September 24, 2003
Search by location with Google
Gary Price and Sheila both point us to a new Google capability: Search by location. Says Sheila: "You're looking for nearby sashimi in a strange city, or you can't remember the name of the pizza joint a few blocks away. Here, you can restrict your search to a geographic area (a city or a zip code), and Google will deliver a map with your results marked on it."
Gary points out, "Google that gets all of the press for being so innovative. Unfortunately many people have forgotten that other tools are still vital, useful, and also doing innovative things."
kpaul said:
People laugh at me when I say it, but I think Google is gearing up to be serious competition for newspapers in the online space...
September 22, 2003
Dealtime Relaunches as Shopping.com
Chris Sherman in Searchenginewatch.com: Dealtime Relaunches as Shopping.com. I also hadn't heard that Dealtime acquired the consumer product review site Epinions in May 2003.
September 03, 2003
Keyword searches in Wayback Machine
Brewster Kahle announces an add-on to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: "Anna Patterson built a search engine for the Wayback Machine [by indexing] a portion of the full archive, 11 billion pages."
What that means is that you can now search by keyword. It's available now here, and Patterson explains some of the intricacies of the interface in a PowerPoint slide show.
August 26, 2003
Google, the search engine that could
USA Today takes a look at Google, which celebrates its fifth anniversary Sept. 7. The search engine is expanding to embrace news and blogs, and is expected to produce up to $800 million in revenue this year. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
August 25, 2003
Google's ads can be too relevant
Today's San Jose Merc carries a business article about the major Internet companies battling for online search dollars, and last week's search engines conference in San Jose. Fun little factoid:
One of Google's new services offers ads that match the content of articles appearing on news Web sites. Recently, the New York Post ran an article about a murder in which the victim's body parts were packed in a suitcase. Google put a suitcase ad beside the online version of the Post article. ...
August 21, 2003
More search engine tricks
From the Circuits section of today's NY Times:
Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait. As the Web gets larger and more complicated, it can help to know a few not-so-obvious tricks to mine even richer results from search engines. (My friends Gary Price and Danny Sullivan get singled out.)
Tools to Dress Up The Web Browser: toolbars, bookmarklets and more.
A good reminder that there is life beyond Google.
July 24, 2003
Google Images question
For the heck of it, I plunked in a couple of search terms in Google images.
I didn't find what I expected.
And I found what I didn't expect.
The first was RIAA president Cary Sherman. I've seen some really second-rate photos of Cary, who's really a dashing fellow, in the media. So I figured some media outlet might be interested in purchasing this photo (the original is larger).
Anyone know why this photo wouldn't turn up on a search of "Cary Sherman" in Google Images? I don't know how Google does its algorithm, but the other images on this page don't all contain the word Cary.
Google says this about its image indexing, but I don't know if I quite believe it:
You can search more than 425 million images on the Web with Google's Image Search. However, there are many more images on the Internet that Google has not yet added to its index. Google is working to crawl more images to increase the quality and quantity of images returned when you search, so it's likely we will add the image you're looking for in the near future.
Images that I had on my WELL site are still up there, even though I pulled the plug on my WELL site in March. And none of the hundreds of images on jdlasica.com seem to be up there, even though they went up at the same time. Also, none of the dozens of photos on my weblog seem to be up there, though I don't know if Google indexes blog photos.
Meantime, Alta Vista Images seems to do a much better job, turning up shots of mine like this, while Lycos Multimedia does a poor job.
Next I plunked in the term "Chacala," because a national magazine just emailed me asking for photos of this coastal Mexican village. My own images of Chacala didn't turn up -- but some folks I know who run the non-profit Mar de Jade resort and Spanish language immersion school there borrowed my photos. (I would have said yes if they asked.) Five of the six photos on this page are mine.
Joe said:
you may have already done this but Google has a page where you can submit your top-level URL for eventual crawling... I'm not sure if this would include image crawling but it probably adds the URL to all their bots' to-crawl lists.
July 22, 2003
Digging for Googleholes
I had missed this Steven Johnson piece in Slate last week: Digging for Googleholes. Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
Google feature outclasses news sites' own search
Google has added another drawing card to its popular Web site by introducing a tool designed to make it easier to find specific news stories.The new feature, available by clicking on an advanced search link in Google's news section, enables users to limit news searches to particular publications and dates. The tool also narrows searches to stories containing an exact phrase.
Mountain View-based Google's online newsstand covers 4,500 English language sources, up from about 4,000 sources 10 months ago.
