LISNews: Librarian News

Genie Tyburski writes \"Chris Sherman, Associate Editor, Searchday, writes an introduction to the search technology behind Quigo. Quigo is taking on the task of indexing database content on the Web. \"

There are many other good search engine related stories on the site as well.

Hermit ;-) writes \"When did I blink!? Google is claiming a \'3 Billion Document Index... [and a] 20 Year Usenet Archive\' Google Press Release and have enhanced their \'News results\' inclusion \'whenever a search is conducted on a timely topic.\' This leaves WiseNut in the dust, which, along with Teoma had been getting billed as potential competitors for Google. WooHoo!!! \"

Wired News is reporting today about the goal of some new search engines that hope to \"beat Google at its own game.\" Google users love it. It\'s simple to use, and because it is the largest URL database, it returnes a high number of results. But, as the article points out, \"Google has a major flaw: It returns too many results. Most of Google\'s results are irrelevant, and it is too difficult to wade through them all.\" more...

Ralph Nader\'s Commercial Alert has accused Hotbot and other search engines of ordering query results based on fees paid to them:

COMMERCIAL ALERT, a 3-year-old group founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader, asked the FTC to investigate whether eight of the Web’s largest search engines are violating federal laws against deceptive advertising. The group said that the search engines are abandoning objective formulas to determine the order of their listed results, and selling the top spots to the highest bidders without making adequate disclosures to Web surfers. . . The complaint touches a hot-button issue affecting tens of millions of people who submit search queries each day. With more than 2 billion pages and more than 14 billion hyperlinks on the Web, search requests rank as the second most popular online activity after e-mail. [More from MSNBC].

Thanks again to the invaluable geeks at Slashdot :)