If you are using the free RSS2HTML script on your website to display the contents of your RSS feed consider spicing up the way it displays by using an RSS2HTML template. Subscribe to the RSS2HTML templates and use as many as you like.
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
Search innovation takes can be found in many places. You don’t have to try a new search engine. You don’t even have to leave the current page of your browser. Try these three great Firefox search add-ons!
SemantiFind
SemantiFind promises to deliver more meaningful results by helping you clarify your query.
Once you have installed the SemantiFind Firefox extension, click the “Start Semantifying!” button, go to google.com and type your search terms. SemantiFind will drop down a list of possible searches that clarify your search If you search for “jaguar,” SemantiFind checks if you mean the cat, the car, or the operating system from Apple.
SemantiFind embeds its suggestions on top of your search results page, above the regular Google results. You can save or delete results to personalize what you get in future searches.
HyperWords
With HyperWords, you can select any word on any web page and do lots of useful things: You can search Google, search the website you are on, search a number of social networks like Twitter, Digg or Delicious, search for images, videos, people and news.
You can search for reference on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Google Definition and Urban Dictionary.
With HyperWords, you can share information with email, through Twitter and Twitter or a number of social bookmarking services with just one click.
There’s more: HyperWords lets you convert currency, translate text and perform advanced searches on the current page.
KwiClick
KwiClick is not exactly a search add-on. It’s more like a Swiss army knife with lots of capabilities which include search and some cool social features.
When you search using the Firefox search box, your search results will pop up in a box and be available as you surf from site to site. By the click of a button, you can move your current search term to Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, FriendFeed or Google Maps. All within the same pop-up box.
KwiClick opens videos in similar windows so you can watch as you keep surfing. It also lets you watch video comments, share videos by mail and more.
You might also want to take a look at
5 Firefox extensions that will change the way you search
GooglePreview extension for Firefox
Firefox addon summarizes Google search results
Firefox plug-in personalises search results
Customize Google
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
Scoopler is a brand new real-time search engine that aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens. It launched in Private Beta in April 2009 and in public beta on May 8.
How does it work?
Scoopler indexes live updates from services like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query, updated in real-time.
Scoopler extracts links, videos and images from the live feeds that are indexed and rank them based on how popular they are - i.e. how much they are being shared right now. In the right column, Scoopler presents a list of such popular items for your topic: news, videos and images.
But there is more to Scoopler than just real time search.
The left column shows the most popular memes on the social web right now. You also get a list of your recent searches, so you can easily juggle between search terms.
Whenever you see something you like on Scoopler, you can share it on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other services using the “share” button. It appears when you hover over content.
Is it any good?
There are lots of services out there that provide tools for monitoring trends or topics. However, many of these only index Twitter and there is a lot of additional information to be had from following sources like Delicious and Dig, like Scoopler does.
That being said, the search results are thoroughly dominated by Twitter. I would love to see more results from other sources.
Instead of just showing the top trending words or hash tags, Scoopler shows the actual headline so you get a glimpse at the story behind the trend. This adds a lot of valuable information.
You don’t have to leave the search results to check out a video, link or image. When you press the “peek” button which appears next to content when you hover over it, the content opens in a preview window in. This is very convenient.
I like Scoopler. It is easy to use and sufficiently powerful to be a useful tool for most information professionals even though it is not so advanced as to be intimidating to regular web searchers.
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Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
Here are some of the search engine news headlines we have found interesting this week:
Beyond Search May 7 2008.
Google Blog May 8 2009: Every year our founders take turns writing a letter that is included in our annual report.