Now here's the cool thing: Even though many news sites close off their content behind a pay firewall after 7 or 14 days, at least some of that content can be accessed through Google's advanced search function. For example, you can retrieve free news going back one month or so on the New York Times by using Google's search rather than the Times' own search.
Now, maybe Google will enhance its clunky alert service so that search results will be relevant, timely, and site-specific. Tonight, I got a Google alert notice for my search term "copyright." The result?:
Copyright Notice Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company.
July 19, 2003
News from the future
OK, this is weird. By typing certain search terms into the NY Times' search engine -- in this case, Britain Tried First -- the first seven results come back dated from the years 2083, 2084, 2088 and 2089.
July 15, 2003
July 13, 2003
New on the ResourceShelf
I've been remiss in not pointing enough to Gary Price's invaluable ResourceShelf. New on ResourceShelf this week.
• Part 2 of an interview with Daypop's founder. Scroll down to July 9. (Here's part 1.)
• Link to video interview with the CEO of FAST Search
• A homemade transcript of a conference interview of a Walt Mossberg intervew with the founders of Google.
• Search engine personalization: An exploratory study.
Also, recently:
• Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work. Excerpt:
Here are the major findings of this study:1. Most participants had little understanding of how search engines retrieve information from the Web or how they rank or prioritize links on a results page.
2. The majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results as they had blind trust in search engines to present only the best or most accurate unbiased results on the first page. As a result, two-in-five links (or 41%) selected by our participants during the assigned search sessions were paid results.
3. Once enlightened about pay-for-placement, each participant expressed surprise about this search engine marketing practice. Some had negative, emotional reactions. ...
July 10, 2003
July 09, 2003
Court win for search engine
From SATN via Slashdot:
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion about fair use Monday. The issue was whether a search engine that indexed images from the web and presented them as thumbnails was fair use under copyright law. They decided that it was fair use and allowed under law.
The court's opinion (a PDF) is here. Excerpt:
This case involves the application of copyright law to the vast world of the internet and internet search engines. The plaintiff, Leslie Kelly, is a professional photographer who has copyrighted many of his images of the American West. Some of these images are located on Kellyís web site or other web sites with which Kelly has a license agreement. The defendant, Arriba Soft Corp. [now Ditto.com] operates an internet search engine that displays its results in the form of small pictures rather than the more usual form of text. Arriba obtained its database of pictures by copying images from other web sites. By clicking on one of these small pictures, called ěthumbnails,î the user can then view a large version of that same picture within the context of the Arriba web page.When Kelly discovered that his photographs were part of
Arribaís search engine database, he brought a claim against
Arriba for copyright infringement. The district court found
that Kelly had established a prima facie case of copyright
infringement based on Arribaís unauthorized reproduction
and display of Kellyís works, but that this reproduction and
display constituted a non-infringing ěfair useî under Section
107 of the Copyright Act. Kelly appeals that decision, and we
affirm in part and reverse in part. The creation and use of the
thumbnails in the search engine is a fair use. However, the
district court should not have decided whether the display of
the larger image is a violation of Kellyís exclusive right to
publicly display his works. Thus, we remand for further proceedings
consistent with this opinion.
CNET had a story on this earlier this week.
Speaking of SATN, blogger and Internet pioneer David Reed -- former chief scientist at Lotus Development Corp., a member of the original committees that created the TCP/IP protocol, and an adjunct professor at MIT's Media Lab -- was just hired by H-P.
July 01, 2003
June 27, 2003
Google puts new gadget in its browser toolbar
Online search engine Google introduced several new gadgets in its popular toolbar for Web browsers Thursday, hoping to build even greater brand loyalty amid heightened competition.The new software for the Google toolbar includes a feature that automatically blocks pop-up ads, as well a program that automatically fills out Internet forms seeking a customer's name and address.
The function that fills in forms offers an option to store credit card numbers too, but the information is encrypted on the hard drive of a user's computer instead of Google's computers, for security and privacy reasons.
The toolbar also enables users to transfer online content to Internet journals known as Weblogs, or ``blogs,'' with a press of a button. ...
You wonder whether the announcement from the Google PR folks was premature. I don't see any mention of new toolbar features on the Google site. Just re-downloaded the Google toolbar and it has the same features as a month ago. No sighting of a blog transfer tool anywhere. Has anyone spotted this?
Andy Rhinehart said:
Here is the link to the new toolbar - http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php
JD said:
Thanks, Andy. Downloaded it. Looks like the "blog this" button works only if you use Blogger, not other blog programs like MovableType. Ah, well.
