Firefox blow the 20 million mark

Good news. I'm also happy this blog have a majority of none-IE visitors !

Google will flirt with a open source project ?

Here the job post for that position. For a new VoIP project ?

Google Definition now link with Answer

Nice move. The Answers site is by far more complete than the Dictionary site. I just love to see more languages to come at Google. In other country, Google is by far more popular than Yahoo and MSN and it is time to Google to think about that.

Google Video will allow preview

Seem the new Google Video Beta, who should be call Google VideoTranscript for now, will add preview of video soon if I understand the three last lines of the Robots.txt file at Google :

• Disallow: /videosearch?
• Disallow: /videopreview?
• Disallow: /videoprograminfo?

A new Googler been censored ?

Here is the story of Mark Jen. Here is the Yahoo Cache of his blog. Here is old blog at Microsoft.

Google Video

The Google Video Beta is now live. It's not, for the moment, to find a movie to see it on your computer like the also new Yahoo Video, but more a way to search the transcript of the programs on air recently (about 2 weeks as I can saw). It's also a way to see when your favorite program will be on air.

It can be also a good way to see the hot news of the past days and where it was been on air ;-)

Here the About page of Google Video.

Google increase the words limitation in searches

Really nice move, but it's work not well all the time !

Google phone home ?

May be, may be not !

Really bad year for Yahoo and MSN in France

The difference is search engine statistics from US, Canada and France, as I already post here, are now even bigger as you can see in this year 2004 graph page at Baromètre Weborama. The first graph of each SE represent a general panel and the second one is for the professionnal panel. Thoses data come from 30,000 sites with 2 millions users by day.

Google Boolean operators going nuts

Here a french post (easy to understand) by Jean Véronis about the Google Booleans operators results who are illogical.

MSN use now is own index

The search at Msn.com now use is own index (the MSN Search beta) and not seem to use anymore Inktomi. The results is sometimes very poor. On a search on "bleuetiers" (blueberries plants in french) 4 of the 5 first results are totally irrelevant :

Number 1, 2 and 4 are there only because they have a address of "rue du bleuetiers" (blueberries street) and number 5 is a listing of publications with 3 occurences of the word !

Yahoo got a record year ! But where are the million$ from Google ?

Here the article of ClickZ.

For the full year, it recorded net income of $840 million, or $0.58 per share.

But where in the above article is the money from Google ? :

Google Inc. has one fewer page of negative search results to its credit today after it settled a patent infringement lawsuit brought by rival search firm Yahoo Inc. Victory, however, comes at a price, which in this case will include charges of $260 million to $290 million and a first-quarter loss.

...

Under the terms of the settlement, Google will issue 2.7 million shares of stock to Yahoo. The deal also resolves another dispute with Yahoo over stock issued last year under a 2000 agreement between the two companies. All told, the settlement is worth about $328 million to Yahoo, assuming the Sunnyvale company sells all its shares at $121.50, the midpoint in the per-share range that Google has suggested for its initial public offering, or IPO.

CFD tu peux m'aider à comprendre ?

What's next for Google ?

Funny (sic) speculation theory :

• Google is no more just a search site and spreading on library
• Google is no more a search site and spreading ON the Web
• Google seem to reverse the court on trademark
• Google is one of the biggest Web advertisers with Adwords and Adsense
  
• Google seem to be the major main source of digitalized data
• Google control Blogger, Picasa, Gmail, Orkut, Hello, Keyhole, Froogle, Catalog, Answer, Groups (usenet), AdWords, AdSense and is inside of your computer with the Toolbar and Desktop search
• Google planning to build a global fiber-optic network
• Carnivore failed and seem to be out of the US security eyes

What's next ? Carnivore will be replace by Google and Big B in the near future ?

Goog Record at $204.60

A new height for the Google action at $204.60 !

"In" is the new Google standard word to check the index

Since Google update is number of pages indexed in last november to 8,058,044,651 he also manually tweak the number of results for the 6 most used words to 8 billion. Here are the 12 most used word in english :

the = 8,000,000,000 / a = 8,000,000,000 / for = 8,000,000,000 /
to = 8,000,000,000 / of = 8,000,000,000 / and = 8,000,000,000 /
in = 7,560,000,000 / is = 3,820,000,000 / that = 2,690,000,000 /
it = 2,570,000,000 / he = 687,000,000 / was = 69,100,000

Google Mini and Baby and Yahoo Baby

Google release a mini appliance box good for 50k documents. He gonna love it. But this one may be not ;-)

SEC probes Mamma : Will this affect the Copernic deal ?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing links between Mamma.com Inc. and Irving Kott, a legendary Canadian stock promoter with a long history of run-ins with the law.

Will this affect the Copernic Deal ?