A China Digital Times post includes a comprehensive list of the websites that are being censored by Baidu. (Multilingual Search May 8 )
The new MSN City Guides is an entirely re-vamped site, featuring a new design with integrated Live Search, Live Search Maps, video, content sharing, and more. (Live Search May 8 2009)
The deal centers around “orphaned works.” These are books that are still protected by copyright but are out of print (About May 9 2009)
Microsoft’s rebranded search engine named “Microsoft Kumo” is expected to launch on June 2. (Every Joe May 3 2009)
Could Microsoft find a position that Google just doesn’t do well? (Liveside.net May 6 2009)
Google is under attack for profiting from content produced by newspaper executives, magazine publishers, and The Associated Press (cnet May 6 2009)
Steve Ballmer, in his speech at Stanford, says that Microsoft is going to have to become “more disruptive in search” in order to attempt to catch up to Google. (M Pilgrim May 8 2009)
This outage seems to be impacting both web access, pop access and imap access. (SE Land May 8 2009)
Yahoo has revealed the limited testing of favicons in its search ads. (Marketing Pilgrim May 8 2009)
Wolfram Alpha, the much anticipated fact engine, was live for a search while (SE Land May 7 2009)
A patent application published by Google this week gives us a little more insight into the search suggestions that it offers. (SEO by the Sea May 8 2009)
Analyze the Performance of Your Site, Not Just Your Keywords (Jennifer Laycock May 6 2009)
The job cuts are split between US and international operations. (Marketing Pilgrim May 6 2009)
Could the net become self-aware and more from The New Scientist (Apr 30 2009)
Here are some headlines regarding the rumors of who’s to buy Twitter:
<ul
Silicon Alley Insider May 5 2009
Apple is set to offer $700 million to buy microblogging phenomenon Twitter in a deal to be announced in June (Telegraph May 5 2009)
Apple buying Twitter? Unlikely Harry McCracken argues (May 5 2009)
If Redmond wants to carve into’s Google search business it needs to offer whatever it takes to buy Twitter right now. (Silicon Alley Insider May 5 2009)
Twitter Searchwill soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages. (cnet May 6 2009)
and some more Twitter posts:
Search engine that searches accounts at Twitter, a free social messaging utility that’s hot right now. (Beyond Search May 6 2009)
Twitter is a wonderful social tool, but did you know that it’s also a goldmine of information? (Online College Degree April 27 2009)
Google is looking at ways of integrating microblogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product (SE Land May 8 2009)
And finally, life at the Googleplex in 200 seconds:
Since we have been to the Googleplex we can confirm the accuracy of this presentation, although the pace is not quite as hectic as this video seems to indicate.
Thanks to Google OS for this one.
photo credit: woodleywonderworks
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
Twitter is planning to improve its search engine in a radical way. Pandia argues that Google and Twitter need each other.
Twitter has many suitors, among them Apple and Microsoft. Still, regardless of how much we admire Apple, the match that really makes sense to us is the one between Twitter and Google.
The new Twitter search engine
This week Twitter’s Santosh Jayaram, previously manager of search quality operations for Google (GOOG), announced that the Twitter search engine will start indexing the content of pages included in tweets.
In practice this means that you can use the Twitter search engine not only to search the content of the microblog tweets themselves, but also the content of the articles people link to and recommend.
Twitter as a real-time intelligence source
This makes perfect sense, as the latest development has shown that people are using Twitter more and more as an intelligence tool, for following the latest trends and the hottest news, rather than for mindless “I am going to the store now” kind of chatter.
As Rafe Needleman of cnet observes:
“This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.”
Twitter may strengthen Google search
Indeed! But this also demonstrates why a Google/Twitter marriage will make so much sense:
Google’s challenge (well, any search engine’s challenge) is to identify the most relevant and best quality pages for any query. In news search it is also important to find the latest happenings a.s.a.p.
At the moment Google uses three ways of doing this:
Given that the regular Google search engine combines results from all of the above, Google does manage to capture much of what is happening right now.
The problem of identifying the best current news
But in some cases this is not good enough.
For regular, “old”, web search results, Google may rely on a network of links to determine the quality of a news article or blog post. The more inbound links from high quality, authoritative, sites, the more likely it is that an article is relevant and of a sufficient quality.
For news that happens right now, however, a reliable link structure has not been established, or it is fairly unreliable. Moreover, Google needs time to analyse this network of links.
