Dec 31, 2010 at 8:52am ET by Barry Schwartz

Happy New Year's Eve everyone, except for you in the Australian region, where it is New Year's Day! On behalf of the Search Engine Land team, we wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy 2011! As like in the past years, the search engines have special logos up for the New Years. Below are images of those logos from the 2011 search celebration. Google's Logo: Yahoo's Logo: Bing's Logo: Ask.com's Logo: Baidu's Logo: Sogou's Logo: Crea8site Forums Logo (a SEO forum): Search Engine Roundtable's Logo: Related Entries: Happy New Yea [...]

StumbleUpon Becomes Android App Discovery Tool

Nov 4, 2010 at 4:10pm ET by Greg Sterling

StumbleUpon, which these days calls itself a "discovery engine," has integrated app discovery into its Android application's repertoire. It takes into account a range of variables to make recommendations to individual users. Those include user preferences, interests and the choices of friends and other "like-minded users." Once installed, you simply hit the StumbleUpon logo/button in the lower right corner of the app and you're presented with a succession of third party app choices. Its suggestions were generally pretty good in my quick examination and use of the app. App discovery has b [...]

Bed Bugs! Use This Bed Bug Search Tool

Oct 11, 2010 at 9:24am ET by Barry Schwartz

Did you know the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has designed a bed bug search tool at http://cfpub.epa.gov/oppref/bedbug/? With the recent scare of bed bugs in Manhattan, bed bug prevention and detection has become a large concern for many NYC residents. The search tool lets you choose an EPA-registered bed bug product that meets your needs. You can search for a product by its name, company, EPA-registration number, where you can use the pesticide and the pesticide type. Since SMX East was just in New York City last week, those of you who have attended may want to check this o [...]

Xmarks Shuts Down After Failing To Sell Its Search Engine

Sep 28, 2010 at 1:38am ET by Matt McGee

Xmarks, the popular browser bookmark synchronization service, is going to shut down on January 10, 2011. Xmarks is a free service that saves your bookmarks across different browsers and different computers, and currently boasts about two million users. I'm a longtime user and fan of the service, going back to when it was called Foxmarks; but personal attachments aside, the story behind why Xmarks is shutting down makes for an interesting read. In his blog post announcing the decision, co-founder Todd Agulnick explains how, inspired by the crowd-sourced success of Wikipedia, Xmarks was inspi [...]

8 Crazy-Cool Search Engines You Should Know

Apr 16, 2010 at 1:30pm ET by Matt McGee

Move over Google, Yahoo, and Bing; blended results or not, personalized search, Twitter results and OneBoxes ... you guys are just too predictable for this article. There's a new breed of search engines out there, and they're letting users search and find some utterly crazy stuff. And by "crazy," I mean a lot of things: unique, cool, awesome, and downright strange. Sometimes all of the above. A search engine that lets you find (and buy) discontinued soda pop? Check. A search engine that helps you find cheap Amazon.com items so you can get free shipping? Sure! A search engine to locate misspell [...]

4 Comparison Search Tools You May Not Know About … But Should

Dec 29, 2009 at 8:00am ET by Matt McGee

I may be the only one who noticed, but it seems to me that 2009 saw an unusual amount of new comparison search tools released. Perhaps it was the launch of Bing, or the growth of real-time search? I don't know, but something inspired programmers to develop new tools and sites to let us compare search results. In this edition of my occasional search tools series, I'll look at four comparison search tools that may have slipped under your radar. Search3 One of the simpler tools, and probably the one with the cleanest interface, Search3 does what it name suggests: It lets you compare the [...]

Wolfram iPhone App Improves Upon Site Experience

Oct 19, 2009 at 11:01am ET by Greg Sterling

There's a way in which the just-released iPhone version of Wolfram Alpha makes more sense than the web version. The web version suggests a Google-like general search engine, which it is not; it's a "computational" or "fact engine" with a more limited range of use cases. It does what it does well -- offer a range of data, calculations and statistics often in a graphical form -- but often there are also no results or no directly relevant results for general or conventional search queries. But holding Wolfram in your hand on the iPhone suggests a "calculator," which it more closely resembles [...]

Marchex Releases Powerful SMB Reputation Management Tool With “Search Inside”

Oct 13, 2009 at 9:14am ET by Greg Sterling

Consumers care about online reviews; small businesses (SMBs) care about what's being said about them online. Most small businesses that are aware of the phenomenon of online reviews (and care) try to monitor those reviews by using a search engine or alerts with their business name. They also visit specific sites like Yelp or Citysearch to see what's being said about them. It's an awkward process that is time consuming, but increasingly necessary. Large corporations have had various "buzz tracking" tools at their disposal to monitor "brand chatter" but these have not been available for SMBs. [...]

Factual: Parting The Curtains Of The Invisible Web

Oct 13, 2009 at 8:00am ET by Chris Sherman

This year, we've seen several ambitious new efforts to mine and make searchable the vast part of the web that remains largely hidden to search engines—often referred to as the deep, hidden or invisible web. The latest foray into the reaches of hidden web is actually a hybrid, of sorts: Factual, founded by Gil Elbaz, who previously built the foundational technology that enabled Google's leap to world domination in search (Elbaz sold his company Applied Semantics to Google in 2003; it was the genesis of what we know as AdSense today). Factual is a self-described "open data repository." Like [...]

