FoxyWeb Tech Journal

Myspace Legal has been very busy lately with some cease and desist letters being sent out to few websites. The legal department wasn’t targeting sites that have Myspace resources such as pictures or profile generators, but they were targeting automated script websites which were benefiting purely from the Myspace community. Sites such as SingleStat.us, which was a status report site for users of Myspace. This automated process type website is against the AUP of Myspace for really one reason: it puts a higher amount of stress on the Myspace servers, therefor providing a lower quality service to the actual community.

Myspace saw this as an opportunity to increase server performance and actually follow through with upholding their AUP. This is a good move for Myspace and we should hopefully see even a slightly higher increase in usability on the website. (via)

Microsoft recently launched a Demographics Prediction tool which will help predict a query or URL’s demographics. This tool will provide predicted demographic data for a specific query or a URL which you will input into the tool. The tool processes those terms and based on, what I’m assuming to be their database of search queries, predicted data for that search or URL. Below is an example of the data.

This can be a very helpful tool for new sites or sites that do not have the time to gather such data. This tool could also be helpful for setting goals for your target audience. This will hopefully become yet another important tool, such as the Keyword Selector tool by Yahoo! has become an important tool to webmasters.

A little new release from Yahoo! in attempt to put themselves back in the game for Webmasters.

Why is this search different?

Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Site Explorer APIs

Access the Site Explorer in your favorite programming languages through a web services API.

I personally don’t see how this helps all that much. You can basically the do the same thing right now just using the site:domain.com function on the main search page. The only added functionality to the search type is that you can do ‘Explore URL’ which actually doesn’t do much else once you click in. Yahoo! has a good idea behind this, but it needs to be developed a lot more.

Yahoo! Search Site Explorer

A nice little quote from search.msn.com that describes the process of the jobs there at MSN. This little insight gives us a better understanding to how MSNbot and all the little gremlines inside of MSNbot, function.

Hand crafted results
When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user’s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks.

If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method – come join us and delight users real-time!

search.msn.com