After posting about Filangy before, their CEO Chirag Chaman was kind enough to pass me on an invitation to try it out, and to provide me with a lot of detailed information for this review.

The service is currently in closed beta and they are asking for feedback from testers, so I've outlined an introduction and my main impressions below.

There are four main components of Filangy:

• The toolbar which enables the service
• WebCache - your personal storage space
• WebMarks - like the name suggests, bookmarks you save to the web, these are given more weight with Filangy's "personal score" ranking system
• The Filangy search engine

Filangy toolbar
The toolbar is for IE on Windows 2000, NT or XP and all
platforms that can install Firefox 1.0.

Like a9.com's toolbar, it
requires you to sign in to your Filangy a/c for it to work.
As you browse the Web, the toolbar quietly sends each URL back to Filangy.com for indexing and addition to your WebCache.

This is done automatically, in the same way as the History feature of a9.com's toolbar - the major difference between Filangy and a9 being that a9 doesn't crawl the full text of the page for you (only the URL and page title), so for instance pages that have poor descriptive titles or none at all are pretty much unfindable using a9's History search.

The toolbars for both browsers are designed to be very simple and minimalistic, containing only a search field, a highlight button, a Save button (which creates a WebMark for that page) and a Pause button to stop Filangy from recording your history.

I would prefer a more attractive toolbar layout similar to, say Google or MSN's than the current minimal design, but that's just my personal preference.

WebCache
The WebCache is a fully text-searchable piece of Filangy's server set aside for your account; any webpage you visit is stored here for later retrieval.
Only the HTML of the page is archived, not the associated images or CSS; image caching will be included probably over the next few months.
Filangy doesn't have a definite limit to how much space each user gets for their cache, and they don't have any current plans for such a limit (unlike Furl's definite 5GB of space).

At the moment there is a half-hour delay before the pages are saved to your cache, Filangy say that this delay will be decreased as the service grows but the real worth to me of a service like this is in finding long-ago visited pages so this doesn't really bother me.

The delay is down to the system of adding the pages - the URL of the page
is sent to Filangy, and they crawl and index the page independently of
your browser - this is a better system than that used at Furl, where
the data is sent straight from your browser, taking quite some time to
send on a slow connection.

WebMarks
WebMarks are basically the pages you specifically bookmark by hitting
the save link beneath the search results, or the save button on the
toolbar - I didn't see the real purpose of Webmarking a page since
every page you visit is saved by default when you're signed in, until I
ran a couple of searches and noticed the personal score gauge beside
each result - the pages you Webmark will be given more weight when you
search, more about this below.

You can import your IE and Firefox bookmarks, but there are no options to export your data if you want to. This is a feature I would require with a service like this - Furl understood the importance of this early on and give their users a
wide variety of options and
formats to take their bookmarks from their servers.

Filangy Search
When you want to find a page you Filangy'd (I know it's not catchy),
you run a search on the toolbar, which brings you to Filangy's very
Google-esque search
engine, that also includes a clustering feature like Vivisimo or Clusty.

Like Google, there are tabs for the category of search you want to do; either a straightforward Web search (Filangy has it's own crawler for the pages users add to their WebCache, and also license the regular
search from a search provider; the results look like a slightly older
Yahoo index), your WebCache and WebMarks.

Beside each Web search result is a preview option - similar to Icerocket.com, this opens an inline frame to display the page, and a save link that lets
you instantly save the result as a WebMark.

Searching in the WebCache tab gives you the main functionality of the service -
the archived copies of the pages you've visited in the past are
available through the cache links beneath each result.

Another touted advantage of using Filangy is the ability to repeat searches you've done in the past - this is a cool idea that could be very convenient, but it's not presented in an easy-to-do way at all; you have to access it from your account page, and there are no links to previous searches on the actual search engine pages, so chances are I will never use this feature as it is.

Personal Score Ranking
The results for WebCache or WebMark searches are ranked by a "personal score" - Filangy tries to deduce which pages are more important to you personally, which is an interesting combination of personalization and archiving.

a9, which I consider Filangy's main competition has no ranking system like this, so a page you bookmark is given no extra importance when you search your a9 history.

The search results are split into two groups - pages you've visited within the last 90 days, and older pages.
Pages older than the 90 day limit have their personal score reset to zero - even if they've been WebMarked - a clever way of ranking the pages on their true use by making the most important factor how often you
visit.

Here's a good explanation of how the personal score ranking
works from Mr. Chaman:

Think of a page as a rechargeable battery.

With every visit you recharge the battery, every day you
don't visit a page it loses a little charge. The end effect is that
pages you have seen in the last few days or WebMarked tend to show up
higher. WebMarked pages also lose their charge a little
slower.

Filangy Privacy
The main concern I would have with a service like this is the privacy of my data, after all, I'm entrusting them with all the pages I view online - very personal information by anyone's standard.

As such they have gone to some lengths to emphasize
their commitment to privacy, providing an authentication code that ties the toolbar installation on a machine to your username and only indexing pages that are publically viewable on the Internet.

Currently there is an option to delete pages individually next to each search result, and options that will show up once an account is used for 60 days to delete low scoring pages, and the pages viewed over the last 60 days.

There is no option to bulk-delete all of your entries if you wish, Filangy are considering adding this, but want to make sure such a permanent removal feature is necessary before they do so.

Reassuringly, the pages you delete are permanently removed from Filangy's servers (this is more reassuring than the vagueness of what happens when you clear your history in a9.com; it's unclear if it still resides somewhere on Amazon's servers).

I will have to use Filangy more to see the full power of it - I'm just beginning to see the clustering feature working now for example - but even in my limited test so far, it shapes up as a useful cross-breed of Furl and the history aspect of a9.

Added:
I noticed I have a couple of Filangy invites to give away, if you post your email address in the comments I'll invite you.

More info:
· Benefits of using Filangy
· Filangy FAQ
· Now that's service.

I noticed a request for invites to a currently closed-beta web service called Filangy on Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Reading through the available info it looks like a browser plugin that records your history and allows you to save the full text of pages in a personal Web Cache set aside for you when you sign up.

It would be cool to have the features of a9.com and Furl combined like this, and from just glancing through the recent blogposts about it on Technorati, the current users find it useful.

Interestingly, it saves the full text of the pages you visit automatically like Google Desktop; this would be enough for me to move away from a9, which only saves the title of the page and the URL, along with the fact that I've found an annoying bug with that service that hasn't been addressed - a Firefox toolbar bug that duplicates your Diary entries (I currently have about 5 original diary entries, but somehow they've replicated into a thousand).

Filangy is only available by invite at the moment (a strategy that has worked well before to drive up interest), and it's not clear when it'll be open for everyone.

More info:
More About Filangy
Jeremy Zawodny
Filangy user: Okay I'm hooked.
I've taken a peek at Filangy ... one critical flaw in my opinion
filangy - WOW - browser cache online

John Battelle posts on his Searchblog about the new Beta version 3 of the Google Toolbar, which boasts three powerful new features.

