>> forwards (December 2001)
<< backwards (September & October 2001)

November 28 [update] Ixquick, more [news] InfoSpace
I have completed a new page, Ixquick, a popular (and good) meta search engine. I also made some small updates to a number of other pages. An article from Reuters says that InfoSpace's purchase of Excite has been approved. InfoSpace will be operating the search engine and directory (the directory is and probably will remain a mirror of LookSmart), while iWon will manage the other parts of the portal.

November 27 [update] Friskit, GovBot, site search [news] Google
I have completed yet another page, Friskit which is a streaming audio and video search engine, and is now located on both the audio search and video search pages. I have added GovBot to the Government page, it is a US government search tool. Today I have made available Fagan Finder's site search tool (now located above reference on this page), which searches within this website and is very up to date. The media have shown us a bad side to Google's new indexing of non-html file types; some documents that people thought were hidden are now publicly available. Remember that if you link to a private document, it becomes a public document.

November 25 [update] Images, Audio, more
I added Singingfish to the Audio & Music page. I also added a new page, AltaVista's Audio Search. I have also made yet another new page, AllTheWeb's MP3 Search. And other page, GoGraph an Image Search tool. Lastly, I added two new links to the Biographies page. Also the Site Map is completely up to date. The EntireWeb search engine is back online. Surprisingly Euroseek has suggested this as an alternative while it is offline.

November 24 [update] Video, Images, Site, Daypop, Teoma, Alexa, more
I have been working on a school project for the past week or so and was unable to update Fagan Finder. However, I have worked very hard today and made, among other things, five new multimedia pages: Singingfish, AllTheWeb Video search, AltaVista Video search, AllTheWeb Image search, and AltaVista Image search. And I have accordingly updated the Image Search, Video Search, and Audio Search pages. Over the next week or so, expect even more changes and additions to the multimedia page. Also, I removed the "all media" search from the main page because there was no point to it, and it no longer worked. I have repaired the Teoma Search, and made some additions to the Daypop page. On the Searching Links & Resources page, I added The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk, and removed the now defunct Alpha Search (not AlphaSearch). I added, mainly for myself, a page of reviews of Fagan Finder. I also made some changes and additions to the About, Why use Fagan Finder, Privacy Policy, other Site pages, and a few other pages. And speaking of this site, I have been playing around with Atomz, and in a few days I will add a search engine that searches for pages on this website, which is a good idea now that there are about 70 pages on this site. Lastly, I have redone the Alexa information on the Site Specific page, as they have improved it and put it onto their front page.

November 24 [news] DMOZ, Google, Yahoo
Google's toolbar now has a new beta feature (only available from that link). It consists of a happy face and a frowny face, which you click on when you are happy or unhappy with the site you are currently viewing. This does not yet affect Google search results. Pandia has more information here. Also reported by Pandia, the Open Directory Project, the largest directory of websites, has passed three million listings (details). Yahoo, which recently added paid results from Overture, has been having problems, laying off staff, and going through a restructuring.

November 15 [update] AllTheWeb, Search Links, more [news] misc
I have completed the AllTheWeb Image Search page, check it out. I have added a number of links to the Searching Links & Resources page. I added Alpha Search and Searchenginez to the internet gateway subsection, and a made a new subsection for search news, to which I added the search engines section from NewsNow and the search engines news feed from Moreover on this page. I also added a link to NewsNow on the News page. On the search engines page, I removed Zerx because I decided that it didn't offer anything unique, plus it had an old and small database. Lastly, yesterday was the semifinals of the College Championships on Jeopardy! and the answer to Final Jeopardy was Google (I got it right). Also, check out Fyuze, where you can sign up and create a customized page. Its a good idea, but the content is currently limited.

November 15 [news] Yahoo, Quigo, Fast, Euroseek, more
It seems that Yahoo hasn't been having much fun lately. They have announced more layoffs and will eliminate some services. More important for searchers however, Yahoo now includes paid search results from Overture (formerly GoTo); three on the top and two on the bottom of every page. I almost never use Yahoo and this doesn't exactly give me an incentive to. Quigo has released a preview version of its invisible web search engine at deepweb.com. I have to say that I am not impressed. The results consisted entirely of products for sale except for definitions from Dictionary.com. Even basic boolean such as "quotes" and -minus do not work. Unless Quigo has decide to be a shopping search tool, they've got a lot of work to do. Euroseek is up for sale, as you can tell from the large banner on the front page. Will anyone want it? Fast Search, the people behind the AllTheWeb search engine have made a deal to provide searching to Tiscali, a major European player. See the details on this article from NetImperitive [article no longer available]. Entireweb a so-so search engine is back online after it was hacked several days ago. I don't know why anyone would bother.

