The Coming Search Wars By John Markoff, The New York Times February 1, 2004

"At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week, Microsoft, the software heavyweight, and Google, the scrappy Internet search company, eyed each other like wary prizefighters entering the ring."

WebSideStory Search Report Crowns Google, Leaving Yahoo! In The Lurch By Kate Kaye, Contributing Writer, MediaDailyNews March 31, 2004

"Guess who tops the search referral charts? It's Google, of course. The search engine king carries on its reign over Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, according to a report released Tuesday by Web analytics firm WebSideStory."

Inside the Searcher's Mind: It's a Jungle in Here! By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide April 05, 2004

"...We know how we search and we assume everybody searches in a similar way. Also, because searching has become such an intuitive function, we tend not to really give the actual search process much thought. If many of us actually looked at what we did in a search process, we’d probably surprise ourselves.

At Enquiro, we decided to try to peel back the shroud that covers common search behavior. We wanted to see just how people searched, and ask them what went through their minds during the search process. It was a fascinating study, and resulted in a 30 page white paper which you can download from www.enquiro.com. Today, I want to cover just a few of the things we uncovered."

Topix.net - News organized by topic and location

"Holy-Cow-When-You-Said-Local-You-Weren't-Kiddin': news site Topix is now up to 6,000 news sources, up from 3,600. Almost a quarter of the sources they're crawling are daily newspapers, and only 1% of what they're crawling are Weblogs.

Topix allows you to get local news. I mean really local. I mean city level, though you can specify zip code. Searching for 90210 provides me several
possible categories but the top category is, of course, for Beverly Hills CA.

Oh, yes, there are other categories. Among them are business, world, sports, and offbeat. These categories have literally thousands of subcategories; Sci/Tech has more specific categories for everything from Agriculture to
Geology to Linux to Paleontology. Pages also have their own RSS feeds if you prefer to do your monitoring via a feed reader." ResearchBuzz #277 April 1, 2004

Microsoft to create search site for Weblogs By Michael Bazeley, Mercury News, Silicon Valley March 27, 2004

"Microsoft became the first big Internet company Friday to say that it would create a special search Web site just for Weblogs. The company said MSN Blogbot will debut in the first half of the year, along with MSN Newsbot, a search site devoted to news."

All the news that's fit for searching MICROSOFT PROJECT FILTERS OUT REPETITIVE INFORMATION
By Kristi Heim, Mercury News Seattle Bureau

SEATTLE - "Eric Horvitz is an admitted news junkie. But like most Web surfers, he's been getting an overdose of the same information. Horvitz and Susan Dumais, both senior Microsoft researchers, are creating technology to make searching for news more effective. Their project, called NewsJunkie, could help Microsoft develop a search function in Windows to compete with Google. It's also planned as part of MSN's upcoming news page, called Newsbot."

Google Tops, But Yahoo Switch Success So Far By Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchDay April 5, 2004

"New stats from web analytics firm WebSideStory highlight the news often heard before: Google's most popular, when it comes to search. But they also reveal that Yahoo's recent replacement of Google results with those from its own crawler-based technology doesn't appear to have cost it visitors."

Google PageRank, Meet Yahoo Web Rank! By Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch April 2, 2004

"What's good for Google is good for Yahoo. The service has launched a system to show the 'Web Rank' popularity of pages viewed by those using its toolbar. That's similar to the Google Toolbar's long-standing PageRank meter -- and brings with it some of the same potential problems."

Searching the 'World Live Web'

"According to popular opinion, and indeed hard market research, Google and Yahoo! have the Internet search engine market pretty well sewn-up. Google in particular has been instrumental in driving technical change, with an extremely active research and development program. For example, one of its more recent developments is a news search service, which allows users to access breaking news from a multitude of different sources. However, where do you go if you are looking to capture popular opinion on a particular subject, or get an insight into the very latest developments in a particular field?"