This version of the IE-only toolbar adds a spellchecker for forms, a translation tool and a feature to turn U.S. postal addresses on any web page into clickable URL's, which link to the corresponding page on the Google Maps site.

Spellcheck feature of Google Toolbar Version 3

The spellchecker is very handy, clicking the toolbar button analyzes the form you're about to submit, and words that may need correction are bolded and coloured red; clicking them gives a drop-down menu with alternative spellings - handy if yu a raelly bad tyipsst.

The auto-translator also looks handy for users who have English as a second language, simply hovering the cursor over any English word for a few seconds displays a tooltip with the word in a language you can specify - the range of languages are French, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

The Auto-Linker is the most interesting feature though - this folds the recently -released (and highly praised) U.S.-only Google Maps service into the toolbar in an excellent way: any U.S. postal address you come across displayed on a web page can be turned into a link straight to Google Maps with one click.

I did a quick test of it using the addresses here, and clicking them sent me smoothly to the exact page on Google Maps, where I could get directions to or from that location from anywhere in the U.S.

Added:
I noticed that autolinker is not limited to just U.S. addresses: it also works with ISBN's (these send you to Amazon.com's page for the book), Vehicle Identification Numbers, and Package Tracking Numbers

This ease of access to more info through auto linking should be useful, and according to Search Engine Watch, more options should be in the pipeline, most likely based on the "Search by Number" look-ups already enabled on a standard Google search.

According to Marissa Mayer (Google's product chief), who spoke with Battelle, the beta won't last long, and a version with the new features will probably be officially released soon.

More info:
· Download the Google Toolbar 3 Beta
· News: Google Launches New Toolbar, Musings on Meaning of Beta
· A New Version (Beta) of the Google Toolbar is Now Available, Still No Firefox
· Auto-Linking: Google Gets Away With What Microsoft Couldn't
· Related: Yahoo! Release official toolbar for Firefox
· Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox | Where is Google?

Yahoo keep rolling out the programs for people to try; last week they launched the official Yahoo! toolbar for Firefox, another sign of that browser's increasing credibility, and last month they released their free desktop search based on top technology from x1.com, the treat there was users basically got x1 for free when it usually costs $74.95.

Between those two, they launched Y!Q Beta, a tool that spreads search.yahoo.com out from that domain, onto sites around the web, into Yahoo news and the browsers of individuals.
The motive behind it (and its official slogan) is to allows users to "search at the point of inspiration".
The goal is good - wouldn't it be much more convenient to be able search from anywhere, without needing to visit a search engine and without the need for typing?

In this way, it takes two of the normal steps out of the process most people would use when searching, namely going to a search site and typing in a query. Y!Q does its best to guess what you're likely to search for, and present the results to you with just one click.

It does this by analyzing the context of what you're reading; with the toolbar installed, this is achieved by sending the text you select with the mouse to yahoo for analysis, with results generated on the fly and sent back to your browser. If you don't install the toolbar, you'll still see it dotted around the Web, because webmasters can embed it directly into their sites.

This is the feature that was most interesting to me, and I've enabled it on this blog, when you click on the "Find more related links" at the end of each post, a query is run on yahoo search and the results display in a pop-up javascript window.
Clicking the link sends the context for the search to Yahoo, in my case it is just the title of the blog post (it's possible to have the search based on the whole page's content with other blogging tools, but it seems to be awkward using Blogger). Because it's just based off my post titles, it's not utilizing the full power of the context search, but it's still fairly useful I think.

It's a similar piece of software in purpose to blinkx contextual search, but with one main advantage - blinkx requires you to download and install an app for it to work, Y!Q has a search plugin for Firefox and an IE toolbar, but anyone with a browser can use it on the pages it's been added to.

blinkx is very good technology, analyzing the contents of whatever window you have open and finding related resources on your hard drive, the Web, blogs and news sites - but despite that, it didn't last very long on my machine.

That was because, despite its premise of making searching easier, it was very alien to my usual way of searching, it presumes to be able to deduce what I want to find based on what I'm reading, or what text I've selected, but it doesn't give me an input field to run a traditional search if I want to, so I'm limited to what blinkx thinks I'm interested in.
It's a simple addition, but a search field was missing from the toolbar when I tried it and so it was uninstalled.

The embedded Y!Q code includes a search field in each of the jscript boxes, but reminds me of blinkx in another way - its power is hidden by default. With blinkx an anonymous toolbar resides at the top of your browser, and you have to click it to see any related resources, similarly with embedded Y!Q all you see is a link to more related links - my feeling is that most people wouldn't be attracted to click either the blinkx toolbar or the Y!Q links because they look too blank.
Something that might make it more appealing for users to click would be an option for webmasters to have the jscript box display when it's moused-over, like IntelliTXT ads.

Another problem I can see with it from a site owners perspective is, there's no way for me to measure whether anyone is using it, and if its taking up space is justified.

It's still in beta status so it will probably be polished and features added (webmasters are promised a smoother method of embedding it on their sites) and some prominent bloggers already have it installed on their sites, but it'll be interesting to see if Y!Q spreads out and is widely used on the Web.

More info:
· Y!Q Search - "Type in what you are looking for the way you think"
· Y!Q: Adding Context to Search
· Inspired: A Conversation with Reiner Kraft - Inventor of Y!Q
· Y!Q Wordpress plugin
· Jeremy Zawodny - Y!Q on my blog
· SearchEngineWatch.com: Yahoo Offers New Y!Q Contextual Search Tool

I came across this very cool new site that's currently in Alpha status.
Tagsurf is a very interesting new form of message board, that takes the latest and greatest concept for classifying and structuring info on the web: tags, (so called folksonomies, that put the power of classification directly into the hands of the users creating the content) and applies them to the actual message posts.

The most popular sites that use this form of classification are del.icio.us and Flickr, and it was easier to use Tagsurf when I thought of it as basically Flickr with messages replacing the photos, or del.icio.us, with messages replacing the bookmarks.

Hitting the front page for the first time presents you with a sprawl of random snippets of conversations; each usually having absolutely nothing to do with the one before it. The first time I loaded the page I thought it was impenetrable, just a long list of random text with no context, then I realized the page is very like the del.icio.us homepage - the same super-sparse type of layout but with the latest conversations replacing the links.

With that realization it was easier to explore and appreciate Tagsurf - clicking through to the tags at the ends of the conversations reveals more posts on that topic - for example clicking the tag for Google gives you a reverse chronological list of the latest things people have been saying about it
Items posted to Tagsurf are not limited to messages either - Web URL's can also be posted, allowing conversations to spring up around them, for instance check the comments users have posted about Russell Beattie's intro to Tagsurf.

RSS feeds are ubiquitous throughout the whole site, allowing you to be notified in your aggregator of replies to threads, but more than that, you can Watch topics and get notified through email or IM. Each message posted also has it's own unique permalink and a Thread link displays the complete conversation (though it would be more intuitive if the number of replies was displayed alongside these links)

You can install a bookmarklet to check for Tagsurf conversations on any page on the internet; this will be very useful, another way to check for opinions alongside the Bloglines citations button, and Technorati's cosmos.

