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Thursday, November 11, 2004

MSN Search Engines

So we hear the new MSN search is about to go live. Let’s illustrate the current Microsoft search confusion:

The new MSN search brings with it new syntax as well. For example you can write keyword {mtch=50} {popl=0} {frsh=100}, which means you want a somewhat exact match on a very fresh page while you don’t care too much about popularity. The Search Builder helps you to click together these queries without knowing the syntax.

Along with the default web search there also comes a new image search. Just as Yahoo did before, MSN copies Google Images down to individual interfaces (not that anyone would mind – this makes MSN Images instantly accessible).

And we now take a glance at what seems to be the first MSN bomb [thanks Justin F.]: just enter more evil than satan and see who’s number one*...

*Spoiler: the top result is Google.com. Now compare this to 1999.

German Feeds Needed

I’m looking for a bunch of good German-language RSS or Atom feeds to add to Feeeds.com/de/. Your pointers are appreciated, via email or the forum.

Project Mimo

According to German 4websites.de, Mozilla next year plans to release a mobile phone variant of Firefox code-named “Mimo."

Firefox Criticism (and Poll)

Everyone seems to love Firefox. It’s my browser of choice as well. Which doesn’t mean everything’s perfect yet. Here are some good and bad points I see at the moment.

Exceptionally good:

Very good:

Good:

Disappointing:

Slightly annoying:

Highly annoying

Poll

On VoteLinks

I asked people in the CIWA-HTML newsgroup what they think of Technorati’s VoteLinks proposal. Harlan Messinger answered:

“No, indexing and tracking applications treat all links as indications of relevance or interest. If you don’t mean to convey to your visitors that there’s something on another site of interest or relevance to your site, then why are you providing a link to it? And if there is something of interest or relevance, why should you think so but not the users of search engines?

The idea is flawed in another way. How does the indexer know whether the referring site is itself on the “right” or “wrong” side of the issue, from the perspective of the search engine user? If a Nazi web site has a vote-against link leading to the home page of a Jewish organization, maybe the Jewish organization’s site should receive higher, not lower, priority on that account. Maybe search engine users would need to sign in with something like a geek code, so the search engine would be able to personalize the search results by weighting vote-fors and vote-againsts according to the user’s own preferences.”

Sorry Everybody

This is sad and funny: at SorryEverybody.com, there’s a gallery of half the USA (or representatives of that half) saying sorry for the re-elected President. [Thanks Jan S.]

8,058,044,651

Google is now officially searching over 8 billion pages (just look at the footer at Google.com). Google employee Bill Coughran writes in the Google blog:

“The documents in Google’s index are in dozens of file types from HTML to PDF, including PowerPoint, Flash, PostScript and JavaScript. Together these pages represent a good chunk of the world’s information, but hardly all of it. That’s why we keep building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what we find. So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it’s not the end of the road. The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages.”

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