November 12 [update] AllTheWeb [news] AllTheWeb, more
As I reported several days ago, today AllTheWeb released a number of new features. Read what AllTheWeb has to say about it. I have already created a brand new AllTheWeb News Search page! I also added AllTheWeb's news search to the News page, and updated the AllTheWeb page and the web search engines page, plus the site map. In testing some of the new features, they look quite good. Interesting that their "query rewriting" includes putting quotes around words that it thinks are a phrase, because AltaVista implemented this quite a while ago. Also, AllTheWeb has rewritten the name of every single Open Directory category to make it shorter. This is the same thing that Yahoo recently did. Still, AllTheWeb's topic clustering is good, the first to integrate human and automated topics, although you can only go one level down (no topics within topics). Lastly, the new customization offers a multitude of options.
In still more news, from C|Net and Silicon.com have more details about the sale of the Excite portal. Also, Inktomi has updated their index today or yesterday. Inktomi powers MSN, HotBot, AOL, and others.

November 11 [update] Translation
The Translation page is complete! It currently includes Babel Fish, Ectaco, and Travlang, and a number of useful links. Also from the translation page is the ability to add special characters and letters with áçcëñtš. I added this information to the Help page.

November 11 [news] Various
IncyWincy seems to be back up again. The Internet Archive have moved their WayBack Machine onto their front page, although service is still slow. An article on C|Net has some more information about the sale of Excite to iWon. It seems that InfoSpace will be running their search and directory. InfoSpace currently owns MetaCrawler, Dogpile, and other internet services. I am wondering when Quigo will ever open. Quigo is an invisible web search engine. They opened in beta in September, and then closed down after I sent them a letter telling them that it did not function in Netscape. Since Google is now indexing some dynamic content, I fear that when Quigo finally opens, they will have lost their edge.

November 10 [news] AllTheWeb (Fast)
Fast Search is making a number of great changes on Monday. While Fast's search engine AllTheWeb is not as popular as it should be (it is a great search engine, you should try it if you haven't), Fast Search is used by the Lycos portal, other big European portals, and is used to power eBay and Scirus. Here is a summary of some of Fast's new innovations:
• a news search using about 3,000 sources and indexed 12 times a day
• grouping of results into folders (topics) (similar to Teoma and WiseNut), made mostly from ODP categories
• your query may be rewritten to get you better results. they will tell you if they do this and you can prevent it
• much more customization
More details can be found at this article from Pandia. Apparently, Fast Search isn't stopping there. Within three months they hope to have an index of 2 billion pages and advanced boolean searching. Fast already refreshes their index every 9-12 days, compared to the monthly refresh of Google, and worse on AltaVista and others.

November 10 [update] Popular sites, front page, government [news] Excite
Using the RSS feeds from Daypop and Blogdex, I have made a page which contains links to the current most popular websites. See that page for more details. Unfortunately Daypop's titles are all "untitled" right now, hopefully Daypop will get this fixed. You may have noticed a small change to the "directory" portion of this page, I think its a little better than before. UKOnline has changed a few things, so I have fixed the link and redone the search on the Government page. I have also made small changes to the Daypop and other pages. The Excite portal, part of Excite@Home (which filed for bankruptcy) has been sold to the iWon portal. iWon is popular, probably because you can win prizes for using it, but I have never liked it. Excite still has some very useful items, such as their news search WebShots photo community, however I fear that they will disappear into the depths of iWon. The face of searching is changing quickly, fortunately the good news (Fast, Google, etc) balances the bad (Excite, WebTop, etc).

November 8 [update] reference, geography, more [news] Xrefer, WebTop, more
I added the Encyclopedia of the Orient and the E-Conflict World Encyclopedia to the Regional subsection of the advanced reference page, and then I decided to move that subsection over to the maps & geography page. On the advanced reference page I added the Catholic Encyclopedia and a link to Guinness World Records. I also made the link to the academic directories more obvious on that page. On the basic reference page, I added OneLook Dictionaries, WordNet, Wordsmyth, DICT Development Group, and a link to yourDictionary.com.
The WebTop search engine is no more, and so I have removed it from the search engines page and the news page. It wasn't very popular, but it was useful sometimes. As I predicted several days ago, Xrefer is working on a subscription service. It is for libraries, and will include 100 sources, instead of the 55 on the free version. You can see it at xreferplus, and read more about it at ResearchBuzz. Also, the Worldwide Directory of Cities and Towns is back up, although some features are still missing. Several days ago, I reported that IncyWincy (sort of a search engine search engine) was back, after being offline for a while. Unfortunately, it seems to be gone again. If it can't stay "alive" for at least half the time, then I will definitely remove it until it comes back up.

