It’s the afternoon of the second day. We’re starting with Ran Hock talking about Yahoo. There’s new stuff such as audio and video search, my Yahoo (personalization, but only in the US), German translation to English only at the yahoo.de site, subscription databases, podcast search (just introduced yesterday, searches large number of podcasts and can limit to series and episodes), Yahoo 360 (easy way to start blog, get web page), mail (storage to 1 gig, look for photomail), and others.

Karen is covering Google and the others, which she says is appropriate, given Steve’s keynote talk. Google removed the number of pages covered (it said 8 billion until Yahoo announced 20 billion, then Google simply said that quantity doesn’t matter, quality does). Google introduced some proximity searching using the *. Google Video got off to a rocky start, now you don’t have to download Google’s video player, so it’s better. It searches on metadata. Google Print isn’t the same thing as digitizing the library books; publishers can send books to Google for digitizing. You can only read a few pages at a time, but if you do a search, you get a list of pages and can keep reading with no restrictions she’s found yet on pages.

Google local search is only for UK, Canada and US. Google Earth mashed with local can take you down to a level where you can see the cars on the road. Personalized search pages is an example of Google running to keep up with Yahoo. If you look at Google Labs, and you haven’t logged out, then your entire search history is captured.

Google owns Blogger, but it’s amazing how long it’s taken to add RSS and Atom feeds for news alerts. Blogsearch was just introduced and there’s now the Web based feed reader. To Google, a blog is only something with an RSS feed, which isn’t most people’s definition. Blog search hint: Search in blog title for better relevancy.

Desktop Search version 2 is not as good as Yahoo’s. Still very resource hungry. She’s mentioning Google Talk and the deal with Sun, which wasn’t all that major an announcement and there’s probably something else coming out. To keep up, look at Google Labs.

Why use another search tool? They have different coverage, search features,and algorithms. Now she’s showing Thumbshots ranking.

MSN relaunched in autumn 2004, with 5-7 billion pages. The results are more consumer oriented, but it has slider bars to weight results.

Ask Jeeves had makeover. It’s added Zoom, which gives you suggestions to broaden or narrow search and also shows latest news. In theory, Ask Jeeves Web answers page takes you to an actual answer if you start a query with how, what, or who. Karen says it doesn’t work very well. She asked “Why is grass green?” Ask Jeeves assumed she wanted to buy astroturf.

Exalead has the NEAR command, phonetic searching, and pattern matching.

Straightforward HTML web page search is no longer a major issue as far as the search engines are concerned; you can search different file formats, resource types. Acquisition of other applications and integrating with the web is becoming more prevalent. Another trend: Integrate local with web search.

Look beyond Google.

Hit a different key every day and see what it does.

Teoma is useful for suggesting related, expert sites and for clustering. The other search engine strong in clustering is Vivisimo.

Neat site recommended by Karen: Trovando , which searches 3350 search engines. You can do images, reference, tags, news, audiovisual, and more.