Archive: May, 2008

Yesterday’s Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm was one of those shows I truly love doing, a conversation with an old friend. Our guest was Gary Price, one of those people who have had an extraordinary impact on the evolution of the search and Internet environment.

Gary was one of the original editors of Search Engine Watch. Before working with Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, Gary had established the extremely successful Librarian focused information site, ResourceShelf.com. After leaving Search Engine Watch, Gary became the chief evangelist for Ask.com, working directly with Ask’s former (and beloved) CEO Jim Lanzone during Ask’s most innovate period. He was let go from Ask in early March following Lanzone’s replacement as CEO by Jim Safka when Ask laid-off many of the team that made Ask so innovative. In 2001, Gary wrote a book with Chris Sherman, “The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See” about the Deep Web, a topic I wrote about earlier this week.

Gary came on Webcology yesterday to address Googlebot and the Deep Web. While he was there, he spoke a bit about Ask.com and the aftermath of the layoffs. It was a grand conversation. Click on the player to listen in.

Working in search, it is difficult to remain optimistic and hopeful for smaller, independent search entities. The competition is fierce and the financial stakes are far higher than in most business sectors. Everyone is scared of the Big G, even a company as massive as Microsoft.

I spent 2006 and much of 2007 thinking and writing about alternative search engines. When I was recently asked to write a longer piece on a Canadian based search engine, I knew it would be a challenging assignment.

A couple of weeks ago, the fine folks at Search Engine Strategies asked me to write a piece about the independent Halifax based search engine, GenieKnows. It was a difficult piece to write for a number of reasons but the greatest challenge was in figuring out why the general public would use GenieKnows (or any other search engine) in place of Google.

It didn’t take GenieKnows PR director Mark Harper long to show GenieKnow’s strongest tool, one that differentiates it from competitors, even those as large as Google.

A couple of weeks into the second season and the wear is beginning to show. The sore arms, legs and backs are only overshadowed by the bruises sustained by stopping a hard rubber ball traveling at 60mph. Nevertheless, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is moving into its third week with two games that should prove to be exciting.

Tournament organizer Matthew Bowes has posted a definitive page on the charity tournament that also updates the standings.

On Wednesday, Reliable Controls plays Team Telus at 6:30. The next night, Team Metamend meats meets Pareto Logic for what many (well, those of us on Team Metamend at any rate) believe will be the highlight game of the series.

Here’s an except from Matthew’s definitive page about the two charities we’re playing for:

The 2008 charitable proceeds from the 2008 Victoria Tech Community Floor Hockey Challenge will be split equally between the Mustard Seed Food Bank of Victoria and the Boys and Girls Club Services of Greater Victoria (minus expenses).

Google’s page-finding spider, Googlebot, has developed a new talent over the past six months that draws it deeper into areas of the web that were previously inaccessible to search engine spiders. Googlebot can now fill in and submit the simplest type of web-forms and spider through the content hidden behind them. When Googlebot finds useful or interesting information behind web-forms, it adds that content to its index.

Reports of Googlebot working its way through forms started surfacing in November 2007 though the feasibility of the form-filling indexing technique was written up in Bill Slawski’s SEO by the Sea blog in October 2006. It was confirmed by a post to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, “Crawling through HTML forms” in April 2008.

Google’s venture into the Invisible Web is extremely interesting though in some cases possibly perilous. An enormous amount of data is, (or was), hidden from search spiders and therefore “invisible” to the general public. While nobody really knows the depth of the Invisible Web, it is estimated to be several times the size of the Visible Web. “Known (or Charted) Cyberspace” is about to get very much larger.