Big Corpo Going into the Blogging World

Really nice move from the marketing department of GM to lauch GM Fastlane Blog now under the name of Par Catalog. As you can see, the comments are open and it's a really nice focus group style. The trackback also give huge visibility to the site.

I'm jalous about the viral spreading of this blog. In less than a week in already have 221 links from 139 sources in Technocrati !

After the IR Report and the Webster Word of the Year, the big company will start to allow some ressources to this (new;-) form of communication really useful to the marketing side of the business.

From my experience, blogging since 2001 in differents forums and collaborative blogs, 90% of my contracts came from my blog posts.

Google Group (Usenet) Timeline

Good move from Google to extract facts from the past 20 years of Usenet archives.

Less than 20% of MSN staff use their own search engine

Really funny data on Yahoo, MSN and Apple staffs search engine habits !

GuruNet launch a free Answers

The Answers super encyclopedia is now free without subscription fee !

Google lost VP Marketing

Post-IPO effect ? The viral marketing approach of that person was genial ! Dommage.

Google Complete ?

A new entry in the Robots.txt of Google is disallowing the Complete directory. At first I was thinking it was there for the Library project, but this is located under the Print subdomain. After I thought is was for Google Suggest (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en) but I'm don't think the Suggest function need a directory for that because it is mainly a javascript program on the client side.

Anybody have a idea what the Complete Project stand for ?

Google Suggest Reversed Engineered

Nice work by Cris Justus to decode the javascript process of Google Suggest !

Yahoo Maps Real-Time Traffic Report

We can't stop progress !



For trafic in Montreal this morning you can look here ;-)

Yahoo Promote Media RSS with his (new) Yahoo Video Search

Nice thing, but should be embed in file by hardware/software as well, like the meta information embed in jpg with the digital camera. Here are the draft specification. And there is the Yahoo Video Search.

Huge victory for Google on trademark ads

Here is the Reuter short story. This will rise the buying of your own trademark in Google Adwords !

Promise of publication : Yes Sylvain is the number one

Little inside : Yes, my friend Sylvain is still number one on is first name on Google. The proof right here on his Treo 600 :

The most important university libraries will be Googlize

Google gonna digitize millions of books available at Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library to make them available in its index.

Google News add new languages

Argentina, Chile, Canada Français (yé), México, Österreich, Schweiz or Suisse.

Google add real-time suggestions to is form

Google suggest is out for english queries :



The number of results is a really smart idea, because if you see huge number, you will refine your search before having results page. à

Update : Also work in french.

IBM PC unit going to China

A $1,25 billion deal have been made with Lenovo of China. Big Blue turning red !

Copernic Desktop Search v 1.2 now fully support Mozilla Firefox

Here is the press release :

December 7, 2004, Boston, MA – Copernic today announced the availability of a new and improved version (1.2) of its award-winning Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) product that fully supports the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. CDS 1.2 also features up to 200 percent faster indexing of PC hard drive content, reduced memory usage, and better compliance with French, German, Spanish and Italian content.

“CDS continues to get rave reviews from press, analysts, consultants, and bloggers, and has won multiple awards, including the CNET Editors' Choice award,” said David M. Burns, CEO of Copernic. “And now CDS is the only production desktop search product with full Mozilla Firefox support.”

CDS 1.2 features lightning-fast indexing of PC hard drive content and improved PC memory usage. The new CDS version also indexes browsing history and bookmarked sites from Mozilla browsers. According to Web analytics company OneStat.com, Web browser products from the Mozilla Foundation continue to gain on Microsoft’s market leading Internet Explorer (IE). Although IE still owns 88.9 percent of the market, Mozilla-based products jumped to 7.4 percent in October. The Mozilla Foundation reports that more than 5.6 million copies of Firefox 1.0 have been downloaded in the two weeks following the product launch.

“We are happy to see that Copernic is providing support for Firefox,” said Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation. “We are close to 10 million downloads in almost a month since the release in November, and developers are taking notice.”

“CDS 1.2 is our third significant product update within three months, while competing products are still in the early development stage,” said Eric Bouchard, EVP of Products for Copernic. “CDS is available in five languages and is simply ahead of the pack in every aspect: features, usability, speed, quality, manageability, user privacy, localization, and now full support for Mozilla’s Firefox browser.”

Improvements in CDS 1.2 include:

* Mozilla Firefox history and bookmarks indexing
* Up to 200 % faster indexing of hard drive content
* Support for the latest PDF file format (v1.5)
* Optimized PC memory usage
* Improved handling of French, German, Spanish and Italian content
* Redesigned user interface for Web searching
* Miscellaneous performance and compatibility improvements

About Copernic Desktop Search

CDS brings the power of a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use search engine right to your PC and allows you to instantly search files, e-mails, and e-mail attachments stored anywhere on your PC hard drive. Using a streamlined, intuitive user interface, CDS performs sub-second searching of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDF's, all popular music, picture and video formats, contacts, browser history, and favorites. With seven separate technology patents pending, CDS represents the state of the art in desktop search design.

