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may 2006 search engine news
What's New in Search - May 2006
Google Spider Teamwork
Google has recently revised its site indexing methods.
Previously, each of Google's spiders was responsible
for indexing its respective content on a website.
This left the image spider (Imagebot) to crawl all
images, the AdSense spider (Mediabot) to index sites
to determine what ads to display, good old Googlebot
to crawl the content of a page, and so on. Hypothetically,
a blog about images that displayed AdSense ads would
need to be visited by at least four spiders. Under
the new setup, a site only needs to be visited by
one spider, as the information indexed by that spider
can be shared with other spiders. Although it seems
that the mine-is-bigger-than-yours battle over index
size has cooled down since Yahoo has given up on overtaking
Google as the leader in search, this development is
still beneficial for Google. More effective use of
its resources can help Google generate higher-quality
results by giving the engine the ability to index
more pages or to perform faster updates on its index,
making it more current.
Google Calls Kettle Black
The folks at Google are upset about the search feature
of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7. The new browser
(still in beta) has an integrated search box in the
top right corner that is set to MSN search by default.
Google is complaining that this setup is similar to
Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows,
a practice that got Microsoft into some anti-trust
trouble in the '90s. Google feels that users should
be able to decide which search engine to use in the
program setup, rather than having it default to MSN.
It seems a little hypocritical of Google to complain,
as the default search engine for Mozilla's Firefox
browser is Google itself. However, considering Internet
Explorer owns more than 75 percent of the browser
market, and it is estimated that up to half of all
searches are launched from a browser search box, it
is easy to see why Google has cause for concern.
Ask CEO Goes to Microsoft
The search engine talent raid trend continues as Steve
Berkowitz, former CEO of Ask, was hired by Microsoft
in an effort to improve its search product. Microsoft
has been struggling to find ways to gain ground on
Google, as all of Microsoft's recent developments
and products have been unsuccessful at making headway.
Recent ratings have shown that Microsoft has actually
lost market share. Berkowitz is expected to bring
a "blend of start-up and high growth business experiences"
and "deep functional knowledge of the search" to MSN.
This move also signals that the changes happening
at Ask have gotten the attention of the major players,
validating the underdog engine and signaling that
it could become a bigger player in the future.
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