Jacques Marneweck's Blog

M-Web, a local South African ISP that charges the earth for their "premium services", is in the process of launching a new search engine after there tremendous failure a few years ago of some obscure search engine which they launched.

I've started to notice the following user two agent strings in my apache logs:

Mweb crawler (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; MSIE 5.0; FAST FreshCrawler 6;
testcrawler (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; MSIE 5.0; FAST FreshCrawler 6;

Interesting to see that M-Web looks like they are getting rid of Google as the search engine which they point their users to via their M-Web portal, they have some API that they get results back from Google which they present back to their users.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Butler for Google is a great companion for using with Google search when you want to also perform the search on Yahoo!, Alltheweb, etc.

Quite useful when doing tonnes of research using and using multiple search engines. It would be great if there was versions of butler for Yahoo!, Allthewweb, etc. ;)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today I noticed that google.com was redirecting me to google.co.za for searches. Was interesting as another collegue was still getting google.com.

Also it allows you to "search the south african web".

UPDATE:
Ian has also blogged about this :)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:27 PM | Permalink

I've been noticing something interesting with regards to the Google and Yahoo! webpage cache systems.

With google I can query and page in the cache, yet with Yahoo! I cannot. Jeremy do you have any suggestions?

It is none the less useful at getting post data from the site and the time of the post etc. etc. esp. after the Hetzner incident, my blog's content is slowly coming back online.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:50 PM | Permalink

Google's page rank seems to be dead in the water still. One site where I'm involved in their development and a tiny bit of their search engine optimisation strategy seem to be seeing strange results when focusing on key word targeting.

According to Craig Silverstein a.k.a their Chief Janitor, said the following:

"The point of view that PageRank is dead is kind of a very static view of the world. It will always continue to be a part of our ranking scheme but, over time, as we develop new ideas on how to do ranking, as we tweak existing ideas, as we think about new ways to have them play together--the role of any one of the techniques that we use will obviously change."

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:30 PM | Permalink

I used to use alltheweb as my search engine of choice. After discovering that they've now updated to Yahoo! I've decided to go back to Google which seems to give me more relevant results when comparing results to those of Yahoo! and/or alltheweb. Previously I was getting better results from alltheweb.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:18 AM | Permalink