The new Vivísimo baby named... Clusty

One of the good sources to do searches today have been released with the name of Clusty ?!?
He one of the better SE in clustering today, specially with broad subject or for clustering the live of a friend with the exception of the mode cluster ;-)
The major problem I found is to get fresh results. Clusty is using the SE databases of; GigaBlast, MSN, Lycos, Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory and Overture. All of thoses take weeks, if not months, to get new sites in theirs index compare to Yahoo and Google.

Spam is not free for spammer, but it is cheap

Interesting study by the Microsoft Research Team about spam and specially the HIP's solution :

Moni Naor suggested using Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) to combat spam. A HIP is an image that contains distorted letters and numbers. Humans can read the HIP, but a machine cannot. Since spammers rely on machines to send and receive messages without expensive human intervention, if spammers were challenged to read a HIP their machines would fail the test. The Anti-Spam team thought this was a good idea.

"You take Cynthia's idea of using computational puzzles, and you take the idea of using HIPs and you combine that with the machine learning filter. If something comes in that's suspicious, the computer sends a challenge. The challenge says solve this computational puzzle, or solve this Human Interactive Proof," said Goodman.

By giving the user the option to solve a HIP, the user won't have to download special software to solve the computational puzzle or update their legacy computer so that it can handle the computation. They can just read the HIP and send back the answer. Spammers would have to employ and pay a lot of human workers to read HIPs, which would make spamming unprofitable.

"It costs at least .2 cents to pay someone to solve a HIP, compared to the .01 cents spammers currently pay - that's part of the reason we studied spammer costs. This changes their profit model by a factor of 20.

Also that part about the 3 categories of products been promote and how the laws in each country can moderate the spammers :

When the researchers connect this geographic information with what the spammers are selling, they're able to paint a picture of how laws might be successful in stopping spammers.

They grouped the type of products being sold into three categories. Domestic, semi-domestic, and international. Domestic products require a domestic presence. They include financial services, insurance, and items too expensive to ship internationally.

Semi-domestic products require shipping, but the cost is low. These include products such as Viagra, college diplomas, and magazines.

International products or services include those that don't require physical shipping or a domestic presence. They range from software, to porn, to swindles such as the infamous Nigerian scam.

About one-third of the spam was domestic, about a third semi-domestic, and about a third international. "This kind of analysis is really useful" says Goodman. "Given the large amount of domestic and semi-domestic spam, it shows that good laws and prosecutions in the US and neighboring countries can really help. Also, when you see such a large portion of spam that appears to be coming from overseas, you realize there's a need to globally coordinate efforts to address the problem. It also shows us that while laws can be very useful, they won't solve the problem by themselves. We have to keep working on improving the technology and standards too."

Interesting metrics about searches at Google

David Scacco Director of the Vertical Markets Group at Google share interesting data at the Channel Advisor Strategy Summit:

28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name". "Brand" keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords.

Google admits that it can only reach 5% of web page traffic via Google.com and its search partners. With their contextual ad partners, that jumps to 80%.

Via Andy

Yahoo makeover

Yahoo redesign is homepage. Less place to the directory part, more place to the Yahoo services and more customizable. Here a full screen shots of the old Yahoo page :


And the new one more compact and with lot less scrolling :

Yahoo let you find ; office documents, databases, etc

Like the Google filetype:, Yahoo got his instruction to find differents type of files with originurlextension:
Note that it is not all the results who have a mdb extension who are necessarily database.

Google hacking : Photocopiers ?

This article seem hard to believe. I know and I read some article about networked photocopiers who use hard disk to store the latest copy made, but Google can't understand image. How can those IP adress can have a decent ranking in a Google query ?

Yellow pages Canada make a deal with Google

Yellow Pages Canada make a deal with Google to include the business listing in Google Local Canada. It should also work in Google Local because, when you put a canadian city in http://local.google.com it is working too.

