“Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms. It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone.”

“A thought-out domain name can save you a lot of time and bring you a lot of traffic. Search engines love topic-related domain names and they seem to be an important aspect which is being used to evaluate web-pages. Besides, if you have a popular web-site with enviable reputation, you might be willing to make sure that your visitors don’t get to some surprising web-sites mistyping your site’s URL… Let’s take a look at essential, hand-picked domain-related tools, articles and resources we’ve found in the Web during our research.”

“There are an abundance of new search engines (100+ at last count ) — each pioneering some innovation in search technology. Here is a list of the top 17 innovations that, in our opinion, will prove disruptivein the future. These innovations are classified into four types: Query Pre-processing; Information Sources; Algorithm Improvement; Results Visualization and Post-processing. [Some of these innovations are present in various Google properties, but are either missing or available only in limited form in the main search page…]”

“Search for music by singing or humming part of a song. All you need is a microphone.”

“Late last year, in my predictions post for 2007, I mentioned something I called, quite uninventively, ‘Blog 2.0.’ More specifically I wroteL ‘10. “Blog 2.0′ will become a reality. By this I mean that Version 1.0 blogsites, of which I think Searchblog is a good example, will begin to look dated and fade in comparison to sites that employ better approaches to content management, navigation, intelligent widgets and web services, etc.’”

“a new visual search engine, where the contents of photos are used to search & retrieve similar items. users can search their favorite pair of earrings or shoes by selecting parts of images, by color, by detail or by similarity to uploaded photos, & order them by color, shape or pattern.”

“Got a research paper or thesis to write? Want to research using the Internet? Good luck. There’s a lot of junk out there — outdated pages, broken links, and inaccurate information. Using Google or the Wikipedia may lead you to some results, but you can rarely be sure of accuracy. And what’s more, you’ll only be searching a fraction of all of the resources available to you.”

“From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com — BMW’s international site — is on top for this search. The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages. German and international bloggers last week were quick to spread the news.”

“Update: Google reactivated their help entry with a new text. ‘It is Google’s policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so.’”

“retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images. If you’d like to have your images (or the images for a specific tag) added, please let me know. A submission interface is planned!”

Weblog from Google employee with a lot about search engine optimization.

“The best of Google on one searchable page.”

“The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is ‘Block View,’ which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street. The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.”

“Over the past year, Iíve evaluated the search experiences on a number of popular content sites. With the help of author and interface designer Darcy DiNucci, I picked apart the search and result designs from sites like Apple.com, NASA.gov, SchwabFoundation.org, and a variety of others. We focused on content sites, rather than e-commerce or Web applications, and we avoided general Web search engines entirely.”

“In research, the find ó particularly finding the answer ó is cause for jubilation. But at what cost? Untold hours during which you initiate several false starts or follow a few distracting, albeit interesting, links? Personal defeat as search engines repeatedly yield too many hits with those at the top leading nowhere, or to irrelevant pages? And when you find the answer, can you trust it? Is it complete, authentic, authoritative and up-to-date? Does it help you envision the forest or spotlight just one tree? Successful Web-based research encompasses economy of time and effort. It also takes into account the quality of the answer. The key is to focus on the strategy and skill of the hunt rather than the find.”