CDS works with Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or later. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/. More information about what's new in version 1.2 is available on the product Web site.

Canadians : Chilly online buyers but broadband lovers

Here is the Emarketer latest study : Canada: The Online Enigma

Google WayBack URL

Can anyone explain why this link http://www.google.com////// give us that ?
Via Zorglob

WebSphere will be more SE friendly

Finally somebody wake up at IBM to improve the resulting URL of Websphere !

Hera a example of the resulting URL of WebSphere fo now:

http://www.entreprises.gouv.qc.ca/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/
7_0_CQ/.cmd/adj/.c/6_1_M1/.ce/7_1_1NG/.p/5_1_130/.d/0/_rp.7_1_1NG/
LnJlcW1ldGgtR0VULnJlcXVybC04OTM4MTM3QTI3MzUwMkU1NTFDMDAwNThBREM5NE
U0NzExOTg0MjI0QTY5RDZGREUzRTVCMDU4MDk3OEM3OEY4MjYxMkJGQTBDM0Y3QjRB
QkYyODUyRTkyNjQwMTJFN0U3NTBCMDBDNzlFODk4MEVDQzlFNTRBRkYzOTEwNzQ0Rk
MwQTNDQkVEQkUwQzRFNDZGQzcxQzA1MUE1Nzk3OUY3MDA2MDYzOUQ3NzI3MTBBODU0
RUMxNDYyQzhFMjRFQzc2RDJBQTFGNzBCMjEzNEQ4MTQ3RUQ0NEI2NTI0MTY5N0VFNj
lENzY1QjMyM0YxRjU5MTE0RkI2MUM5RkQ1QUU3

Incredible no ? They should keep that version for encryption purpose ;-)

Microsoft launched MSN Spaces Blog service

Here it is with the possibilities of photos, lists, music and categories. But like the lauched of MSN Beta Search few weeks ago, it seem suffer from heavy traffic at the moment and you get a lot of errors like ".NET Passport Unavailable at This Site" ;-).

Interactive Printed Edition

Finally a good use of web stats!

Blog is THE word of the year !

A bit late for my point of view but a good news to spread ! Will RSS will be the 2009 word ?

Google handle around 30 petabytes of data

In this interview of Zdnet, Urs Holzle, VP Engineering, give some metrics on Google GFS.

1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes
1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes

FYI : The Internet Archive Wayback Machine deal with only 1 petabyte!

Google versus Microsoft : Who gonna win the battle of lucrative movie market ?

Seem Microsoft and Google will try to Amazoned the new (after the buble crash) virgin market of digital video & movie ads !

Pros

• A movie ad is fare more lucrative than any other ads. You can also provide links to dvd sellers, cinemas, products placement and even movies database!
• Highband connections is coming the standard in north america

Cons

• Copyright and agreement nightmares to offer a wide sets of clips, trailers and movies
• Inserting commercials in the clips/movie to bypass some adblock system
• Huge bandwith and storage capacity

Will see next year...

Products Placement in Blog

It's there and it's already have a huge covering !

Mamma plans to acquire Copernic

Big move in the Quebec province today. Mamma media solutions (mamma.com), from Montreal is going to acquire Copernic technologies from Quebec city.

Update: This deal seem to not include the newly create Enterprise Search company Coveo.

Google will seek SE spammer

A new posting on the Google Jobs section have the title of Quality Rater. They are looking for part-time remote workers from US and Canada to help with search quality evaluation on a project basis.

Lycos going in the SEO business

Lycos is going in the Search Engine Optimization business with his Insite Site Side Optimization solution. A bit weird for a SE to offer optimization service. Will they boost rankink for their clients in Lycos ? Did they will loose some ad revenue by Google ?

But at $200 by page with extra monthly fee to monitor the result, it is not frightening for us.

Google Serp's Estimate : As low as 0,000075

Sometime Google tell us a really huge number like this query! Results 801 - 817 of about 10,900,000. Ouch ! Should make a contest to find the lowest one. The Google Goof is born ;-)

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 817 already displayed.

Best Search Engine : Huge difference by country

Here a table who show the search engine statistics by country :



US stats from ComScore published in SEW
France stats from Baromètre/Xiti.
Canadian stats from 5 Canadian sites generating more than 800k/unique visitors by month

Hypothetic Future Convergence of the Web

After a summarization about the biggest innovations since 15 years (they forget ICQ for the IM venue), this movie of Robin Sloan predict the next convergences of the IT industry for the next 10 years. The Google Grid is one of the most credible and I love to see also the TiVo move by Google.

