Matt Wardman: "Anybody who thinks that any web traffic measuring process (even the “gold standard” ABCe version) can meaningfully distinguish differences between competing websites of well under 1% has not done their homework."

"In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr [Jakob] Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a hom

"Powerset has finally rolled out a "natural language" search engine. It’s not a Google killer. It’s barely a business model right now. But at least it’s something the world can finally play with…"

The irony, of course, is that a "Ronseal headline" isn’t one.

Adrian Monck make an interesting point in a wider argument gainst a "Flat Earth News" example from Nick Davies: Marketing stories through sensationalism is "journalism’s modus operandi, which is being rapidly superseded by search."

"Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar."

"Nathan Stoll, former product lead of Google News, has been quietly working on [Mechanical Zoo] a new social search service he started with the help of two other Google refugees, CNET News.com has learned."

Martin Belam: "a newspaper site search ought to be able to index content directly from a CMS faster than Google can crawl a site, and so I thought I’d do a test of how fresh newspaper site search indexes were."

"A local search engine just launched on Facebook. It is called Loladex and you can’t do searches on its Website, only on Facebook. That is because it taps into your friends’ recommendations to rank results."

"Yahoo! will now be indexing Semantic Web and Microformats markup from around the web and will use that information to display more structured search results."

"U.S. law has not caught up with search-engine technology and its implications" - based on James Grimmelmann’s article in the Iowa Law Review.

The group behind the Automated Content Access Protocol has published a set of responses to criticisms it has faced from bloggers since its launch in November.

"Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages … Some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages"

"A new UK report [by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee] on the habits of the "Google Generation" finds that kids born since 1993 aren’t quite the Internet super-sleuths they’re sometimes made out to be"