Search

Turns out that Yahoo! search can’t find the Pirate Bay. Between moves like this and forcing page inclusion instead of crawling, I as a user, have moved on from Yahoo!. The other day I needed to go back to Yahoo! search to use their backlink checker, and instinctively did this… (see image) More

The Vast.com (developer) Preview is finally available! If you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to, here it is, in a nutshell – we are building a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. More

“Say, that’s a nice ad business you got there. It’d be a real shame if something were to happen to it…” Ok, so . But, when Microsoft decides that it doesn’t want Google’s revenue stream as much as it wants Google gone, why wouldn’t it do this? And what’s wrong with helping consumers filter out unwanted content on the Internet?  – I’ve created a monster. More

Barry Diller wants Ask.com to grow market share. I’m sure there’s lots to be done on improving distribution deals, the crawler, back-end algorithms, etc., but how about starting with some simple, obvious UI fixes? Here are the results of a search for “Search Engine” on the 4 majors: At 1024×768, the UI differences are glaring. More

Time Bray has it right. In the future, every site can carry search. All Microsoft has to do is to give the revenues from any potential search to the site carrying it. Two big assumptions: MSN Search has to be as good as Google search (not there yet, but possible) Microsoft is willing to forego the Google ad revenue stream in exchange for severely crippling Google. More