'Daypop down until further notice'

Looks like Daypop is out of service for at least a month. 

Ask: The retooling of a search engine

NY Times: The Retooling of a Search Engine (with CEO Jim Lanzone, above). Today, Ask.com is introducing AskCity, a service that integrates maps with information about local businesses, restaurants, concert and movie listings and reviews. I tried it out, and it worked surprisingly well on a number of search queries. Check it for yourself.

Google abandons online answer service

Associated Press:  Google to abandon online answer service

Google as news archivist

SearchEngineWatch: Google As News Archivist.

Until recently, it was difficult to find news archives on the web more than 30 days old. That's changed in a big way with the advent of Google's News Archive search.

Researchers and info pros know that everything is not available for free on the web, although sometimes it feels that way. One area in which it is evident that information comes with a price tag is news from more than a month or two ago. Sure, you can get the latest news from The New York Times from its web site, but you'll have to pay $4.95 if you want to read anything from more than a few weeks ago. Google News and other news sites don't offer any greater depth; if the news is older than a month, you're out of luck.

But last September, Google rolled out its "200-year" News Archive Search, offering full-text content from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and third-party sources such as LexisNexis, HighBeam and Thomson Gale. You can search the News Archive at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, or by clicking the "News archive search" at the Google News page. If Google detects that your regular web search query would retrieve archived articles, it sometimes even includes those in the search results page.

The search screens for the News Archive are virtually the same as the regular Google News search; the only difference is that the Archive search includes the option to limit the results to free articles, or for articles costing less than $5, $10, or $50. (The $50-plus articles are from investment analysts, market research reports and other high-end content, sold through Alacra.)

The search results page differs from the usual Google search results format. The default is to sort the results by relevance, and there are hyperlinked dates along the left margin clustering the results by year. ...

You can see a sample search results page, with pricing for some, here.

Video search engines worth a peek

Bambi Francisco at AlwaysOn: Video search engines worth a peek. Excerpt:

By 2007, consumers won't just want bearable video, however. They'll want organized video. Heretofore, it's been about making video available and easy to watch. Tomorrow, it'll be about making it easy for people to find what they want amid the explosion of video content going online.

That's what I've been saying in my conference circuit talks, though the answer probably won't lie in video search engines but in better recommendation technologies.

A rave for Groowe

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch raves about the Groowe toolbar.

Google's data or yours?

From Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media:

A Couple of Post-Election Thoughts. Excerpt:

The collaborative nature of the online medium got a workout in several journalistic ways. Perhaps the most notable was Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall’s brilliant gathering of string on what turned out to be a last-second bit of trickery — not the only thing of its kind by the two parties, but one of the most notable — the now-notorious Republican “robo-calling” stunt where automatic phone dialers inundated voters with repeated calls that appeared, at first glance, to come from Democrats — a tactic quite plainly designed to annoy voters, not educate them.

Marshall, more than any other journalist, blew the whistle on this stunt — and, moreover, he led the charge to persuade the traditional media to wake up and cover what plainly was a big story. I strongly doubt that this story would have been in the major newspapers and on TV had Marshall not done this work.

Agreed.

Your Data or Google’s? Some Small Progress. Excerpt:

When you upload your videos to places like Google, YouTube (now part of Google) and other sites; when a blog-hosting company keeps your blog for you; when you entrust what you’ve created to others — it’s vital to ensure that your data is yours. Your ISP doesn’t own it. You do.

Google takes the position that while it’s your data, Google has the right to hang onto it essentially forever, and then to mine the data and use it to create better advertising. I find that more than a little creepy, and I think you should, too.

I'm not sure what Dan's getting at here. You upload your video, Google's servers store them for free for as long as you keep it there, and it earns revenues around it through ads, which you know about in the first place. I'd like to see a revenue split with the video creator, but there's nothing creepy about this.

Google-bombing as a campaign tactic

NY Times: Google-bombing as a new campaign tactic.

Google's election mashup

Political Wire:

Google Earth just implemented an overlay of all 435 congressional districts on their maps. Clicking on a district gives you information about the candidates running with links to news.

CNET has screenshots of the program, which is available as part of the free Google Pack. (PC only, apparently.)

Google supporting Republican candidates for Congress

Google says its mantra is "do no evil." So why is Google PAC doing this?