

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:I came across a add to blogspot button, that seems good. You can add the CSE directly to your blog. It takes the HTML code as a widget. So you can add the custom search engine even if you have no idea about html.I added a add to blogspot button myself.I will explain more about how i created the widget to add to blogspot in the next post.

You can try the query "jakarta" in Indonesian blog search and Google.The refinements are given as below

komputer		belajar		ngeblog		jakarta
jogja

More about the search engine can be found at -->DoIT - Denny on IT: Launching Indonesian Blog Search Engine

Try it:Indonesian blog search

Java Search engine

2007-03-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Java

Contribution: [Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:The best Java search engine in terms of the number of sites it will search.
You can try the query "package" in Java search and Google.The refinements are given as below

Tools		Forums & User Groups		Tutorials & Articles		Database & Persistence
Security

The refinements seem to do a lot to help.

Try it:Java search

Indian Classical music search engine

2007-03-19T02:41:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Indian classical music(Hindustani,carnatic)

Contribution:[Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Search as many as 49 different sites on Indian classical music. Try the query "Vatapi" in Indain classical music search engine and compare it with Google.The search refinements are given as below for "Vatapi"...vatapi ganapahti

Hindustani		Carnatic		Musical Instruments		Artistes
Concerts		Theory		Introduction		Blogs

A good help if you are doing some research work on music as well.

Try it:Indian Classical music search

Add your search query to the list

2007-03-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

With the new add your search query feature, anybody can add a query they like to the blog. Just scroll down the sidebar and there you have text boxes to add your name and query.

As soon as you add the name and query the search query will appear in the recent query list along with your name. I hope to link these queries to coop search. Once this is done it will also be added to the Google module or gadget as they call it now.

The cse search page will also have this option soon enough. Although custom search queries should add the recent queries, i don't see it happening in the near future at least. To do that i would need to host the search at my own site and make changes as well.

The coop search blog now has the first position for the query coop search blog.And in the coming days may be anyone can add a search engine directly to coop search without having to mail or comment about it.

Google through the ages-from 1998 to 2007

2007-03-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

The Google search engine started sometime in 1998. The page format has not changed much! since that time. Although Google homepage is controversially the worlds costliest piece of real estate, it still remains simple and elegant. In this post i track the changing views of the homepage using the waybackmachine

The first page dates back to November 11th 1998. It has links to Google Search Engine Prototype
and
Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

Google search engine alpha version.
The first ever screen shot of Google would look something like the one below:

I wonder why the "!" is used so frequently. May it is some other character. But the interesting part is that way back then, they had people subscribing to to Google updates. And even custom search engines on Linux and Stanford.The I am feeling lucky button was there alright. A huge link to about Google.

The beta version had more links and looked as below:
Thats colorful. And a lot more links than the previous version.And making Google as your default was much more complicated than just clicking on a link.I will probably track Google further throught the years in my next post.

Search the future-not black magic

2007-03-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

No this is not black magic, it is the wonder of feed powered search. Rather than indexing the sites, the feed is indexed. With the "search the future" feature of bloglines you can get feeds for a keyword you subscribe to.

you can subscribe for the same at the following url, but you need to have a blog lines account for that.

http://www.bloglines.com/sub?mode=3

In their own words -"Want to know when someone posts something you're interested in? Enter a search query below, and be instantly notified when a blog entry that matches it becomes available to you"

This apart it would be useful to get alerts when somebody starts using a new word. The service should filter out typo's and show only folksonomies. (Words created due to a need for that word)

Ranking your links-show how good a web page is

2007-02-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

Google recently started to take int consideration ,the rel=no follow link. In their post in the Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam they detail some of the reasons for implementing the no follow attribute. You can also find numerous articles that describe why it should or should not be done.

To put it in simple terms--When you link to a web page, you are giving it a score of 1 in terms of search engine score.But when you use the "no follow" tag, the score becomes zero. So spammers wont get the benefit of increasing thier search engine ranking. Since, the web site publisher gets the choice to give a value of 'zero' or 'one', it is but natural for him to have the ability to rank his link as well.

By ranking a link, i mean to say that you canprovide a numerical value specifying how good or bad a particular web page is. Yes even bad pages should be capable of being ranked. As of now no search engines honour the ranking of links. But inthe course of time it should become a default feature not only with search enginesbut also web publishing tools. Since we are addingit to the "rel" tag, the scoring should be doenas follows:

rel="score=2" for a positive score of 2

rel="score=-3"for a negative score of 3 etc...

Arguments as to the effectiveness of this are plenty. The rank tag will become more useful as we enter the era of personalised search. Your blog, mail,social network...etc..will be indexed to provide you with personalised search. When this happens, the use of scores will not affect the overall ranking of a website,just the ranking with respect to a particular person.

Other attributes may be added as time progresses. The process of ranking links can be automated to provide ranks to pages based on the domain name of the page. The various bookmarking sites like delicious are involved in collecting the opinion of different people on a particular web page, the use of scoring is hidden in these sites. Although different people have different scores on their tagged pages, it is hidden and is calculated based on various criteria. The idea of scoring web pages, is open in google coop. In the customized search engines, you can directly provide scores to sites. Thus, it is useful to score web pages directly in the links.

Google stops indexing live search

2007-02-24T02:08:00.000-08:00

It is rather a surprise that finally google has stopped indexing Live search. In an earlier post about search engine indexing search engine, i had shown a screen shot to prove my point. Now the live search page does not appear as a result anymore.

Take a look at the googleoop - Google Search to see for yourself.

What is the reason for this sudden change? Is it only the algorithm kicking in late or something else? But they continue to index the various other things such as the ice rocket search engine, technorati etc..

They also index the various tagging services and aggregators. Is it too difficult to make out the difference or are these services faster than the google bot? Yes they are bound to be faster. After all its the wisdom of the crowds!!

That apart, the content stealors are better at the job as they generally parse through the XML only. It is indeed very difficult to index the web. The considerable size of the internet is to blame. The net is growing at a tremendous rate, propelled especially by the social networking sites that are exploding.

One piece of good news is that Orkut is not being indexed. But myspace is being indexed. So these social networks are having an impact on the search engines. Lets not forget bloggers here. The bloggeres are producing all sorts of search engine crap. The list could be endless..search engine link bombs, new word generation etc..

Google result filter-filter irrelevant sites

2007-02-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

The google result filter will see which queries have results on the google search engine and which do not. Using the google filter website you can remove sites from the search results.

So if you feel a site is nothing but spam, just add that to your list of sites to be excluded. You can take a look at the translated version here.
Translated version of http://www.google-filter.com/

They make use of the google API to provide a personalized site filter. With the google coop search, this can be done effectively. It is a pity that the personalised search does not have the same feature. You can bookmark something to be excluded.

Why is it a search engine?

2007-02-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

Yes why should it be a search engine? why not just a search tool or search app.

Wikipedia defines an engine as,"An engine is something that produces an effect from a given input. " So just because a search engine works based on a input is a good criteria to call it an engine.

Then why dont we call a mailing sytem as a mail engine. It has no wikipedia refrence. Is it just that the word became popular due to repeated use or is their any significance associated with it?To find the significance we need to find who used the two words together. Google does not provide an option to sort results by date.

A search for the oldest search engine returns http://www.aliweb.com/ as the first result. It claims to have been established in 1993. So assuming thats correct we need to find a reference that is older than that. Wikipedia refers to "wanderer" as the first search engine. So when did the word search engine catch on? rather difficult to track the history of a word on the internet. Hopefully wikitionary will make it easier to track words.

