Archive: July, 2005

Yesterday, I wrote a quick review on IceRocket. One feature I failed to mention was their “Update your snapshot” feature.

Basically, IceRocket displays the same screenshot as Alexa, when listing a web site. In fact, when a screenshot is missing, it pulls Alexa’s default “Picture Coming Soon” graphic. I find this feature helpful, as sometimes I recognize whether or not I’ve been to a site before by the screenshot.

Yesterday while reviewing their site, I noticed this feature, and noted that the screenshots were very old. I figured that I would give it a shot. The tool promises an update within 48 hours.

I just checked, and our screenshot at both IceRocket, and Alexa was updated, within 24 hours.

It’s nice to see it when features work as promised.

Great work!

This morning, Yahoo and Boeing announced a multiyear distribution agreement under which Yahoo’s search engine will be used as part of Boeing’s Connexion in-flight Internet service.

Connexion provides real-time, high-speed Internet access to air travelers in flight. Boeing plane equipped with the Connexion service offer either a LAN, or a wireless 802.11a/b/g, connection, or both.

This is a very smart move by Yahoo. Assuming that most people will use the default engine as a place to start surfing online, Yahoo has effectively found a way to ‘introduce’ it’s search engine to users in an entirely new environment. Let’s face it, the search engine wars are not going to be won by attracting new users online. They are going to be won by poaching customers from competitors. The only way to ‘win’ is to be perceived as offering the best search service. Since most people assume that search = Google, the competition needs to work harder to prove they are just as good, or better. The only way to do that is to get them using their services. This deal is a great way to accomplish this task.

Blake Rhodes, the founder of IceRocket dropped me a nice note after my post last week about Mark Cuban relaunching IceRocket. He invited me to look at their features in greater depth, and post some thoughts.

Today, I took the opportunity to take a look through the site for a little while. I had a longer review written up, but my Firefox browser crashed and it got wiped out, so this will be a short review. We’ll post a longer one on our Search Engine Map at a later date.

Here’s my quick notes on IceRocket:

• Quick results, and while generally relevant overall, I found lots of links to 404’s.
• Standard Tabs – very googlesque – plus a couple that are original, such as tabs for Blogs, Multimedia, Phone Pics, and ‘Find a Friend’.
• ‘Find a Friend’ is cheesy. It pings mingles.com, and facethejury.com. I’m aware that there’s a big social networking market online, but to me it just looks cheesy as a tab in a search engine. I suppose that having one resource to crawl all the networks is probably helpful, but this seems out of place.
• Phone Pics is a neat idea.

Here’s a search engine oddity. Go visit msn.com, and type in the query “search engine” Then look at the results. No MSN, Google, Yahoo, or any other major search engine in the top 10. True, search.com and searchenginecolossus are there. But none of the majors. Now keep going.

Lycos appears at #31. MSN search, Google and Yahoo don’t appear anywhere in the top 100.

There’s lots of entries for discussion forums, and some blogs, which discuss the search engines, but the search engines themselves are strangely absent. (Microsoft Search for Enterprise Server kicks in at around #87)

I find this curious. If I type ’search engine’ into a search engine, I would expect a list of search engines. I would expect other resources about search engines, such as Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com) to appear as well, (and it is #1 in my results), but predominantly, I would expect actual search engines in the results. In comparison, when I performed a similar query in other engines, I found actual search engines in the results.