From My Inbox: Some Search Tools To Check Out

After Yahoo-Microsoft madness, there’s been a bit of a lull so I’m cleaning out my inbox and wanted to mention a few items that might be of interest. Below, a way to quickly search blogs & social media sites all at once, a new video search tool, a study into automatic search queries, an awesome […]

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After Yahoo-Microsoft madness, there’s been a bit of a lull so I’m cleaning out my inbox
and wanted to mention a few items that might be of interest. Below, a way to
quickly search blogs & social media sites all at once, a new video search tool,
a study into automatic search queries, an awesome Twitter search tool, a way to
track search rankings over time, and a compilation of Google help info for site
owners, from Google, in PDF form. Plus, a way to see headlines from blogs and news sites in a variety of subjects, including search marketing.

Addict-o-matic

From Dave Pell of Rollyo, it lets you pull
back matching results from news search, blog search, and social media sharing
sites.

What’s going on with Myanmar and the cyclone recovery? A
myanmar search lets you see
top results from major news sites, Google Blog Search, Technorati, YouTube,
Digg, Flickr, and more on a single page. Nice! Don’t want a particular source?
Just click the X in its box to make it disappear.

The NewsFix area also lets you
see sources selected for particular topics.
Thought 2.0 is kind of
fun — a variety of A-List blogs all on a single page, showing their headlines.

Snipp.TV

The pitch to me was, "a unique Video search engine that combines Speech
Recognition and Textual search to provide the capability of search within the
media soundtrack as well as on the textual file details – resulting in more
results, with higher relevancy."

Sigh.

Blinkx has had a similar pitch for some
time, nor is it the only one that has tried this. See my
Video Search Challenge
Isn’t Speech Recognition, It’s Content Owner Management
if you want the hype
dissection.

Sigh and hype-deflation all done, I guess it’s another video search site
worth keeping an eye on. Right now, Snipp tells me they have about 10 content
partners they work with, such as Reuters, CNET, and Fox News. Another 15 are
supposed to come. The video index is updated daily.



A Large-Scale Study of Automated Web Search Traffic

Last week, I did a write-up about a huge number of search research papers (WWW2008:
Search Research Paper Roundup
). Gary Price over at
ResourceShelf then pinged me about this
one. From the abstract:

As web search providers seek to improve both relevance and response times,
they are challenged by the ever-increasing tax of automated search query
traffic. Third party systems interact with search engines for a variety of
reasons, such as monitoring a website’s rank, augmenting online games, or
possibly to maliciously alter click-through rates. In this paper, we investigate
automated traffic in the query stream of a large search engine provider. We
define automated traffic as any search query not generated by a human in real
time. We first provide examples of different categories of query logs generated
by bots. We then develop many different features that distinguish between
queries generated by people searching for information, and those generated by
automated processes. We categorize these features into two classes, either an
interpretation of the physical model of human interactions, or as behavioral
patterns of automated interactions. We believe these features formulate a basis
for a production-level query stream classifier.

I got all excited hoping I’d find the paper fascinating. I’m clearly the
wrong audience, but maybe someone else will. It primarily covers ways to help
identify potential bot-generated queries.

SearchRascal

I know, I know. Tools that let you check rankings seem a dime a dozen, and
years ago I stopped caring about them when I — along with many others —
started preaching that it’s more about watching your analytics and seeing what
actually sends you traffic than guessing at terms that might send traffic and
obsessing over monitoring them.

Still, for other reasons, it’s nice to know how results have changed over
time. Search Rascal does this — tracks the top results in any query for Google,
Yahoo, and Microsoft. Check out the results for
cars. You can see if
something is new from last week, if it has moved up, down, or so on. You can do
daily and monthly comparisons, too. You can only go back in time if someone has
previously established tracking on a particular query, though.

Summize

My favorite new Twitter search tool, since it always seems to be online and
stable, unlike some other tools I’ve tried. What are people Twittering about
Xena: Warrior Princess? A search for
xena
quickly brings back me
and Oilman plotting a potential weekly
viewing night. What are people twittering about Microsoft? Try a
microsoft search. Want to
monitor something? Just use the "Feed for this query" link at the top right of
each results page to add it to your favorite feed reader.

Groowe

If you’re not using the Groowe toolbar, go get it now. It’s one of those
tools I tried and have stuck with for years. If gives you virtually all the
features of the Google Toolbar, but with a click, you can tap into Yahoo,
Microsoft, and more. It’s the first thing I install in a new browser. You can now
customize it to add additional toolbars and features not part of the default
installation. Say you want to use our Sphinn social media site.
This plug-in lets you
add a Sphinn feature to Groowe. Check out the full list
here.

Google
Publisher’s Guide

Want to understand how Google interacts with your web site but don’t want to
read all the help pages one-by-one? Google’s got a PDF compilation you can grab
at the URL above. You can also get publications on Google Book Search and Google
News.

Postscript: Forgot one!

Alltop

Want top headlines on SEO from search marketing blogs across the web?
This new area of Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop
service gives it to you. Alltop also has similar pages for a growing number of
subjects. Of course, places like Original
Signal
have already been doing this, so check them out, too. For more SEO and
SEM blog compilations, also see these custom pages we offer:


iGoogle Search News Tab

My Yahoo
Search News Page


Windows Live Search News Page

Netvibes
Search News Tab


Pageflakes Search News Page

Also look in our Search
Engine Land blogroll
, scroll to the blog compilations area, and you’ll find more
all-in-one style headline pages. Ah, heck, I’ll just copy and paste ’em!

Blog Compilations
SearchCap: Daily
Search Recap

SearchMonth
Alltop: SEO
Original Signal: SEO
SEOBlog dailyCrawl
SEOmash
Search Brains
SocialBlogroll

This Week In SEO

Topix: Search Engines
TopRank Big List
Of Search Marketing Blog


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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