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Showdown News Vol. 2 No. 4
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Inside: AltaVista Translations Big news stories in the search engine industry over the past few weeks. This issue of Showdown News takes a closer look at several of these changes and the implications and contradictions of the news.
SEARCH ENGINE NEWS
AltaVista's translation service, Babel Fish, has added three new options: German to French, French to German, and
Russian to English. It still is limited to translating 5K of text. The Go Translator which also uses Systran software
does not yet include the three new options, but it will translate more the 5K worth of text.
Excite has launched its new Precision Search with an emphasis on the "clean and simple" approach. It has added
some features and removed others. It now links to Category Search, News Search, Photo Search, and AV Search at
the top. Relevance ranking now relies much more on link analysis with a weighting towards established sites.
Meanwhile, the related Web pages "more like this" feature is gone along with the suggested searches. The language
limits, directory results, and news results are still available, but not on the initial screens. The quick results are now in
the left margin as opposed to being on top. On June 26, 2000, Google announced two major milestones. First, Google claims an amazing more than one billion record database. Unfortunately, reading further in their press release quickly turns up the mention that only 560 million pages are fully indexed, while the other 500 million are "partially indexed." These "partially indexed" pages are URLs found on the fully indexed pages that have been added to the index but not yet crawled. For the searcher, the only way to find these partially indexed records is to use search terms that are in the anchor text used on the page that links to the URLs. In other words, you won't see many of those 500 million records, so it is more accurate to view the new database as one of 560 million records.
All that being said, it is still a significant and sudden growth from the 230 million records that Google was claiming
just a few weeks ago. If this number holds up, it will be an extremely significant jump. On the other hand, time should
tell as to whether the bulk of the increase is coming from spam, duplicates, dead links, or useful Web pages.
Secondly, in another significant announcement, Google will replace Inktomi as Yahoo!'s search engine for results
beyond what is in the Yahoo! directory and destination site. This is on schedule to happen within the next 30 days.
For now, Inktomi results continue to be displayed by Yahoo! It should be interesting to see how the Google results
look on Yahoo! In a less dramatic move, Google has also added news headlines at the top of its results. So it now serves up news headlines, directory hits, RealNames Internet Keyword links, and its own search engine results. Which of these will show up on Yahoo!'s results page remains to be seen.
Inktomi announced its GEN3 database of 500 million records back in April. However, none of the Inktomi partners
were using the GEN3 database at that time. Now, Inktomi reports that three partners have implemented GEN3:
iWon, Snap, and HotBot.
Lycos announces moving to the Fast database for its results from both the main page and the advanced search.
(The advanced search had been serving results from Fast for several months.) The main search screen also pulls
results from the Open Directory and other databases, depending on the search terms. WEBTOP ALSO AT HALF A BILLION?
The little known WebTop search engine and its WebCheck desktop client are also claiming to have build a search
engine database of 500 million pages. On its main site, the Web Zone claims over 500 million documents. The Bright
Station (WebTop's parent company) press release states that WebTop has "indexed over half a billion documents on
the Web." This is starting to sound like a favorite number to quote. SEARCH ENGINE SHOWDOWN ANALYSIS:EXCITE VS. GOOGLE Given the recent announcement about Yahoo!'s upcoming switch from Inktomi to Google (as they switched from AltaVista to Inktomi in the summer of 1998), you might expect this part to analyze Google and Inktomi. But Excite's reasons behind the changes with their Excite Precision Search launch seem in part inspired by Google and in part in direct contradiction to Google's recent moves. If nothing else, the contrast demonstrates the way in which the search engine industry is still young and trying to find its way. On June 19, Excite unveiled its new Excite Precision Search. It emphasizes improved relevance (due to a greater reliance on a weighted link analysis), the "clean and simple" focus, and a less cluttered results page. Excite removed its directory search results, news search results, the language limit option, and the "More like this" link for each result. Several of these moves have been interpreted as making Excite more similar to Google. Meanwhile, Google has added search results from the Open Directory, news headlines, a language limit, and a "Similar Pages" link for each result. The "Similar Pages" link uses GoogleScout technology to find more pages like that particular result. Google has also added advertisements on some of its results pages. Rather than the typical banner ad, Google is using text ads in a blue box which do load more quickly than graphic banner ads. In a sense, Google has become a bit more like Excite used to be.
See a longer version of this analysis at Search Engine Showdown. THE HALF BILLION CREW
The other new Search Engine Showdown analysis looks at the half a billion record claims being made by several
search engines. Google claims 560 million fully indexed records in its new database. Inktomi says that their partners
using the GEN3 database are searching a combination over the 500 million mark. And WebTop now claims a
database of more than half a billion documents. Let's take a look at each, and then see how they compare in actual
performance. See the full analysis on Search Engine Showdown.
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