GigaBlast is a well known name amongst search engine marketers, I thought I'd mention it here as it's shaping into quite a nice search engine with some impressive features.

Developed by Matt Wells - I believe he used to work for Infoseek (it's been a while since I heard that!). The size of the index has increased dramatically over the past few months and now currently has over 2 Billion pages indexed. Your can view the cached copy (much like other major search engines).

Another great feature is the Queries you can use. One feature I really like is you can restrict your query to only search by a particular ip address (I've never seen a feature like this before).

By using the query 'ip:a.b.c.d' where a,b,c,d would values of the ip address you want to check. This is great for checking which domains are sharing your ip address - if you are using virtual hosting that is.

After viewing a message on Google Blogoscoped, it pointed me to a website called DoubleTrust.

Its concept works on a great idea that if a website is ranking highly on both Google and Yahoo there is more trust - therefore the site is more likely to be relevant.

This reminds me of the site Yahoo vs. Google which can compare the results of the two most popular search engines in a easy to follow dot-presentation of the first 40 results. Websites with a short line nearest the left side can be considered more trustworthy results.

I got pointed to this thread by reading an interesting post on Search Engine Roundtable. It talks about how Google (now being a Registrar as of January 2005) may be reading the nameserver and/or whois data.

I believe that Google have been doing this for sometime now - but by using the Google Toolbar to help locate new domains - although I'm sure many would disagree.

Potentially with the PageRank feature enabled, Google do have the facility to monitor every page you visit. I have domains that are private to me and never received any inbound links yet they are appearing in Google (one in particular has a very obscure name yielding just 4 results in total with mine being at the top).

"We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams..." -- Google Blog

Google Sitemaps is a new service released today - I haven't seen this mentioned on any other search engine websites yet.

The new service (at its beta stage) aims to help Google keep track of your new pages.

"Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages."

The first step is to create the sitemap file (in XML format), this is done by using a program called Sitemap generator. After, this XML file is placed on your server and you need to "add a sitemap" when logged into the Google sitemap service and locate the sitemap file. Google will then analysis this should located any pages Googlebot can't locate.

This seems to be the top news on many message boards and blogs over the past 24 hours. Google's secret lab or "Rater Hub Google" as entitled by Google. It all started by postings on various forums of strange referrals spotted by webmasters in their logs in the form "http://eval.google.com...".

Exactly what this unknown address is about was uncovered when an entry in Search Bristo's blog revealed what goes on behind the scenes. The lab is an area for testers who manually check through Google's search results. I actually don't think it's particularly surprising that Google are doing this. I'm sure most, if not all popular search engines rely on manual testing to some extent, Perhaps their algorithm can "learn" from the users choice to whether a site is spam or not and develop their algorithm as a result.

GoogleGuy has just commented over at WebMaster World about possible future measures to try a combat scraper sites with using AdSense. A link could appear within the feedback page when you click on the "Ads by Goooogle" part of the advert. This could make it possible for anyone to report any page to Google with AdSense on it.

"I'm talking to some people on that side of the company about how to get spam out of AdSense. It may be that we can designate a keyword to use (like "spamreport") in the "Ads by Goooogle" feedback link."

A thread is on WebMaster World has been dedicated to Questions for GoogleGuy, at the moment it's being quite active and questions are being answered. I recommend reading though it. It interesting the Brett's thread on building a Successful Site in 12 Months thread is still relevant today and was recommended by GoogleGuy.

If you have a question or interested I recommend viewing the thread.

Today GoogleGuy posted a message on a lengthy Webmaster World thread about the Bourbon update.

"Here's the advice that I'd give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so..."

This will no doubt be some comfort to webmasters who have been hit hard by this update - hopefully more changes are to come.

CNET have reviewed 9 search engines as they all go head-to-head, they are A9, AltaVista, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Google, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN Search and Yahoo Search.

Each search engine is reviewed in detail plus it has a useful comparison chart which provides an overall score out of ten plus details of additional features. It is close between Yahoo and Google, and gives the ability for user feedback on each search engine as well. Although entitled "Searching beyond Google and Yahoo..." clearly these search engine have clearly performed best.

Speakwire is the company that brought Speegle recently - a talking version of Google, which can read all the results of Google in realtime. Its text-to-speech technology is very convincing and one of the best I've heard. Speakwire now has the ability to actually say the contents RSS feeds from popular news websites from around the world.

Their services are well worth checking out.

Shmoogle is a search engine with a difference, that uses Google results but places them in random order on each search. The theory being that "All results are equal".

The question does completely randomised results produce more relevant results? For Googles sake, hopefully it doesn't!

Yahoo Mindset is a new service from Yahoo (still in its beta stage). The concept being it allows you to differentiate between having results more weighted towards commercial or research based - this is done by using a slider on the search page (see image above). This idea is very interesting and on the keywords I've tested it seems quite accurate. I also like the way you can adjust the slider after you've searched and the results sort themselves automatically without reloading. Although the slider has very accurate positioning - I did find myself normally wanting one extreme or the other and rarely something inbetween.

The FAQ explains in greater detail and they are interested in user feedback to try and develop the service further.

A more light-hearted look at what happened to PageRank over the weekend. Marissa's Blog - A Google Employee's Parody and outlines what happened over the weekend with Google - CompanyX.

"...At the end we couldn't remember what position one little green switch should have been in so we left it 'off'. I doubt it does anything important anyway."

I recommend reading through some of the other posts on her blog also, I'm sure you'll find it an interesting read...

PageRank returns after being down for 60 hours prompting many speculations such as a new Ranking system - possibly TrustRank. I'm sure many link brokers will be grad and relieved to see its return. Even GoogleGuy posted a message on WebMaster World hours before it's return;

"I suspect that the toolbar pagerank will be visible again in a few hours or so--I'll ask around about it." - GoogleGuy

For those of missed it when it was first mentioned on Web Master World - I highly recommend following this link to EPIC 2014.

The short 8 minute presentation outlines how Google and other major companies evolve over the next 10 years and creates EPIC. The opening text reads;

"In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline."

Rather interestingly at Resource Zone (the official Dmoz forum) they have removed the "site status" section. I thought this was a nice way to communicate with the editors (well they were always helpful to my requests) and was probably closed due to the large amount of status requests they were getting.

"At some point the submission status requests seem to have taken over and almost become the focus."

I think I was a slightly late with this one as it actually closed on the 21st - anyway, here are the official details - Discontinuation of site status checks