Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad: Funny things going on with Google. Seth Finkelstein has identified what he calls a “GoogleNack” — when a Google results page trips over a spam site and removes a big chunk of the results.
“The suppressed sites should be quietly removed from the items returned. However, the following glitch would explain the behavior observed here:
The result display is stopping on the first spam (to be suppressed) resultThat is, when a spam site would be removed, and then the next (non-spam) site would be returned, instead the result display is simply crashing.”
Between this and the “never talk about AdSense” PR mess, Google’s image is taking a hit these days. Bad timing, with Microsoft’s MSNBot and Amazon’s A9 breathing down their necks.
PageRank is Dead: Is it actually dead? I don't know, but he makes a good point here: "Google has a really hard problem to solve. It's not unlike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying…
Amazon Plans Search Service To Drive Sales: Everybody is rushing to search these days. "Amazon.com Inc. has quietly established a beachhead in Silicon Valley to develop its own Web-search technology, a plan that could pit it more directly against Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in an emerging battle over who controls…
MSN Search — MSNBOT: This is new. MSNBOT is a prototype Web crawler robot developed by MSN Search... More good information over at Scripting News: They [MSN] currently outsource all their searches to Inktomi and LookSmart, with ads embedded through a partnership with Overture. Now that Inktomi is owned by Yahoo (the #2…