Rich Media Is Rising Star of Online Ad ? Not so sure !

Here a Emarketing prediction were I really don't agree with. Specially for thoses and particulary for this marvelous tool.

Google Scholar : Another nice move over Yahoo

Google Scholar have been launched yesterday !
This is one of the good Google move, without the dollar sign place at first objective, for now. It also offer some new informations to us with the crawl in the invisible Web. The citations ranking results are also a very good choice over the PageRank.

This project have probably germinated at Google with the Open WorldCat program in january 2004.
It is weird that nobody at Yahoo wake up and make something like that after their index got more than 2 time the size of the Google index of Open WorldCat ?

Here two good reviews of the Google Scholar : The librarians view and the search engine specialist view.

Special version for MSN Beta Search in Quebec

In France they got MSN Search.
In Quebec we got MSN Recherche. But they forgot to traduce the title of the page and make a little mistake in the traduction of the option box (pages en Canada).
Here the explanation why Québec is so distinctive.

Internet Ad Spending Skyrocket

Here a little snippet from a CNET article written 16 month ago:

According to the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, commercial search in 2002 accounted for nearly $1 billion in total sales, an increase of 210 percent over 2001. Researchers expect the paid search market to reach as much as $4 billion by 2005.

From the same source (PwC) a new article written by Clickz 2 day ago:

Revenue for the first nine months of 2004 totaled slightly over $7.0 billion, compared with the $7.3 billion in revenue reported for all 2003. Based on these numbers, 2004 could be a record year, beating the previous $8.0 billion revenue record reported in 2000, according to Pete Petrusky, director of advisory services at PwC.

That will normaly almost reach the $10 billion with this christmas quarter! Doh!

The new standard word for guessing the Google index size

With the new increase of the Google database, the guys at Google have manually fixed the number of results for the two most used words of the english langage. They both show us a 8 billion flat results.
Now we will have to use the third most popular word to follow the size of the Google index. (7,840,000,000 results today)

Torino 2006 adopt Exalead solution for his search engine

The official site of the XX Winter Olympic games have choose the Exalead solution to search all the Olympic sites involved in thoses winter games (CONI, IOC and Torino 2006 Merchandising and Educational websites as well).

One of the features is the results can be group by; the 4 langages, the 4 sites involved in the WG, the type of documents (kind) or by refining by keywords.

Google2 Browser ?

Funny to see on my Sitemeter statistics on browsers share, a new one with the name of Google 2 after all the meme with that recently !?!



By the way, I really proud to see I got a majority of readers who use someting else than IE. Thanks everyone !

MSN Beta Third Impression : Cheating with numbers

MSN Beta Search will only show you the first 500 results for a query. If you got less than 500 results you will see normally the double of the real number. Just add "count=100" at the end of URL and you will see the number slice by 50% or more.
First search : 61 results
Same search with 100 results : 26 results !!!
Same search at Google : 201 results (but 196 real pages)

MSN Beta Second impression : Wrong target

The integration of Encarta in the search engine is a good idea but the implementation is a bit weard. Why you can have the answer of the birth of Matisse but not the same for Dali ?
You can have the date of death of Beethoven but not the one of John F. Kennedy ?

Here is the help page for Facts search.

My second impression about MSN Beta Search is it will hurt more AskJeeves at the place of targeting Google or Yahoo!

MSN Search Beta First impression

I always test a new search engine with a word who is not popular on the web and who I know the better source pages for that word because I made a site 8 year ago who have a few pages dedicated on it.
Here is the query for that word who mean "blueberries plants" in english.

First : The results are the same as the MSN Tech Preview of this summer.

1-9 of 214 containing bleuetiers

• Why 9 results shown on first page ?
• Number 1 and 2 are only there because the word "bleuetiers" is the street name of that company !
• The first page of results is very bad except result 6,7 and 8
• The 214 results is not true, if you go to page six, the results stop at 52 while Google have 218 real results !

The 2-3 dozens other queries I made this morning are betters but my first impression is MSN is as good as Altavista !

With a delay of 10 months Brin get it

In early january 2003 Sergey Brin of Google give that interview where in hope to see Google get the cap of 10 billion pages. We get it today :



Are the Google peoples afraid of the launch of the new (sic) MSN beta search ?

Google add POP3 feature to Gmail

Gmail have now the possibilities to forward your Gmail message to your other mail account or to configure it directly on the Gmail Pop3 server. You can also create a filter to forward certain type of message.

How much you bet Yahoo will stop charging for that service in the next days ?

