Search engines have improved their capabilities over the years to integrate near realtime information in their search engine results. Lately, many search engines decided that it would be a good idea to integrate Twitter results. This frankly did not yield the desired “freshness update” the search engines where hoping for, largely because of the amount [...]

The latest US search engine market share statistics compiled by Nielsen have been released and they confirm a trend that we have predicted for some time now. Microsoft’s Bing search engine managed to grow from 9% to 13.6 in the last twelve months, while Yahoo fell sharply from 17.1% to 14.3 and Google Search moderately [...]

Not all change is good, and it is often better to keep a system as is, than to add self proclaimed innovative features that many users might not want. Google has made lots of changes to Google Search in the past, and while some of them made sense, others did not. Google’s latest experiment is [...]

One thing that Microsoft seems to have done right, when it comes to their Bing search engine, is the daily changing homepage image that many Bing users seem to like. It is possible to download the active image easily in the web browser to the local computer system. Previous Bing images can be downloaded as [...]

Yahoo and Microsoft have been testing Bing powered search results offline for some time now. A recent email sent out to advertisers confirmed that the testing will be moved to the live search results shortly. During that period part of Yahoo’s Live search results will be powered by Bing, “with paid search volume in particular [...]

Google launched an encrypted version of their web search in May (see Google SSL HTTPS Search). HTTPS search was enabled on the main Google.com domain and users simply had to add an s after HTTP in the url to access the encrypted search engine. Encryption increased the privacy of the search engine user by preventing [...]

Imagine the surprise of a close relative when they were greeted by an iGoogle page instead of the classic Google homepage after opening their web browser. The search page looked slightly different. The Google logo now read iGoogle and a message below the search box told them that they have been signed out and needed [...]

Search engines are constantly evolving, a recent trend puts related searches and information on the search result pages to provide searchers with additional options and direct answers of their search queries. The Bing team announced yesterday that the layout and design of Bing search has been changed for all users. The most obvious change is [...]

I switched to Bing recently and had my fair share of experience with Microsoft’s search engine. The main reason for switching was a deterioration of quality results in Google Search. It began in May and has not changed since then. That, and the noise that has been added to search result pages over the past [...]

The introduction of encrypted search at https://www.google.com/ a month ago has increased the privacy of search engine visitors by preventing people from intercepting search terms and results. Encrypting all communication between the client’s computer and Google Search had a few side effects though. It was for one not possible to use all Google services. Google [...]

Google has made lots of changes to its search website in the past year. A few of the noteworthy, and often distracting changes, include the new fade-in homepage which only displays the search form until the visitor moves the mouse, the sidebar that is displayed on search result pages or design changes to buttons and [...]

A typo industry exists out there. You may not know if but typo domains are some of the most attractive domains for webmasters who want to cash in on a popular brand or name without having to compete against all the other webmasters who target the same. Keyword research tools such as Google Adwords Keyword [...]

Remember the story on Read Write Web that was called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”? It causes some controversy back then because it made the popular web blog rank in front of Facebook in Google Search for the term Facebook Login. Many Facebook users left comments and messages on the Read Write [...]

I have been working with the Bing search engine for the last couple of days after switching to it from Google Search. It still takes time to get used to this new search engine after using Google for the last decade or so almost exclusively. I really do not want to say to much about [...]

The default address bar search engine in the Firefox web browser is Google Search. This means that any search phrase that the user enters directly into the Firefox address bar gets send to Google Search which returns either a direct hit or a search results page. Some Internet users might prefer to have a different [...]

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is officially one year old today.  The search engine formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search was officially unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the 28th May 2009 at the All Things Digital COnference in San Diego. The search engine went live on June 3rd that same [...]

Google recently enabled SSL on their main search engine google.com allowing search engine users to access https://www.google.com/ instead of the standard Google search domain. This secure search encrypts the data that is exchanged between the user’s computer and Google search so that third parties like other network users or the Internet Service Provider cannot spy [...]

If you want to search Google Buzz for public messages you need to log into Gmail and use the search form at the top. There does not seem to be another official option to search public messages in Google’s new social messaging service. The public messages might eventually make it into the Google search engine [...]

Most search engines that offer realtime search results use basic filters to display results to their visitors. This can be a time based filter or one that uses popularity to select the results that are displayed in the search engine. Factery Labs uses a different approach. The realtime search engine tries to concentrate the results [...]

Searching your desktop for files can be a real pain without the right tools. Every desktop has one (ore more) search tools that can be used to search for that missing file. Linux is not an exception. One of my favorite search tools for the Linux desktop is Beagle. You can read about the basics [...]

Google has released the year-end statistics of Google Zeitgeist 2009 which includes information about the most search topics in various niches in 2009. The default statistics show the search queries for the United States with the option to switch the country to view them for several dozen other countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany [...]

We knew that it would be coming eventually and the time apparently has come today. At least for some users that is as Google stays true to its policy to roll out changes to their services over time. Real-time search is an addition to the standard Google search results that users see when they perform [...]

Starting today Google begins rolling out a new search personalization feature that has an impact on every search engine user that is using one of Google’s search engines. Previously personalized search results were only displayed to users who were logged into a Google Account. The new system changes this behavior so that every user will [...]

Search results are different depending on the search engine the user utilizes. The language plays another important role. A search for Berlin Sightseeing and Berlin Sehenswürdigkeiten will yield two (very different) sets of results. This is especially relevant if the search targets a region or country where the people are speaking a different language than [...]

A recent post over at Search Engine Land suggests that Google will be rolling out a new search interface – or more precisely search result page design – to selected users later today. The effort seems to have originated in the analysis of the current search results layout which is everything but coherent and has [...]