What could be more appropriate?
Rather than "search engine", one could use search 'anything else'. things like search spider, search agent etc.. Like all other engines, the search engine has revolutionized the web. The steam engine, increased the speed at which people moved from one location to another on the planet. The search engine speeded up the movement on the web.

Just Google it

2007-02-11T23:55:00.000-08:00

I was searching for search results for http://www.google.com/search and stumbled upon something rather intresting.

The sites claim to fame is "Someone thinks you are an idiot because you were too stupid to check Google before asking a question. They gave you a link to this site as a joke. The fact that you followed it pretty much proves the point. Hope that helps. Have a nice day"

You can take a look at it here.But in case somebody sent that link to you be sure to make them see the search engine nightmare. Google does seem to be least bothered about this situation.

FLADGE the SUGGESTION ENGINE

2007-02-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:It will sugggest topics for you.

Contribution: You can try the Suggest.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:If you are just wanting to find some random stuff. This is a good one. It suggests a topic randomly. You can even select one of the custom topics. The selected topic is then presented as a google search result.

Its presetly only having an english interface at present.

Try it:Suggestion engine

Portuguese research search engine

2007-02-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Portuguese research search engine

Contribution: You can try the Suggest a site. Or in portuguese Sugerir um Site.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:The site provides an option for adertisers to advertise on gooogle using adwords.And as itis becoming standard practice among CSE's to suggest few search queries.

To put in their own words "The ForumPME is a research engine that, through the personalization and management of a catalogue of sites with contents direccionados for Small the e Médias Companies (PME) Portuguese, attributes priority or restricts the research results, using the Google technology." Try the query "emprego" in forumpme and compare it with Google.
Try it:http://www.forumpme.com/

search engine indexing another search engine?

2007-02-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

The experiment i was trying as per my earlier post has paid off. Google will index the search results of live search. The people at live search mostly have not put a robot.txt file to their results. And what do we have. A wonderful result in the form of googleoop.To make it immortal i took a screen shot as well. It is the third result.

Google however will not index its own search results as might be expected. The only page that appears if you do sites restricted search for http://www.google.com/search is the site itself. So no wonder it will not enter a infinite loop. Yahoo seems to be of the results though.

Image SEO-Google images bombing

2007-01-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

Image SEO is the use of search engine optimization tactics to make a particular image rank better in search results. The main methods to follow would be

Naming the image file appropriately. If you want your image to be the first result for say "coop search", name the file "coop-search.jpg". I use the hyphen as space would be interpreted as "%20".

The 'Alt' attribute or tag is used to contain the keywords. So i am putting Alt as "coop-search". Anyway Alt is not highly weighted these days.

Related content-since a image will get a higher ranking when the content is related to the image, i should have better chances. Most of the content here is related to search and search engines.

Longdesc(long description) can be used to give a detailed description of the image in another Html file.

So much for my image promotion. Can somebody google bomb a image? By that i mean to say can sites other than the one which originally hosted the image influence the results for a picture. This would amount to bandwidth theft and can be prevented. So the appearance of Images for a particular query is not actually google bombing as the search bots are unaware of the contents of the image.

Now to put my coop search image using all this info as below.The icon i use is the first image. The next one is the bigger image. May be i will use that as a banner.

Coop Search Firefox Mozilla search plugin

2007-01-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Coop search works wonderfully in any browser. You can access it using the CSE search or the coop search. However, if you use the Mozilla firefox browser you can add the coop search plugin to your browser.

Coop search can now be used directly to search for other google coop search engines. We made the search plugin for the coop search and pu it up at the mozilla sherlock website.You can get the firefox plugins at the mozilla sherlock website.

It does not have any bugs as far as we have tested. But feel free to let us know if any problems turn up. It should be possible to use it with IE7 onwards as microsoft is supposed to support sherlock search plugins.

Search Engine nightmare

2007-01-26T21:46:00.000-08:00

The search engines such as the google search engine use extensive resources to index the various sites in the internet. They make use of advanced algorithms to provide the most suitable results for the users.Just imagine if the results offered by these powerful search engines is very similar to those offered by a simple javascript orPHP script.

I disscus one such javascript which tries to provide such results.And later look into some of the causes,solutions etc..

The Search engine nightmare is a simple javascript that shows a list of results which link to the top sites on the internet. It does not check for the exsistence of pages.It should be possible to do that using PHP and other server side scripts.You can compare the results with google using the last result.I plan to make a personalised version of Search engine nightmare as a google gadget later.

The increasing pouplarity of sites such as wikipedia, delicious, digg, urban dictionary,simpy etc.. has resulted in people linking to the same site for multiple words. The web 2.0, which is driven by user submitted or generated content has resulted in tremendous popularity of these sites which thrive on user provided content. The users who submit content also refer to this content and link to them whenever neccessary. So this effect leads to unintentional google bombing of these sites.

Moreover since these sites have implemented the no follow attribute, the sites that are tagged dont get indexed. The effect can be seen very easily in Google. Large number of search's give Wikipedia as the first result.Similarly Technorati, delicious,simpy,urban dictionary,other bookmarking services etc..also come up in search results.

I could recognise two types of words that get into this effect (which i like to call search engine klogging). The first type of words are those that are being used for the first time.For example "googleoop" is a word that has not been used. So a search for this gives a result that has links to Simpy,Rojo (a feed aggregator)..etc..Generally these words get results that are more relevant as time passes with more popular use.

The other type of words that get into this klogging of the search engine are "tag" words.These are very commonly used words that are used for tagging something.This may seem veryimproper results. But actually they are not. In fact when you search for "blog" it gives the blogs of a few people and companies. This is actually a 'wrong result'. For example the http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/ appears as top results but has nothing to do about a blog except that it is a blog.

Google seems to have realised this(not very sure of this) and has implemented a algorithm to overcome the effects of google bombing. The custom search engine also is a step in this direction. So basically when you want to search the web, you search the web using the expertise of somebody or your own expertise.The google custom search engine can be customised to search the sites that you have tagged using the google marker.The coop search provides a search tool to find the most suitable CSE(customized search engine) for a particualr query.

So does it mean that it is the end of good old fashioned web search engines?In most probability it is an end to the search engines that index the entire internet.The huge size of the internet is one good reason for this. But the same algorithms are now being used to index the selected number of sites.

A question that arises with these developments is--"will people pay to get tagged?
"If this catches up and spamming of bookmarking sites continues, it wil become a mess. Content can be stolen and tagged excessively to get traffic. Since the tagging sites dont check which content is original.

miserable failure after the algorithm update.

2007-01-26T19:11:00.000-08:00

Look at results for miserable failure after the algorithm update.Although the site of Bush is gone, the resuls are showing blogs and news sites that have used the words 'Miserable failure'. So if google's aim was to show results which were not related to google bombing, that seems to have failed.

The effect of google bombing seems to have been overcome, if the definition of google bombing is "Mainpulation of results of google search engine to show results which dont have the words given in the query". The democratic nature of google search engine is proved by the new search results. But it is spam.

The first result has got a picture of Bush as well. So google will still be getting mails complaining how their results are politically biased!!!.

Impact of using google bombs on page rank

2007-01-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

What is the impact of using google bombs on page rank of that page? It should go down right? Recently google updated their algorithm to overcome google bombs. So this may take a while to take effect on some of the more obscure or less popular google bombs.

