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people search sure is a controversial topic…while some might find a search engine capable of automatically syndicating all available information on a person creepy, to say the least, others welcome the concept, arguing, that all this information has been online & and for the most part indexed anyway. I belong to the latter, so on the occasion of 123 people’s recent public launch, I took the chance and compared it to Spock, another people search service around since mid-2007. subject of matter - the good old vanity search…

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Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has the scoop of Yahoo’s latest beta-product, Yahoo Search Assist. an iteration on type-ahead tools like Google Suggest or Yahoos own Search Suggest, Search Assist selectively suggests terms for refining a query by clustering common keywords within search-results. this should basically help in situations when users struggle to find the “right” keyword to refine their queries. in his screencast, Danny demonstrates the new feature - which is only available to a select number of users at the moment - by searching for Lego organizing systems. (more…)

Mitch Kapor’s (inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the EFF) bookmark-synchronizing utility for Firefox-based browsers, foxmarks, is about to enter the market of human-powered search engines - a space currently heating up - not only since the recent launch of Mahalo. the search engine will utilize user-generated metadata on URLs to deliver - according to TechCrunch - superior search-results compared to Google - especially for popular search-terms, which naturally suffer the most under SEO-efforts. thinking about foxmarks, three questions arise:

• there are obviously privacy issues when using user-submitted data for a public search-offering (update: the foxmarks-Blog promises to give users the ability to opt-out before they’re going to launch a public service)
• when is Yahoo! going to leverage del.icio.us in a similar way? given that del.icio.us has far more users than foxmarks (I’m guessing) this seems to be a no-brainer…
• how is foxmarks going to protect their service, which might work very well while it has not appeared on SEO’s radars, from spammers?

update: after reading that Yahoo! just integrated Flickr’s image search-results (which is superior to the image search at Google or Ask, at least according to Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk) tightly into their main Yahoo! Image Search product, a possible adaption of del.icio.us-metadata to the Yahoo!-searchengine does sound even more interesting…doesn’t it?

these days, the recently launched Universal Search is the predominant topic when it comes to Google. that, however, shouldn’t keep you from trying out some of the other very recent additions the search-company search, ads & apps-company has made…

launched today, Google Hot Trends feels like an - almost - real-time-version of the popular Zeitgeist periodical (edit: okay, seems like it’s calculated at several times a day). based on rather mysterious algorithms, Hot Trends highlights the most active search-queries, apparently localized to state/country, although localization currently seems to be restricted to the US (this morning, Hot Trends was filled with various queries on the ABC-show “The Bachelor”).

coming from Google Experimental is another nice feature, which algorithmically tries to display search-results in timelines and map-views - doesn’t really work perfectly on all kinds of queries, but still is an interesting idea.

in what might turn the most substantial upgrade to their core search service since the beginning, Google’s Marissa Mayer announced the launch of Universal Search as of today. don’t expect a completely new product though. Universal Search is basically all about blending search-results from Google’s numerous vertical search engines (think news, images, video, books etc. - we’re talking about 14 different search-indexes!) into a single, inter-ranked result-page. from an SEO-perspective, the most interesting question is how Google is going to rank results from their various engines against each other.

Universal Search should be rolling out for google.com within the next days. meanwhile I recommend reading Danny Sullivans extensive roundup on Search Engine Land, “Google 2.0″.

SEOmoz updated their ranking of search engine ranking factors according to 34 independent SEO specialists. along with their Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this is a great entry point for anybody new to SEO. the top 10 reason your site ranks in search results as it does are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. Keyword Use in Body Text
10. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

(via Search Engine Land)

so Google finally devoted some time on solving an algorithmic phenomenon causing astonishment among net-newbies as well as amusement in geek-circles since years: the Googlebomb finally has been disarmed. as things go with search/ranking algorithms, Google Blogoscoped can only guess on how the mathematical solution of the problem looks like - but it’s probably based on the likeliness of inter-links between otherwise separated link-networks. however, main reason I’m blogging this is that the “utter incompetence” bomb aimed at former austrian minister of finance K.H.Grasser is listed among the most famous bombs ever

launched today, WikiSeek is a vertical search-engine indexing only pages within the Wikipedia-domain(s), plus sites which are linked from within Wikipedia-pages (an attempt to minimize spam-results and deliver better results than Wikipedia itself). Search Engine Land thinks it’s poorly implemented.

remember Scrybe, the pretty-much-hyped Flash-based online-calendar/PIM with offline-capabilities, which went into pretty-private beta a few months back? few days ago, the Scrybe-blog announced phase 2 of their beta, mainly adding ThoughtPad, a web-based clipboard-feature. beta-accounts still seem to be kept scarce artificially, and while I received my invitation today, I wasn’t able to complete the sign-up process…

the on-demand IPTV-venture formerly known as the Venice Project, put down its project-name and is from now on called Joost. however, it’s still Windows-only and remains in private beta.

according to Read/WriteWeb, Eurekster just upgraded their social search service swicki. a swicki is a user-created mixture of customized search engine (think Rollyo) and wiki, allowing its users to tag and promote search-results up & down, as well as adding their own results. sounds a lot like what Jimbo Wales is going to create with Search Wikia…