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…
if you’re bored of the ever same, sterile user-interfaces of common search engines, you might wanna try out Ms. Dewey, a Microsoft-owned experimental search-frontend to Windows Live Search. being distracted by hi-quality flash-video of librarian Ms. Dewey (played by Janina Gavankar, who - according to Valleywag - has been featuring soft-porn movies in her past 
) won’t make search any more efficient, but it’s eyecandy definitely worth watching once!
superficial observation might suggest that blog-search & -indexing is a problem solved long time ago - after all we have specialised blog search-engines like Technorati, sphere and Icerocket. however, Technorati - blog-search pioneer and defacto market-leader - is afflicted by repeated technical problems (like randomly “forgetting” to index blogs for weeks - just google for wordpress + technorati + troubles) and performance-issues (after all, a ping after updating your blog should lead to almost immediately updated indizes, and not lagging several hours behind). another problem Technorati shares with all its competitors is the uphill combat against spam-blogs (aka ’splogs’) & replica-blogs. [disclaimer: in no way this should be a rant against Technorati - I'm using the service almost daily and don't see any real alternative at the moment]
you might suppose Google should’nt really have a problem to establish their very own kick ass blog-index, but like their online RSS-reader, which has only gained attention after its recent major upgrade, blogsearch.google.com has been living quite below the blogosphere’s radar. according to the screenshot (see below) blogger Andy Boyd has posted today, this might be subject to change in the very near future: in what might be a local beta-rollout, Andy seems to have received results from blogsearch mixed within the general results from google.com:
TechCrunch points out that this might be a “believable scenario because Google recently added blog search to Google News last month and to Google Alerts four days later”. indeed, Google would be the first mainstream search-engine to specifically incorporate blog-posts into their search-results. a great boost for the blogosphere in general, and smaller bloggers - holding a lower page-rank - in particular could be anticipated. so let’s sit back and see what’s coming (soon, hopefully) on google.com…:)
update: here’s what Google Blogscoped has to say about this:
Also, I wonder how Google wants to decide on quality for these blog links – surely they can’t allow any recently updated spam blog to inhibit this spot, but for very fresh posts it might also be hard to rank this in terms of backlinks… unless they manage to count blog-post backlinks in near real-time.
years after the big search-players agreed on nofollow-directives and robots.txt-controlled exclusions, Danny Sullivan reports that Microsoft & Yahoo have announced to join Google’s sitemap-effort, an XML-protocol allowing webmasters to optimize the crawling of dynamic web-content:
Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.
in case you haven’t spent the day under a rock you probably already heard the news about Google Co-op. the freshly rolled-out service allows everyone to build customized frontends to Google’s search-index for integration on their own website, similar to established services like Rollyo but with greater flexibility. users can restrict search-results to their own websites or extend them to the web, adapt the look and feel of search results (including pre-defined refinements), allow other users to collaborate on the search-engine or even integrate Google AdSense on the search-results. using Google Marker, users may add further annotations for individual sites. while Co-op’s primary use might be to replace weaker site-specific search-features, I can also imagine independent vertical search-products built on top of it. as always with big news in search, I highly recommend to catch tomorrows Daily Search Cast!
Google has added some nice features to their Webmaster Tools recently. site-admins may now query extensive charts of Googlebot’s activity (see screenshot below) and are allowed to control how often the search-engines spiders visit a site (though only in rough levels like “slow/medium/fast”). an interesting new feature is the opt-in for Google’s enhanced image search, which submits the images on a website to Google Image Labeler. if you haven’t used Webmaster Tools before, maybe now is the time to start - its a great way to learn more on the inner workings of Google’s index.
looks like Google ain’t going to slow down these days: Code Search - Google’s effort on indexing source-code on the web - was launched earlier today. Code Search offers developers powerful ways (read: regular expressions) to search for code-snippets in any particular language, under any specific license. a quick test-drive unveiled that Code Search suffers from similar problems like established competitors Krugle and Koders: string-based search-results often mistake underlying semantics. when searching for an id3-implementation in PHP, results often lead to external function-calls, but not the actual source implementing id3. still, indexing source-code will definitely help making open source knowledge more accessible to average developers, not able/willing to spend hours/days to dissect code. looking forward on Danny Sullivan’s commentary on Code Search…
update: here’s a collection of [queries for]code that was not really supposed to be public
just subscribed to the Daily Search Cast (thanks to a recent post by Jason Calacanis). during his daily 30 minutes, Search-Engine-Watch-founder Danny Sullivan covers all the news on search engines and search marketing. yesterdays episode discusses the alpha-launch of ‘human-powered’ search engine ChaCha (I just gave it a try but was quite disappointed), Yahoo! Answers UK, Netscape Search, news from Google handing out Orkut-userdata to the brazilian government (hmm), and much, much more! this show really presents loads of targeted information in a very condensed way… I’m subscribed!
