Yahoo! launched its new site design during May, initially on Yahoo.com but with a preview tab on the UK domain as well. The new look site offers more access opportunities from the home page, which you would expect from a market leading portal service, and whereas search takes a prime position on the site, the original Yahoo! directory service has been further relegated from view.
Last year Google launched its Sitemaps program, which allows webmasters to submit details of all their website’s pages in xml or text format, so that they can be considered for inclusion in Google’s index. In the past few days, Google has announced additional new features for this program.
Another new tool has just been launched by Google. This time it’s Google Talk, which marks their entry into the VoIP market, allowing users to make free phone calls over the Internet.
Following our feature on the new Google Earth product last month, we felt it only fair to review MSN’s new Virtual Earth product in this issue, as it has recently been released in a beta version. By enhancing its established local search tool, MSN is clearly playing catch-up with Google’s impressive new application.
Following hard on the heels of Google Local and Google Maps (May
newsletter) comes Google Earth. This new product requires software to be downloaded for free to your PC (as well as a broadband connection) and combines some practical search functions with some amazing quality satellite imagery. Together, these offer a powerful and fascinating view of the world.
All of the main search engines are constantly developing new search technology and applications, many of which are made available online in beta formats for web users to try them out and, if required, provide feedback. The latest projects from Yahoo! include a new twist on generating relevant search results.
Can you remember how your website looked 2, 5 or even 9 years ago (if it even existed)? Well, for some enlightening fun, try the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. Over 30 billion web pages have been recorded and archived since 1996 and you can view how websites used to look through many design changes or updates.
As we reported last year, Microsoft has been developing its own search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo and this has been launched during January on MSN. The new look search engine and revised results listings have been available in a ‘beta’ format for several months and we reviewed this back in December’s issue of the newsletter. Now that is has been introduced into the main MSN Search tool we have started to notice some substantial changes to the search engine results being shown, although it is still too early to detect any real trends and the importance of the ranking criteria being used.
One of main challenges for search engines at the moment is being able to
pinpoint businesses in a certain location easily. This remains a major barrier
to small businesses that are geographically constrained, for example
hairdressers or plumbers. Until recently these businesses have relied heavily on
the Yellow Pages and other local directories to advertise to their region.
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