The usefulness of the bookmarklet and the site in general depends on one obvious thing though, whether enough people regularly use tagsurf to make it another del.icio.us - del.icio.us took off because there couldn't be anything easier to understand and use; my own first impression of Tagsurf is that it's harder to get used to than that, it requires more effort from the users, and being a previous user of del.icio.us or flickr is an advantage.

There are bugs evident as I use it - the notifiers don't work for me at all currently - and I think a Popular conversations page like del.icio.us and an overall-tags page like Technorati's would be good additions (at the moment you can't easily view the full range of tags people have posted in, there's only a recently-posted-tags box along the side) but these are all forgivable given its Alpha status, and the fact that it's impressive even as it is.

More info:
· User conversations about Tagsurf
· Russell Beattie: Tagsurf: Tagged Hyperforum
· Tagsurf first review - This is going to be big
· Tagsurf: a clever use of the tagging concept

Yahoo added a tab for Video Search to their homepage yesterday, presenting the feature to the millions of regular yahoo users (it was available for some time through the next yahoo page).
This is a fairly decent search tool, presenting video of TV shows from their partnership with TV Eyes, along with clips from around the Web in a familiar search interface that gives users what they expect to find when they search on it.

It contrasts vividly with Google's simultaneous announcement of Video Search beta, which takes a totally different approach; maybe so much so that not many people will have a use for g's offering.
Google does not actually present you with a video file in any of the results (as yet), nor even a link to a webpage that may contain the video file you're looking for. Instead what it gives you is the information surrounding the video you search for, closed caption text, a screen capture image, and if you're in the U.S, a schedule of when the show will air next in your location.

It seems to me to be a rush release for Google (it's the only explanation for releasing video search without any videos), just a part of the healthy competition between the two companies; Yahoo have the clear winning product at this time insofar as something people will likely have a use for, though Google have secured assets that will probably make their tool a winner in the long run.

With the participation of the U.S. TV stations involved (listed here), they have continual access, through satellite antennaes & dishes installed at Google headquarters, to all of the currently broadcasting shows as well as the closed caption content that is transmitted with each show, archived back to last December - a trove of non-internet content they'll be able to wrap around actual video clips when they're made available.

Google are focusing on their main aim, to go for the content that's not yet available to people through the 'Net, in the same spirit as the Print project, that will see them go into top libraries in the U.S., scan the collections of books and make them available online.

At the moment there's not much use to the G video site, there are no clips, no access to the complete closed caption transcripts (only the segments containing your search query) - it's main use will probably just be as a handy TV guide-like service for people in the U.S. The one glaring advantage Google have is their presentation of all the information that is currently available - hands down much better than Yahoo's, which only gives you a screen capture, the file name and the size of the clip.
For comparison, check these results for the smae item:
Y:60 Minutes Google | G: 60 Minutes Google

Another similar impressive piece of technology has been available for some time - the blinkx TV video search. Their service disposes of the need for the closed caption content altogether, they've created their own automatic transcription technology that interprets the content of terrestrial/satellite tv shows & radio broadcasts in real time into their index, along with media content from the Internet.
blinkx TV is available here and the white paper explaining how it works is available here (.pdf)

More info:
· Yahoo search blog: Video Search Goes Mainstream
· Google blog: We're tuning in to TV
· Press release: Google Tunes Into TV
· Google Debuts Video Search
· Yahoo!, Google Thrust Video Search Into Spotlight
· Geeking with Greg: Roundup of comments from the blogosphere
· Yahoo Next - Yahoo research labs
· Google Labs

I found a nifty experiment by Russell Beattie on mobdex.com; RSS serialisation of public domain ebooks.

Each novel on Mobdex has its own RSS feed, which you can add to your aggregator; Mobdex then delivers you a page of the book at intervals you can customize yourself, so you can read the installments at your own pace:

And if you're a speed reader and want the pages to be updated more frequently, add an "interval" parameter in minutes. This would produce another page for my aggregator every couple of hours:

http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ&interval=120

Check here for more info.

I decided to try out the new desktop search tool from MSN when it was released two days ago.

This tool is billed as the MSN Toolbar Suite, that consists of a search toolbar for IE, one for Outlook and a tool that sits in your taskbar.

I'm having problems with it so far, but from what I've seen of it in action, it seems very useful.

After you install, it begins its indexing cycle - the length of time this takes depends wholly on your system, but it was fairly quick to index my files even though I had my usual programs open (Firefox, IE, Y! Messenger).
You're probably best giving the program some time to index without interruptions, it will stop indexing if the computers resources are being used up too much by other apps, though you have an option to force the indexing if you wish.

The indexing status is slightly confusing, it gives you how many files that have been indexed so far, but also how many are left - it seems to detect the total amount of files it has to index in increments, so you can't see an overall total of how many files are left to index.

Once that's done, the program monitors your files for new additions, emails etc to add to the index as it detects them.

You can specify the locations you want indexed, but not the different file types - my own test of Copernic was whether it could index the text within my .hjt files from Treepad - MSN finds the file if what you searched for is in the file name, but doesn't index the contents at all.
This is an obscure file type to index, but the main attraction of Copernic for me was I could pick and choose myself what was important for me to be able to find.

Another crucial feature of Copernic that I like is the ability to preview any file from within it; I don't have Adobe Acrobat or Power Point installed, but have a lot of .pdf and .ppt files, I can easily view these files in Copernic without having to download any other apps.
MSN has no preview ability like this, except for the snippets of text you get in the results when you search.

For the types of files it does index though, it is very useful - all your program shortcuts are indexed, images are represented by thumbnails in the results and in music files, info in id tags is included.

The IE toolbar has also been updated - it looks more stylish, with a blue gel button for different parts of MSN, the highlight viewer (this was my main reason for using the MSN toolbar previously) has been polished up and given more prominence .
There is now a new MSN Spaces button as well, allowing you to Blog It straight from the toolbar, exactly like the Blogger option in the Google toolbar.

The taskbar tool has an excellent design in my opinion, just a text field and two small buttons that give you everything you need to use it, in a design that's pleasing to the eye.

This simple-looking tool is by far the most useful in the suite, enabling you to search your disks and the web without the aid of a browser, and it's also done in a search-as-you-type interface that is very convenient.

But the feature I thought was most interesting is the ability to run commands from the tool, and create your own shortcuts, either to webpages or to programs.

If you watch the demo video posted at the same time it was released, you can see the usefulness of this - the developer has an absolutely blank desktop, no files and no shortcuts (unlike my own which can't hold all the stuff that has built up).

He's able to access all his programs straight from the taskbar by entering commands (just put an equals sign before the program to run, eg =notepad) or through his custom made shortcuts (see the image for how to create these), and if he hasn't created one for the program he's looking for, the search should be instant to find whatever he's looking for.

This gives the MSN search an enormous advantage over the other apps, because it makes it much more than a search tool, replacing one of the more time-consuming tasks people have gotten used to on their PC's - eg having to go Start>All Programs>Folder of what you're looking for>Program to startup your programs.

My guess is that this won't take off very quickly, because it takes a change of behaviour that every Windows user has become used to, but its a very cool innovation.

