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August is holiday season in both Southern Europe and North America, which means that search engine news traffic slows down. Next week, however, we should be back to normal.

One of the most important news this week is probably Google’s implementation of Google Suggest on English language sites. Google will now suggest alternative search phrases as you type. This is not a Google invention, however. Ask and Yahoo! have implemented this feature a long time ago.

Another important milestone is Yahoo! abandoning Mash, its attempt at developing a social web site (after its Yahoo! 360 failure).

Given that Yahoo! did not manage to buy Facebook, this means that Yahoo! is unable to compete in this arena. This is a serious issue for a company which normally is very good at content production.

(Truth to be told, Google isn’t very good at this, either. Google’s Orkut is big in Brazil, but not elsewhere compared to Facebook and MySpace.)

More search engine articles from around the Web:

• Yahoo Sheds Some Skin, Drops Mash

  Yahoo’s bad luck in the social network arena continues: the latest casualty is “Mash,” which never left invite-only beta status since it was launched about a year ago. (Wired Aug 29 2008)

• 6 Unique Ways to Get Instant Links to Your Site

  Search Engine Guide Aug 25 2008

• SES San Jose 2008: Top 10 Stories

  The most important coverage of the SE Strategies conference (SE Watch Aug 26 2008)

• Google Now Searching For Synonyms

  Search Engine Land Aug 26 2008

• Is Google Moving Towards Becoming a Social Search Engine

  Google experiments with user voting (Search Engine Journal Aug 26 2008)

• Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Link to Other Sites

  Seriously, share and share alike. How do you expect to make friends when you never share anything? (BigOak Aug 27 2008)

• Search & Internet Explorer 8

  Danny Sullivan has spent some time playing with the new search functionality and checking to see if Microsoft was going to try to stack the deck in its favor with the new browser. (Aug 27 2008)

• Google Coming Down Hard on Scrapers!

  It seems that Google is hell bent on its resolution to evade and block scrapers, by deliberately changing the search results in an effort to confuse the scrapers. (PageTraffic Aug 28 2008)

• Google Suggest to Change the Ways of Search Engine Optimization

  SEO Roundtable Aug 28 2008: On Sphinn, lots of debate is cropping up about how Google Suggest will change the face of SEM — for good.

• Why Google has lost its mojo — and why you should care

  Google has gone from innovative upstart to fat-and-happy industry leader in what seems like record time. (Computerworld Aug 25 2008)

• What Google’s improved Flash indexing means for your website

  Discussion on how Google handles Flash files (ongoing Aug 2008)

• Google & Yahoo Ad Deal Set for October Launch

  Search Engine Journal Aug 29 2008.

• The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition

  Google Suggest’s proposals for one letter queries (O’Reilly Radar Aug 26 2008)

• 24 Firefox Search Plugins You Need

  The following list contains useful search plugins that can speed up the information finding process tremendously. (AltSearchEngines Aug 25 2007)

• At a loss for words?

  Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. (Google Blog Aug 25 2008)

• Google Suggest - disabling

  If you don’t like the new Google Suggest feature which they’re rolling out now it’s easy enough to disable it. (Phil Bradley Aug 27 2008)

• Microsoft To Acquire Ciao For $486 Million

  Microsoft buys comparison shopping search engine (AltSearchEngines Aug 29 2008)

• Ask.com Celebrates Ask Kids Relaunch

  Ask Kids has a whole new look, with a completely customizable home page. (Ask Blog Aug 28 2008)

• ‘Google killer’ remains elusive

  Google is far from being unseated as the dominant player in the US search market. (DMNews Aug 29 2008)

• Google may let users comment on, rearrange search results

  Google Inc. is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. (Computerworld Aug 26 2008)

Original post by Per and Susanne Koch

Google adds search suggestions to search results, generating a list of alternative search queries.

Google has added a new feature to the Google home page and other search pages. As soon as you start typing a search query, Google will open a small pull down menu directly under the search form with a list of alternative search queries based on the letters you type. The list changes as you type.

Behind each suggestion Google adds the number of search results for that particular query. Don’t put too much trust in that number, but it gives you an idea of the relative size of the amount of information available.

It is similar to the “Did you mean?” feature Google has had on the search result pages, the main difference being that Google Suggest is generated in real time.

The point is to help searchers formulate queries with more keywords — queries that are more targeted and more likely to generate relevant results. A happy searcher is, as we know, a returning searcher, and Google would love to have you back for more.

Google uses updated web search statistics to determine what queries to include. Search queries that are popular today are therefore more likely to get included. Google does not make use of your personal search history to generate the suggestions.

Google is not the first search engine to implement such a feature. Both Ask and Yahoo! have it.

Its usefulness seems to be a matter of personal taste. Some like to get to glance at the alternative search phrases and select one that is relevant. Others find the constantly changing list of queries an irritating distraction.

If you want to disable Google Suggestions, click on Preferences (to the right of the Google home page search form) and scroll down to the relevant section.

So far the feature is limited to the English language.

Google Suggest FAQ
The official Google Blog on Suggestions.

Ready To Get New Customers?

Original post by Per and Susanne Koch

I see a lot of new search products on a daily basis. One of the things I don’t see often, though, is real improvements to the presentation of search result. Jamesoo is a news search engine with an innovative results page: The news stories that match your query are presented in newspaper layout.

Jamesoo was launched this month. It searches RSS feeds, which should make for fresh news and a brand new, relevant “newspaper” on the subject of your choice, whenever you want it. A great idea.

How does it work?

When you do a search on Jamesoo, a “newspaper” is compiled for you: You can page through news from the last seven days with headlines, teasers and images much like a regular news paper. The pages are easy to scan and the design is relatively uncluttered.

Clicking the headline brings you to the entire story on its original page. Another link below the story leads to a Jamesoo page with recent stories from the same source.

Jamesoo is available in several languages. The interface is translated into Arabian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. These localized versions search for news in the language in question, e.g. a search on the Swedish page brings news stories in Swedish only.

Is it any good?

Jamesoo has an algorithm which classifies the sources by relevance. With the appalling signal to noise ratio in the blogosphere, this is not an easy job and it seems Jamesoo has a job to do.

Two of my test searches (Johan McCain and Barack Obama) contained no irrelevant stories, but still some of the results were void of real news value.

Here’s an example:

Searching for news on Barack Obama, one of the top stories in my Jamesoo “newspaper” had the headline Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle. The entire story consists of an image with the text “Barack Obama has left a comment in your blog” and a blurb: “Looks like a new meme is finding it’s way around the Internet. It now seems as though Barack will soon have to battle Chuck Norris for WWW domination.” This silly newsflash didn’t make it onto the top 10 pages of a similar search on Google News.

The quality of the stores is my main concern. There is also the issue of speed: During my test, the response time was several seconds, which won’t do in 2008.

Another issue is the lack of RSS. There is no way to subscribe to your search results. Of course, the mail boon of Jamesoo is the way the results are presented. Still, if the quality of the search results improved, people would like to add them to their RSS reader.

The design could be better. The home page looks good, the results pages are a little gaudy. This can be easily fixed, though.

Still, Jamesoo is fun to use and the way the results are presented is innovative and interesting.

I believe the big search engines could learn much from startups. Google News gives you lots of options, bells and whistles, but if all you want is fresh news on the topic of your choice, Jamesoo’s concept is a winner.

Jamesoo was launched just weeks ago. Once they iron out some kinks, this could be a great product.

Ready To Get New Customers?

Original post by Per and Susanne Koch