A Look Back At The Old Search Engines

Sep 14, 2009 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Six Revisions blog complied an excellent list of the classic search engines, some dating back to the 1990s. His list includes screen shots of both the old and current (if available) versions of HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler, and All The Web. Scrolling down the list and looking at some of those old screen shots bring back fun memories. Of course, there are many search engines missing, too many to list there or even here. But looking at the old screen capt [...]

iPhone’s Spotlight Search

Jun 22, 2009 at 10:12am ET by Barry Schwartz

This Friday, I was one of the million people to get a new iPhone 3GS. After getting through my activation issues I had some time to test out the new search feature on the iPhone, named Spotlight (from Apple OS). With the new iPhone, you can have an unlimited number of applications, so finding those applications, including finding data in the core Apple iPhone applications, can sometimes be a struggle. Apple hopes that the new iPhone Spotlight search feature will ease the problem of finding things on your iPhone. Here is a quick how to with the iPhone search feature. (1) Accessing S [...]

Collecta And CrowdEye Join The “Real Time” Search Club

Jun 18, 2009 at 12:25pm ET by Greg Sterling

This morning there are two new entrants in the "real-time" search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company. The two new engines join an growing field of competitors, including Topsy, OneRiot, Tweetmeme and Scoopler, not to mention Twitter Search itself. Then there's Faceb [...]

Searchme Launches Multimedia Visual Search

Apr 30, 2009 at 3:59pm ET by Chris Sherman

Searchme has rolled out what it calls "true" blended search results, combining web, video, images, music and Twitter results organized by their relevance and playable inside the search results page. Searchme displays results as small versions of entire web pages, in a format that looks just like the "cover flow" display in iTunes. I love Searchme as a "recall engine," using it to find web pages or sites that I've previously visited but can't remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to reco [...]

Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Apr 29, 2009 at 7:30am ET by Matt McGee

Wouldn't it be great if you could use a search engine without needing to touch your mouse? You know, type your query and then scan and even click through to results without actually clicking the mouse button? Or maybe you're looking for an alternate source of search advertising data, like how many advertisers are bidding on certain keywords. Or maybe you're into something more mundane, like finding an apartment to call home. In this roundup of five search tools you may not know about, I'll introduce you to possible answers to those questions and a couple more. This is the third in my occas [...]

Wolfram Alpha Makes Public Debut

Apr 28, 2009 at 7:35pm ET by Matt McGee

The highly anticipated Wolfram Alpha search engine made its debut today, although Google tossed in a little spoiler. The webcast was apparently difficult for some to view, but you can get impressions of what happened from Between The Lines and Bits. The site also has a new blog and Twitter account, and we'll be looking at it more closely in the near future ourselves. There's more discussion on Techmeme. Postscript: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha "Fact Engine", our review of the service. [...]

How To Overhype Your Search Engine

Apr 24, 2009 at 6:55pm ET by Danny Sullivan

After covering search for 13 years, I'm more than a little jaded. I've seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they've promised, other than Google -- and it's a special case. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching Wolfram Alpha walk the same hype path so many have followed before. So I thought I'd offer a little advice, for what it's worth. Here's how to set your search service up for a disappointing fall. 1) Fail to brief those in the know: First I heard of Wolfram Alpha was on Techmeme back in March. The com [...]

Firefox Drops Google For Yandex In Russia, But Big Loser May Be Rambler

Jan 12, 2009 at 8:41am ET by Barry Schwartz

Mozilla's General Counsel, Harvey Anderson, announced the Russian builds of Firefox 3.1 will drop Google for Yandex. He explained that after months of research and surveys, Mozilla learned that their "Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search." So, in the next build of Firefox, the default search provider will be Yandex for Russian users. The big loser in all of this might not be Google. PaidContent.org reports that Rambler, one of the big Russian portals, will be letting their CEO go after seeing their market share drop from 14.9 percent last year to just 6.4 percent [...]

5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Dec 29, 2008 at 1:28pm ET by Matt McGee

How would you like to track hot news geographically? Or see where social conversations are happening on a map? Maybe you'd like to find businesses that are open 24 hours a day, or research keywords on a state-by-state basis. If so, read on for a look at five search tools you may not know about, but should. About two months ago, we published 7 Search Tools You May Not Know ... But Should. That became a popular article and let us know that we should continue uncovering largely unknown search tools in future articles. So, here's the second in an irregular series of posts about search tools you [...]

DeepDyve Explores The Invisible Web

Nov 11, 2008 at 8:00am ET by Chris Sherman

As web search engines have improved over the years, there's been less attention paid to an "inconvenient truth" about the indexes of our favorite information finding tools—namely, that search engines still miss the lion's share of information available on the web. This so-called "deep web" remains largely impenetrable to search engines for a variety of reasons, and for many types of queries that's just fine. But if you're a serious searcher, looking for the best information possible, you can't afford to overlook this vast "hidden" store of information. And that's a challenge, because sear [...]

7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Oct 21, 2008 at 8:45am ET by Matt McGee

Google UK recently shared a list of 52 Things to Do on a variety of Google properties (found via Phil Bradley). It's a collection of tools and tips about using Google products and services for some everyday functions. If you're a search power user, you probably know most of them already. But Google's message seems to be, "Did you know you could do all this stuff on Google?" It got us thinking about non-Google search tools that might have slipped notice altogether, or just fallen off your radar. With that in mind, here's a list of seven search tools you may not know about ... but should. [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014
SMX Advanced - June 2014

EMEA

SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014
SMX Paris - June 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.