You can see this integration with Windows Explorer in the results page also - the right-click menu on the individual results gives you the options you would get if you right-clicked that file within Explorer.
So for instance right clicking an mp3 in the results will give you options to play the file in your media player, an image will give you the option to edit with your graphics editor etc, all depending on your own set of installed programs.

The results display also uses a top idea from Google Desktop - integrating the desktop into the regular search.
If you go to http://beta.search.msn.com/, you will see a tab for your Desktop, clicking through to this shows you a set of options for limiting your search to certain types of files, such as Documents, Email, Music etc
Clicking the More dropdown breaks those down even further.

This was a very cool idea from Google, but they do it in a more secure (it seems to me) way than MSN.

The results page of MSN Desktop is a modified Windows Explorer window, which allows you the extra context menu options I mentioned, but if you decide you want to switch to a web search from your results page, as far as I can tell it's Windows Explorer connecting to the Internet and not IE.

I am not expert on the matter of Windows security, but I do not like the idea of a tool used for accessing the files I have stored on my computer being necessary to do a web search.
I've always had Windows Explorer blocked in my firewall from connecting to the Internet, I can't see a reason for that to connect at all. That's a small gripe I have about it, but it still works perfectly well for me as a hard drive search if I block its net access.

I haven't been able to use the email search yet, I have Outlook Express installed, but when installing the Suite, I'm told I must have Outlook 2003 installed, contrary to the specs posted on the download page.

There seems to be a problem with the auto-start or starting the app by typing in the taskbar tool for me, it takes over 5 minutes to load , but is instant if I manually start it up from the Quick Launch or program menu.

I thought this might have been because I had Copernic installed, but after uninstalling that MSN is still very slow.
It may also just be my system, but I don't think so, 1.6ghz 512mb ram w/ 4gb of hard drive space is well within the specs.

These problems I have with the email and startup times are probably bugs, that can be forgiven in a new beta tool.

Overall this is an impressive tool from Microsoft, my favourite feature being the commands you can specify yourself and the whole range of options you get from the right-click menu in the results.

For more info:
· Download the MSN Toolbar Suite
· Introducing MSN Toolbar Suite - Silicon Valley team (and demo!)
· MSN Toolbar Suite Beta First Impressions
· MSN Desktop Search vs Google Desktop Search
· More MSN Toolbar Suite reactions from the blogosphere

a9 have just released a toolbar that works in Mozilla Firefox on Mac, Linux and windows.

This is the first official toolbar for Firefox by one of the top competing search engines (MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Google only have toolbars for IE.)

It allows all the functionality of the IE version - recording of the browsing history, access to your bookmarks, the diary & lists features and access to more information about the site you're viewing.

Download it at http://toolbar.a9.com/

More info about a9:
Toolbar help
Why use a9.com?
Amazon A9 Search -Is It Really A9 Out of 10?
A9.com Promotion Push Starts
A9.com Launches With Major Updates (15 Sept)
A9, Amazon's Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley (14 April)

I just read this interesting article about what a possible Google browser might look like (despite the fact they've since flat-out stated "we are not building a browser").

Since Google's new acquisition Keyhole was announced the other day, the article prognosticates a browser that ties all the Google services together into a "world browser".:

It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it'd also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

This would be undoubtedly cool, but so far there's been no visible effort by Google to make all their different products interact with each other (aside from your Gmail login working with Google Groups, and Bloggerbot in Hello).

I'm more inclined to go along with the view of this article, that Google's services are really all over the place, lacking a cohesiveness.
Maybe the plan behind the scenes is to tie them all together, but from the outside it looks like Google is split into loads of different teams all doing their own thing independent of each other.

Google announced today they had acquired satellite imaging company Keyhole (read the press release here)
This is very slick software that lets you zoom in on any part of the globe (even down to street level in some cases), lets you find businesses & facilities and lets you measure distances.

Even though it's a nice piece of software, I was a bit non-plussed as to why Google had bought it though, until I read this interesting post on the John Battelle Searchblog where he had a talk with the head man at Keyhole, John Hanke:

[...]Hanke showed an application, which he called geoblogging, which allows folks to fly around Keyhole's data and annotate various things they see. "They identify a spot, then talk about it, upload pictures they took there, whatever," Hanke told me. "That then becomes an icon, a point in the Keyhole database" that others can view and comment upon.

A super-detailed map of the globe that users can update themselves with comments, images etc?
After realising Keyhole could do that, the usefulness and potential of the software became more apparent. It will be very interesting to see where Google goes with it.

For examples of users adding to the Keyhole data, go to this site, it's a place where users have been uploading their own place marker files.
Look for the .kml attachments, clicking them in IE will send them automatically to Keyhole which will then zoom to the location.

More info:
Keyhole
Official Google Blog: Power of 2
Google Buys Satellite Map Firm Keyhole Corp.
Google Acquires Satellite Image Software Firm

I've been using Google's Desktop Search (GDS) since they introduced it on 14 October. For the past few months I've also been using Copernic Desktop Search (CDS).

I have compared the major differences I noticed between the two below (yellow is a point for CDS, blue=GDS):

• File extensions - I frequently jot things down in the program treepad, which uses the unusual file extension .hjt. With CDS I can set it up to index those without problems - GDS has a very small amount of extensions it indexes, with no configurability except enabling/disabling the few it does support.
• Auto caching - This is where I get most use from GDS - it duplicates your IE history into its own cache, so even if you clear your temp Internet files, the old pages you visited will still be searchable.CDS makes an index of the files in your IE history, but does not back them up itself.
• Result listings & convenience of use - There is no need to keep entering queries and pressing enter while searching in CDS because of the search-as-you-type feature. There is also no limit to the amount of results in the list. GDS is limited to a very small 10 results per page.
• Music, video & images - No options within GDS for these at all, except if the filename happens to be exactly what you search for. CDS is excellent for image and music searching, image searches display in thumbnail view, while the music search goes inside mp3 id tags.
• Obtrusiveness - One of my instant turnoffs with software is it starting up with the system. Marginally worse than that is adding an icon to the taskbar. GDS does both of these, and what's worse does not provide an option to disable either. CDS does include a taskbar icon when it's running, but does not require a system startup.
• Full text indexing of IE history - This is a big advantage Google has, with CDS you can only search the title and file name. GDS indexes the full text.
• Bulk-indexing - CDS is very configurable in this way with lots of different options to suit everyones needs. GDS insists on a very inconvenient hours-long initial index.
• Time to index new files - From my own tests, after the initial time-consuming indexing of your drive, files appear to be added instantly to Google's index; Copernic is slightly slower everytime I've tested.
• Email indexing - I only use web based email and have not had a chance to properly test this, but from what I've read GDS is hands down on this; CDS allows you to search your email, but GDS provides convenience tools like being able to reply & compose emails straight from the results pages. it also allows you to group your emails in the familiar conversation view made famous in Gmail. (GDS does not support searching your Gmail messages yet)
• Presentation of results - GDS shows full text snippets, CDS only has file names. GDS also displays thumbnail images beside history results.
• Firefox support - neither support Firefox yet, though both say they are considering it for the future. A workaround I've been using that works very well is to install the Slogger extension - this converts the browsing history into html files (indexed by both programs by default).