Have you ever “googled” yourself? Chance is you found at least a few websites and resources about yourself even more so if you have deliberately added information about yourself on websites across the Internet. Most users probably do so when they signup for social networking websites such as Facebook or MySpace but information are also [...]

Safe Search is a filter in the Google search engine. By default moderate filtering is applied to all search results which can be changed by the search engine user to strict filtering or no filtering. Especially families with kids but also organizations and businesses use these filters to prevent that inappropriate search results appear in [...]

Microsoft this time seems to be dead serious to compete at all levels with the seemingly almighty guys at Google and especially their search engine. Several key services over at Bing were updated today including the already reviewed Bing Maps service. But Bing Maps was but one service that got updated. Microsoft has also updated [...]

Bing Maps has been updated today with several new features and a new look and feel. Most notably in this regard are a new button bar with each button loading a specific feature of Bing Maps. Microsoft has also added some new colors to Bing Maps but those are only the obvious changes to the [...]

Google set up a search sandbox a while ago showcasing and testing their new search algorithm. The public display served not only to show the world that Google was ready to take on the challenges by new search engines like Microsoft’s Bing but also as a testing ground for webmasters who were encouraged to compare [...]

There are two main reasons for switching to one of Google’s alternative search interfaces: Speed and Usability. The following three Google search engines utilize the same search index and parameters that the default Google search engine offers with the difference that all four of them are faster, more accessible and less obtrusive when displaying search [...]

If you are familar with KDE you know Konqueror. Konqueror used to be one of the finest file managers on the PC desktop – period. But now KDE has migrated toward a simpler, more user-friendly file manager (Dolphin) and pushed Konqueror to serve as a web-browser only. That does not mean Konqueror can not be [...]

Real time search has become a buzzword this year. With Twitter increasing its popularity search engines like Bing or Google Search are aiming to make their search results real time or at least closer to that. We have seen some attempts already. Google for instance has included new time based filters for their search results [...]

Federated search is one of new features of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. The feature integrates the possibility to search external data sources from within Windows Explorer in the same way a local or remote search is performed. Federated search in Windows 7 is enabled through the Open Search standard with a good dozen connectors [...]

If you perform a Google search nowadays you get mixed search results. Google not only displays the first ten pages that is has in its index for the entered keyword but also image, video and news results. Sometimes ads are also added to the search results and placed on top of everything else. Some search [...]

One of the latest trends in the search engine market seem to be custom search options, search filters and specialized search parameters. Google has introduced the search options in the main Google search engine a while ago. These were made up of advanced search parameters which have been accessible before (before starting search) and new [...]

The Microsoft Bing development team is trying to distinguish their search engine from Google by adding new features to their search engine. The latest feature that the team is developing goes by the name Bing & Ping. It has been designed to offer Bing users better options to share search results. This feature resembles the [...]

Recently I wrote an an article covering the Easystroke mouse gesture tool (“Start applications using mouse gestures with Easystroke“.) That article explained how easily you can set up a simple mouse gesture to start an application. In the comments one reader brought up the handy GNOME desktop tool GNOME Do. GNOME Do is one of [...]

One of the new improvements that Microsoft introduces in their search engine Bing is a Silverlight driven visual search engine. Visual search meaning that pictures will be used to display and navigate the search results instead of text and text links. The benefit is a better search experiment with the limitation that it only works [...]

Google Search offers several options to limit the search results by a selected time frame. One is available in the advanced search parameters which allows users to search only in results that have been published or updated in the last year, month, week, day. The other becomes available in the newly added Search Options on [...]

Microsoft’s introduction of its Bing search engine has revived search engine competition it seems. Bing did receive some praise since its introduction and Google has since then reacted by offering search engine users a preview of their upcoming search engine technologies in the form of the sandboxed search engine Caffeine and a limited test run [...]

It is not often that Google changes something on the front-end of Google Search. The only element that the Google developers change regularly is the logo that adds a little bit of change to the search engine every other day or so. Changes to the rest of the front-end on the other hand are rare [...]

The results that Google search is displaying to a search engine user can be different depending on several factors including the web browser, geographic location, web history or or data center that is serving the search results. Search results can be different for the same user on the same computer depending on several factors that [...]

What is the name of the song they are playing now in this movie? I guess everyone has asked that question at some point in time only to find out that it was very difficulty to get an answer unless a movie soundtrack was released with the song in question being on the record. Most [...]

What do users normally do if they want to research a phrase that they have read in a text, Word or Excel document, on a website or in a user agreement of a program that they are installing? The usual answer is that they copy the phrase, open their favorite web browser, load the a [...]

Searching a PC filesystem is something people do on a daily basis. I am always shocked at how often I see people searching for files they have created and can not locate. There are a lot of tools out there to aid the user in their searching. For the Linux operating system there is Beagle, [...]

Yahoo announced upgrades to three of their major products and services. Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Messenger were all updated on the same day. Social integration was the key phrase during development as most improvements to the products fall into that category. Yahoo Mail now comes with a redesigned mobile version that is available [...]

Google is currently giving webmasters and other interested users a sneak peek of their upcoming search algorithm. Interested users can open a sandboxed search engine that is using the new Google search algorithm to test it. Google is mainly offering this new search engine to webmasters to test website rankings but it can also be [...]

There are some of us who prefer to do as much as possible from the command line. For whatever reason, this type of person wants to prove to the world the GUI is not necessary. For that reason, I thought I would illustrate how, with the help of curl, you can search Google and update [...]

You might have already heard about Google’s new sandbox search engine that is showcasing a new search infrastructure. Google invited webmasters to test the search engine and provide feedback which might indicate that the search engine algorithm is still tweaked. Users on the other hand can enjoy a Google search engine without advertisement and other [...]