A couple months back when reviewing AskCity I mentioned liking the drawing feature that let you markup any map. Ask has taken it one step further and now using the drawing tools you can literally shape your search.
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The dichotomy of having a Yahoo directory listing has been known for years. You want a directory listing for the authority link and the improved Yahoo ranking, but your home page link will then show in search results with your directory listing title and not the page title you spent so much time crafting. Your site gets more visibility, but potentially suffers from lower click through. Even if you don’t have a listing in their directory Yahoo may now be grabbing page titles from another source that could potentially be damaging to your brand.
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Yahoo news is reporting that Yahoo has developed oneSearch, a new mobile search service that gives phone users instant answers.
oneSearch redesigns search to offer potential answers as immediate search results instead of how computer-based Web search returns lists of search results.
Has anyone noticed that the 4th search engine Ask seems to be doing some nice things and usually gets it right with new additions?
Add Ask to the list of search engines letting you search on a map. Earlier today they launched AskCity, their new local search and map, which while similar to the map search of the big three engines, adds a few nice features and touches. Even though I’m not the most frequent users of any of them I thought I’d take AskCity for a spin and see how it compares.
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A few months ago I wrote about the ways in which Google could measure traffic patterns and how they might be using those patterns in their search results. Many in the seo world would agree that Google, as well as the other engines, are using the information they collect to help determine what pages to display to a given search query. Recently I came across a few quotes from Google and MSN employees that would indicate our traffic patterns do indeed affect search results.
The Live Search WebLog announced a new search operator sure to please webmasters. LinkFromDomain, which shows where a site links to, is meant to be a complement to the already existing LinkDomain command, which shows all the links coming into a given domain.
The new Yahoo Search Builder is an easy way to add search to your site. I took it for a quick test drive today and liked what I saw. It’s very simple to set up and Yahoo gives you some decent customization options. There are a also a couple of nice features to give you a lot of control over what gets searched. And if you’re into web standards you might like that the code to add the search box is all css.
And just like that one of the supposedly anonymous AOL searchers has been identified. As reported in the New York Times this morning searcher number 4417749 has been identified as Thelma Arnold of Lilburn, Georgia. Her identity was found simply by following the trail of searches assigned to the ID. That didn’t take long.
We’d all like to believe that anything we do in the privacy of our own homes is truly private. Sadly this isn’t true. With data being collected by every search engine, data about the queries we type, the sites we visit, even our email how can we possibly believe that any part of our lives is private anymore. Maybe it’s something we all simply accept as part of life in an online world, but the recent AOL screw up should make us all think once again about simply accepting things.
I’m heading out of town to visit family early tomorrow morning so today’s post will be on the shorter side as I still have quite a few things to do to get ready. I will be keeping up with my regular posting schedule while on the road. If I can’t find the time for a longer post I’ll try to offer a few more quicker posts. Today I’ll point you to an article I came across a day or two ago about how both Google and Microsoft are doing a lot to help save planetary resources.
