Subject Matters

Google Prefetching for Mozilla Browsers kv9 writes “A post on GoogleBlog reveals that Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. More info on the Mozilla Prefetching FAQ and the Google Webmaster FAQ”

A9.com with Syndicated Search joeykiller writes “Search Engine Watch reports that Amazon now lets you add your own search to their A9 search engine. Users can opt-in to use additional search engines in addition to A9.com’s own when searching. Amazon has chosen to use an extension of RSS 2.0 for this, and hopes that this format will enable search syndication in the same way RSS did for content. Several add-on searches are available already, among them New York Times, Wikipedia and NASA.”

Tom Foremski writes at SiliconValleyWatcher about search spam aka “search engine optimization” and tells us about Become, company who runs shopping search site Become.com. Its founders, Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, claim to have a spam-proof ranking technology, called Affinity Index Ranking (AIR). And that’s only for starters.

They applied for patents for their technologies. And just in case somebody does figure out how to influence its search results, they also applied for patents for… potential spamming technique!

“Its an insurance policy,” Mr Yang smiles. “We can sue the spammers for patent violation if we have to. I don’t know if that will work, nobody has tried it and if Yeogirl is right, we won’t need to.”

Jon Udell writes @ InfoWorld:

…The current craze for tagging things — Flickr photos, del.icio.us, and Furl URLs — shows that people are more likely than you’d guess to add structure to content. Under what conditions will they make the effort? First, tagging must be easy — a two-second no-brainer. Second, it must deliver both instant gratification and longer-term value to the person doing the tagging. Third and most important, it must occur in a shared context so that network effects can kick in.

Of course, some tags are implicitly woven into the fabric of our content. Consider, for example, the recent Demo conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. As information about the event flowed into the blogosphere, a likely tag to hang on conference-related items would have been the distinctive name Demo@15. And sure enough, that tag was used on both Flickr and del.icio.us, although by only one person. (Hint to conference planners: If you want the blogosphere to synchronize its coverage of your event, pick a tag and promote it.)

But there are also implicit tags — namely links — that identify items about the conference, and a new service I built this week is helping me find them. After Jason Hunter showed me Mark Logic’s XQuery-based XML database, Content Interaction Server, in a screencast, I set up an instance of it and began pumping in the RSS feeds of all the blogs I read. Then I wrote a query that combines free-text search for items containing the strings “Demo” or “Demo@15″ with structured search for items that contain links to demo.com. It yielded a nice list of Demo-related items that I couldn’t have built any other way.

from Slashdot:

tod_miller writes “Google has changed its definitions link from dictionary.com to answers.com. A google search for juxtaposition shows the effect. What is interesting is that answers.com pulls information from wikipedia.org, which was provided bandwidth by google.com [and now Google is providing a service that will be used worldwide to pull information off Wikipedia]. Aside from having both a dictionary.com and a wikipedia.org search box in FireFox (as well as Google) the definition link on Google is still useful and I regularly check it for obscure uses or exact definitions of words. Now it uses answers.com we do not get all the different forms of the word, but we do get any medical or wikipedic information. Interestingly, answers.com does not use Google AdSense, but commission junction that looks like it. There is no announcement yet from Google of their change.” This change took place several weeks ago, as players of e-scrabble and other compulsive word-checkers might have noticed. Update: 03/13 23:20 GMT by T: (Also mentioned in passing last month.)