Bill Thompson said:
Duh! what do you expect - this about Google's market share [they own Blogger] not about making the world a better place. Blogger and Moveable Type are rivals and in the free market that means using whatever means they can to get customers and lock them in. OK, so few people will bother to move from MT just because they can't blog from the toolbar, but how many people will now *choose* Blogger because they can.
We shouldn't be surprised.
June 24, 2003
Google: You don't know me
Sheila's getting married Sunday, but she's still bloggin' away. Her latest:
At a page called Google Weblog [created by blogger Aaron Swartz]: "Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to your page? Just enter its URL:So I did. The results: poliglut.org and three conservative sites. Oops.
But maybe it was an anomaly. So I put in J.D. Lasica's site. (He's a senior editor of Online Journalism Review.) His top hit is Sharpton for President. Oops again.
Oops is right.
June 08, 2003
Getting more from Google
Simson Garfinkel (whom I met at last fall's Poptech) in MIT's Technology Review: Getting More From Google. Searching the Web can be a frustrating exercise. Here are some tips and tricks to help you find exactly what you want from the leading search engine.
May 16, 2003
Search results clogged by blogs
Wired News: While many commercial websites struggle to be noticed, some bloggers are unintentionally attracting lots of hits. Their daily utterances, even on topics they know nothing about, are generating high traffic from search engine queries.
May 14, 2003
Daypop in Google's shadow
Mark Glaser in OJR: Can Daypop Stay Out of Google's Headlights? Wherein Mark interviews the founder of Daypop:
... Daypop lives on in the shadow of the giant. [Google] Most people who use Daypop probably have no idea that it was started and maintained by one man, programmer and game designer Dan Chan. Chan wanted to follow the soap opera of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections while living in Hong Kong, but couldn't find a variety of news sources by searching online. So after moving back to Los Angeles, he took six months to do the coding work for Daypop, launching it in August 2001 as a way to search Weblogs and news. A mention of Daypop in the Wall Street Journal brought his traffic to its current level of about 50,000 page views per day.
May 13, 2003
Thinking global, Google News goes local
Looking to serve more of a global audience, Google said it is adding more regional categories to its news service.The Mountain View, Calif. based search engine company unveiled five new country-specific global news service sites that are based on its main Google News offering.
"Today we have Google Canada, U.K., New Zealand, Australia, and India," said Krishna Bharat, principal scientist with Google. "It is all part of our plan to be an unbiased global news provider that also serves local tastes."
May 05, 2003
Net radio, Google and more
New in the San Jose Mercury News:
• Dan Gillmor: Chairman leads surprisingly vigilant FTC.
• Mike Langberg: Net Radio Poses Threat to Local Broadcasters. Mike's take on commercial-free Internet radio.
• Two-part series on Google. Today, Google: An engine of change. By the way, just how lame is the Mercury News' website? There is no link to part 1 of the two-part series. No mention of part 1 in the Business section. And a search for Google on the site's search engine turns up this result:
No results were found for the query "Google". Please try another search.
Later: Tripped across a link to part 1, Inside Google, on another site.
May 02, 2003
How to become a Google star
SearchEngineWatch has a column offering 10 tips on how to get found in Google.
jose said:
more concrete steps are in "google hacks," which seems to be the source for most of these ideas.
April 21, 2003
Tips and tricks for Google geeks
International Herald Tribune: Tips and tricks for Google geeks. Excerpt:
Did you know, for example, that you can use Google as a U.S. telephone directory?To start, all you need to know is the person's last name and state. Type "phonebook:" followed by the last name and two-letter state abbreviation in the Google search field. (The search returns a maximum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly common, you'll have to help it out by providing a city or a first name.)
If you type rphonebook:, you will get only residential listings. If you type bphonebook:, you'll get only business listings. (Don't leave out the colon after ěphonebook.î) You can even use this feature as a reverse directory. Type phonebook: (area code) (number), and Google will (usually) give you the name of the person who has that number.
I recently learned this trick from a new book, "Google Hacks," by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, which is published by O'Reilly ...
Did you know that there are special syntaxes you can use to narrow your Google search? If you're researching an academic subject, type site:edu into the search window, and you'll restrict your hits to .edu sites - colleges and universities. It is also possible to search Google for a particular file type, such as a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe Acrobat file.
Google also has a built-in dictionary. After you've done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an underlined word, and Google will give you its definition. Another click activates a thesaurus.
Another useful enhancement to Google, which Calishain said came too late to be included in the book, is Google Alert. You enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.
Calishain, the co-author of the book, has more free samples at her Web site, www.researchbuzz.com, an informative site dedicated to search engines and databases on the Web. You can find the Google tools that she has devised at www.buzztoolbox.com/google. Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days.