Take a look at the google bomb project which has numerous google bombs. Even then it has got a page rank of five. So does it mean using google bombs has no impact on your ranking!!Although i did not find any direct relation between google bombing and page rank, it is suerly against the guidelines given by google.

Will the new algorithm penalise blogs for having used a google bomb?And what about penalising those blogs which talk about google bombs and hence spam the search results.

I took a look at results for miserable failure after the algorithm update.So if google wants to stop hate mail they have to penalise those who use the words bush and miserable failure on the same page.

SEEATDUMMY-Search Engine Experimentation Anchor Text Dummy

2007-01-24T05:40:00.000-08:00

If you want to use this same name(SEEATDUMMY), use at your own risk. I am using this word for Search Engine Experimentation. So it is possible that it could be google bombed, google looped and what not.

SEEATDUMMY-Search Engine Experimentation Anchor Text Dummy

For each experiment i will be using the series SEEATDUMMY(number of the SEEATDUMMY). So i will not run out SEEATDUMMies quickly. Google search engine recognise "hello4590" as a different word from "hello4591". So i should not have any shortage of SEEATDUMMY's.

SEEATDUMMY1 is being used to find the effect of google lucky links on search engines.

Effect of Google "I am feeling Lucky" links on search engines

2007-01-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

By "I am feeling Lucky" links i refer to a link to a website via google. Google search engine provides a button "I am feeling Lucky", by hitting this button the browser is directly taken to the page that appears as the first search result in google.Thus you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them. The feeling lucky link uses this method to link to a website.

As an example if i wanted to link to a wikipedia i could link using http://www.wikipedia.org/ to get a link with anchor text of Wikipedia linked as Wikipedia. If i were to use a i am feeling lucky link i would link using
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia&btnI=I to get a link with anchor text of Wikipedia linked as Wikipedia.

You can find firefox greasemonkey scripts to do this type of linking. What if these links were added directly on the web pages. How would the search engine react to such links? Would this amount to Web Spam?Will this have any postive effect on the position of web pages in search results?

Since the link will be pointing to a google domain name it is possible that it will not get indexed. So will it be equivalent to a no follow link? However, since it has no referrer it could be used as a Dereferrer as well.

Will google give extra points to sites that use No follow link or google lucky links?

The no follow links can be linked to specific web pages while Lucky links link to only the first search result, so the chances of it being spam are reduced considerably!!.The disadvantage with no follow links is that they reduce the usefullness of search engines in some cases. It looks like this can be overcome to a certain extent using lucky links.

One could also use a Refresh link via google to link back to thier own site. Other dereferrer sites can also be used to do this.

To find answers to these questions and more let me do a test. As it would be a bad practice to target a query that can be used, i have choosen a the query "SEEATDUMMY1". If you know what is the effect of these links please do let me know.

Google Loop-will it take the bait?

2007-01-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

The idea is to link to the google results page with the search query as the link text. I have been doing this using the klog generator, but this is the first attempt to see its effect on search results. The words i have choosen are google loop and googleoop. Assuming google will filter out its own search reult links, i will also link to Live search(since its fairly new) using the links google loop and googleoop

You can help me in this experiment by

Copying and pasting the links google loop and googleoop (linking to these words using the same links as above). The first word had 29,600,000 results when i tried and the other one did not have any in google. And for live search google loop and googleoop.
Bookmarking the search results for the above in google using Delicious, Simpy or whatever it is that you use.
Spreading the word that such an experiment is on.
Use any (legal) SEO tactics you know to achieve the same results

Feel free to let me know of any related information.This is a experiment to see if google will loop on its own results or that of other search engines if particular keywords are google bombed to the results page(What i like to call klogging). I am doing with no evil intention and will remove this post if it is causing problems or against guidelines of any sort after going through such warnings if any.

Google customised search can be made Delicious

2007-01-18T06:47:00.000-08:00

Ok i have been ranting about how bad it is that you cant use your google search engine with Delicious and so on. Zooie made a product that actually uses your delicious bookmark, you can take a look at his actual post Google coop just got delicious. The service he has created is at http://idlivada.vpsland.com:8000/login.html. You need to give your login and password and also your cse id to generate the XML.

you can Add Just bookmarks with the tag you specify
search entire domain or restrict to only to what you have tagged using "*"
use an algortihm to decide the best tag etc..

As soon as you give these and sepecify the features of your search engine as in the cse page, you get the XML code. You can upload this XML to get a search engine with your Delicious bookmarks.

But again, it does not get updated if you update your bookmarks..so its a kind of migrating service from delicious to google.I was hoping to make something along these lines for Simpy--i wanted to Call it Simpyfuge. Simpyfuge is supposed to use a simpy account and add these to your google results as much as you want. Hopefully this will not require you to upload XML give create a search engine etc..

Google customized search-is it just advanced search with default options?

2007-01-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

Google launched google Co-op so that everyone could roll out her own search engine!! But is it just the advanced search with default search results? Or does it offer much more. Using advanced search you can restrict the domain to search and it has been used by many to provide a search box for their sites, such as

http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=www.w3schools.com&as_q=split

that will search only that site for that query.You can also restrict which domain not to search. Yes however google seems to go crazy when you try to limit the search to two or more domains.May be the syntax is wrong but"http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=www.w3schools.com+www.javascript.com&as_q=array" gives some really weird results.

And again with google coop you can save which sites to restrict the search to.

Search Refinements-Another thing with coop is that it gives search result refinements based on labels. This feature is not the only distinguishing feature though.Whats inside the google coop seems to be different.

Clearly google customized search seems to be a way to overcome competition from tagging services. You can not only search the sites you have bookmarked but also those which are present on google. (Subscribe to your search engine)You can do that by clicking on add my expertise to your search. Is this an example of "Evil", thats debatable. However, it is fact that you cannot add your delicious bookmarks to your google as a third party tool directly.

My definition of "Evil-Everything voned is legal", Eg:Microsoft provides operating system--everything produced by microsoft is accepted as legal(not a virus, trojan etc..). Everybody else has to get separate certification..So is this..google has a search engine thats most popular..if you want to add third party tools you have to provide it separately, you cant add it to google directly. On the other hand you can very easily add modules to google homepage.

Add to google?

2007-01-10T18:07:00.000-08:00

If you are using the google homepage for keeping your stuff you can add this module or gadget to your homepage by clicking on the add to google button . If you want to code for the module.I added it on a page at cse search.Some good search results are also link logged on the page inside the module. Apart from this you can add a custom search engine to your google search results by subscribing to a search engine. You can subscribe to the coop search using the subscription page at google. For subscribing to a google account you need a google account.

Plasma TV custom search

2007-01-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Plasma TV custom search

Contribution:No explicit declaration (Try their google Custom search engine page Plasma TV Finder)

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:The search refinements of this search engine offer something new. The search engine provides a few basic search refinments like Reviews Compare > Plasma vs. LCD,
Forums, Plasma TV Problems, Buying Guides, Plasma TV Technology Scoop. But it does not stop at that. It provides some sub-refinements as well under the headings such as , , . Each of these provide a multitude of further refinements.

They claim "This search engine is dedicated to Plasma TV technology and is designed to help you quickly locate relevant information and find the perfect TV for you purposes. Our search engine will only display information based on the refinement key topics you select. If we are unable to find information for a given topic from our listed indexes we will search the web for your request."

