Changes to search engines (was Submitting websites to search engines)

[JQ Johnson]

Search engine evaluation comes up fairly frequently on this list, but
perhaps not frequently enough to track the rapid changes that are occuring
in the web search playing field.

We've had some discussion of metasearch engines and portals, but what
about other "new" approaches to searching the web?  In particular, has
anyone seriously evaluated Alexa?

Alexa, for those who aren't familiar with it, is Brewster Kahle's response
to the problem that the web is growing much faster than the search engine
databases.  His product offers a "what's related" set of links for any
particular web page you visit.  So the idea is that you find one web page
using AV or whatever, then follow the Alexa links to better sites.
Ancillary services include a rating service and an archive of deleted
pages (so if you get a 404 not found Alexa can give you a copy of the page
as it appeared last time Kahle's company archived it).

The interesting thing is that the data for measuring relatedness comes
from a Salton style distance vector comparison of words appearing within
sites, plus a traffic analysis of what pages Alexa users tend to jump to.
So it moves away from the 2 dominant search paradigms to date:
hand-cataloging of top sites, and keyword search of the contents of pages.

There are, of course, privacy and intellectual property issues associated
with the Kahle initiative.  But what I'm interested in is your current
opinion as to whether the product actually provides an effective tool for
finding things on the web.

For more details on Alexa and/or to download their (free) software see
http://www.alexa.com

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/