Wikia Search has officially launched!

As I have mentioned in my previous post, Wikia Search is now live at http://alpha.search.wikia.com/. The Wikia Search project, which is now live, officially launched in alpha form on Monday 7 January following a brief private testing period.

I tested the search results with some popular keywords and the results were far from impressive.

Anyone is able to discuss and rank search results, write and edit Mini Articles and more bringing the company claims more transparency into the search engine process.

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Possible Google rival to be launched on January 7th.

The launch of a new search site, called Wikia Search, is planned for the 7th January 2008. Co-founder Jimmy Wales said the open source search engine would be released for public viewing in “alpha” so users can complain about flaws and developers can work out the bugs. 

Last February, Wales announced plans for an open source search engine to offer what Google (NSDQ: GOOG) does not: transparency. He said during a talk at New York University that the new search engine could take the mystery out of how information on the Web is scanned, retrieved, and ranked. 

Wikia Search could threaten Google’s hegemony but the new community driven search engine will take time to evolve, just as Wikipedia took time to build up its entries.  However Google supporters argue it will allow humans to manipulate the search process and that computer-generated results are the fairest way to provide people with information.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales said the open source search engine would be released for public viewing in “alpha” so users can complain about flaws and developers can work out the bugs.

A “trust network” of users, similar to those who contribute to Wikipedia, will discuss and debate what should come next. As search heads toward greater personalization, Wales believes people can come up with smarter, more relevant searches than machines. He has said that collective wisdom will improve search more than knowing everything about an Internet user.

What is a Sitemap and why should I have one?

Many experts agree that a sitemap is a must for every website, blog, or a web directory. Often you will see that there is a little link on the front page of a website that is labeled Sitemap. So, what is a Sitemap? Basically, it is a graphical representation of the structural and hierarchical linkage of a web site.

Sitemap is something which came in existence a few years back. People thought it is a tool through which they can optimize their websites. In fact sitemap is an easy tool through which a site owner can inform search engines about the pages of their websites. Through sitemap people can create an index of the pages of their websites which are required for crawling by search engines.

A sitemap can be created in XML format. This page will list the pages of the websites along with some Meta data for each of the URLs which is listed in sitemap. These data can contain Change frequency, Last modification Time, and the priority of the page. Due to all these data, search engines can crawl more intelligently.

Many major Search Engines like the idea and recommends to have it on every website. Google has stated the same thing in their Webmaster tools. This is a clear indication how important a sitemap is for a website.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Google also says:

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Sitemaps need not be just a series of links in a tabular form. You can also provide details for each section and sub-section through descriptive text. Sitemap is useful just because it contains all the information regarding all the pages of the websites at a single page. Hence, search engines can gather all the information regarding the website from a single page and due to this they crawl each page of the websites regularly.

China’s blogger population reaches 47 mln

A report on China’s blog development has found that the blogger population has reached 47 million, more than half of whom are women.

“One fourth of online surfers are bloggers,” said the survey, based on a poll by China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) of 1,862 netizens in late November. It added that registered blog spaces have exceeded 33 million since the advent of blogs in China five years ago.

The survey also showed that 57 percent of Chinese bloggers are women, in contrast with the 55:45 gender ratio of China’s 180 million netizens, reports China Women’s News today. The newspaper reports that blogs, as a new medium to record personal lives, share feelings and socialize, are particularly attractive to women, who have fewer alternatives in the cyber world.

Source: Xinhua

Happy New Year .. Happy 2008

It’s hard to believe, but the year 2007 has come to an end. Happy New Year 2008 to all our customers! The team of Leading Directory wish you health and success in the New Year of 2008. We wish 2008 to be peaceful, and happy for everyone.

Reflecting back on our humble beginnings in 2006, our staff has come a long way. We wish all of you well and look forward to serving you in 2008.

Survey: For many Americans, the Internet has become the great problem solver

When facing a collection of conundrums, including health problems, tax issues and schooling choices, U.S. citizens are more likely to head online for help than to go to the library or consult family or experts, according to a new survey from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And when they do, most are finding the information they need to solve their problem, according to the survey.

“What was a novelty in the late ’90s for a lot of users has moved to the center of their information universe,” said Lee Rainie, Pew Internet’s director. “That’s a very dramatic story of technology adoption and impact in a short amount of time.”

But not everyone is going online for help. Instead, the survey found sharp divisions between Americans who have broadband access at home or work and those who either have a dial-up connection or no access at all.

Americans who had broadband tended to use the Internet to help solve a variety of problems, and it seemed to drive them to access other information sources as well, including libraries, books and government agencies.

In contrast, those without broadband - who generally are older, poorer and less well educated than those with it - tended to report fewer problems they needed to solve and to use far fewer community resources in dealing with the issues they did have.

Source: mercurynews.com

Bhutto Assassination Draws Malware Scammers

Blogger links that purport to lead to video of Benazir Bhutto’s last moments alive go to a fake video codec and an all too familiar exploit.

Criminals have long embraced current events as fodder for their schemes. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan grabbed worldwide attention, and of course that of malware creators.

Security vendor McAfee has spotted several sites on Google’s Blogger service hosting new social engineering attempts related to this. The scams purport to link to a video of the Bhutto assassination.

If someone clicks one of these links, the browser displays a message saying a new Video ActiveX Object needs to be downloaded to play the video. This codec is a fake, one that has been seen plenty of times previously.

“These webpages contain obfuscated variants of the MS06-014 exploit which is perhaps one of the most popular of all the exploits we see on a daily basis,” researcher Rahul Mohandas said in an Avert Labs blog post.

That exploit affected Microsoft Data Access Components, and received a patch in April 2006. However, scammers continue to hope to find unpatched systems that will allow their exploit to work, and download more malware to the PC.

Source: Webpronews.

Google Analytics Adds Graphing, E-Commerce

More ways to play with the data in Google Analytics means the detail-obsessive types have access to multi-point data graphing. The feature provides webmasters with a way to compare a couple of metrics and see where they stand.

“For example, you might want to see how your AdWords traffic compares with your site average or how one conversion goal compares to another over time,” Alden DeSoto wrote at the Google Analytics blog.

There’s also a new page tag in down, as Google wipes away the final remnant of the old Urchin name. Ga.js allows for more readable tracking of e-commerce transactions.

The new ga.js doesn’t play nicely with the old urchin.js tags, so websites can’t use both on the same page. It’s ‘either or’ and the enhanced e-commerce features of ga.js probably make it the more desirable one to use.

As a sidenote, Google added six more languages to those they support for Analytics. Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese (Portugal) now have a home among the 25 languages in the product.

Source: Web Pro News