A thread on Search Engine Watch entitled OpenRank - An Open Source WWW Index explains a new project by the user randfish. It is called Open Rank - the idea is that they would build a large index all webpages (I think they are hoping for at least 1.5-2 billion pages indexed). This would not be a search engine, instead, it would be built primarily for SEO's to freely have access to the index.

At the moment we are too reliant on search engines, say Yahoo and MSN stopped giving useful backlink information (like Google has), this would be a serious problem for SEO's when accessing links quality and general link building etc. With OpenRank there would be no worries because you wouldn't need to reply to search engines to supply SEO's with this information.

But it's not just backlinks you could find, Imagine all the functions that Google could have to help SEO's if they wanted to. Personally I think this idea has a lot of potential, the only barrier is indexing the entire web (which is a big one!). I hope they succeed.

Subscriptions is a new service from Yahoo. Currently at a beta stage is allows users to search fee-based content. Since you would normally subscribe to such content regular search engine robots cannot get access to it. Subscriptions allows you to search through documents as if they were regular pages open to all. The idea is you would find a document covering material you would be interesting in researching and willing to pay a fee for.

"Yahoo! Search Subscriptions beta is a new way to search the subscription content that's important to you. By partnering with publishers, Yahoo! is providing the convenience of a single place to access and find all relevant content, whether it's generally available web content or content from your personal subscriptions."

Currently Yahoo Subscription gets it sources from;

• Consumer Reports
• FT.com
• Forrester Research
• IEEE publications
• New England Journal of Medicine
• TheStreet.com
• Wall Street Journal

I imagine there will be many more sources to add to this list shortly.

Many people are now seeing shifts in results pages on Google as of this morning, it turns out that many people who were hit by the last update (named Bourbon) are now seeing their site revert back to the position they were - pre-bourbon.

The update happened a month ago - on 20th May, and has been one of the most talked about updates in Google history - simply because so many people were affected. Many of who do follow Google's TOS and some probably have no idea how what spam is.

For further information read: Bourbon Update 1 | Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update

Google Scholar is now reportly being linked from universaries. Google is doing this by singling out known ip address.

The link is included within the main Google Homepage - I noticed this a few days ago - it appeared for me even though I'm not a universary! Maybe they were just testing (see below) as afterwards a story on Search Engine Watch covered this in depth.

A thread on WebMaster World reports that some advertisers are receiving emails from Google to test a new addition to the Adwords service called Site Target.

Site Target first got noticed in April 2005 - It is essentially a whitelist of websites advertisers want their adverts to appear on. Unfortunately it doesn't allow you to block particular website, and also, currently it only works for image ads (I imagine this will change).

"Since site-targeted campaigns are tied to specific URLs, they won't appear on Google.com search results pages, on the Google search network, or on associated products such as Gmail. Keyword-targeted ads will continue to appear in all those locations."

Google now links to various 3rd party programs which can generate sitemaps using many different server side scripting languages including PHP, ASP and ASP.net. Google Sitemaps use XML format - details of the protocol is outlined on the sitemaps help page.

Links to the 3rd party programs are linked on Google Code.

A post at Stuntdubl entitled "Why Does Google Lie to SEO’s?" really is quite an interesting read. It discusses whether Google are doing the right thing in being so private with regards to information and algorithm updates and generally sharing information between SEO's - whereas Yahoo and MSN are quite open in comparison.

Of course the article does go on to say about the recent activity with GooglyGuy and WebMaster World with discussing the Bourbon update - so perhaps things are changing?

The search engine Scirus was recently blogged about in Search Engine Watch after increasing the size of the index. I must say I've never used this engine before but found of the results to be quite effective on some searches which would be flooded with commercial sites normally on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There were however many scraper sites even some on academic domains.