Research on B2B buyers by Marketing Sherpa & Enquiro

Here is the 17 pages research (pdf) fill with a lot of easy reading tables. Here some interesting snippets :

• Place users go is search (64%), followed by going directly to a well known manufacturer (19%) and going to a portal on the industry (6.6%)
• 82.9% of the searchers chose Google as their engine of choice
• With users with a Masters degree, Google was the favorite of 86.6%
• 36.8% of buyers researched and purchased online while 27.3% researched online but purchased offline
• 69.6% use traditional organic listings (76.7% for Google users) versus 24.6% use sponsored listings
• The organic ranking click rate is 27.4% for the first position, 19.5% for second and 12.8 for third rank
  

Google index increase to 9,58 billion

Wow a 33% increase since this post 10 days ago !!!



Update : 11h24 EDT
On a medium site (10,000 pages) the number of pages indexed have a 25% increase.
On a big site like CBC.ca / Radio-Canada.ca the number of pages indexed increase from more than 15,000 pages since yesterday just for the section (yesterday 14,900) of the Archive (yesterday 16,700) !

Google add a Firefox page to celebrate the launch of Firefox 1

Here is the Firefox page at Google displaying a new tip at each page load.

PPC keywords rise 14 percent in the last month

Good news for the SEO who make organic optimization.

RSS news parsing + Flash = 10x10

Interesting Flash application who use three main RSS sources (Reuters World News, BBC World Edition and New York Times International News) to give you the 10x10 grid who show you the hundred most popular news of the hour.

Hard end of week for Goog

May be that is the answer for the bad performance of the last days. Or may be also this !

GDS Plus v1: Third Party Add-on for Google Desktop

The add-on tool made by Larry Gadea allow to crawl more types of text files by the Google Desktop. It also can be used to tell Google Desktop wich type of files you do not want to be indexed.
The PDF is still not working with that add-on.

Google : The new locomotive of IPO

From the Globe and Mail article here a promising snippet for the future of the techno industry :

In fact, October turned out to be an especially strong month for new stock issuance. The 33 companies to come to market for the first time represent the most IPOs in a single month since 60 came in August 2000, according to data from Thomson Financial in New York.

Google reach the 6 billion

After almost reach $200 in trade today, the other index of Google the "the" search pass the cap of 6 billion:

MSN future look ?

From the Serch Engine Watch Blog here some screen shots of the next MSN look ?



In this one you can see a PC tab and the Search Builder Box (a advanced search) open! The MSN Desktop out soon ?



In this one with a click on Result Ranking you will see appear three sliders like some used at Yahoo shopping.

Google for president

Too funny paper by the Standford Daily Online Edition!

MapReduce : The programming model who give us the Florida update ?

A new report (pdf) on MapReduce, the new programming model use by Google to processing and generating large data sets, his now at Google Labs, I found thoses :

We wrote the first version of the MapReduce library in February of 2003, and made significant enhancements to it in August of 2003, including the locality optimization, dynamic load balancing of task execution across worker machines, etc.

The update of the Google index following thoses was in mid-november and was the most talk about update. Coincidence ?

Fidelity : A $325,2 millions in less than 2 month with Google stock?

Remember this post (but with a broken link inside now) the 10th of september ?

Here a new link with the same story here:

Google Stock Gobbled by Fidelity Investments

Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest mutual fund manager, bought $549 million of stock in search engine Google’s IPO, about 23 percent of the shares offered during the initial public offering. Fidelity reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it now holds 5.21 million Google Class A shares. That’s about 16 percent of Class A stock and 1.9 percent of Google’s total shares outstanding.

The Boston Herald reports

“We don’t comment on buying or selling of individual securities, nor on SEC filings,'’ said a Fidelity spokesman yesterday. Fidelity’s fund managers tend to be shrewd, but on balance conservative, stock pickers. “Fidelity has a very good research department, and a particularly good group of technology analysts,'’ adds John Bonannzio, commentator at Wellesley-based research firm Fidelity Insight.”

The Herald adds that Fidelity could be sitting on a $100 million dollar profit in a month - wow.

This last line is the best! Not $100 but normally at least 325,2 million dollar profit in around 40 days if you look at thoses:

5.21 million actions (buy in august and september) x $110* = $573,1 million
5.21 million x $172.43** = $898,3 millions

* Higher price reach since the IPO at the moment of the news release of the buy)
** Price at closing today
Difference : $325,2 million at least in less than 2 month!!!

Google : Since 1999 a 437,115 percent increase

From the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (pdf) :

Is it enough to measure success by revenues alone? How about when your company name actually becomes a hip verb, when your site is used for everything from getting the lowdown on possible love interests to finding critical medical information? Or when your IPO becomes the cause célèbre of the business world?

