Greg Notess reports in Online that Yahoo! no longer has full support for Boolean. Boolean is a search syntax used for composing more complex queries in search engines. )See out Goalgetter tutorial for an introduction(. Now the NOT operator is gone in Yahoo!, and searchers will have to stick to the "search engine math" operator to achieve the same effect. Put a minus-sign directly in front of a term that you want excluded from search result )meaning that Yahoo!

I use every opportunity I get to talk about all the data available at bookmarking sites like Delicious and I often wonder why more search tools don't utilize this wealth of information. InSuggest is a Swedish company specializing in personalized web recommendations. This summer they launched a service based on Delicious. InSuggest has had a service for recommending web sites based on URLs you provide. They also have a similar service for suggesting images.

Here are some of the articles we have found interesting this week: Big Update to Webmaster Tools Live Search has launched a significant update to the Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta )Live Aug 6 2008( Has Google Blocked WebPosition Ranking Software for Good?

More often than not, a Google search will return millions and millions of results. 50 Matches is a search engine that never returns more than 50. The idea is that by indexing and searching only sites that have been bookmarked, "dugg", etc., the quality of the results will be so high that 50 matches are all you need. There are many ways to use the powers of the social web for search. You can encourage voting and commenting like Scour does,

Google gets rid of its highly controversial search marketing business. Google has made quite a few acquisitions lately, and one of them " the DoubleClick acquisition " brought them a search engine marketing company on board as well. Google has been heavily criticized for this. A search marketing company will have search engine optimization as one of its main objectives,

Despite the fact that it is made first and foremost for fun, you can find a lot of interesting information on Twitter. But the only search offered by Twitter is for names and locations. Here are 3 great ways to search Twitter. At first I thought Twitter was a really bad idea: Instant access to a lot of useless information. But it is actually a lot of fun and has some real life applications. I sometimes lurk on Twitter's public time line,

When you try to optimize your web site for the search engines, one of the most important tasks is to make sure that you know what kind of search queries people out there actually use when searching for the kind of goods, services or info your site provides. Google recently updated its public keyword research tool by adding what seems to be pretty exact numbers for how many people used a particular keyword phrase during the last month.

The search engine industry normally calms down during the summer months )most of these companies are on the Northern Hemisphere where there is summer now(. This week, however, we witnessed the birth of a new large scale search engine, the first one in a long time. Cuil )pronounced /ku:l/ or "cool"( seems to rely less on link popularity and more on the content of the web pages they find when ranking results. Immediately this strikes us a step back, search quality wise,

Google competes with Commission Junction with its own affiliate network. Apart from Google AdWords, affiliate agreements are probably the main sources of income for many "non-professional" web site owner. The recipe is easy: Find products that are relevant to the topic of your site. Sign up for an affiliate agreement and get percentages of the sales generated from links on your site. In other words: You )normally( get paid per sale, not per click.

A new large search engine called Cuil )pronounced "cool"( was launched this week. By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Våge, Internetbrus According to Cuil the search engine is three times as big as Google, Yahoo and the others, with more than 120 billion web pages in its index. The last time I say figures this high in relation to other search engines was for Recall, the short lived full text search of the Internet Achive in 2003. )That being said,

Google has launched its Wikipedia-killer to the world. Will they succeed? Last week Google made its new site, Knol, open to all the world. Until then only beta-testers had been able to read and contribute. Knol lets anyone write an article about any topic of interest. Then readers may make comments and rate the article. They may also may suggest addition and rewrites, but the first author retains control of the text.

How many Web pages are there out there, really? More than 1 trillion, Google reports. The fact is that no one knows the exact number, and the fact that a lot of the content is hidden behind database search forms means that we never will. Still, the search engine companies make a living out of spidering the Web, trying to find all the good stuff, and they probably have a pretty good idea about what size we are talking about here. The Google Blog now reports: "Recently,

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have developed a detailed documentation about how they implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol )REP(. The search engines' robots go wherever they want as long as they find links to follow. This means that they may index everything they find on your site or server unless you tell them explicitly not to. There are several reasons for doing so. You may have pages with duplicate content,

Scour is a brand new meta social search engine that encourages voting and commentary on each of its query results drawn from Google, Yahoo! And Live Search. And they will pay you to use their site. You score points for searching, voting and commenting and if you invite your friends, Scour will add 20% of your friends' points to your balance. From my point of view, the money is the least interesting part. For one thing, in Scour's own scenario, an average of 4.

Recent search engine intelligence gathered for our readers: Google's Lively already home to sleaze Google offers an alternative to 3D world Second Life )Phil Bradley July 10 2008( Hakia to Accelerate Semantic Analysis of the Web Hakia is using Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service or BOSS.

The never ending Microsoft courtship has led to another loud "No!" from the prospective bride Yahoo! Microsoft officially gave up its quest for Yahoo! weeks ago. Disgruntled Yahoo! stock owners, seeing their potential wind fall disappear, then made heroic efforts to force CEO Yang & Co to agree to a buyout. The Icahn rebellion Microsoft responded by saying to stock owner and rebel Carl Icahn that they might consider a new offer if he could get rid of the present Yahoo!

If you have done nothing to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages, here's some advice that give results. The web is full of sound )and unsound( advice on how you can improve your search engine rankings and increase your online visibility. There is a whole industry out there catering to companies that try to get more customers and more sales online. But what if you can't afford that?

It is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the search engine industry catches its breath. No big news this week, but we did found some interesting articles all the same: Ask Maps Now Using Virtual Earth Ask switches to Microsoft's Mapping service,

Evernote is a cool tool has the potential to become my outsourced brain, a place to store anything I want to remember, tag it, annotate it and make it easy to find when I need it. I have been testing Evernote for about a month now. This week it is available to anyone in open Beta. Evernote allows you to capture information in any environment using whatever device you prefer, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Laura Milligan has put up a useful list of niche search engines over at College@Home. She points out that though the general Google site is often touted as the number one search engine online, college students sometimes need more specific tools to help them uncover quality information on the Web that they can use for class projects, research papers, and even job and apartment searches. This list features a huge variety of search engines that can be useful to many of us,