Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search

Friday, May 07, 2004

BW Online | May 6, 2004 | Web Search for Tomorrow: "the arena that Google dominates is now being targeted by all comers. From bigwig rivals such as Microsoft (MSFT ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ) to startups like Vivisimo and ChoiceStream, scores of companies are spending billions of dollars trying to come up with new and better ways to help people find information. The flurry of research not only poses a potential threat to Google's dominance, over the next few years it could also revolutionize how users search the Web"

Personalization: honing results to fit a searcher's location or preferences. An astronomy buff who searches for "Saturn" would get results about the planet, for example, not the car

Trends: search engines such as Google provide a current snapshot of information and views on specific topics available on the Web. But there's no reliable way to discern how that snapshot changes over time.

Everywhere:Probing the Internet is valuable. But much of what a user wants may be tucked away elsewhere -- stashed in a Word or PowerPoint file on a hard drive, or in e-mail archived on a server somewhere else. Grabbing such data isn't easy right now, but companies ranging from Lycos to Microsoft are exploring ways to dig out information from these sources with a single search tool.

Microsoft, for example, has a two-year-old project, dubbed Stuff I've Seen, that creates a searchable index of every last word that appears on a person's PC screen -- from work files to appointments to Web pages.

Better Results:The average search query contains 2.5 words, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. As a result, searches typically turn up hundreds of links, many of them irrelevant. A handful of startups, from Vivisimo to iXmatch Inc., are using so-called clustering technology that organizes several hundred search results into subject-specific folders.