They both score on five of the criteria above, but because Copernic is more configurable and full featured generally, that would be my recommendation instead of Google Desktop. Also worth noting is that Google Desktop is in beta and they will add more features as time goes by.

More info:

·Copernic Desktop
·Copernic Desktop v1.1- Improvements & tweaks list (released on 13 October)
·Google Desktop
·Google Your Desktop - Detailed intro to Google Desktop
·Google Desktop - Vote For A Feature
·Robs Blog - Copernic Desktop Search
·Slogger Extension - Make your Firefox history searchable
·MSN: Desktop Search before Year End
·Yahoo Readies Desktop Search Tools

Me too, I will also bite.
I've already had a glimpse of the cool re-order as you type feature that's been ported over to Snap, but will have to try X1 myself after hearing this: "it blows Google Desktop software out of the water."

Added
Speaking of Snap, I noticed they've recently renamed the default refining columns on searches; popularity and satisfaction have been changed to "No. of clicks" and "Avg Page Views" which I think are far more descriptive.
Strangely though, they've made those two more user-friendly while dropping the other two main refining columns that would provide very useful info to people searching.
Previously you had columns to sort by web popularity and web satisfaction - how many people visited that page, and the amount of pages viewed on that site by visitors from the Snap network.
These sorted your results by post-search data Snap acquired from Internet Service Providers and was a very innovative idea that I hadn't seen anywhere else.
But now they've replaced these with columns to sort your results by the cost to advertiser and conversion rate (how many people made a purchase after clicking through to that site); these will probably be useful to people on a shopping-search but as a feature of a general search engine I can't really see the reason why anyone would sort by these.

For the past few days I've been using Snap, the new search engine unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference.

At first glance Snap struck me as cluttered and busy, very different from other SE's.
One of the first complaints I saw was that Snap disables the scroll wheel on the mouse to scroll through the results, but this is missing the point of the new approach in Snap - the old behaviour of scrolling through pages of results or even below the fold of one page is what is being avoided here, even the familiar link to the next page of results you see at the end is almost unnoticeable.

Snap allows you to filter your results after you've searched - say you do a search for cruises, then want to drill down to something more specific like Mediterranean cruises, you type Mediterranean into a second text field that reorders the results as you type, this is very cool and doesn't even require another page to be loaded.

In addition to typing in refinements, the results can be sorted by columns with different functions, clicking these columns reorder the results in descending order, clicking again sorts by ascending order.
The default columns:
Popularity - how many users clicked that link directly after doing the exact search you just performed
Satisfaction - number of pages on the site visited by users directly after doing the exact search you just performed
Web Popularity - the amount of Snap network visitors to that page
Web Satisfaction - the amount of pages viewed on that specific site by members of the Snap network

The Snap network are users who have searched on Snap, combined with anonymous browsing history data Snap acquired from ISP's (more about this here).
I haven't found much use for these options myself yet, the second query field being the most powerful option I've tried, but I will give them a further test as I use Snap.

Searching for shopping queries like mp3 players will give you even more new columns with which to sort the results, based on price, memory, PC interfaces, manufacturer and other info directly related to the query - this is an excellent feature, it's the first instance I've seen of a search site actually rearranging its layout to present the best info possible.

Certain queries also get special treatment - for instance a search for yahoo will add an extra section between the query box and the results that contains refinements within Yahoo (mail, login etc), the latest news and company information.
The criteria for receiving this special treatment is hard to decipher: it works for broad generic searches like games or news, and some major companies get it like Yahoo & Google, but strangely, not Microsoft.

Another aspect of Snap getting a lot of attention is their unusual approach of opening up all their statistical info (searches performed, incoming links, advertisers and revenues earned) and displaying it front and center on the home page.
This is almost the mirror opposite of Google, who are famously secretive about the usage data on their engine.
Apart fom just being an opposite to Google and being a useful tool for advertisers though, I can't really see the reason or use of it to a user except as a novelty.

I did notice a few flaws in my initial test of Snap

• the small index - the refinement tools would work excellently for ferreting out pages within one website, but the providers (Gigablast & Looksmart) don't have near the same coverage of the Web that the large engines have; the coverage is far from complete and this is a major drawback on the refining aspect.
• Loading results pages hangs Firefox for me momentarily (like Gmail) while it loads tons of JavaScript into the browser. This makes the load time significantly longer than Yahoo or Google, though I can see that the reorder-as-you-type feature requires a lot of code to be loaded into the browser.
• Refining your search down works well for broader searches, but it comes apart on more specific queries. eg a search for President Bush, if you try refining down to one of his famous quotes "axis of evil" there are no results, even though the exact page to match that search is in the Snap index.
  This is likely because of a limit on how much code can be loaded to the browser after each query, and shows the drawback of relying on client side to provide the refinements.

These are my impressions after just a few days of using Snap, and I probably haven't seen everything it has to offer yet (it's that feature-heavy), but apart from the flaws above (which I'm sure will be looked at) I am very impressed with it so far.

For more info:
· Official Snap weblog
· Why we built Snap - By founder Bill Gross
· New Snap site thinks outside the search box
· Snap Gets Into Search Game
· Snap, But No Crackle Or Pop
· Snap: The Revenge of Bill Gross
· Bill helped Google with paid placement, can he now snap its search?
· Snap.com: "A different kind of fish."
· Jeremy Zawodny liveblogging from the Web 2.0 conference

Yahoo yesterday surprise-launched a public beta for a new personalized search site that can be plugged into the recently updated My Yahoo page.

My Yahoo Search allows Yahoo account holders to save, annotate, block and share the results of their searches.
These options appear below each result, alongside the now-familiar "Add To My Yahoo" & "View As XML" links that are included on any result with an rss feed.

I think it's a cool addition to Yahoo as an idea; Yahoo have millions of users, and they are in the best position to open up the idea of a personal web to non- tech users who were probably nonplussed by the recent launch of a9.

a9 is very feature heavy, so much so that I think people could easily become overwhelmed by all the features because it's very different in look and feel to Google.

The My Yahoo Search interface is very similar to the default search.yahoo.com; a smart move to gradually introduce the features, rather than force them too soon.
Ask Jeeves are also trying this gradual approach with their new My Jeeves site.

One point I read about My Yahoo Search was that none of these features are new, or even as advanced as the other personal web tools, and that's true - a9 is far and away the most aggressive personal web search, saving every search you perform and even the individual sites you visit, though even that lacks the killer app of saving the full text of pages ala Furl.
But this new offering by Yahoo is only a beta, and they will definitely add in new features as they go along; a likely target for them I would imagine is a revamp and integration of Yahoo Bookmarks, which has been around for years, but has been overtaken by far more powerful bookmark managers like Furl.

