Bing search history

As Google does with its search engine, Microsoft maintains a history of all the searches you have performed from its search engine while logged into a Microsoft account, e.g., Hotmail, Outlook.com, etc. You can view the history of your searches conducted with the Bing search engine by clicking on Search History at the top of the Bing web page. If you click on that link, you will see links for "Recent searches" and for "Frequent searches".

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Google search history

If you use Google's search engine to search the web, if you're logged into a Google account, such as a Gmail account, while performing the searches, you can see a history of the searches you have performed by visiting https://history.google.com/history/ while logged into that same account. There you will see a graph displaying the number of searches you've performed over the last few days and the total number of searches during that time period, plus your top search clicks. You can change the time period displayed to be last week, last month, last year, or all time.

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Kiddle

My wife informed me this morning that someone had commented on a site she visits regularly that Google is now providing a kid-friendly version of its search engine, Kiddle. I hadn't heard of the site and when I checked I found that the site isn't owned or operated by Google, but, instead, was developed by someone else based on the Google Custom Search capability, i.e., it relies on Google's search engine, but with its own custom filters to eliminate results that may be unsuitable for young children.

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Searching for online copies of an image

If you have an image on your computer or find one online and want to know locations where that image appears on web sites, you can use the TinEye site or Google Images. Both sites allow you to upload an image or provide a URL for an online location for an image. The services will then return a list of all the locations where the image or similar images were found.

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YandexBot Web Crawler

When checking my website logs to see if there were any entries indicating it had been "crawled", i.e., indexed, by DuckDuckGo, I found that there were no log entries for any of the IP addresses used by the DuckDuckGoBot for indexing webpages for 2013 nor for 2014. I found at DuckDuckGo's Sources webpage that though the search engine has its own web crawler, it relies heavily on indexes produced by the web crawlers for other search engines stating:

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, and Bing.

DuckDuckGo's page states they apply their own algorithm to rank results obtained from other search engines upon which they rely for data.

One of the search engines mentioned was Yandex. The Yandex search engine, Yandex Search, can be accessed at www.yandex.com. According to the Wikipedia articles for Yandex and Yandex Search the company operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in Russia with its search engine generating 64% of all Russian web search traffic in 2010. The article on the company also states:

Yandex ranked as the 4th largest search engine worldwide, based on information from Comscore.com, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company's services) daily as of February 2013.

The article also indicates Yandex is heavily utilized in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, providing nearly a 1/3 of all search results in those countries and 43% of all search results in Belarus.

When I searched the logs for this year for this website, I found quite a few entries indicating the site had been indexed by the Yandex web crawler. I.e., there were many entries containing the following:

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)"

In the homepage for this site, I include PHP code to notify me whenever Google's Googlebot indexes the site, so I updated that code to include a check that will lead to an email alert being sent to me whenever the YandexBot indicates the site, also.

<?php
$email = "me@example.com";
if( eregi("googlebot", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) )
{
    mail($email, "Googlebot Alert",
            "Google just indexed your following page: " .
            $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}

if( eregi("YandexBot", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) )
{
    mail($email, "Yandex Alert",
            "Yandex just indexed your following page: " .
            $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}

?>

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Removing a site from search results

If you don't wish to have any results returned for a particular site when you are performing a search using Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo, you can include the option -site on the search line. E.g., if I wished to search for "accessing deleted wikipedia pages", but didn't want any results returned from Wikipedia.org, I could use the following search terms:

accessing deleted wikipedia pages -site:wikipedia.org

If you wish to include only results for a particular site, then you would put the site's name after the word site, e.g., if I wished to search just moonpoint.com, I could use the following:

accessing deleted wikipedia pages site:moonpoint.com

If you restrict searches using the site option, if you use a domain name such as moonpoint.com, results will also be returned for any domain names that include the specified domain name at the end of the domain name, e.g., in this case anything on www.moonpoint.com or support.moonpoint.com would also be returned. The same is true when using the -site option, i.e., no results would be returned for en.wikipedia.org or www.wikipedia.org in the first example.

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Survey and Correlation Data from 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors

At 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey & Correlation Data, I found some interesting information from a survey of search marketers regarding how search engines may rank websites. Many of the factors that may lead to an increase in page ranking didn't surprise me, but some of those that were listed as resulting in a decrease in a page's ranking did surprise me, e.g., the number of characters in a page's title and the use of hyphens in URLs, which I often use. I've factors expected to have negative results below:

Page Has Twitter Card Markup	-0.02
# of Large Images (Greater Than Or Equal to 1024X768px)	-0.02
Folder Depth of URL (# of Trailing Slashes)	-0.02
# of Videos On Page	-0.03
Page Contains Google+ Authorship Markup	-0.03
# of Google Adsense Slots in The Page	-0.03
Domain has Numbers (example123.com)	-0.03
# of Hyphens in Domain Name	-0.03
Total Area of Adsense Slots on Page	-0.04
# of Characters in the Title	-0.04
URL Contains Hyphens	-0.04
Total Length of the Full Domain (www.subdomain.pld.com)	-0.09
URL Length in Characters	-0.10
Response Time of Page in Seconds	-0.10

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Viewing Cached Google Pages from DuckDuckGo

I've often found Google's cached copies of webpages useful when a website isn't currently accessible or when I would like to see a previous version of a page that has recently changed. Unfortunately, Google doesn't make it as easy as it once did to view such pages. Though DuckDuckGo doesn't provide cached copies of pages, it does provide a very easy method to access Google cached pages from the DuckDuckGo search field as explained at Cache. You simply put !cache in front of a URL in the DuckDuckGo search field. E.g., !cache http://example.com.

DuckDuckGo states that "We would like to provide cached results ourselves, but unfortunately it is non-trivial to do so as it requires a lot of storage."

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Google Street View Privacy Concerns

An article by Brian Cooper titled "Google Street View Continues to Raise Privacy Concerns" raises privacy issues for Google Street View. The article mentions a lawsuit brought by a Pennsylvania couple whose home was included among Google Street View images. The Street View images included close-ups of the couple's home, swimming pool, and outbuildings. The couple sought compensatory and punitive damages, claiming that Google had invaded their privacy, acted negligently, was unjustly enriched, and trespassed upon their Pittsburgh property, which includes a private road leading to their house. However, in a February 18, 2009 article Judge Dismisses Google Street View Case, Juan Carlos Perez of IDG News Service, states that Judge Amy Reynolds Hay from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, granted Google's request for dismissing the lawsuit because "the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under any count."

As one of the commenters on the article by Mr. Perez noted, many people who see Google Street View images as a significant privacy issue may ignore far more serious privacy issues, such as warrantless wiretapping.

You can see where Street View is available in the U.S. at http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/.

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Political Donation Lookup Tool

At Campaign Donors : Fundrace 2008, one can use a search tool to look up campaign donors by zip code, city, last name, occupation, or employer.

I came across the site by accident while doing a search on a company name. The site revealed that the president of the company had made a campaign contribution to George W. Bush in 2004. I tried a search on my zip code and the site returned a list of people in my zip code who had made contributions to either the Democratic or Republican party and the amount donated.

The site states the following:

All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.

FundRace is updated according to the reporting schedule set by the FEC. Public contribution data is geocoded using public U.S. Census Bureau data. Dynamic maps are powered by Google Maps.

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