SES Conference & Expo, which was originally called ‘Search Engine Strategies’ is going through another name change. The new name will be, “ClickZ Live.”[Source]
Nice to see the use of the letter zed instead of “s” from such an large and prestigious event. And they even copied how I capitalize it. When there are more than 2 search engines to discuss and share, expect this site to spring back to life!
As Google is well aware, AltaVista was once the #1 search engine in the world.
Launched in 1995, it had first-move advantage, for it was the first search engine to fully index the sites that it crawled, and it crawled a good portion of the web.
Where AltaVista failed is how easily it was the game by SEO experts. This was the era of meta keyword spam, invisible text and so on.
When Google arrived it offered a new factor – link popularity, as well as indexing much more of the web and handling spam better. AltaVista changed hands a few times before ending up at Yahoo ten years ago. In the last decade it hasn’t provided anything unique, and has just been a legacy landing page. Anyone who was thinking they still used “AltaVista” needs to move on… because AltaVista.com now redirects to Yahoo!
One million searches in 8 days is huge for Duck Duck Go, the little search engine that could. Most people haven’t heard of it, but regular users are typically aware of a special feature that protects them from governmental snooping:
When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.
Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
Now there’s a reason why other search engines don’t do the same – they need to analyze visitors and they need to monetize their product. DDG point out that IXQuick.com is another search engine that takes privacy seriously.
Both sites still manage to have contextual search ads that provide them with an income. What they can’t do is personalize your results, which is slowly and surely becoming more important. But on the other hand, the SERPS remain the same for everyone, something that webmasters tend to prefer.