More info:
· My Yahoo! Search
· next.yahoo.com - New Yahoo area reserved for beta products, similar to Google Labs & MSN Sandbox
· Yahoo: our vision is of a very individual Web — a "My Web"
· My Yahoo Search and Yahoo Next are Launched
· Yahoo Bows New Personalized Search
· My Yahoo Search Offers Personal Search Features
· Yahoo Introduces Personal Search
· Yahoo wants users to get personal with search
· Yahoo Offers "My Web"
· My Yahoo! Beta Test w/ Big Focus on RSS (28 Sept)

FeedBurner announced today a new service, that allows you to insert Amazon ads into your RSS feeds.

If you use the service, any purchases made through visitors clicking the links will earn you a percentage of the sale, which will be credited to your Amazon Associates account.

I saw recently that another service from WayPath, Blender, allowed the addition of the Amazon ads into your feeds, but it was only launched as a test, and you couldn't add your own Associates ID to earn from the ads. (The option is there now)

I discovered Feedburner a few months ago, and they keep coming out with the coolest features for RSS feeds; how it works is you add your current feed (any version of RSS or Atom) to Feedburner, which "burns" the feed into a version that will work in any reader.

Then, through an extremely simple enhancements page, you can add on any of the extras you like, such as making those ugly XML files friendly to the eye, or splicing your Flickr & del.icio.us items into one single feed.

This Amazon idea looks pretty cool for people who would like to try monetize their feeds.
Also new is the ability to add a Creative Commons license into your feeds. For any bloggers or site owners who publish RSS, I would highly recommend checking out Feedburner; it's free to sign up and the extras you get for your feed are very useful.

More info:
Join the Amazon Associates program
FeedBurner FAQ
Burn This! - The FeedBurner™ Weblog

Yahoo! have started a beta test for the new version of My Yahoo!, the personalized page that comes with every Y! account.

It includes a much-needed update to the look of the page, and made the content modules easier to edit (clicking edit now gives a drop down menu) as well as some cool looking new skins and colours.

The search box is now more noticable too, but the big update is the new focus on blogs & RSS.

They have an approach to make RSS much more accessible to non-tech users, weaving it into their search results as a simple "Add To My Yahoo", that cuts out the friction of cutting an URL into a newsreader and subscribing.

Yahoo! have been busy building their RSS directory since the RSS module for My Yahoo! launched as a beta in January and the directory is now available to browse when you're signed in to Yahoo! here.
A representative for them also recently posted on the webmasterworld forums that they planned to be as inclusive as the top search engines out there for RSS.


I read RSS feeds a lot and in its current form, can't see the My Yahoo reader being as useful to me as Bloglines, but it is a good tool to introduce the millions of Yahoo users to the convenience of RSS.

More info:
My Yahoo! What's New?
My Yahoo! Does RSS
Add your RSS Feed to Yahoo
Follow the discussion of the new My Yahoo! on the official YSearchBlog
All-New My Yahoo! Coming to You Soon
Geeking with Greg: All New My Yahoo

Via searchenginelowdown.com

DailyRundown.com has a short interview with Martin Bouchard, the co-founder of Copernic.

When asked what Copernic has in the pipeline, Mr Bouchard said

Without revealing all our secrets, expect to see things like blogs/RSS indexing, personalization of search results, intelligent information clustering, unified searching, and much more.

I haven't tried all of Copernic's search tools, but I did download the free Desktop Search that was recently released; it is a very impressive piece of software that wades through all the files on your system to give you instant search results.
It indexes all your files in the background and goes dormant if too much processing power is being used, so it will work well even on lower-spec computers.

It indexes email, files, images, music files (even inside .mp3 id tags), video files and even the IE favourites and history.

Firefox support is also being looked at for the next version, as well as a full text indexing for the browser history and an option to include search snippets in the results.

Copernic Desktop Search website

The blog at searchenginewatch.com points to an article about kozoru, the search engine start up I posted about last month.

I was very interested when I first read about kozoru; on their technology page they claim "search technology doesn't work", and that they have a new approach to finding the info you're looking for, rather than the keywords & boolean we're used to.

On his web Journal, the founder of the company also addressed my presumption that kozoru would be similar to Ask Jeeves:

... Ask Jeeves created a very good company and a compelling first step into the world of advanced search technology.

But, kozoru is very different and I can't wait to show it to everyone.

They plan to create a platform, and this article gives some good information about it; they will build it with layers of authoritative sources, starting with the dictionary, encyclopaedia's next, then news sources and web pages coming further down in the order, because the Web is mostly "opinion", and not overwhelmingly reliable information.

To put the Web below other vetted sources of information as the article quotes kozoru's communications director as saying, brings to my mind the recent argument over the validity of the Wikipedia, where it was actually put forward by some that Wikipedia is more authoritative than conventional encyclos, because it has a potential peer review of millions, and I tend to agree somewhat with that.

We won't really know what kozoru will be like until it launches, sometime next year.

*Just as I was writing this post I noticed a new post about this kozoru article on Techdirt, where the Wikipedia debate started:
Searching Authoritative Sources First?


More info:
· What is kozoru?
· John S. Flowers - Founder of kozoru
· Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source
· Who Do You Trust, The Wiki Or The Reporter?
· Wikipedia Reliability Redux

Via the John Battelle Searchblog

As was bound to happen, Furl has been snapped up by a large corporation.

Two days after the Furl site was quietly redesigned, CEO Mike Giles in a letter to users, said Furl will be joining with LookSmart:

... LookSmart acquired Furl for the same reasons you probably use it - it is a great service that works well - and LookSmart has no intention of changing the things that make it great. On the contrary, LookSmart is committed to making existing features even more powerful.

It is now called "LookSmart's Furl" and new features are in the pipeline, including groups, and the ability to search across the entire public archive (currently you can only search within your own archive).

The space for the archive is also officially now a huge 5GB of space (there was no stated limit previously).

For anyone who hasn't heard of Furl yet, it's an excellent service that allows you to bookmark any page you visit to Furl's servers, but more than that the entire page is archived and fully searchable. It also offers sharing of archives and lots of other features you can check here.

LookSmart is a search engine company, with directory results provided by the volunteer edited Zeal directory, and the regular search results collected by the distributed crawler, Grub.

If Furl is integrated as a part of LookSmart's search engine, it will have an excellent feature not offered by the other recent personalization engines: full text searching of the pages you've visited.

More info:
· LookSmart - Help Build the Best Web Search
· What is Furl?
· About LookSmart
· Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, and the PersonalWeb
· Welcome to the family Furl! - From the CTO of LookSmart
· LookSmart Acquires Furl

A good introductory article to Bloglines, running through the main features.
Something I didn't know, that Bloglines is run out of the home of the founder, Mark Fletcher.

Also released today were some handy new features to Bloglines; the option to keep posts as new, and to view related feeds based on the feed you're currently reading.

An article in the New York Post has started a wave of speculation across the blogging world that Google is planning on making it's own browser.

The main evidence for the idea is the recent poaching by Google of top engineers from Microsoft, as well as hiring Adam Bosworth, (described as a driving force behind the IE browser) and the registering of the domain Gbrowser.com by Google in April.

Google have had so much imagination put into their products and choice of acquisitions so far that if they just release a me-too browser based on Mozilla (as has been suggested) it will be disappointing.