November 7 [update] links, shopping [news] AltaVista, Google
AltaVista's comparison shopping search is now partnered with DealTime, and is located at http://altavista.dealtime.com. I have accordingly redone the shopping search on this page and on the Shopping page, and I have added ^links to the shopping page. The deal with DealTime includes the shopping.com domain, now owned by DealTime. Also, I added a link on the search links & resources page to Bookmark Search. The links page is getting large and I am thinking of breaking it up into several pages. Lastly, I mentioned on the AltaVista page that their database is out of date (by months). Some people with high-speed internet will notice thumbnails of websites of Google search results. This can be turned off on the preferences page. I haven't seen it myself yet, but even if it is not useful to everyone, it will be to some, so I am glad that Google is taking another step forward.

November 6 [update] Google [news] Google
Google's Image Search is out of Beta! The long-awaited advanced image search is here, and I have already remade the Google Image Search page, so check it out. Speaking of Google, I have more news of their new indexing of non-html files from ResearchBuzz, and you can find the Google info here. Google Groups, by the way, is no longer offering to pay people for pre-1995 usenet messages, so I assume that they now have them all.

November 6 [update] Netscape, front page, more [news] AltaVista, Xrefer, Excite, more
AltaVista, the ailing but still quite alive search engine has a new program to enhance listings. Websites can get logos, slogans, and links to show in the results pages. ResearchBuzz has more information, and you can see AltaVista's own page about it here. Perhaps following in the steps of Lycos, but probably just trying to make some improvements on a sinking ship, Excite has made a few small changed to their front page, and so I have adjusted the link on the news page.
The Worldwide Directory of Cities & Towns is currently down, but will hopefully be back soon. Xrefer may be thinking of charging for new services, because several weeks ago their listing of titles changed from alltitles.jsp to allfreebooks.jsp. I corrected this link, as well as one to SurfWax on the meta search engines page, and one to Delphi on the message boards page. I also enabled browsers other than Internet Explorer to see what they have selected on the front page; you'll notice it at the top beside options. Lastly, it is a new month, so I have started a second page of old news.

November 5 [update] Weather, Reference, News, more
I have completed the Weather & Meteorology page, and I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions. I've also changed the weather search on the front page from Yahoo to AccuWeather because Yahoo was a little messed up. To the Advanced Reference page I have added a searching for SearchEdu, and links to the Library of Congress, Where to do Research, and Resource Central. I added the meta search engine Search.com's news search to the News page, and made some small changes to the Government & Military page. I also added a link on the Searching Links & Resources page to Lookoff.com, and the link on the front page to bookmark this site is now a link to make it your start page. Lastly, Fagan Finder has been getting a ton of viewers from Belgium in the last few days, I don't know why.

November 5 [news] Google, Lycos, IncyWincy
The numbers of files I reported several days ago as have been indexed by Google differs from what Google has said. Google said (SearchDay) that they have indexed 35 million non-html files included 22 million pdf files. I reported that they had only 7 million total, including 4 million pdf files. How do I account for this? It could be that they counted file types which I did not, and also because I am referring to mostly English documents. If you're a Lycos guy, then you've probably already noticed that they've redesigned. It is a generally a big improvement, and you can find out more from SearchDay and Pandia. Also, IncyWincy, which I was planning on removing today, has finally reappeared. The site had been down for at least a few days. IncyWincy is a search engine which uses date from the Open Directory project, however it is enhanced by their search engine search engine. If you consider this website to be a directory of search tools, then IncyWincy is a search engine of them. Right from the search results page, you can launch searches directly any results which have search engines themselves.

November 3 [update] Personal & Blogs, Biographies, Directories, more
A brand-new section is up today, Personal Pages & Weblogs. I've removed the weblogs (and ICQ whitepages) from the Interest Groups page, and moved them to the new page. The new page is for searching for weblogs, searching within weblogs, and searching for personal websites of individuals and families. I have added Homepageseek under miscellaneous to the directories page. I also added Who2 to the Biographies page. Who2 is a great all around biographies site which includes a profile, vital statistics, external links, and specialty pages on professions and other topics. I also fixed a small mistake on the Daypop page.

November 3 [news] Google, Google, and Google
I have done some detective work and found out more about Google's recent indexing of non-html pages. Here is a breakdown of these file types, and the approximate number of them that Google has indexed:

Portable Document Format (.pdf) about 4,690,000 Microsoft Word (.doc) about 1,430,000 Postscript (.ps) about 632,000 Microsoft Excel (.xls) about 357,000 Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) about 312,000 Rich Text Format (.rtf) about 262,000 Corel WordPerfect (.wpd & .wp5 & .wp4 & .wp) about 56,841 Total: 7,739,841, or about 0.5% of Google's total index. [note written later: Google has also indexed other file types, and has indexed more than said here]

Also, Google now follows links from Macromedia Flash files (.swf), but does not index them.
And, in more Google news, it seems they have been testing displaying thumbnail images of websites on search results. I hope that they decide to implement it, as long as there is an option to turn it off, which should be the default. See the articles from ZDNet (C|Net), Silicon.com, and Business 2.0.

>> forwards (December 2001)
<< backwards (September & October 2001)