Reality: Every business, big or small, wants to save money wherever they can. I appreciate this. I understand with this. What I don’t understand, however, is why so many businesses try to take the cheap means and cut corners in their Online approach— and then are amazed when they get scammed/get terrible results/get blocked by Google. I know how terribly costly it can be to launch, uphold, and ...

Google’s latest search algorithm change designed to fight spam and improve its search results went live yesterday. Plenty of people are seeing its impact already. Better or worse? It’s easy to find some examples of things being bad; it’s hard to say overall if there’s been a net improvement or not. Judging Relevancy Is Tricky I’ll go through some examples, but let me start with some caveats. ...

By Tom Simonite The Web isn’t kind to new search engines. Several newcomers, including Cuil, SearchWikia, and Searchme, have all debuted and disappeared in short order in recent years. A new challenger, Blekko, which launched today, hopes to avoid their fate by finessing its results in Wikipedia-like fashion. It’s a method intended to block the low-quality pages that pollute the results ...

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company’s search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past. Eye candy: This visualization shows the connections between different places, companies, and people, following a search using Recorded ...

For the past few years, computer scientists have touted Web-search data as a way to spot emerging trends–from changes in housing prices and unemployment numbers to the next box-office hit or the location of the next flu epidemic. But research released today gives a more nuanced view of what these data are good at predicting, and why. Credit: Technology Review A group of researchers at ...

Searching the Web could become faster for users and much more efficient for search companies if search engines were split up and distributed around the world, according to researchers at Yahoo. Credit: Technology Review Currently, search engines are based on a centralized model, explains Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a researcher at Yahoo’s Labs in Barcelona, Spain. This means that a search engine’s ...

Later this week, a new “real-time” and “social” search engine called Wowd will open a beta version of its service to the public. The company says that its search results include only pages that have actually been visited by its users, and that its ranking algorithms offer information based on its freshness and popularity. Real-time search: Wowd indexes pages visited by ...