Another person who has invented tools for Google and put them online is Kevin Shay. One of his programs lets you search Google for terms that are within one, two or three words of each other.
Other search engine articles today:
PC magazine: Fooling Google.
Wired News: A revamped search at Ask Jeeves.
Chris Sherman in SearchEngineWatch: Ask Jeeves Serves Up New Features.
April 16, 2003
The trouble with Google's SafeSearch
Danny Sullivan in SearchEngineWatch.com: Google's SafeSearch porn filter was found to exclude non-porn sites such as the American Library Association, in a recent test conducted by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
April 10, 2003
Google's faulty porn filters
More on the Google front ...
Declan in News.com:
Children using Google's SafeSearch feature, designed to filter out links to Web sites with adult content, may be shielded from far more than their parents ever intended.A report released this week by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society says that SafeSearch excludes many innocuous Web pages from search-result listings, including ones created by the White House, IBM, the American Library Association and clothing company Liz Claiborne.
It's surprising how little has changed since I wrote this column on the same phenomenon in 1997.
Google: Is all the news fit to post?
Perhaps in response to widespread criticism in the blogosphere, Google says it's working to distinguish press releases from real news on the Google News site:
... [A] representative for the popular search engine said that Google would in the future differentiate corporate and government statements from news articles. "It is not our intention to list press releases without clearly marking them as a press release," the representative said. "I will notify the team about the issue...and we will work to fix the problem."
April 07, 2003
Why is Google shooting itself in the foot?
In re Saturday's item about Google accepting press releases on its Google News page, readers at the Register UK sound off.
April 05, 2003
Google News dilutes its value
On the online-news list, Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin just pointed to this Register UK story about Google News incorporating press releases into its Google News page.
I know it's old-fashioned of me, but I've got to take issue with Google's decision to pollute its news pages with press releases.
I applaud Google's idea of opening up the news process to those outside the traditional news establishment. The frequency of appearance of obscure foreign news publications, for example, is a great element of Google News. But why add PR releases to the news mix and not, say, news weblogs?
Yes, on rare occasions there's a nugget of real news contained in a press release -- but if you print it verbatim, with no background or context, you're pretty much involved in marketing or PR, not news.
The late PointCast News Network used to mix news and PR releases as well, as in this headline to a press release that ticked across its screen:
CLINTON SHOWS SHOCKING DISREGARD FOR THE VALUES OF THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS, AGAIN REWARDS PRO-ABORTION ALLIES.
Does any journalist really doubt that a press release from Philip Morris, Monsanto or Exxon-Mobil (to cite three of the releases already on Google News' site) will consist of anything except slanted propaganda and distortions or omissions of the truth?
Certainly, there's value to be had in legitimate business announcements, and Google should indeed run them on an appropriate page -- but not mixed in with news, even if it's labeled as such. Why? 99.99% of Google's readers have never received a business press release, so they don't know how to judge them. As in: skeptically. Printing them alongside blurbs and pointers to articles in the New York Times or CNN unduly enhances their believability.
The good folks at Google have boasted in the past that they don't have a single journalist among its 500-some employees. This development proves it. I'm afraid Google News is diluting its value with this new move more than they realize.
Andrew T. Mackay said:
Hi Jim,
I was interested in your comments with regard to our news service. Ordinairily we write our news stories from scratch. There are however occasions when posting a press release on our site is useful for our members and users to read directly. We are a news source for many news portals and as you know our news is also taken by google and sometimes we have a headline story. I agree that it is annoying when it is a press release and not an original version of a story. I hope that this scenario will not stop you using our site as I beleive in the main our stories are quite different and very much cross-genre. Our news on google does generate many hits and as an independant site it is crucial to us to get the word out and get more users.
All the best
Andrew T. Mackay
J. Taylee said:
I took a look at soundgenerator.com and thought their news pieces to be of excellent quality! so there!
Valentino said:
Yeah I agree the site rocks!
March 25, 2003
Google rejects, accepts anti-war ad
Google refused to accept an anti-war ad from Unknown News because it violated their policy -- but then changed their minds.
March 19, 2003
Google's strong growth curve
Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows. Story by Keith H. Hammonds, photographs by Timothy Archibald. Except there are no photos on the Web site. That's what happens when you slash your online staff to nothing.
March 05, 2003
Googlefight
Have you tried Googlefight? I hold my own against fellow bloggers like Joi and Matt, but Doc blows me out of the water.