Google is an Internet phenom if ever there was one. But unlike so many earlier phenoms that tanked, Google has revenues. Indeed, they posted $220,000 in revenues in 1999 and $961,874,000 in 2003, an increase over five years of 437,115 percent.
A play on the word googol, which refers to the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, Google is now an unlikely household name. The search engine company first opened its doors in 1998, and while in beta mode, answered 10,000 search queries a day. Word got out and in one year, the service was answering more than half a million queries daily and had Red Hat as its first commercial search customer. Oh, and they tossed the beta label, as well.

Yahoo slowly put its tentacles in China

A few others parternships with China for Yahoo! When you look how internet connections already reach 6 millions users in the only town of Beijing, you see the huge market there !!!

Gates: PC will replace TV, TV will become a giant Google

A not so bad article, and at first thought make me laugh at the first paragraph :

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates must see Google everywhere he looks these days. He must even see Google when he closes his eyes, and enters that lucid dreaming state from which all of Microsoft's great strategies eventually emerge. What he sees at that moment, we imagine, is a Tellytubby landscape that looks a lot like the Windows XP default wallpaper - perhaps with Chairman Bill himself as the sun. But bouncing across this happy vista are the red, green and blue colored balls that have rolled out of the Google playpen.

But after reading the others one, for one of the first time I agree with the comment of a writer of the Reg.

Meanwhile, and this is even more astonishing, digital TV has become an object of widespread derision in the UK. For the first time in its history, the word "digital" has negative brand connotations. Such is the pushback against glitchy digital TV streams, full of drop outs and hiccups, and hard-to-use controls, that people are beginning to clamor for the analog signal to remain on. "Digital" now means "crap", which should give lazy marketeers some pause for thought. TV is becoming associated with the kinds of problems people associated with PCs. It's true a few programme formats lend themselves naturally to some form of interactivity: particularly live TV which invites vox pop polls or comments. But these gimmicks actually get in the way of programming with a conventional narrative pull: such as a movie, a drama or a footie match.

That one make me remember the party I got with friends, not seen for a while, a few day ago. They were around 28 to 45 years olds, and the majority are just new (around 1 to 3 years) with "new" technology. I was shock to see that party focusing on a joystick :

They were completly addick to a Xbox boost with a 200 gig drive and full of MP3, video clips and TV shows record on it with a easy to use GUI program to handle it. Almost 75% of the peoples who was there already have DVD and use and computers at work, but were totally obsessed by the Xbox hack to TV where you can have the total control with a Joystick, and make me a bit sick while the TV and Xbox take the control of the party ;-)

Warning for French trademark keywords use in Overture

The french keywords suggestion's page of Overture now show this warning about registered trademark :

Remarque 2: Vous pouvez vérifier si un mot clé correspond à une marque déposée en vous rendant sur le site de l'INPI* (http://www.icimarques.com)

Translation : You can verify if your keyword match a registered trademark by going to INPI* site.

*National Institute of Intellectual Properties

Hope they will make some distinction between other country using french language and France ! Will Google Adwords will make the same warning after their French trials ?

Microsoft Catalog Index

A unknown Microsoft (2000 and up) service is the Indexing Catalog. Not very easy to setup, it build a index like GDS and CDS before you can use it. After that it will show you that form to perform your query :



Well, its fast, and that's it. In a test query I made on MCI versus a normal (slow) search with the research tool provide by Microsoft it found only 8 of the 19 files I got. The MCI missed 7 Word documents and 4 Word backup documents. But it is the only tools I saw for now, who perform also searches in CSS.

The lack of a nice GUI interface, the number of clicks to reach it and a glitch in the Help screen Advanced Query Syntax give me a very bad first impression.

Thanks to Dodgers Webstractions.

I will comeback on this in a Desktop Search tools comparaison soon !

Power searchers equal power buyers

Good news for SEO and SEM industry. In the Web 2 Conference the presentation (powerpoint) made by Gian M. Fulgoni of ComScore reveal that power users of search engines are clearly better clients than light or non-searchers.

Here two of the slides of that presentation:



Also notice the huge increases in some categories of goods :

Google IM protocol already embed in GDS

It seem that some new protocol "google_im://" are already inside the code of GDS. I was not so far !
Also the lack of finding other file may be explained by the use of Microsoft "index.dat" file by GDS.

GDS + Firefox + Slogger even index what Google can't see

I just test the Slogger Firefox extension who save in Html every kind (php, Websphere, asp, etc) files in a folder of your choice to let be crawl by Google Desktop. It work amazingly good. Even that page, made by Websphere, who will never appear in the Google index due to is uncrawlable url and construction, now appear in my Google Desktop query!

With that extension Google Desktop can now see ALL the pages your surfing and you could get back the textual information on a GDS search. Yes!

