RESOUR> [NetGold] INTERNET: SEARCH: Google: Good News / Bad News: The Tale of Two Articles

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Net Happenings - From Educational CyberPlayGround
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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 16:43:55 -0500 (EST)
From: David P. Dillard <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: NetGold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: NetGold <NetGold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [NetGold] INTERNET: SEARCH: Google: Good News / Bad News: The Tale
    of Two Articles

INTERNET: SEARCH: Google: Good News / Bad News: The Tale of Two Articles

Google Grumbles
By Brian Livingston
February 18, 2004
E-Week
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1525826,
00.asp?kc=EWNWS021804DTX1K0000599>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://snipurl.com/4l1n>

Google.com is such a sacred cow in the search business that I hate to be
anything other than worshipful. But it's beginning to appear that Google's
results pages have developed a problem with relevance, based on my
experiences and those of my readers.

In coming to this conclusion, I'm most indebted to John Meyer, the
president from 1985 to 1990 of Ventura Software, the maker of Ventura
Publisher. He's tested many more examples than I can possibly print here.

<snip>

So what's gotten into Google? It's true that some queries will always work
better on one search engine than another, as one Google executive pointed
out when I asked him about it.

"These are the types of questions that have always been best answered on
Google Groupsthere are more good technical answers there and fewer
unrelated pages," said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality.
"I think this has always been the case and is not due to any recent
changes to Google or the Web."

But I'm convinced that several changes introduced by Google over a period
of months have led to unintended side effects in its rankings.

Google's reliance on link popularity may have finally hit a wall. Past a
certain point, link counting rewards "optimized" sites rather than
lesser-known sites that may contain exactly what you need.

By contrast, Teoma last year introduced something it calls
"Subject-Specific Popularity." More weight is given to links between
authoritative sites than to other links. This approach looks to me like a
winner.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Google Boosts Search Index
By Matt Hicks
February 17, 2004
E-Week
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1528744,
00.asp?kc=EWNWS021804DTX1K0000599>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://snipurl.com/4l1v>

Google Inc. on Tuesday upped the ante in the increasingly competitive
search-engine market, announcing that it has increased its venerable Web
index to 6 billion Web pages, images and other documents.

In its core search area, Web sites, Google said that it had increased the
number of Web pages in its index to 4.28 billion, up from about 3 billion
previously. Google's index of images has doubled in size to about 880
million images, said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality.

"It's a natural outgrowth of the growth of the Web and of us understanding
better what pages are useful and which are not," Norvig said.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company's index boost comes as its
competitors build up their search engine arsenals.

Web site operators also reported this week a new Yahoo Inc. Web crawler
indexing their sites and that Yahoo was using its own search technology,
instead of Google's, for retrieving results. Yahoo officials have said
that the company plans to switch from Google by the end of March.

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The full articles may be read at the URLs found with each.


Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetGold/>
<http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html>
<http://www.kovacs.com/medref-l/medref-l.html>

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