bruceb news

Amazon.com has unveiled its own search engine, www.a9.com. Search results are drawn from Google as well as Amazon, and include search results from inside books indexed by Amazon. If you sign in with your Amazon account, you can store your search history, annotate web pages, and even see a history of web sites visited. A9.com also offers an Internet Explorer toolbar, like Google and MSN, which offers one-step searches of the Web, Amazon, the Internet Movie Database, and Google, as well as popup blocking.

Here’s an article about Amazon’s foray into the search engine business.

If you use MSN’s web search for “linux windows,” it returns sixteen web pages with both those words on them. Try it!

If you use Google for the same search, it returns almost nine million web pages.

What’s going on? This author makes a mistake and argues that it demonstrates Microsoft’s censorship of its web search results. That’s not quite right.

Instead, it demonstrates how these services can be intentionally misleading – or if you’re feeling generous, just designed very badly.

There’s a tiny “Next” on the top of MSN’s search results. Since the page purports to display “1 through 15 of about 16″ search results, you’d expect the next page to have the one remaining link. […] continued

Google has added a new service that will make you go, hmm.

Do a Google search for your home phone number. Type in the number like this: 707-xxx-xxxx.

If the number is listed in the phone book, you’ll instantly get back your name, your address, and links to maps that will helpfully display exactly where your house is.

Interesting, eh? On the one hand, that’s a powerful search tool, definitely one to add to the arsenal of ways to find information on the net.

And on the other hand, there’s some serious privacy implications. If you have a listing in the phone book you’re obviously not hidden, but it feels different for a map to your house to be quite this readily available. […] continued

I have a lot of information stored in my Outlook folders. Maybe you’re in the same position – dozens of subfolders, or 5,000 messages in your Inbox that you plan to organize as soon as you have time.

80-20 Retriever is a $49.95 program that indexes your Outlook folders and does lightning-fast searches, presenting results by content, person, date, or folder. The new version 3.0 adds a preview pane and also indexes all of the Microsoft Office documents on your local hard drive or on network drives. It can be run on the Outlook Today page, on a separate Outlook page, or in a web browser from a desktop shortcut. […] continued

This article starts out by explaining the different approaches chosen by Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista for indexing the Internet – and makes it easier to understand why Google is so scarily accurate. It drifts a bit at the end, but the first half is interesting reading.

Google is experimenting with different ways to rank web sites when it reports search results. Here’s an interesting article about search engines and the extraordinary things done to increase site rankings on Google and the other search engines.

I keep searching for the perfect way to index Outlook and my documents so information can be found easily. I’ve been using 80-20 Retriever, which integrates with Outlook, updates its index every night, and comes up with pretty good results. A bit quirky, but not bad.

Enfish Find is a brand new indexing program that will be available to download free for one day only – tomorrow, Wednesday September 5. The screen shots look quite good, and Enfish has a good track record. I’m hoping it’s the killer search engine I’ve been waiting for!

UPDATE 9/15 Enfish Find was unsatisfying. […] continued

According to this article, Outlook 2002 features indexing and search functions for all content in Exchange 2000 Server – including messages, documents, contacts, tasks, calendar items, and other data.

That’s a limited feature, because most small businesses aren’t using Exchange 2000 Server. But it’s a valuable addition to Outlook if you are using Exchange 2000 – and it’s yet another good reason for a small business to look into Small Business Server 2000, which includes Exchange Server 2000.