Which search engine gets the most traffic and how close are the others? Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com, gives the following traffic stats for the last four months:
Google 56.9%
Yahoo 21.2%
MSN Search 8.9%
AOL Search 3.2%
For more information, see:
OneStat.com
ComScore Networks gives different stats:
Google 37.3%
Yahoo 29.7%
MSN 15.8%
Ask Jeeves 6%
Many years ago Gary Kildall, the true founder of the personal computer revolution, wrote these lines:
It was then that I learned that computers were
built to make money, not minds.”
We would do well to remember this quote today as you ponder how to get the search engines working for you. The name for these engines is even wrong. Most people think of the search engines as a tool for finding specific information that relates to a topic. In fact, that’s how I used Google to find the initial quote in this post. All wrong. Google (to quote Eric Lindquist)) is really a media company that relies on the chaos of the Internet to match searches with advertiser pitches.
When Microsoft announces it plans to beat Google at the search game, that’s nothing but propaganda. What Microsoft is saying is that they plan to be a media company that matches searches with advertiser pitches, and do it better than Google. The game is always who can make the most profit.
Note: All of the existing major search engines started at universities as true search engines. Google and Yahoo started at Stanford, Inktomi from the University of California, and Lycos from Carnegie Mellon. All have gone commercial.
If you are serious about the search engines and want the best book on it (#21 of all of Amazon’s sales now), you want the book The Search by John Battelle that is just out:
Google has just released a new blog search engine. You can get more information it at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/09/15/google.blogs.ap/index.html
You can try it at:
http://blogsearch.google.com/
Note: I still find the regular Good search engine is better than this blog searcher, but this searcherdoes bring up some interesting stuff.
The Internet is serving a very important role in the hurrican recovery. One of these is connecting survivors together that are scattered all over the nation. Go into a database and search for family members - or add your own name and where you are.
The problem, however, is that serveral people have set up the databases and you end up having to enter your name and contact address to several or, if you are searching, searching several.
Enter a new web site that can search all the leading survivor databases for you. It exists at:
http://katrinalist.net/
This brings up legal issues when taken beyond Katrina. There are already web sites that search eBay and other databases for the lowest price on a specific item. These same people have started lawsuits, saying it is illegal for other sites to use their information that way.
In most cases, the courts have ruled that people have a right to protect their information. Is this fair, however? What if people networking these Katrina databases had to secure rights to each database they are using? In some cases you wouldn’t be able to locate the database webmaster. Internet databases should be open by default unless secured otherwise.
For our spammer blacklist at
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm, we consider it an open database and any hacker canuse it to kill IPs. These are illegal IPs.
If you are like us, you have been angry at the increasing level of spam and the whippy laws from Congress that do anything to stop it. So we found the only way to stop it is to take the lead ourselves. We have spam filters on our host and local system. Also, we’ve been compiling our own public and uncopyrighted black list of spammers and publish it online with an invitation to hackers to use this database to develop their own viruses, trojans, and spyware. In other words, hackers can take the lead by launching denial of service and other attacks on the illegal sites. You can find our current list at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm
Have fun!
The IPs listed here are only those that have spammed us. You can’t send us an IP to add to the list. Build your own black list and advertise it, like we do.
Remember a couple of things:
You may see some prominent IPs on this list. There are several on the list hosted by yahoo.uk, for example. Spammers are using that host to sell prescription drugs using illegal email from blind accounts. We’ve written Yahoo.uk on this, but they have done nothing. So we are asking hackers to shut down multiple IPs on this host that are being used for this.
Many sites are now building links into our black list. Thank you very much! This pushes our black list higher in the search engines and helps make everything work better. Some of these IPs have already moved onto the commercial black lists, such as postini’s, that are used by commercial hosts for controlling spam.
This disadvantage of this strategy is that more and more IPs are killed, and there is a shortage of IPs on the Internet. My first priority, however, is to protect my computer - not the spammers. Will President Bush, Congress, and the FTC every wake up to this or do we have to do it?
Like Germany, we should have a high federal fine for the spammer (I think it’s $65,000/spam in Germany). That would finance the FTC operation. A portion of that should be kicked back to whoever reports a spammer to the FTC to cover their reporting cost. How about it Congress?