Hopefully they will do something with the resolution of the results page--resizing of page. Moreover they have huge whitespace at the end of the results. Google has fixed this problem and put up the solution to the extra white space after search results.

Try the query "HDTV" in Plasma TV custom search and compare it with Google.Find it faster with webperc..

Try it:Plasma TV Search

Free TV Search

2007-01-05T01:43:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Free Tv Search(free to watch)

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: FreeTvSearch.com allows you to search for tv shows online that you can watch for free right on your browser. Try the query "Simpsons" in Free TV search engine and compare it with Google.

It shows text based results. They could provide an option to use Snap.And they dont seem to believe in Search result refinements. There is a list of "Fav5 = Southpark, Family Guy, American Dad, Simpsons, Futurama". It would serve better if these were linked to results-"Instant search" or in my language "Link logged"

They show a list of sites that are being searched. This is a new trend with CSE's or custom search engines. It is somewhat similar to the tagging service in that a list is displayed with links to these sites.

Try it:Free TV Search

Moop Search-the meta coop search engine

2007-01-05T01:09:00.000-08:00

When i first came up with the idea of Coop search it was as a "Search engine search". The idea was to fetch results from other customized search engines. This would be a meta a search engine. Google provides an option to subscribe to search engines, but it would be impossible to subscribe to all the "good" custom search engines.

You could subscribe to some of the search engines, you like the most but that would be limited in scope. So why not have a Moop search?

There are many reasons for that--that would mean that a scheme to choose the best results from the best search engines would have to be evolved. How effective this scheme or algorithm would be is difficul to acess. The choice to choose the search engine would be lost!!

Then again the description of each search engine could be provided along with the top result from each of the search engines. I plan to do that sometime. But that would involve the development of a scoring scheme and selection algortihm for the meta coop search engine.

If you want to add all the search engines as subscribed in your CSE, you could do that, but how effective would the scoring scheme be?

Indian search engine

2006-12-21T01:49:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:India

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The search engine provides an option to use adavnced search as well. But it seems a very ambitious search engine as India has mulitple dimensions to cover. The most likely way to go would be to get results from other smaller search engines using subscriber code in the XML code.
You can try the keyword "banglore" in the indian search engine and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.informationmadness.com/

Web companies search engine

2006-12-21T01:39:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Web companies that Daniel is tracking

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The search result refinements are Products/Companies and Buzz. You can compare the results for the keyword "google" from technoxintesis and compare it with Google.Daniel claims"It searches about 1200 Web companies and their reviews in the blogs I track. We have done this for our own research and plan to keep updating it."

Try it: tecno.xintesis.com

CSE-links

2006-12-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

A directory of the various custom search engines. It presently classifies the CSE's 22 categories and my guess would be these numbers will grow. As many as 68 links are provided by CSE links.

You can suggest your own CSE for inclusion in their web site by becoming a editor. They provide a feature to preview your CSE page directly from thier web site. It is powered by Snap a free service that shows a preview of a web site without actually taking you to that site. It shows up as a mouse over effect in Cse-links. It is comparitivley better than the custom search guide as it includes a search box to search within the site. It seems to be run by Paul Codman / John Owen.

Try it:CSE Links - Directory of Google Coop Custom Search Engine Links Worldwide.

My name is video- video search engine

2006-12-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Videos

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: If you are wondering whats the point of another video search engine, when google is doing a fine job--yes but it takes ages to load--if you have ever tried it on something other than broad band.

The video search which gives text based results is a good alternative. And the greatest advanteage or dissadvanteage of this CSE is that its search refinements are rather unique-instead of searching by catagories like in google it searches by website as well.

They have also used google API's to show some images!!It would be better if they provided an option for showing previews of search results for those who want to see a preview. Something along the lines of Snap.

Along the lines of Mad for toys this CSE also has "instant searches" option, which links key search results from the first page.(a very good example of klogging-look at the klog generator.)

The search refinements offered by it are Movie Trailers, Music Videos, YouTube, News, MySpace, Funny, TV Shows, Free TV stations, Concert Videos

You can try the query "Harry potter and the order of the phoenix" in Live Music search and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.mynameisvideo.com/

Live net music search engine

2006-12-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Live Music

Contribution:You can suggest a site by e-mailing them

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: A music search engine is a great idea- as it can cater to the specific custom needs of different listners. By restricting the search to limited numer of sites you can get really customised results. Live music search really does a good job of customising to specific needs.

The CSE claims to "Find live concert video, sessions, online radio and more" and the search result refinements include "BBC (online radio) Concert Videos Concerts (audio & video) Sessions Online Radio"

Along the lines of Mad for toys this CSE also has "instant search" option, which links key search results from the first page.(a very good example of klogging-look at the klog generator.)
You can try the query "Elbow" in Live Music search and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.livenetmusic.com/

Toy Search engine

2006-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Toys (United Kingdom)

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The very fact that it searches for toys is very interesting.It has got a attractive interface-it needs to have it-you are attracting kids to buy toys. Various Pictures are linked to search results. Thats really a good one...you are sure to click on those images.

That apart a list of various toys is provided at the bottom, which are linked to search results.
Yes for those of you who have been following the blog, it is a very good example of klogging. If you are new you may want to look at the klog generator. If you had thought it was a crazy idea, think again, klogging (or link logging) is catching up.Well i however think it is indeed a crazy idea.(I need to make some code changes in some of the klog tools.)

But i still have not come across anybody try out NHTML, it seems a rather very complicated idea to use and make people understand. If once known, it can become convenient to use though.

"Find amazing toys easily from specialist online shops with traditional, contemporary and collectible toys for kids, teens and adults"

Point to note it has safe search activated by default..highly neccessary when searching for kids toys..

You can try the query "model aircraft" in mad for toys and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.madfortoys.com/

Free christmas music search

2006-12-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Free christmas music (& the joy and cheer of the christmas spirit)

Contribution:You can suggest sites that are not in the list by mailing using the mail id given on the site.

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: You can try the query"wish you a merry christmas" in Christmas song search and Google.As the creator claims, its nothing fancy...but search engines are built to search not to be fancy.And lets sing "we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year"

Try it:http://freechristmasmusic.googlepages.com/

Google filter-let me know what you think of it

2006-12-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

Google filter is a module or gadget for google homepage. It checks whether a given word has google results.For example you want to know if words like "xetakey", "fetakey" and "metakey" have search results. Instead of tying each query one after the other you can use this module to segregate the words into those with results and those without results.

A earlier version of this is Venpund which works only for internet explorer. Google filter works on almost all browsers but this module can mess up sometimes when google reults come hapazardly or something.But it generally is fine if you try it again. If you know whats it with the code, do let me know. Mostly the IG_fetchcontent has to be used directly without the for loop.It works on a fairly simple logic, if the size of the results page is greater than "7000" it considers the result to be present.

you can add it your google homepage

and tell me how it performs and what use it found in your case. The idea is to be able to use this gadget to see how various CSE's will perform when filtered for words and various other modifications. This should be possible as soon as an option to add the url of the CSE is provided in the gadget. But there is concern as this may produce fake adsense impressions on that cse. So it wuld be better if CSE's without adsense can be run for such tests. It must be noted that google has such an option in that if you search using http://www.google.com/search?q= mostly.

