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.