There again, Google have not made a me-too product yet, so a browser from them would certainly be big news.

More info:
· Lots of bloggers predict Google browser
· What if Google upgrades toolbar to full browser? (Free reg. req.)
· Will Google Launch A Browser?
· 2001 prediction of a Google Browser

Ask Jeeves unveiled it's new personalization features today, adding a My Jeeves area to the site.

The changes to the main search results pages are surprisingly discreet, the only difference most people will notice is a "Save" link beside each result.

Clicking these let you save your search results to My Jeeves, where you can also add your own notes to pages; it doesn't require a login and works using cookies, like the Saved Stories feature on News.com.

If you look a little further into the site, you see that you can sign up for a free account and your saved searches won't disappear when you clear your cookies, or use another computer.

The plan looks to be to keep these personalization features as low key as possible, and gauge whether people will go out of the way to sign up for them.

This is the opposite approach to the other recently released personalization engine, A9, which has as it's main selling point the ability to save everything you browse & search for.

The My Jeeves site went live yesterday, a day before schedule, though it was incomplete with 404 errors on some of the pages.

A press embargo was requested until the official release of the features, but DMNews.com broke the story early, seemingly by accident, and sent interested readers to the incomplete My Jeeves site.

DMNews later temporarily removed the story, but not before news of the main features had spread through the search engine blogs and forums.

Jeeves also got a new look, for the past while, he's been missing from the search engine, and clicking to find out more revealed he had gone travelling to discover the future of search.
The new look Jeeves made his debut on the Japanese Ask Jeeves in late August.

In addition to My Jeeves and the new look butler, Jeeves recently added a Red Cross version, where search ads generate funds for the charity; a fun guest butler on the U.K. version and a competition to win an Apple iPod.

More info:
· Jeeves: I'm Back!
· My Jeeves F.A.Q.
· Jeeves Desktop Search coming soon
· A Quick My Jeeves Test Drive
· Jeeves Stretches Out, Gets Personal
· Ask Jeeves Looks to Outshine Google

Jeeves has disappeared from his home of the last 4 years, the http://www.ask.co.uk/ search engine.

A link to the explanation tells visitors that 21 September will have an update along with possibly some new personalization features to the search engine.

As a part of the story, you can now choose a guest butler to replace Jeeves, including Russell Crowe, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.
There's also a competition for an Apple iPod if you forward on the guest butler page to a friend.

More info:
· Ask Jeeves' Butler goes missing
· Ask.com's Jeeves disappears on 'gardening leave'

(Via webmasterworld.com)

The aggressive marketing campaign for Amazon's recently launched search engine has begun.

If you login to use A9, then go to Amazon.com, the famous Amazon logo is changed to advertise the new ^Π/₂% program, which gives you 1.57% off items you buy on Amazon.
The discount is made possible by the text links embedded in the search results on A9, and is a reward simply for using A9.

Clicking the logo brings you to this page:

How can we afford this additional ^Π/₂% discount?

Because of sponsored links (the small text-based ads you see on search results pages), web search has turned into a highly profitable business. The search engines are making a significant amount of money every time someone clicks on one of those ads. With our automatic ^Π/₂% discount, we are effectively sharing with you some of the money we collect from sponsored links, i.e. sharing the pi.

A9 has received mostly positive reviews since it was launched officially and is definitely a big development in the search engine competition going on.

Brett Tabke, administrator of webmasterworld had this to say: "I think other search engines are going to wake up on this in a hurry." about the History saving aspect of A9;

and John Battelle, who writes a very popular Searchblog, said:"... if A9 catches fire, Amazon will have created some valuable online real estate that might very well challenge the lead Yahoo and Google have in search."

More info:
·A9.com review by John Battelle
·A9: The next big thing?
·Nice going, A9
·A9.com Launches With Major Updates
·Why Use A9? - Official featurelist

Amazon's A9 search engine has gone out of beta stage into official release and now offers a lot more features.

This really is a major update so it's well worth checking out the website or downloading the toolbar to test all the new features.

The new features are:

• Lists - lets you to grab every link on a page or within a selection and navigate through them from the toolbar
• Online bookmarks - save your bookmarks to the a9 server where they are fully searchable
• Reference searches - from GuruNet, which integrates information from various sources into one "Answer Engine"
• Discover - a beta service that shows related sites, categories, frequently visited sites and movers & shakers. All seemingly data taken from the other Amazon search site, Alexa.
• Movie search from the IMDb
• Image search results from images.google.com
• Drag & Drop links for all results; very cool feature that works perfectly in IE and Firefox
• New skins & text size adjust

John Battelle had a first look at it and posted up a good review here.

The review calls attention to the main feature of A9, the clickstream, where your path from wanting to find something, to finding it, to where you go from there, are all recorded into a searchable History you can come back to anytime in the future.

As the review says, this could lead to a whole new way people search, but it would take time for it to be effective.
I've been using A9 on and off since the beta was launched in April, and my IE browsing history has been recorded since then so I can get an idea of its usefulness; but I don't know how many people would give it that much time.

I'm also not sure how willing most people would be to sign up to use all the bells & whistles, when Google is satisfactory as a search engine for most people.

Having said that, I have noticed demand on a few different sites for extras that Google don't offer - like thumbnail images in the results and a searchable browser history, both provided by tools like MoreGoogle and the Recall Toolbar.

A9 offers both of these + Google results + a lot extra, all in one free sign up, so if the major marketing push Amazon are planning convinces people to try A9, these extras may make them stick with it.

More info:
· A9.com Launches New Web Site To Make Internet Search More Effective - Official press release
· generic.a9.com - Bare-bones A9, an address to privacy concerns with logging the browser history
· Watch Out Google! Amazon Gets Search
· A9 Launches New Version - Discussion on John Battelle's Searchblog
· Gurunet.com - The source for the reference search in A9

The Preview Release of Firefox version 1 is available now from Mozilla.
It is now the main download file on the Firefox homepage.

This version offers 4 major new features:

• Livemarks - RSS integration in the browser
• FastFind bar - Small toolbar allows you various options for finding text on a page
• New Plugin installer
• Warning toolbar for pop-ups and software installs

As well as some more minor updates:

• Bookmark manager improvements
• Improved password encryption
• Improved compatibility for IE users
• Firefox can also now be configured as the default browser on GNOME.

Read the improvements in more detail here, here and here.

Unfortunately, I've found a lot of my favourite extensions will not work with this new version, though eventually most should be upgraded by the various authors.

More info:
Firefox Preview Release Available, Spreadfirefox.com in Beta
blakeross.com - it's here.

I just noticed this link on Furl; Lycos have a new system in the works for a virtual hard drive:

From mid-September, users of the new service will be able to "drag and drop" files from windows directly into a new online file storage drive.

Lycos says the drive can store any kind of file, such as image, music and movie files, as well as Word documents and presentations.

The firm will offer up to 1GB of file storage on the drive. At the same time, it will increase storage sizes for all its mail services, which will also feature a new look user interface.

The new service will also include synchronisation between an online calendar and Outlook.