Webinars, webcasts, Podcasts and Web Events Search Engine

2006-12-14T04:52:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics: Webinars, webcasts, podcast, web events, live events, on-demand events, streaming events, tutorials/training

Contribution:May be you can request them here

Results hosted at: Own site

What's Interesting: Really unique interface, they have used custom buttons to switch from one CSE to another. (it was dropped from google in favour of speed itseems) They have done a good job of integrating the content and classifying them in the various fields. (Hopefully i can run google filter on this one and do a more decent analysis of the classification scheme.CSE's still dont support this.More about google filter in the next post.Its the fully operational version of Venpund)

This search engine has the various boolean operators like "OR", "+","-" and also the quote operator.

"FindWebEvents.com is actually comprised of 9 search engines, all specifically targeted toward helping users find any type of web event, web media and online demonstration."

It may help the people who did it to remember that everyone of us does not use 17 inch monitors. Many things get hidden. Especialy the Google ads..Its not good for buisness.

"You can try the query "seminars" at webevents search and compare it with google"-well i told this but it is as stupid as saying "seminar+seminar" in your google search.A better keyword could be "ajax"-seminar and the results would be at webevents search and compare it with google

Try it: http://www.findwebevents.com

Supersubra- SAP search engine

2006-12-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:SAP related search

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: This CSE provides a list of links included in the CSE. That way you dont keep suggesting which site need to be included.Even those who are not contributing to the CSE can take a look at the list here. You can try the query "SAP tips" in the SAP Search engine and compare it with Google. And Supersubra means "super+clean" results.

Try it:http://supersubra.googlepages.com/sapsearch

Web development search engine

2006-12-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:"This community based and web development related search engine will search the Internet for websites about PHP, SEO, CSS, web 2.0, web-design, programming, hosting, etc. The results are builded from selected web development sites and of course the standard results from Google. While this custom search engine is optimized for web development related searches, a regular search for common items is also possible."

Contribution:You can add sites using the "Suggest a web development resource" box.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The CSE provides search result refinements for scripts, resources, templates, programming, seo, php, open source and weblog. You can try the query "Ajax Examples" in the Web Development search and compare it with Google. They have selected a few queries manually for showing best results. It would be more exciting if they could also show most recent queries as well.

Try it:http://www.finalwebportal.com/

Island of Cyprus Search-Getcy

2006-12-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:General, Government, Technology, News, Property information about island of cyprus

Contribution:You can suggest sites through the comments section or add sites using google markers. (3 contibutors)

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: Getcy is actually a collection of five other CSE's. Each of the topics General, Government, Technology, News, Property. But it was a dissapointment to see that a query is not carried from one CSE to other. If you type a query in the general CSE and then click on the News tab it will not directly take you to the results in the news tab. Rather you have to give the query again. This can be easily overcome.Hope they implement it soon.They are still in the process of refining their results though and adding more sites as well. You can try the query
"tourism" in Getcy and Google.

Try it:http://getcy.com/

A world without search engine!

2006-12-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

Just imagine how horrible it would be if the internet did not have any search engines. It would like having all the books in the world, but having no light to read them..Well thank god for having bestowed upon us the mercy of search engines. However, as i was wondering what would have happened to this world if search engines were not to be?

May be we would have to have huge link directories. But how practical would this be... Just think a list of all the sites in the entire world. It would be tremendously huge and may be even not practically possible..It could have been possible in a world that was many times smaller than the present internet.(pre-search engine era)

"Impossible" is said to be a word from the dictionary of lossers. So i thought of making this impossible directory of all the sites in the world. Just imagine a site that is linked to all the sites on the internet.As a n experiment to that regard i created a site for linking up to all the sites in the internet..(this is not a joke believe me). It may come in handy if search engines became non-functional or something ..More than anything else it will surely be fun. If you want your site listed just comment below and i will add it to a suitable "directory"

Although directories seem to be the way to go... it will be evident clearly from all those directory sites and link sites that a site or topic cannot be classified into a single directory. So it would be more meaningful if these were organised in some sort of a tag format..I start the proces of creating this List to be called the "Site list" or something more fancier i can come up with.

Take a look at the list of all the sites in the world.

Google sets - a step towards context specific search

2006-12-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

Google sets is a new lab gadget that predicts a list of words that would form a set with a given set of words. For example if you gave "red", "green" and "red" as your list. The tool will predict items such as "yellow", "white" etc... So basically it is able to recognise all these are colors.You can look at a practical implementation of the same in a search engine at Kuchita. If you give a search query, the search engine suggests related words.

However, it has a come a long way from google sets to give personalised search and google suggest. The personalised search seems to be a good one as context is different for different people.Google suggest is also the same but it suggests words at real time as you type in words.

It is a advanced pattern recognition algorithm--yes--but still context is still more specific, as the same person may have to find different things at different times.You can also take a look at
http://www.sdrow.org/ it has a interface very similar to google sets. But the algortihm seems to be different.

The program behind a bot is rather similar to this, except that it is more gramatically oriented... the order of words and their relationship with each other is of much concern.

Speeglebot-how good is the AI??

2006-12-02T00:07:00.000-08:00

Speegel bot is a solution provided by the Speegle search results. Speegle search results offers voice version of the google results. It offers two male voices and one female voice options explicitly. It seems to be a little slow as it puts up the following message for every search query.

Please be patient... our server is quite heavily loaded at the moment and search
results may take a while to process.do NOT refresh several times to try and make
it work, please do not click stop and play repeatedly either.

For a speech based web application, it does really fine.

The SpeegleBot seems a better product though. The description makes a modest claim as follows

Talk to the SpeegleBot about anything you like but remeber to be polite.
holiday homes, leisure, travel, gadgets, motors and anything else under the
sun.

But as you would expect, the Anything under the sun is a little bit of an exageration. As soon as the Speeglebot is turned on it starts with the greeting "Hello, my name is Speeglebot, i am here to answer your questions..."

If you have seen one of those chat bots, this is very similar to that. If you say "Hello" it will say "Hi there" and when you say "Hi" it will say "Hello there". And still the surprise is yet to come...Try asking it "what is your name?" It will say "my name is speeglebot. Go on click an advert for me it will make me happy" That seems to be against google policy though.

Who created it?

Team speegle the Mactavish.

It can be a rather good way to pass your time. Though it was a dissapointment when It said the opposite of "good" is "Anti- good". So it basically has a preset databse of replies to each of the possible questions. However, it claims to have an IQ of over 250 in terms of humans.

In case it does not know the answer it suggests it may be something to do with "Haggis or may be string theory". As for as having fun is considered, it is the best thing. However, you get bored after trying out a few things. It is no better than a chat bot as far as "deductive reasoning" is concerned. But the question is how good is it as a search tool. Well it was a rather poor performer here as well. Try asking it about hotels in london.It asks "any specific location" but seems to go wild when you respond to that.

If you compare it with other Bots of the present generation, it seems quite intelligent. It is fast and intelligent. Hopefully it can be made a better search tool. It would still be better if it learns as it talks---needs lot of memory space i presume..It is difficult to be analytical while analysing such AI models. It would be better if the turning test were performed on it.The turning test is a test in which the robot and a human being are placed behind seperate screens and both are asked the same question. If the AI is able to answer as good as or better than the human it can be considered to have passed the test.

As the bot claims it seems to have an IQ of 250 in human terms. It is rather well written and best suited for children. It has a built in safety mechanism to prevent the use of innapropriate language. I wish Team speegle the Mactavish all the best and more success...And i will try to analyse all the bots with a better grading scheme.

