Arachnophilia, the Joy of Playing with Spiders

Spiders make great geek pets, at least virtual ones do. Here at StepForth, we keep a couple spiders on our system to test sites, pages and documents in the hopes of learning more about the behaviours of common search engine spiders such as GoogleBot, Yahoo’s...

Bouncing the Bulter?

Is the Butler finally being dismissed now that Ask has been purchased by InterActiveCorp? Rumour has it Barry Diller, IAC CEO is preparing to rename the Ask Jeeves search engine, paring its name down to a single word, ASK. This wouldn’t be the first time the...

Trouble at the ol’ ODP

The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of web sites and documents existing online at this time. While many search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN maintain larger databases of electronically spidered sites, the volunteer editors at...

Ask gets another piece of the puzzle, Excite Europe

The Butler is growing bigger again. This morning, Ask Jeeves announced the acquisition of the Excite European network from Italy’s Tiscali SpA., giving Ask open access to the rapidly expanding European search market. “This deal is a next step in Ask...

Search Engine Relevancy Challenge

Is MSN better than Google? How does Ask Jeeves stack up against Yahoo? Which of the Big4 search firms produces the most relevant results? Those questions are difficult to answer as what is relevant to one searcher might not be particularly relevant to another. Search...