Here a Google query looking for a few words on the page link before. No URLs pointing to www.entreprises.gouv.qc.ca, because Google cannot crawl that page. But with GDS team up with Firefox and the Slogger extension here I can saw it in my "Results Store on your Computer".

Google Desktop : Security Warning

If you install by defaut the Google Desktop and you go check your bank account via the Web, you will have good chances to see all your account informations indexed by the Desktop application.

I you make a search after with your Bank name, you will have a good chance to see in the cached results with all your credit or debit balance at the top your screen. Frightening!!!

You should uncheck this box fast or at least, the Google Desktop should make appear a warning treath each time you enter in a secure zone with https. Specially because because it's not so easy to retreive thoses informations to delete it in your hard disk.



Can anybody tell me why the peoples at Google let this line check in your preferences ?

Update: I know if anyone a bit tech saavy can see all thoses information using my computer, it is just it make it so easy and fast to do it, even without searching specifically for thoses private informations!!!

Google Desktop second impression : Too soon

Here some test done this morning about the files it see on the Web and on your hard drive (hd) :

• .htm (web yes / hd no)
• .html?parameter (web no)
• .html# (web yes)
• .shtml (web yes/ hd yes)
• .net files without filename (web no / not test)
• .php (web no / hd no)
• .asp (web sometimes* / hd no)

*If your URL is simple like filename.asp or with clear parameters (&src=web or even .asp?cid=11623) but not working if it's like (.asp?uniqueid=21633)

Here some wrong statements I read here and there on forums :

• It can crawl other than only your C: drive if it's partionned (mine go to G:) and even find other USB drive (not verified by me)
• It can show you more than 10 results for all your files. Just add &num=100 at the end of URL

Google Desktop first impression: Frustration

Why ?

Give a bit more transparencies when you invade private life

When a program scan my hard disk I like to know at wich stage he is now, and at least see the name of files he is parsing in a status bar. That should be a minimum of good manners !

Opt-out at the place of Opt-in

Help us improve Google Desktop Search by sending non-personal usage data and crash reports.

Here again Google remain vague and don't have a minimum of clarification !

Time to crawl

Twice as much as Copernic to crawl less file!

Partial file crawling

Seem to have the 101k limit like in Web. That's make me really mad.

Html crawling

Yes, but only if your file have a .html extension, if it's .htm you can not see it! That really sucks!

IE only for Web browsing history

Even if its take Firefox and Opera as your defaut Web browser it is not taking the major hot thing in this program : The Web history!

Meta Indexing of your HTML files

No

Date of file indexed

Web History file's date is ok. Every computer files I don't open since the indexing process today have the same date of the 5 august ??? Even when I transfer few months ago 30k files from NT 4 english version with international date setting (dd/mm/yy) to my new computer with a french version of XP with date as (yy/mm/dd) don't make any problem !!!

I think I will stop were, take a cold shower, and try a bit more tomorrow before unistalled it!

Election 2004 and PPC campaing

On the third week of august I was wondering why nobody in the political field in US was not using PPC campaign ? I definitly found the answer reading this article today who was concern by the same mather :

Google apparently has a policy that bans ads that include "language that advocates against an individual, group or organization"—so attack ads won't fly.

As I seen and get echo of the campaign in US, now I understand why we not see any ads;-)

First impression on Exalead

Seem a smaller database than they talk about, but very good to manage about over optimize and SE spammer sites and very nice results with clean little sites and fair to good results for small-middle (200 - 1k pages) but poorer to big one, and also to governement web sites. The clustering is far from Clusty and the Web site location is just average like all other services (and very hard with the technology to be better for now).

But it is still in beta and really giving very good effective results within the really small delay they got to put that up (and differents from all the other "new" sources) and very good new tools and options to dig deeper with a not so bad user interface (should take a bit more minimalist view here). And with all the good and many advanced search features not seen anywhere else, you should keep a eye on it.

Hope for Google, Exalead will not merge, fusion or make a deal with Vivisimo, because if they can handle a better clustering, fusion databases or crawl them deeper with a little tweak in algo for the biggest sites, the Goog will fall under the hundred soon ;-)

Google Related Searches coming back soon ?

I notice this new line in the Robots.txt of Google a few months ago :

Disallow: /relpage/

My first thought was Google will comeback with related searches or a clustering engine, but I was not sure enough, because Relpage is also used in some database query languages.
But now, with the screen shot taken two days ago and post today on the Marc Duval blog, we got the proof Google will comeback with it soon.