Lycos says the new service will free users from their PCs, making documents, contacts and communication available from anywhere they have a internet connection.

Lycos upgraded their email service last month, making the interface simpler as well as introducing an Online Drive feature that allows you to upload files.
There is no drag & drop function with the Online Drive already available, and there's a 10mb storage limit.

Related info:
Two New Lycos Search Tools

An article speculating about why the number on Google's homepage of how many pages it's indexed has not been updated for a year:

My guess is that in Aug 25, 2003 Google's index was full. Why do I say this? . . .

. . . The database was constructed using a Document_ID that is associated with
each Web page. This document_ID was published as being a 4-byte unsigned
long integer. This means that for every single Web page Google has in their
index, an ID was created to identify this Web page. But like everything,
there is a limit and a 4-byte unsigned long integer has a maximum value of
4,294,967,296. So if no changes are made to their database structure, it
would mean Google has probably reached this threshold. And as new pages are
added, old pages are removed (disappear). Quite alarming isn't it?

It's an interesting article, and one of the comments puts it "It's like Google could be going through its own private y2k crisis"

It's puzzling, no one except Google knows how they manage their index and ranking, all anyone can do is observe the end product and draw conclusions and theories from that.

I've noticed myself that if you search for "the" in Google you'll get far more results than the limit posted on the Google homepage. Maybe Google's index is much larger than anyone thinks and the homepage number is a low priority to them as long as no one has a higher one (Google increased the number in 2003 just days after AllTheWeb.com posted a record index of 3.2 billion pages).

An interesting post on the blog of Nick Bradbury, asking for advice in how to deal with a disgruntled user of his TopStyle CSS Editor.
The user is demanding $1,000 in damages because when he uninstalled the trial version of the program, it was still associated with CSS file types in Dreamweaver and he couldn't edit them. He also threatened a lawsuit and to launch an advertising campaign against Bradsoft if he is not paid.

Apparently changing the setting in Dreamweaver for CSS editors will solve the problem.

It just looks like a misunderstanding of the controls in Dreamweaver, but the posts the user made about it could be damaging to the good name of Bradsoft with titles like
"WARNING: TOPSTYLE TRIALWARE HIJACKS DREAMWEAVER"
and lines like
"Will someone from Macromedia contact Bradsoft and tell them to quit using DW as a hostage?".

The response from Nick Bradbury on the Macromedia newsgroups where the complaints were posted: "Yes, and it was TopStyle on the grassy knoll that day, too."

Some new updates to the Google AdSense service:

Publishers can now display three ad boxes per page (previously only one was allowed) Info: »»

Multiple domains can now be included when setting up a search box for your site and they're dropping the Websearch name, it will now just be referred to as AdSense for search.Info: »»

Collapsible ad units - ad boxes can be set up to revert to a blank space on the page if there's no relevant ads available Info: »»

A strange one - Google are experimenting by changing the familiar "Ads By Google" to "Ads By Goooooooooooogle". It's been suggested in one of the forums I read that by changing the ad code it may defeat ad-blockers which block AdSense, or it may just be a way of drawing more eyeballs to the ads with a change from the familiar. Info: »»

For a roundup of the different changes that have been made to the official AdSense policies and F.A.Q. pages, check the analysis by Jenstar from the webmasterworld.com forums (Reg. required).

Google look to have a strategy to extend and make as accessible as possible the AdSense program; they recently opened the doors to the millions of bloggers who were previously excluded from the program by a rule stating personal sites would not be allowed, and AdSense for search is also a fairly new addition, which allows site owners to earn income from Google searches made from their sites.

More info:
·Google AdSense
·Google AdSense F.A.Q.
·General tips by Google for success with AdSense
·Webmasterworld.com AdSense forum - Frequented by an official Google representative, AdWords Advisor

Via searchenginelowdown.com

Copernic released their Desktop search program today.
Via a search box in the Windows taskbar, it allows you to search easily for:
· Pages & news on the Web with AllTheWeb.com
· Products on Copernic's shopping site
· Emails and Contacts
· IE history and bookmarks
· Any file on your system, including music, video and images

I have only lightly tested it but the results so far have been served up near instantly for me, and according to the F.A.Q., it shouldn't cause any slowdown on the system by only indexing when there's a low use of resources by other programs.

The image search is cool, displaying all results as thumbnails along with the dimensions and location on the hardrive. The music search is very effective also, it seems to be able to search within the id tags on .mp3's and there's an option to open the files in your default media player.

I was mainly looking for the ability to search within the text of my own files; and it seems to do this very well, but in the results, it doesn't show a snippet or any other information except for the filename and location.
Clicking the links allows you a quick preview in Copernic, but this is user-unfriendly to my mind because each result requires an extra click to get more information.

It is still a vast improvement on the terrible terrible search built into XP, and it allows you to find things efficiently, but I've recently seen the value in caching articles and pages I'm interested in on my system (like Furling to my hard drive) and a search engine with all the functions of a web search were what I was looking for.

I had hoped this would work well with the Slogger history cache, and it does index them without any problems, but the filenames generated by Slogger are pretty featureless (only the date and time the page was saved) so the results in Copernic don't give me much information about the files that contain my queries.

It is a very good piece of software all in all though, extensible to include any file types you wish to include, just in my opinion the results interface leaves out some basic features most people would expect from a search engine.

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Added
Martin Bouchard of Copernic sent a message in reply to my comments above:

Thanks for your positive feedback on our Copernic Desktop Search software.

To solve the problem you mentioned "Clicking the links allows you a quick preview in Copernic, but this is user-unfriendly to my mind because each result requires an extra click to get more information", we would need to keep a text copy of all document in cache (like Google). This would take more space on the hard drive but would permit a quick abstract feature and even faster document previewing. We will probably have this implemented in the next version as an option for those who don't mind using additional space on their hard drive.

Also, the next version will probably have a full Web page history indexing function so you would be able to natively search the content of the pages you visited. We're also evaluating FireFox support for next version.

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Check out Copernic Desktop Search here

Related software:
· blinkx - Another recently released desktop search program, suggests files based on what you're currently viewing, though less extensible than Copernic
· HotBot Desktop - The first desktop search to be released that plugs in to IE. also includes Web, history search and RSS reader
· Slogger Firefox Extension - Archive the full text and media of pages with this browser history extension

I recently found the Slogger extension for Mozilla Firefox; it's like a super charged version of the default browser history.
It saves every page you visit to a hard drive folder you specify, including all associated media and images on the page, like the "Save Page As" option in file> menu.

What I like about it is you can set it to save each page automatically and just forget about it, leaving it to quietly save everything until you need something.
It can be configured to only save the text of the pages to save disk space, or you can disable auto save and just click a button on the toolbar to save individual pages.

A good desktop indexing program would work nicely with this to make the history searchable - request to blinkx, please let me configure which file types to index.

A similar history enhancing tool (with built in search) is available for Internet Explorer, the Recall Toolbar, or if you like the advantage of having your saved pages archived online, check out Furl.net.

More info:
· Slogger homepage
· Slogger help pages