I use Google Insights quite a bit—I find it a very useful way to measure interest in topics. Here’s one I keyed in just for the hell of it. Red is the word success and blue is the word fail. The chart covers from 2004 to today: What seems to have happened is a surge… Read More »
I find that the auto suggestions feature from Google Suggest in the Firefox search box very useful. But perhaps not in the way it was intended. Google Suggest works via algorithms that “use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses… Read More »
The whole WhenU story gets weirder and weirder. Last week Ben Edelman, the privacy hound, pointed out that the besieged pop-up provider WhenU was ‘cloaking’ itself. This means, in Ben’s words, ”using prohibited ‘cloaking’ methods to make search engines think certain WhenU servers offer content of interest to readers seeking certain search terms, when in fact… Read More »
X1 Technologies, Inc., the hard disk indexing guys, have teamed up with NewsGator Technologies, the RSS-in-your-Outlook guys, to allow fast searches through your subscribed RSS feeds and Usenet newsgroups. This basically involves an extra element in X1, which “lets a user sort through the aggregated messages and find the content they want, narrowing and displaying… Read More »
In case you haven’t heard, Amazon has launched its own search engine, A9 and a toolbar (for now compatible only with IE) which dovetails with your Amazon account. Supposed advantages over other search engines (here’s A9’s own list): Simultaneously searches Amazon’s book store while searching the web. Amazon book search results, and a history of your… Read More »