Venpund-google defined checker

2006-12-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

Venpund can be described as a tool, that can be used to check if a set of words shows up positive results in the google search engine. If you tried absurdities like "Gunjipudi" you would not get any results in a sane search engine like google. But you need to check each word one after the other.Venpund seems to solve that problem. You can list out multiple words one after the other in separate lines and click on the find words button.

As soon as you click on the button, it filters out all the words that produce results. Only words that dont have any results will be listed in the bottom text box.However, Venpund is only for internet explorer. Moreover, it may not work from the web site directly. You need to save it onto your desktop before using it. The general problem you would face, is "host not responding error". This can be overcome by saving it onto your desktop.

I am not sure whether a google API for the same is available or not. The Venpund works by checking the size of the results page. If the size of the results page is lesser than "1600"bytes the assumption that it has no results is drawn. This seems to work fine....However, a server side script for the same from google would be a better alternative as all the browsers can then use it.

If you are wondering whats the use of Venpund, it can be used to find new words or names for one thing. But basically it will serve as a defined() function for the google search engine. I wonder if its available as a command line function as well on google. However, i did not find any devices that did the same job as Venpund and so i have put it up.Do tell me if it needs to be improved.If a API exsists for the same, inform me about it as well. I am in need of one such API.

Carfilter-Search UK car reviews

2006-12-01T01:57:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Car reviews

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: You dont get any result refinements. See the difference in results for the query "Mercedes" with Carfilter Google. Hope more refinements are added. But it does a good job of restricitng the results to UK.

Try it:http://www.carfilter.co.uk

The Perfect Search Engine

2006-12-01T01:41:00.000-08:00

"The perfect search engine," says Google co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." To understand what we mean, the search engine should understand context. I keep blabaring about "Context" all the time. Yes Context is the essence of the words meaning. Thus, a search engine that has no regard for context is never going to be perfect.

Although google search philosophy is very sound, but what i have experienced is somewhat different. As soon as you enter a search term and hit the return key, the top ten results are shown by google. The first criteria among these results seems to be that they are popular...Then the words we searched for are searched for. This seems to be a rather good logical thing to do..The reasoning goes as follows..

When does a person use a search engine??

When he comes across a piece of news or something that is the buzz word across the campus/city. So as soon as that query is presented to google, it will present the result that has a high probability of what you are searching for. But try searching for something that is 'stale news-over powered by new stuff that has same keywords'. Its here that we have problems.

The perfect search engine still seems a distant dream though..for now.I would like to tell that, when i metioned about 3d search engines and wise men---the idea is not to provide better graphics. Rather it should be to provide the best result. The user should be directed to "a page" that satisfies his query. He should not have any use for multiple pages. However, some search queires require information from multiple sources. In such a case more reulsts make sense.

Dissecting the search box code

2006-11-30T04:51:00.000-08:00

The google guideline clearly mentions"The code for the search box will be generated for you to cut and paste into your site". But Plenty of examples can be seen which dissect the google code. One of the most controversial is the removal of the "Google Custom Search" line which is present in the search box. It surely is violating the google guidelines.

Its fairly simple to do. Just add Value="" in the line Input name="q". If google is really serious they may modify the script or penalise those who are removing the google line. The other things that are done involve changing the word that is displayed in the search button. I have seen varaints such as "Find", "Locate"...etc. This is done by replacing the value="search" with value="Find".

If you have seen the google homepage more carefully, you would have noticied the "Feeling Lucky" button beside the "Google search" button. If you hit this button, you are directly taken to the first search result site. This is not still implemented in CSE's. If you try changing the name="sa" for the button it does not seem to affect the search results in any way.Hopefully google will provide these options in the long run.

And if you feel the search box is very long for you liking, you can decrease its length by changing the size="40" to a more appropriate size. This can be useful if your search box is not fitting on your side bar. Generally the side bar is long enough to fit the Google CSE. However, it can become a little long in some side bars. You can reduce to sya 30 or 35 to fit it in. If the side bar is still smaller than this, you better increase the size of your side bar.

CSE networks-advanced blog rolling

2006-11-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

A very interesting new development with Google's CSE's is the formation of networks. A network search is very similar to blog rolling. Instead of providing a link to another blog, CSE networks include only one or two sites or blogs on a particualr topic. When a user searches for a particular topic he will be driven to that topic, but only to the site which has been included.

Each of the sites in the CSE network will have the search box and drive traffic towards each other. It can be compared to the ClikZ network. However, it is different in that one of the person generally owns the network.

This will surely lead to user monopoly. Each person will try to limit the search network to his own benefit. The same concept can be extended to create klog networks. To understand what a klog is visit http://kloggenerator.googlepages.com

Take a look at the network of Daniel Malewitz. It has as many as 9 volunteers with 34 sites being searched. Try the keywords such as Google in this CSE and most of the results will be from within 2 or 3 blogs. Similarly, other networks are in the making at present. If you have created such Networks do let me know.

CSE networks may well increase adsense click fraud drastically. The bigger the network, the more is the chances of missuse. The network badges for these networks may soon become popular. Each of these sites will also display CSE network badges and encourage others to join the networks.

Death of the search box?

2006-11-28T19:40:00.000-08:00

Prologue (this is hopefully a technical article and not a story)

The times are changing as they always do…People are too lazy to use the search box, be it the search box in a search engine (no search engines have a long life ahead of them) or a specific site. Thus, the need for alternatives have driven people to make lot of unique and interesting ways of linking up data. In this post I hope to review all these methods. --end of prologue

Problems with the Search box.The search box became popular due to the flexibility it offered, the user had the capacity to give a query he liked. But this seems to be a problem as well. How—

The user has to know what to type into the search box---for example if you were searching for the “pictures” of a palace (to use as a background-so any palace would do). The user could try words as diverse as “Palace pictures”, “Palace images”, “Palace photos” and the search results you would get would be as diverse as these -Palace pictures Palace images Palace photos Although all these queries mean nearly the same thing for a layman like me, they do have a subtle difference. This difference is based on context.
Auto fill(google toolbar) –this seems to be a good problem solver. If you type a particular query once you can use it again without having to remember it. But again the results are not related to context. So the problem is lack of context sensitive results. What i mean is--you get a result about computer viruses when you search for "virus". This should seem rather annoying for a biologist.Not that any biologist would search for 'virus' alone. He would give a more apporpriate query like "XYZ disease causing virus". Yes, so, what is "appropriate"? It is relative to context. Context seems to be the problem. Enough of defining the problem--lets see some results.

Google Earth

"Offers maps and satellite images for complex or pinpointed regional searches."--So the context here seems to be specific to a region. If you were trying to find a shop near you that sells "high sucrose content milk", you just go to your region in the map and find one. You can personalise your search to a particular region.

Smart Tags and Auto link

Although both these methods of providing context specific links at the browser were proclaimed evil, they seem to be the first attempt at providing Context specifc linking.Smart tags was introduced by Microsoft in Internet explorer. Auot link comes with the google toolbar. These tools will provide links to sites of their choice from the words that appear in a particular page. The main problem was that the publisher of that particular site would not in any way get any benefits, and he was inadverdently driving traffic to other sites.

Grease Monkey

The "grease monkey" is firefox extension that allows its users to choose a module which can be used to link words appearing on its site to other sites. The advantage with this tool is that the user can decide which kind of sites get linked.The main drawback is that if you need to share your list of sites, you generally have to transfer a file.

Monkey Grease

This is a server side alternative, in which the publisher of the site gets to choose which sites to link to. The program will then link words and links "appropriately". But most of these auto linking methods seem to be one sided-either the publisher has full control or the user has full control.