New Exalead in Beta

Tons of options for this new version of the french search engine who now got a billion pages index. Here a list of the functionalities :

• Related Terms
• Related Categories
• Web Site Location
• Document Type
• Bookmark Site
• View Site in a Frame
• One or Three Columns Thumbnail Views
• Restrict Query to 11 langages
• Restrict Query to Country
• Restrict Query to four Types of Office Document or Rtf and Txt
• Site: Search
• Stemming Search
• Phonetic Search
• Approximate Spelling Search
• Sorting by Date or Relevance
• Prefix search
• Pattern Search

Exalead supports regular expression patterns. Patterns are introduced by a slash ('/') character. Within a regular expression, '.' is a special character that can represent any character, '*' stands for character repetition, '|' stands for 'or', and parenthesis are used to group characters. '?' is placed the end of a character group to make it optional.

Example:
/s.ren..pi.y/
Searches for documents with words that match the pattern S . R EN .. PI . Y -- this can be very useful to finish your crossword puzzles!
/mpg(1|2|3)?/
Searches for documents containing any of the following: mpg, mpg1, mpg2, or mpg3.

Time and Search Engine: Short term memory

A really good study on Google and Altavista and theirs problem with long term memory due to time stamp of Web documents in their databases.

Google client's parameter giving lot less results

When you use the Firefox search box Google will add the client parameter to the URL and sometimes another one name rls. when the &client= parameter is there, you will have a lot less results. Here a query for the word "the" (2,5 billions results) and without the parameter &client= you get a 5,9 billions results !!!

The beginning of the end of RSS ?

If Yahoo really start this project, I think it will be harmful to them, or to RSS if other SE also go in that direction. Hope they will find other way to make money and not corrupting the first easy way to make the web more semantic!

Google goes SMS

But for US only!

Launch of Snap

The Snap search engine is launch today by Idealab, the guys behind Overture. Here is my first experience :

Like

• Transparency for the stats they give you
• Clustering
• Refine the results
• Sort on multiple criteria

Disliked

• Frame results page
• The small database
• Pertinance of results caused by Web Popularity
• Speed

For now, it will be for me a good metric tool, but if the database going bigger and if they fix relevancy and framed results, it will be a very good competitor.

Finally a reverse phone and address lookup for Canada in french

Really nice tools for us up north and also en français pour la première fois!

Michael Moritz : I'm Feeling Lucky

The little history of the Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Moritz who put $12.5 million in Google in 99.

Moritz is too modest to say how much he has made personally from the sale - he is reported to have received up to $280 million in cash, plus stock worth more than a $1 billion - although he dismisses reports he is now a billionaire as "wickedly overstated".

Google best secret : We're a dog company

Google put up a new investor section on his site. And yes they are a dog company (e.) ;-)

We have nothing against cats, per se, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our campus would be fairly stressed out.

Web Mining, XML and SE integration of thoses ?

Nice interview with Mr. Laurie Lock Lee, principal knowledge management consultant with Computer Sciences Corporation in Australia. The last paragraphs are the better's one:

If you could command sites like Google to make one or two big changes, what might you require?

Clearly textual clustering or summarization, which is what we are seeing from companies like Vivisimo, Autonomy, Semio, and Verity. This technology on top of a Google-type search engine, which reaches even further into the rich data sources available over the internet, will make the web even more useful than it is today.

Are there major trends in WM standardization that you think people should be watching more closely?

XML is already the de-facto standard for improving the ability for machines to interpret textual repositories. I would anticipate that XML will become as pervasive as HTML. We in fact may still see a de facto standard emerge.

Hope so, because since 99, Xml seem to me is only use to produce sites from database, but not really to structure the web for a easier comprehension for machine interpretation of the pages produced.

Why Google don't encourage the users of RSS ?

Only 7% of the sources Topix.net crawls have XML feeds. I'd estimate that only a few hundreds of the top 3,000 newspapers we crawl have RSS support.

After reading the post on the Topix Blog, I'm a bit surprise that no engine, except Yahoo, clearly encourage or stimulate the use of RSS in our sites. RSS is not only useful to News site, but in a lot of sections of the site. Every of thoses pages like the; Press Release, Portfolio, Calendar, Career, New products, Investor and a lot more sections, should have a RSS feed.

You save bandwith, and your clients save a lot of time by not visiting a page not changed since his last visit or by time save to manage the spam he receive in his email box because of the subscribtion of your press release.

Why not give bonus points on ranking, or a special category, or a logo on SERPs (like Yahoo), to thoses who take time to give to search engine a more structured feed. If the crawler of Google see that feed, we don't have to run complex algo to calculate the "weight" of words in the page and save computing time ! Why not encourage thoses strutured feed ?

Search engines ads : The new Eldorado for lawyers

The Vioxx is not yet completly retired for the drugstores you can already see lawyers adwords on Google !

Trafic from SE : Yahoo and MSN gooing down while Excite making a comeback !