Search Engine News

I don't often use this site to discuss popular search engines but two of the four sites listed here are unique (new?) enough to make me cover them.

Yahoo! has shortcuts. Almost every search engine has them. The problem is finding out what they are. Yahoo! Help shows you the many shortcuts available within Yahoo! I'm a big Google fan but after looking at this site I will definitely be looking more closely at Yahoo! for some of my searches. As an example if you want to know how your favorite pro sport team did in today's game just type in the team name and the word score. Not only do you get a list of links but the latest scores from your team show up at the top of the links list. Similar shortcuts exist for finding gas prices, auto searches by VIN, time zones and area traffic reports.

Fagan Finder's URLInfo site is a great source of information for web masters, or blog masters. The site was actually so simple it took me a while to get used to it. I was expecting something more complicated. When you visit this site a simple 3-line interactive series of URL box, and 2 tab/menu bars appear. (There's a brief intro and that's the part that confused me). Start by entering your URL in the info box. Then click on the tabs and menu choices of each to find out who has linked to your site. The searches run from Alexa to Google, Yahoo!, Technorati, Blogdex and more than I can list here.

20 Questions is what the next search news is all about. It is called Next Search Survey and is exactly what it says. It is a survey of 20 questions which will be tabulated between August 13 and November 13 of this year. The site owners promise to have the results available on the Internet by November 14. With the competition growing between search engines you can be sure search engine administrators and marketers will be looking closely at the results that show up here. This is your chance to let the search engines know what you like and what you don't. It only takes a few minutes.

Our final search link goes to ggler. No, it's not a typo. ggler uses the Google search engine and then along with the citation it displays a small thumbnail of the first page. Google provides this type of service with the search link available at the end of most citations with its cached version link. But that's an extra step. After testing this site with searches for which I was familiar with the expected results, ggler only had thumbnails for about 20% of the web sites found. Google certainly has a much higher percentage of cached sites. But ggler is a relative newcomer. Give it time and check it regularly to see if it improves.