Search Engine News Roundup

Search engines are in court and in newspapers, and they're forming partnerships. New search engines index specific types of sites. And we look at how people are using the Web to interact and search.

Google and copyright again

In September, we wrote about a Belgian court's ruling that Google had to remove French and German newspaper content from its Belgium sites because of copyright concerns. Now, Google News Norway is under fire.

According to Mediebedriftenes Landsforening, the Norwegian association for media companies, the problem is that Google News includes photos from indexed sites on its home page. While the use of short quotations is acceptable, the use of protected images is not unless an agreement is in place to use them.

In Denmark, the Danish association of newspapers has prevented Google News Denmark from launching because of copyright issues. Google has contacted Danish newspapers to request permission to link to their news articles.

More details are in the Pandia article Google News in trouble — again.

Search engines and newspapers

Online and offline media are crossing over in a big way. The New York Times (free account required to log in) informs us that Yahoo has formed a partnership with 176 newspapers to share content, advertising, and technology. Newspaper employment ads will appear at Hotjobs, a Yahoo site, and Yahoo will be able to index the newspaper content. Yahoo will also display newspaper local ads, and the newspapers will use some of Yahoo's content and technology at their websites.

Yahoo is following in the steps of Google. Earlier this month, the New York Times wrote about Google's partnership with 50 major newspapers. Google plans to sell advertisements for print editions of newspapers, with testing beginning this month.

Search engines working with and against each other

Yahoo Answers and Answers.com have also formed a partnership. Content from Yahoo Answers will now appear in Answers.com search results, and Answers.com is now including some Yahoo Answers content. Search Engine Journal has details.

Google came out with Google Sitemaps in 2005 as a tool for webmasters to help Google bots crawl sites more easily. In addition, Google Sitemaps provide webmasters with information about website traffic and any problems Google might be having accessing the site. It's to be expected that other search engines would also be interested in this tool.

This month, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo agreed to work together to support the Sitemaps protocol that Google started. Webmasters will be able to use Sitemaps to track results from all three search engines, not just from Google. Those who are already using Sitemaps don't need to make any changes to it for Microsoft and MSN bots to be able to read them too.

Microsoft provides details in their announcement. The new sitemaps.org site also has more information.

With almost 50 percent of all Internet searches being done via Google, Google is still the search engine leader. However, Yahoo has increased its share of traffic over the past year faster than Google has. Yahoo's searches are up 30 percent from last year, while Google's are up only 23 percent. Ask.com and AOL have also seen growth in their search numbers, while MSN's numbers have gone down. Source: eweek.com.

New search engines

Wikipedia.com describes how social networking sites have been around since 1995 but in recent years have multiplied to over 200 sites. With so many social networking sites to be searched, a search engine has been developed to do the job: wink.com.

Wink started out as a search engine that let users rate and tag search results and view how other people had rated and tagged them. Now, a tab for people search allows users to search people's profiles at (so far) three different social networking sites. See First Social Network Search Engine Launched for more details.

The new health search engine Healia, still in beta, has been four years in development. The aim behind Healia is to provide results that consumers and health care providers can have more confidence in. It has its own database. Information is ranked by quality, and technology helps computers connect health terminology to other terms to produce relevant search results.

The new Kosmix search engine has several search categories: health, video games, finance, travel, US politics, and autos. Each category has its own subcategory, and more categories are planned.

How people are using the Web

These days, college students are more likely to be online than be watching TV or listening to the radio. It's even more likely that they'll be surfing the Web and doing another task. The number one website they visit is myspace.com, which moved up from fourth place from last year. Youtube.com is in third place, while google.com an ebay.com are in fifth and sixth places. The full chart is at rojo.com.

For online adults of all ages, searching the Web for health information is as common as looking up a phone number or reading blogs. Eighty percent or more of Americans who are online have searched online for health topics. When they search for health information, 66 percent start with general search engines (or they did for their last search). More statistics are at tekrati.com.

Webmasters of sites for local businesses will be encouraged to know that according to a recent survey, 70 percent of those surveyed had searched for a local business online, 46 percent of them in the previous three months. Overall, people were satisfied with their results, and 68 percent expected to contact a vendor via the phone number published at the website.