This month AOL relaunched it's Multi-Media Search Engine Singingfish. Singingfish indexes audio and video files and is one of the few search engines that can spider and index these files. Singingfish indexes Real, Windows Media, MP3, and Apple QuickTime file formats. This relaunch was due to the first upgrade to Singingfish.com since AOL acquired the multimedia search player in late 2003. Even though Singingfish is a multi-media search engine AOL uses it to test new technologies. AOL will now start branding Singingfish as it's own brand. Singingfish receives roughly 700,000 queries. a day.

Singingfish provides paid inclusion feeds, which allows advertisers to pay a flat fee to be included in the Singingfish index. Singingfish's results are syndicated throughout the AOL network and to clients like the Windows Media Player, WindowsMedia.com, RealNetworks' RealOne Player, and the RealOne Guide.

 In 2004 the search engines were ranked according to popularity and usage. the study polled 225,000 individuals in 26 countries. The users had real-time metrics installed on their computers that tracked the web sites that they visited. What was tracked were unique visits to the various search engines, not search activity. This poll was conducted over the period of 1 month.

 The top 5 search engines used were:

Google 39.4%

Yahoo 30.4%

MSN 29.6%

AOL 15.5%

Ask Jeeves 8.5%

 In this coming year it will be interesting to see if MSN (Microsoft) will gain any ground on the top 2 Google and Yahoo. MSN is scheduled to launch their new search engine in the beginning of the year.

 In the tests that we have conducted on MSN we have found their results to be more accurate than Google's in a lot of cases. Let the search wars begin!

It's been a month or so since Google's Desktop Search Application was released. My initial reaction when the software was launched was nervousness. We live in a time of daily security breaches and while I trust Google for the most part I am reluctant to install software that indexes too much as far as I'm concerned. Google's application indexes data files, including word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail messages, cached Web pages and chat sessions. What if it searches your cache and finds bank summaries or personal messages? What if it's a shared machine and it accidentally shows you someone else's personal information? I understand that Google found a capability that was missing in Microsoft's OS and decided to fix it, and for that I applaud their efforts. Unfortunately at this time I'm not willing to take the security risks of installing their application.

If Google can work on this application and fix some of the security breaches I would be happy to install this application. Does it really need to index a computers cache, I personally don't think so. I think this feature should be removed, and the same holds true for searching other machine user accounts.

If anyone has any additional information please let us in on it!

Looks like Microsoft doesn't want Google to have all of the fun, so their new ready for prime-time search engine has been released. This new search engine can be seen at: http://beta.search.msn.com.

Their index is currently supported by 5 billion pages and is a algorithmic search engine built by Microsoft engineers.  The functionality resembles the present Google and Yahoo search engines. They chose to make the interface clean and uncluttered much like Google.

MSN Search features a "Near Me" button which when clicked will present local results. By default it uses the searchers IP address to determine location. These settings can be manually changed.

Link building is a targeted way of building a web sites link popularity. You may ask why is link popularity important and why does my site need it? Good Question. And the answer is because search engines like Google put a lot of emphasis on inbound links that come into a web site. The anchor text that is used to point to that inbound web page should also match the optimized phrase for the page, but that's a different topic. Link building will over time get you to place better with the major search engines.

You can start your link building efforts by doing a search for your desired keyword or keyphrase on Google for example and contact some of the top results to see if they would be interested in exchanging links with your site. Have the code that you would like them to use to point to your web site ready to give to them when you contact them. Make sure that you have an area of your web site that is devoted to posting your relevant link exchanges. That's right you want to exchange links with sites that have relevancy to what they will be pointing to.

Building inbound links to your web site is very powerful and if done correctly it will:

Increase web traffic to your site

Save you advertising money and time

Make you more of an authority on your subject matter

Increase your visibility in the search engines

In the search engine optimization industry it is well known that there are 3 types of hats that an seo may wear. There is the white hat seo who is on the up and up and does their job in a ethical manner. The black hat seo who does things in a not so ethical manner and normally does their optimization in a manner that the search engines state is not proper. Last but not least is the gray hat seo who is somewhere in the middle of the white and black hat seo.

It behooves me to say that most black hat seo companies are fly-by-night operations that stop doing business when the heat gets too hot. They close their operations only to start up somewhere else under a newly assumed company name. These companies make promises to their customers that they can't deliver. We've  all seen the promises like: "We guarantee you the #1 position on all the search engines for your industry keywords". No one can make this guarantee, so don't believe it.

So the moral to the story for companies out there who are looking to optimize their web sites is to make sure to deal with reputable companies. Make sure they have been in business for some time, check references, and ask them to show keyword results for work they have done to optimize web sites. Don't be fooled by companies that send you spam mail with false promises to get your business. SEO is hard and rewarding work when done correctly!

 One of the biggest trends these days is to use blogs to market and educate users on whatever the sites topic of interest is. Bloggers have even found their ways into the mainstream political arena like blogger Tom Burka. 
 
 Blogs are becoming a large source for people's daily information. Our own blog is related to search engine optimization and seo for example and provides the reader with valuable information on current seo trends.
 
 But political and news blogs are not the only success stories out there. Many business blogs are designed as marketing and public relations tools. Many business people today use blogs as one of their main sources for relative news.
 
 It's promising to see blogs have impacted business and how their growth will continue to be a large source for news and marketing. We are definitely on the cutting edge of a new wave of electronic publishing!

70 Million Strong

More than 70 million Americans use search engines on a weekly basis. And the most used search engine on the web is Google, are we surprised? One third of the people who use search engines say that they could not live without them. What did they do 30 years ago? But as the information that is indexed by search engines grow, so does some of the frustrations with the search engine results pages (serp). So many users are looking for new search tools to emerge.

Specialty Search Engines

 I suspect that the future holds room for many specialized search engines. Take Amazon.com's new A9 search engine that specializes in consumer products search. The mainstream general search engines won't go away anytime soon, but keep an eye out for the specialists as that arena is sure to grow.