ResearchBuzz

So I’m working on a presentation and I just added this to my speech notes about mainstream adoption of blogs:

Expected but not yet available: a search engine that indexes only “official”/sanctioned corporate blogs.

And then I blinked a couple of times and realized that really, this would not be THAT tough to do. Is anyone offering an “official” filter for blog search?

I bet you could write a bot that sucks in the URLs of the Fortune 500, googs for patterns matching common blog software on those domains (particular phrases, strings in urls), and spits out a list of likelys. Then you could hire a gang of mechanical turks to eyeball your list and yes/no ‘em. That’d get you started, then you could solicit visitors for the independent employee (but still sanctioned) ones, the more obscure company ones, the non-corp (LAPD) ones, etc.

That sounds fun. I wish there were 32 hours in the day. Or that I needed less sleep.

Ixquick has announced that they are going to permanently delete all personal search details gleaned for its users. This is in response to various privacy concerns and issues that have bene popping up all over the Internet.

IxQuick (http://www.ixquick.com/) is a metasearch that searches several search engines including Gigablast, Yahoo, WiseNut, and Overture (Overture??) It also searches the ODP and Wikipedia. (IxQuick states that “Ixquick does not share the user’s personal data with these individual search engines in any circumstances.”)

I asked Ixquick spokesman Alex van Eesteren a few questions about this new policy. First question: what exactly are you getting rid of? Alex: “We delete the IP addresses of the users. In fact we have a program running which opens the log files, deletes the user related IP addresses and overwrites the ‘old’ logfile. Also we took away the unique ID out of our Cookies, the Cookie is only used for remembering the settings on the user’s PC. We even overwrite the ‘old’ Cookie if a user has one on his PC from before this privacy initiative.”

Second question: Do you have a schedule for throwing away this data? Alex: “Yes, we guarantee that we delete the user’s IP address within 48 hours. In most cases we delete the IP addresses even earlier.” IxQuick’s privacy policy is available at http://us.ixquick.com/eng/privacy-policy.html.

Third question: Are you retaining any data to help people understand how they’re using your site and what they’re looking for? Alex: “Yes, we are retaining data related to what people are searching for and how. We’re deleting the information that connects the search to a particular person. So we will know if people are using our Advanced Syntax search, and we’ll know how they use it, but we won’t know who uses it.” So in other words, IxQuick is not deleting all the tracks users make on their site, just the tracks that make users identifiable.

Last question: Are you having any third party check to guarantee compliance of this new policy? Alex: “We agreed with the largest computer club (HCC) here in the Netherlands for example that they will check the procedures and that it’s really done as we say.”

While I appreciate the statement, I wish that IxQuick offered a better array of search engines for metasearch — what they’ve got seems a bit long in the tooth. Yahoo and Gigablast are all right, but how about adding some other searches? Even non-engine resources like the Librarian’s Index to the Internet and specialty searches like Sphere would make for an interesting mix.

ResearchBuzz has been having some link problems. I had been getting some complaints about it but must give massive props to reader YD who not only pointed out the problem but also noted that it appeared to be a WordPress bug. I had already tried to get rid of the editor mentioned, but didn’t realize I had to turn off the editor both at the Options level and at User level. (I write the ResearchBuzz entries in a text editor before I post them so they can be spell-checked, etc.)

The rich text editor has been turned off and yelled at, I will go back and fix the old entries, and it shouldn’t happen again. Now, if I can just find a plug-in to get rid of those $@&%*(@! Smart Quotes and derivatives… (I found a pointer to one, but it led to a 404 page)