SortFix Powered Search Blog

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We all know that the younger generation is much more tech savvy than our generation, and we can asumme that most children use the popular engines (Google,Yahoo!). Most of us don’t know more than that on children and search engine. There are more ways children search the web. In this post we will try to explore it.

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Many have asked us about our ‘Power Words’ and I realized that though most people understand very well that because “Power Words” are related to the search, some should be added to the search query, only few grasp the idea that the “Power Words” can also be used as a negative filter.

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The Ipad is something different. This device defers from other tablets especially because of its interface and usability behavior. It’s also different from the Iphone or other smart phones and mobile devices because of its size. One of Apple’s goals, I think, is to replace our portable devices such as laptops and notebooks, and not the iPhone or other smart phones.

Ipad

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In our previous posts, we mentioned (by the way of course) that soon enough our new design will be launched. Well, soon enough just became… Now!!! This post is all about it.

Sortfix New Logo

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As some of you may have noticed, we’ve added a search widget on the sidebar. So now you can search the web from the sidebar of this blog.

Sortfix Search Widget

The better news is that it’s not exclusive to our blog.

Just go to our ‘Get Widget’ page, and you’ll have Sortfix Improved Search at your fingertips:

Thanks to Yohay Elam of Forex Crunch for his help with this.

A lot of words have been written in the past month on personalized search and the marketing impact it will make in the future. Due to the impact Google has on the Internet market, every change the guys at Google make, such as the implementation of personalized search, wakes up SEO professionals and gets them on their feet.

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Still don’t know what to buy for Christmas? Waiting for the last minute? Sortfix Video Has the Best gifts for you to buy.

Now watch and find on Sortfix the coolest gifts on HD video-

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Sortfix Team

Less than two weeks from Christmas, here are a few search updates you should know about.

Google Goggles - Google just launched this new search application for Android phones. This application enables you to search by taking a photo instead of a text- or voice-based search. Users can take pictures of business cards, locations (with GPS), or text-related items as books, from Android phones and then retrieve search results by them. It is a cool app. With time we’ll see how useful it will be. Watch this short video demonstration.

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One of the things we mentioned in our last post was the length of an average search query. We can assume that often the length of the search query will determine the relevance of the search results. In this post we will explore the impact of search queries on our Web experience.

As mentioned in our last post, the average number of words used for each search query is relatively low (3.3). In many cases it is almost impossible to arrive at an effective search string in 2 to 3 words. The search query isn’t sufficiently specific for the search engine to retrieve relevant results. Let’s look at a search example to better understand the challenge.

Say that we’re going to tour Europe on vacation and we want to rent a car. A typical search query would probably be something like “rent a car europe.” The results on Google would look like this:

(Try to think about what’s missing in the results. The answer is in the next paragraph.)

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SEO is a very up-to-date industry. The search algorithms evolve constantly; competition is great and very dynamic. One of the key factors that has an impact on SEO is search engine algorithms, and more specifically, Google’s page rank. In this post, we will review some of the current views and recommendations, and take a look at a few past views that are still very relevant in 2009.

I had the idea for this post when I found a blog post from March 2005 at Search EngineLand by Christine Churchill on search engine algorithms. This four year old post is still relevant.  Although the examples there are for Ask Jeeves, they mostly apply for Google also. According to this post, the two main factors that impact searches are content and linkage. These still very much apply. Content is of course a key factor, due to the fact that search engines rely on text analysis and the relevance of the content to its segment/industry. Linkage, the second factor, influence the level of relevance (and relationships) that is determined by the search engine. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest post by Rimmon Lavi, Social Psychologist. Article on web search by the evolution of human kind point of view.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. Serious scientists and philosophers alike acknowledge the importance of the theory of evolution for the understanding of life. They praise Darwin’s clear and concise model, whose validity has been confirmed by the genetic and biochemical discoveries made over the last 60 years.

But this year also marks 200 years since the publication of J.B. Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy. Over the last two decades, we have seen renewed interest in complex evolutionary processes outside the genes. These epigenetic processes neither modify genetic heritage nor create new species or organisms, but they do respond much more rapidly to changes in environmental conditions. The results of these epigenetic processes also transfer through the generations, as assumed by Lamarck’s theory of evolution, without confuting Darwin’s model of genetic evolution, which is based only on natural selection among accidental mutations.

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As always, a lot is happening in the search industry. Here are a few highlights from the last month.

SearchEngineWatch.com reports on the closing of Google’s Caffeine Sandbox, which was just released last August.  Google intends to release a new index soon.

SearchEngineWatch on Google's Caffeine

Last week, Pandia Search Engine News recommended its top five sites for social search. The post covers known social sites as delicious and StumbleUpon and Google’s new social search.

Pandia on Social Search

Google’s social search

You can also use Sortfix’s for social search, as we reported in the past.

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We just uploaded a new video via youtube, How to personalize your music search, following our recent post on the subject.

This video was made using the very fun to use animoto website.

Just to make it simple and easy, we added a new Video Page with our search clips, examples, features and funny animations.

When you don’t really know what you are searching for, you can still retrieve relevant results. In this post we will look at how you can improve your search when you don’t really know exactly what you are looking for.

I’ll use an example of a search I did myself a few days ago. Someone mentioned the name Bobby McFerrin to me. I know he is a musician, and he wrote the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I also know he plays classical music. I tried to think about what I know about his current work. I wanted to learn more, but wasn’t really sure what.

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