Klogging (using the kloggenerator)

Its simply linking each word to a list of links. Each word appearing on the website is linked to a list of websites about that topic. Both the publisher and the users of that web site can add or remove web sites from that list.

So the use of the search box is on the decline. You generally use a serch box when you find a new word in a site and it does not have a link. If all the words on all the web sites and blogs were linked to appropriate sites or lists of sites, the chances of your using a search box are very small. The klog tool also provides a method to link to multiple words together as well using NHTML. However, every time you come across something new, like a new car--how would you find it??--no you would not use the search box--You would log into your account (tagging service account) and click on the tag "Car". This brings up a list of sites about cars--in these sites, you would try to find your new car brand. Your tagged sites are more likely to provide you with content related to your context than a search box.

The future

The virtual worlds seems to hold the key to the internet of tommorow. A world linked together, we move from one virtual world house(site) to another.We talk to people through virtual characters, send e-mails through virtual post boxes, buy goods in virtual money... the possibilities seem limitless. The Death of the search box is the death of the 2 dimensional web. The idea of having to view the entire web through a browser window is loosing ground. The search engines need to provide a virtual world alternative to the search box. The most likely alternative i can think of is a "wise old man". A bot that can answer the questions of all those who want answers. How well the AI grows around us is the quesion.

buffalobird-game search CSE

2006-11-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Games,game reviews, downloads, demos, cheats..

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Google pages

What's Interesting: You get result refinements with the following headings Game Cheats, Game Reviews, Mac Games, Internet Games, Game Demos, Game Downloads

See the difference in results for the query "cheats" with google and

buffalobird-game search

Google

Try it:http://buffalobird.googlepages.com/gamer

Google CSE wisdom of the crowd or expert tagging

2006-11-27T08:51:00.000-08:00

Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) can be maintained by a one person working alone, a defined team or be open to all. If the CSE is being maintained by the 'crowd'(-defined as any person who may be or may not be technically qualified in that domain.) the wisdom of the crowd is at work. One of the best examples of such an experiment is the "PUTCH". I hope to interview the person who started it one day.

The google CSE is different from general 'crowd' wisdom in that experts can provide highly selected content to the users of their CSE's. I came across few CSE's on very specific subjects. These can be very helpful as most of these sites are popular only within a small community of users. Now coming to the idea of teams of experts, this is a still more effective stratergy in that the experience of all those experts is made use of.

Most of the CSE's are encouraging others to suggest sites that need to be included in a CSE, rather than asking them to volunteer. The concept of volunteers is in some controversy mainly due to the following reasons

Sharing of Adsense income if any
Resolution of conflicts regarding the inclusion/exclusion of sites
If one volunteer is removed all the changes made by the volunteers is removed

However, the overall effect of CSE's seems to be one of user specific search. Very much like tagging--i say like and not the same. In tagging, each user tags different sites with tags of his choice, without bothering to see what others have tagged it with. In a google CSE on the other hand, the users of a single CSE, can see for themselves, what tags other users use and have a chance to improve or modify those tags.

As the CSE gains popularity, more of these interesting features of social bookmarking based search will come to light.

Find Metal- search engine

2006-11-25T18:55:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Heavy metal news, interviews, bands, videos, and metal history

Search range:All sites indexed by google (with preference to list of sites)

Contribution:You can suggest which sites need to be included by mailing webmaster@find-metal.com

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: You get result refinements with the following headings History of Metal,
News, Blogs, Video, Lyrics, Christian Metal, Speed Metal.

See the difference in results for the query "bands" with google and Find-metal

Find-Metal

Google

Try it:http://find-metal.com/

Google CSE- increase annotation limit- comment campaign

2006-11-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

Google did a very good job by introducing the CSE's. But why did they have to put a limit to the number of annotations. May be there are many reasons. But it seems that most of us have reached the 5000 limit. Many methods have been used to overcome this limit, such as listing out sites on a particular page, or different pages of a domain and annotating that url. But these cannot be annotated.Thus,

I am here by requesting "Google Customized search" to increase the number of annotations one can add to a CSE. If you also want them to increase the limit, Support my requestby commenting below. Thank you...

Google Boat Building and Cruising Search Engine

2006-11-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topic:Boat Building and Cruising

Search range:All sites indexed by google (with preference to list of sites)

Contribution:You can suggest which sites need to be included

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:The CSE has options to show different number of results (one result at a time or more), it shows all the results in the side-bar. So no need to leave the main page to see the search results. As you can see in the picture the search results are listed one below the other in the side bar. No need to refresh the page as results can be cleared using the clear results button.

Try it: http://www.craftacraft.com/GoogleCustomSearch

Klog and NHTML beta

2006-11-17T04:13:00.000-08:00

It looks like Klog generator development will keep me busy for some time. Moreover NHTML seems to be better in its working when combined with CSS, in the mean time i was planning to feature a few customized search engines on this blog, be my guest if you have a good search engine.

The kloggenerator is still available at http://kloggenerator.googlepages.com/, if you feel it needs more features or better explanation or lesser features and morre explanation let me know, i get the feeling that documentation for the klog generator is somewhat patchy.

Klog your site-Connect it to your CSE

2006-11-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

The method to klog your site can be found at

http://kloggenerator.googlepages.com/

Just enter the first page of the results of your search engine for any query into the GOOGLE CSE klog tool and generate the KLog code for any text you input into the kloggenerator. It does not do any magic, it simply links your words to your Google CSE. If you want to allow user participation, allow the users of your site to add or remove sites from your google CSE. So the klog method has the flexibility to allow both the publisher as well as the user to control the linking.

It would be highly impossible to have grease monkey scripts for each and every site on the internet. However, each publisher can klog his site and allow for user modification of links only or the entire website. It does seem to be very much CHMOD777 or web 2.0. The klog is different from multiple tags in that numerous links or NHTML is adopted.You can lok at

http://kloggenerator.googlepages.com/nhmtl

to understand the working of NHTML.

Klogging compared

Criteria Klogging Auto link Smart tag Muliple tagging Grease Monkey

Manufacturer You Google Microsoft You You

Browser support Not needed Requires toolbar Only IE Not needed Only firefox

at present

Who can modify Both the user Mostly Google Mostly Microsoft Publisher only User only

where to link to and the publisher

Disabling Possible Possible Possible Not possible Possible

(Requires browser support)

Downloading Not required Tool bar needs only for IE Not required Required

to be downloaded

I do doubt if i am allowed to do such a comparison, as i am invlolved in the development of klogging. However, feel free to contradict any of these claims. Also it would be acceptable if further changes are needed to the concept of klogging, as it is still in BEta.

subscribed links-similar to RSS feed

2006-11-15T04:35:00.000-08:00

With google customized searche engines you can have subscribed links. It is somewhat similar to getting RSS feeds from a site, only results from your search engine are the feed into google. You can ask people with similar intrests to subscribe to your search engine. When their search queries match those for your search engine, they will be taken to your results. This is very similar to Networks in Delicious.

You can create a subscribed link by going here.

http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/

So the more number of subscribers you have, the better. People can also subscribe to individual sites, however, the idea of subscribing to a CSE is more appealing as you can restrict your search field.Moreover, as their seems to be a limit on the number of subscribed links, it would be more beneficial to have a CSE, which in turn has a list of those needed sites.