This means that Google needs other kinds of input to tell what article or blog post is the best one right now for a particular query.
Twitter may provide that input, as the tweets give real time information about what the twitterati think is the most interesting stuff on the web this very minute.
Twitter doing it on its own
Now it may seem that Twitter is thinking of doing this on its own, turning Twitter search into a competitor to Google News and Google Blog Search.
If that works out and Twitter manages to develop a good enough search algorithm, Twitter Search will become a social search engine for current news.
Why Twitter needs Google
This is a big if, however. Twitter does not, for instance, have the same experience in combating spam as Google does, and spam will become a huge problem when black hat search engine marketers realize that people are using Twitter Search as a regular search engine.
They may set up a large number of interconnected “fake” Twitter accounts, sending out tweets linking to sites selling particular products or services.
Someone searching for Obama’s trip to Pakistan may soon find themselves on sites selling illustrated literature of the more unsavory kind.
Popular twitterers will also be encouraged to include endorsements and links to particular pages for a certain fee, and Twitter need to be able to distinguish between paid and regular links.
Combating spam
Twitter is already thinking of ways to ensure the quality of search results.
Jayaram says that when you do a search on a “trending” topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that.
In other words: Twitter will boost pages that are linked to from persons who have a lot of followers and retweets.
Twitter knows that it is easy to generate a large number of followers on Twitter, and already has mechanisms in place that stop people from getting too many just by befriending others.
At the moment there is a limit of 2000 friends. If you have more than that, you will not be allowed to follow more people. This means that any twitterer that has more than 2000 followers have gained them because of his or her reputation, not because he or she has followed people found on the friend’s lists of other related twitteres.
Will Google acquire Twitter?
At the moment nobody seems to know. Twitter founder Biz Stone said Wednesday that Twitter is not for sale.
Hitwise reports that U.S. visits to Twitter Search have increased 514% from January to April, and given the present PR blizzard surrounding the brand, that increase will continue for quite a while.
Maybe Twitter reckons it has a product it can develop on its own, without Google.
Still, even such a strategy may leave room for Google. One important reason for focusing on search, is that Twitter need a revenue stream. The best way of doing that is to add text ads to search results, and Google remains the champion of pay per click search.
What about Apple and Microsoft?
There have also been a lot of rumors about Apple and Microsoft buying Twitter.
Microsoft desperately needs something that sets it apart from Google in the search engine field, and buying Twitter may give the company the advantage it needs.
However, Google has more to offer the Twitter engineers than Microsoft, which means that Microsoft will have to give them a lot of money, indeed, to compensate for that.
We find it hard to see why Apple should be interested in Twitter. Apple has no search engine of its own (unless you count iTunes as a search engine), so unless they want to become a competitor to Google a Twitter acquisition makes little sense.
And why should Apple want to compete with Google in the search field? Apple do well with their combination of beautiful hardware and functional software, but their attempts at developing services in the cloud (Mobile Me) have not been very successful. Nor do they have any social web sites to speak of. This isn’t Apple’s turf and they know it.
See also: Microsoft Must Buy Twitter (Silicon Alley Insider)
Follow Pandia at Twitter: @pandianews
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Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
Google is changing the URL referral strings, i.e. the URL webmasters can see in their analytics software when someone goes to their site from a Google search result page.
This is important news for search engine marketers, as they make use of this information to analyse their search engine rankings and the effects of their search engine optimization strategies.
In this video Google’s Matt Cutts explains that the new URLs will include info on the position of the page in search results.
See also Webmaster World discussion..
More on Google Web Search’s New Referral Strings
Make Pay Per Click Pay Off Big!
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
By Lars Iselid, Internetbrus.com
Now that Danny Sullivan has started to call Twitter a “help engine” we should probably look more into microblogging as a search tool.
Microsoft Vine is now out in beta, and although I have not been selected to test the service, I would like to draw your attention to what PC World said about it on April 28:
“Vine is a downloadable application that allows you to send out Twitter-style alerts, disseminate reports with more complete information, and keep track of your Vine contacts”.