I hope Yellow Page will make a clear link to Google Canada Local, because for now, it is hard to find in... Google ;-)

Ask Jeeves will bring the Web search to his second step with MyJeeves

After A9 who give you a history, AskJeeves go a step further with the possibility to save and organize your materiel in sortable folder. For now it save only the tiitle and description, but it should save the entire page in a near future. Also they release today a Local search.
More info on SEW
PS: It is a really good thing for Google that AskJeeves still display sometimes up to 10 sponsored results before the organics results ;-)

Mooglezilla or Gbrowser ?

You remember the post on the Google browser ? The 26 of april Google have registered the domain Gbrowser.com. More information on Jason blog.

I hope they go to register the trademark and make a agreement with them ?

The number one secret of Google : Viral Communication ?

When you saw the launch of Gmail in April 1, releasing some new features on week-end or in holiday to make the geeks blogger (who are usualy pro-google) spread the news before news agency, or seeing some anodyne news like this article where you see about 4 paragraphs on moving service staff outside the United States but still get a new title like "Google making its mark worldwide Firm will have to play catch-up in some key nations" or excerpt title like Google's Global Growth you can tell they get lucky with the press or they got some really good PR peoples in there ?!?

Google add a few mores filetypes parsing

Google can now parse files from Autocad (.dwg and dxf)

Yahoo going in the dating business

Yahoo launch personal for 10 countries! See the tour!

The number of new services from SE is only a beginning !

Overture expanding

Good news for us here in north, Overture will expand in Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The french service of Overture was in France and was not really easy to reach for the Quebec customers.

Seem it will be in english and french now for Canada!

Google ban some big SEO company in France

Netbooster, Absolute Référencement, CVFM, Ability Référencement and 1ere Position have see their sites ban from the Google index. Thoses players, like the number one in Europe, Netbooster also been out of Yahoo.
Some of the customers of thoses agencies also get penalized. It will make a huge backlash in the SEO community in Europe.
The reasons I suspect for thoses penalities is huge quantity of doorway keywords overstuff pages generated dynamically by script to reproduce the uncrawlable database of theirs clients and huge cross-linking strategies!

When I discuss of thoses strategies on french forums and with a manager of one those company more than a year ago, they always tell me: It is impossible to do other way, they don't want to change the backend of the site nor to use Url rewriting because "blablabla" and security and "blablabla". My response was always : Tell the customer to call you *before* his next makeover and let them use costly PPC campaign instead!

May be now they will start to educate web agency to stop making uncrawlable site at the place of using bypassing way to get on the SE index.
Via Zdnet France (in french)

Microsoft Research Reorg

With the lead of Eric Brill (I love is funny linking) the new Text Mining Search and Navigation Research is one of the four new research teams with "a new hub for search" focus. Google and Yahoo should keep a eye on thoses guys.

Goog going good

A really nice week plus a history peek ($115.67) for Google!

SearchStatus : A really nice extension of Firefox

Why I love more and more Firefox ? For little extension like SearchStatus !
It use the free space of the status bar in Firefox to display the Google PageRank and the Alexa traffic ranking, and can give you all the backwards links of the main 3 search engines on a simple click, for the page you're browsing!

Microsoft get caught pants down in search engine spamming

Too funny to saw even Microsoft doing that!

A9 seriously challenge Google to innovation

With the new features like; Reference, Bookmark and Diary, the new A9 (no more beta) is a very useful search engine.

With is focus on history, the Alexa data, the new references from Guru net, the bookmark and diary combine with the really smart idea to drag your all the links and title results, from any box (movie, history, reference, etc) to the search box or in your bookmark is making A9 a very good research tool !!!

PS: If A9 can add "site:" automatically when you drag a link to the search box it will be even more useful.

Izito : A new GUI metasearch

Izito was launch today. He use Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Teoma, Wisenut, AlltheWeb and Kobala (a Nederlands search engine) and use Flash to display and arrange result. His features are :

• Tiling of result in 1, 2 or 3 columns
• Park results for future use
• Add to favorite feature

Cons:

• Problem with diacritics (é,à, etc)
• Same query with different results
• Problem with Firefox viewing the site