Irrelevant content and lower ranking

2006-11-14T02:10:00.000-08:00

As many new Google customised search engines are being created. These are getting included in my search engine at http://cse.search.googlepages.com/

However, many of these sites have a tendency to include irrelevant content on the same page as the search engine box. Not that it is wrong..It leads to the COOP search providing lower ranking to the sites with time. As more and more people will get these sites in their search results and find it irrelevant.Ok I will take an example to explain what i mean by irrelevant content.Consider the search engine at http://www.indigoguide.com/spain/ski-resorts.htm

It is a page about ski resorts. However, to the right corner they have put a custom search engine. When somebody searching for a search engine to find a "restaurant" or "entrratainment" enters the query this page will come in the results as it contains those words. However, since that person is not going to find it useful in most of the cases he will not use the page and go to the next result. This way that page gets a lower ranking. So if you include words or sentences irrelevant to what your search engine finds, it will lead to an overall decrease in your ranking in the long run. And since COOP search is a human parsed search engine, A lower starting score is given to those pages which contain irrelevant words and sentences.

Coop search engines directory

2006-11-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

The google team has created a search engine directory at

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/examples/GooglePicks

It lists different types such as cool tricks, bloggers, educators,enthusiasts, Government, Industry experts, Locals, Media publishers, researchers and techies. Each list is not exclusive. Therer are many search engines that are not included in that list as such. Something like your google gadgets content directory.

My mysore search engine has made it to the Locals list in that directory. Take a look and see how well you can search mysore related sites. I have not included any mysore tourist spam sites in my search. That gives way better results than google results which is filled with tourist sites.You can take a look at it in

http://mysorechronicles.blogspot.com

Enough of blowing my own trumpet. Let us see what other goodies that this directory contains as we move along.

Annotations-grade sites in your search engine

2006-11-11T18:11:00.000-08:00

You can grade your sites by using annotations. To do so download the XML or TSV file from the "advanced" tab of your site. If you have not loaded a list yet, no file will be present. Just type in the following manner a list of your sites with their scores.

The labelname "your search engine code" is specific to different search engines.You can know what yours is from the advanced tab of that specific search engine.Once you have typed it as shown above, save the file as .xml and upload it.And you are ready to go.

Make a google module for your search engine

2006-11-11T04:31:00.000-08:00

After having suffeciently tested your search engine, you can go ahead and make your google module. You can either create a "Custom Search Gadget" using the facility offered by google or make your own by pasting your CSE's code into the content section. To add the one created for you by google you can visit your search engine homepage and click on the add to google page. You can then use your search engine from your google homepage itself.

CSE list-find what others have done

2006-11-10T04:49:00.000-08:00

Before you start out and build your own CSE- customized search engine it would be wise if you saw what others have done. To get a list of CSE's regarding any topic you can use the search engine in this page. Just type the name of the topic and hit the return button. You will be presented with a list of search engines dealing with that topic. However, don,t be disheartened if many such options are present. You can always do something that is different.

Take a look at the search results given by these search engines. If you feel you can do a better job, go ahead and do it. Most of the search engines that are seriously into the CSE work would have got themselves tagged in this search engine. However, it contains more than the 90 odd sites that have been tagged as of now. It uses a special consturct to search the entire list of Google CSE's

Once you have decided what topic you want to base your search engine, collect a list of sites that provide quality information about that topic. Preferably visit each of those sites to determine the type of content.Make a list of these site with a score of 0.5 or 0.75 or 1.0 for the different sites depending on thier content. You can then convert it into XML format or other formats supported by google such as TSV.

You can also make a list of sites you want to exclude from your search results if you are allowing the search enines to search the entire web. If you can exclude some of the big sites which occupy most of the search results you could get some really fascinating results.More about what else you can do in the next post.

Browser requirements-Customized search engine

2006-11-07T01:22:00.000-08:00

If you are having problems accessing your customized search engine control panel or adding or removing sites. you better upgrade your browser. If you are using internet explorer the IE7 or above is preferable. If you are using firefox use a version after 1.5. The opera browser is also fine if you use a version above 9.02. The page may just load and show erroe if you use a browser that is lower than these.

If you want to use the advanced features of the control panel, it would be best to upload the files with the annotations in XML or other permitted formats. It provides you the chance to provide a preliminary score to your site. This feature is yet to be implemented for the users of the interface.

You can download the latest version of firefox for free. It is supposed to provide better security then IE. However, it would be best suited for linux environment. If you are a windows user you can use it just like your IE, but it may be a little slowere than IE in windows XP home edition.

creating a customized search engine part II

2006-11-06T01:13:00.000-08:00

Fill out the form as described in the last post. After pressing the next button you will be taken to the screen shown here. You can try out a few search queries in your own search engine.After pressing the Finsish button you are done, Your customized search engine is ready to run. You will be taken to the control panel of the search engine, where you can do all the tweaking to make your search engine look and work like how you want it to.As such you can add as many as 200 annotations per file and a maximum of 5000 annotations per gmail account. Let us see what other things we can do with this search engine in the next post,

How to make a customised search engine?

2006-11-05T00:50:00.000-08:00

Go to the following site and you need to login with your gmail account to get access

http://google.com/coop/manage/cse/create/

Once you have logged in you will have to go through two steps to create your own search engine.

In the first step you will be asked to give information about

Search engine name-Two or more search engines can have the same name, so dont worry, you need not have to check for availabilit etc,But make sure you select a name that explains what your search engine is going to search for. And since this appears on your google homepage(yes, google provides each of the search engine a specific homepage ), make sure it is a descriptive name, as search engines will give a better relation to your word and its meaning.

Search engine description-This is to describe what your search engine is about and the same applies to this as for the name. But don,t include unrelated words, as it will lead to ranking in for those unrelated words.Although if you want to attract unwanted traffic, go ahead, but i would not reccomend you to do that.

Search engine keywords-This seems to be the most important part of the entire form, select two or a maximum of three keywords. keep the range of your search engine in mind while selecting the keywords. Since the search engine will be searching for these keywords choose them wisely. You dont have to worry about choosing them wrong the first time, as they can be changed latter on.

The option to include only sites you mention, or giving prominence to these sites is also provided. Choose the option of searching for only included sites if you want to narrow down your search drastically, however, if you plan to make it more broad, choose search the entire web. But choosing to search the entire web will take a little time to be of much use.

To start a COOP(Customized search engine) you need to include atleast one site while starting the venture. So find the best site to include first on your engine, as the first few sites that are included will appear on your google homepage.

You can choose to collaborate with as many as 100 volunteers. It would be wise to collaborate if you are covering a wide topic. However, be careful as to whom you collaborate, as they too get to change the sites to include and exclude.

More about the next step in the next post..

Harness the power of Google search

2006-11-05T00:41:00.000-08:00

"Create a highly specialized Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Place it on your website and, using our AdSense for Search program, make money from the resulting traffic."

Google describes its Customised search engine thus. Let us see what each of those lines mean in a little detail

--Make topic specific search engines

--human parsed search engine in contrast to google's search engine which is mainly robot generated

--possibly a result of competition from delicious

--allow members to make money from that-generates more interest

--a high degree of customization to help people who keep searching for very obscure topics--like searching needle in a hay stack..

Searching search engines

2006-11-03T03:19:00.000-08:00

With the release of google's customised search engine, the race to build custom search engines has heated up. But it would be such a waste if all these COOP's could not be used. So COOP search is a way to find the most used COOP's and using them. Since I have been AJAXED, it would be easy to use these search tools with ease.