Vine is displayed as a widget on your Windows desktop and you log in with your Windows Live ID.
You may use Vine for search, as Vine…
“…culls information from more than 20,000 news sources and public information services including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children”.
Take a look at their video and fact
sheet (PDF).
Make Pay Per Click Pay Off Big!
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
The call for speakers submission deadline for the Online Information Conference is now extended to 8th May.
Whether you work in business, libraries, academia or the public sector, this is your chance to be seen as one of the leaders - with your story reaching a global audience from over 40 countries.
Lorna Candy is Head of Content for the Online Information Conference 2009, which will take place i London 1-3 December. She told us:
“We want to hear from organisations that have transformed themselves to be more agile and flexible by exploiting open linked data and conversation streams. We are looking for exciting, innovative applications as well as lessons learned from Twittering and mash-ups. We want to show case organisations that are using semantic web techniques to create new and exciting resources. And what about managing the chaos of agile development and “always beta” deployments? Have you learned how to guarantee privacy and security in this heady but chaotic world?”
If this strikes a chord, take a look at the conference themes or go straight to the submission form.
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Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
What exactly is included in the RSS Scripts Directory?
The RSS Scripts Directory includes a number of scripts for manipulating RSS feeds. The following scripts are available to subscribers.
RSS2HTML Pro - The RSS2HTML Pro is an add on script that expands the functionality of the free RSS2HTML script making it even more powerful.
RSS Mesh - The rssMesh.php script allows you to produce an RSS feed by taking the latest items from multiple feeds.
FutureRSS - The FutureRSS script only displays items thats dates have passed. Allowing web publishers to prepublish content weeks or even month’s in advance, knowing that the content will automatically be displayed at the appropriate time. Publishers can control the publication date, syndicating contents well in advance.
RSS2HTML Cache - The rss2html Cache module can be used by users of the rss2html.php script and will decrease the display time of RSS feeds. The rss2html Cache module saves the feed locally for a specified period of time, making feed retrieval much quicker.
SQL2RSS - The sql2rss.php script allows you to easily create rss feeds from SQL databases.
RSS2SQL - The rss2sql.php script allows you to easily create SQL databases from RSS feeds.
RSS Filter- RSSFilter is a PHP script that filters the contents of an RSS feed. The filters can be defined by the publisher so that the resulting RSS feed contains only the information they want. RSSFilter uses rules to filter the items that are included from a feed in the resulting feed.
Additional details on the RSS Scripts Available
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
A Firefox from the new search engine Duck Duck Go is now out of beta. It blocks 44 million spam domains, 28% of which are found in Google.
In my interview with Gabriel Weinberg, Duck Duck Go’s Founder and CEO, a couple of weeks ago, he explained how his brand new search engine has partnered with The Parked Domains Project. That project regularly crawls the Web and marks spam and parked domains. It is now marking 44 million pages, which depending on how you count, is approximately between 30-40% of the whole Internet.
How it works
The Duck Duck Go Toolbar uses the same data to prevent users from going to 44 million spam or parked domains. In other search engines, these domains often come up in search results and by slightly mistyping Web addresses.
Here is an example: If you have the toolbar installed and by mistake you type in yotube.com in stead of youtube.com, it will alert you of the mistake and ask “Did you mean youtube.com?” After a few seconds, it will then automatically redirect you to the suggested site.
Spam is a big problem
According to Gabriel Weinberg, there are approximately 80 million total .com domains, 68 million of which have active Web sites. The Duck Duck Go block list has 28 million .com domains. Depending on how you look at it, 35-41% of all .com domains are useless Web sites. With the new toolbar, you will never have to visit those useless sites.
Weinberg explains how using the toolbar also helps eradicate spam in the long run: “By using our toolbar, users can help fight typosquatting and related practices. The less people go to these spam Web sites, the less of them there will be in the long run.”
Original post by Per and Susanne Koch
