ALCANDER NEWSLETTER

13 February 2004

 Issue 5

NEWS ITEM IN BRIEF

LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION

Microsoft's plans for a new search engine technology

01-02-04

Google has more than 70% of the world’s search engine market and scan nearly 3.5 billion indexed web pages.

08-02-04

Lycos restructures, cuts U.S. staff

11-02-04

FindWhat acquires Espotting

11-02-04

WEB PROMOTION

Alcander's Free Link Popularity Enhancement Tool

<This text has been removed, because Alcander would prefer to not disclose details of this tool until it is available. A beta-version is expected to be released in May / June 2004>

In our first 7 issues, we look at the 7 BIG mistakes in web design. We've now reached the fifth in this series, and we are going to look at....

The Search Engine War : Avoiding Being Overtaken

Once one has reached good rankings with the search engines, it is important to avoid resting on one's laurels. The search engine wars rage on and if you sit back, you will be overtaken.

In order to maintain good rankings, you need to

• update your site's pages regularly

• consider forming joint ventures with sites competing against yours for search engine rankings (e.g. via affiliate programs)

• take note of new search engines and search directories that arrive on the scene (and the demise of others). Make sure your site gets listed in all the important places. N.b. The imminent arrival of Alcander's heLPer tool, described above, will help with the latter.

If we ran a web award scheme, we would give out awards to the following web sites. We have placed each "award" in one of 8 categories. Who knows, one day we may run an official awards website. One way of getting ideas for compelling websites is to look for inspiration from other compelling websites. The categories below are subject to change.

Arts & Entertainment :

CollectArt.co.uk

Collectart specialises in Modern British Artists, particularly Theodore Major, Lawrence Isherwood & L S Lowry amongst others.

Humour

Official Fish

Caricatures and Portraits

Business/Commercial:

Border Art

Genealogy maps and clan crest merchandise

Science and Technology:

SciCentral Gateway to the best scientific research news sources

Creativity :

ThePerfectLogo.com

Good looking site for a corporate identity design company specialising in logo design and visual branding.

Webmasters Resources :

Atomz Publish

Powerful Web Content Management System

E-commerce :

WebGroove

Fair Isaac are the preeminent providers of creative analytics that unlock value for people, businesses and industries.

Educational :

TechnologyStudent.com

A design and technology site (for educational purposes).

Why restrict your searching to Google? Each month we look at other ways of searching the Internet.

How do you get to all the helpful information locked away in databases that can never be indexed by search engines i.e. the "deep web", sometimes (inaccurately) referred to as the "invisible web".

The "deep" Web is content residing in searchable databases, the results from which can only be discovered by a direct query. Because search engines can't direct every conceivable query to all the databases that drive websites, they have no way of indexing all dynamically created web content.

There are a few products which enable the search of the entire web. BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager (DQM) allows individuals and groups to discover and manage virtually all Internet content with unprecedented flexibility and power, with access to more than 60,000 unique databases.

Exceptional Digital Enterprise solutions (XDE) provide a product called XQASP Invisible/Deep Web/Hidden Internet exposure tool which overcomes deep web indexing problems.

Ez2find, a meta-search engine, can find information in 1000 different topic based or language based databases, in real time, thus also delving into the deep web.

Read about terms or definitions before we get around to putting them in our knowledgebase (www.alcander.co.uk/knowbase.php)

favicon : A small icon used by some browsers to identify a bookmarked Web site. The icon will appear in the address bar for browsers which support them such is IE5 and above.