March 04, 2003
Google to Unveil New Ad Program
WSJ.com via Yahoo!: Google will sell and deliver ads on other publishers' Web sites. The move transforms them into a media company, says one analyst. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
February 27, 2003
Google's free newsletter
The Google Friends mailing list offers a free email newsletter that goes out every two months or so. Thanks to Sree for the pointer.
February 19, 2003
Google + Blogger = Bloogle?
Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch , puzzles out some theories about Saturday's surprise announcement that Google is buying Pyra and its Blogger software. Theorizes Chris:
First, Pyra has over 1 million registered users, with about a quarter of those actively publishing weblogs. For the most part, these blogs are ad-free, offering an appealing distribution channel for Google's AdWords text based ads.Second, Google could use the links created by webloggers to enhance its news service. Even though Google's news crawlers are constantly updating Google News' 4,000 sources of information, alternative internet sources are gaining a reputation for breaking important news stories more quickly than traditional media sources.
For example, the New York Times reported that the first hint of problems that doomed the space shuttle Columbia appeared on an online discussion eleven minutes before the Associated Press issued its first wire-service alert.
Intriguingly, news of Google's Pyra acquisition was broken by San Jose Mercury News tech journalist Dan Gillmor on his weblog, moments before Pyra CEO Evan Williams "announced" the news to the audience at the "Live from the Blogosphere" event via a projected screen from the presentation laptop -- by clicking a link to Gillmor's weblog!
Charles has more on the move here.
February 10, 2003
Cool search tricks
With the help of Gary D. Price, MLIS, of The Resource Shelf, and a handful of articles, I put together a list of Cool Search Engine Tips:
• To cut down on results and search only on the page title, type: intitle:"Online journalism"
• Find out who's linking to your web site or blog, use Google like so: link:jdlasica.com/blog or AlltheWeb like this: link.all:jdlasica.com/blog. (AlltheWeb seems a better choice here.)
• Limit your search to a specific site or server:
- site:berkeley.edu "jd lasica". (No space between the colon and the next word.) This limits your search to only Cal sites.
To search for Microsoft on the NY Times' site, type: site:nytimes.com Microsoft
To search your name or a subject limiting the search to only .edu sites, type in this syntax: "jd lasica" site:edu
• To limit your search to a specific file type:
Use filetype: to limit searches to .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls files. For example, here's how to look for mentions of the phrase "lawrence lessig" in powerpoint slides: "lawrence lessig" filetype:ppt
Or combine: "california" filetype:xls site:gov intitle:state to get spreadsheets from .gov sites that contain the word California and have the word "state" in the title.
To search servers only in Canada: "jd lasica" site:ca
Caveats: It's important to remember that is good as Google is, it very likely doesn't have everything. That's why it's always a good idea to use more than one engine. Also, site: does not work with Google News.
AltaVista allows truncation searches. Type fudg* brownie recipe and the wild card will retrieve fudge brownies, fudgy brownies and fudge-nut brownie cake.
The wild card will also allow wild card word substitutions, so Nestle * cookies turns up lots of results in AltaVista or Google.
AltaVista also allows proximity searching. Type substitution NEAR chocolate to find the word substitution near chocolate.
Type a url into AlltheWeb and youíll get a list of all web pages and sites that link to it. For example, http://jdlasica.com/blog.
Other Google tricks:
• Googlism will find out what Google.com thinks of you or your friends. For instance: Doc Searls.
• Use Google as a U.S. telephone directory. All you need to know is the person's last name and state. Type phonebook: followed by the last name and two-letter state abbreviation in the Google search field. No space between colon and next word. For instance, phonebook:bread & chocolate va. (The search returns a maximum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly common, you'll have to help it out by providing a city or a first name.)
If you type rphonebook:, you will get only residential listings. If you type bphonebook:, you'll get only business listings. (Don't leave out the colon in ěphonebook:î.)
• Reverse directory: You can use the phone book as a reverse directory. Type phonebook:(area code) number, and Google will (usually) give you the name of the person or business who has that number.
• Dictionary. After you've done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an underlined word, and Google will give you its definition. Another click activates a thesaurus.
• Google Alert: Enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.
• Google lists more search tricks here.
• You can find more Google tool tricks at Buzztoolbox. [One tool lets you search business names by state, with the city optional.] Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days. (Unfortunately, indexing and freshness are only tangentially related, so ěfreshî does not mean new.)
Another person who has invented tools for Google and put them online is Kevin Shay. One of his programs lets you search Google for terms that are within one, two or three words of each other.
Parts of this were first published on my Manila blog on Oct. 31, 2002.
