Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted by o2b
on Jun 10, 2004 -
53 comments
Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the
Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted by condour75
on Oct 27, 2003 -
29 comments
Is Grub out of control? Barely more than a week old, the distributed search engine is already causing headaches. It does not properly follow the
Robot Exclusion Standard and thus spiders sites against their owners' wishes. Because it is a distributed client run by thousands of volunteers (and therefore connects from many different IP addresses), it is non-trivial to block. The Wikipedia project, for example, is
experiencing slowdowns because of it. Let's hope they can solve these problems, as the idea seems to be quite cool.
posted by Eloquence
on Apr 23, 2003 -
7 comments
Nationalise Google? "Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is - a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest." Bill Thompson from the BBC tells me that Google puts a cookie on my computer that can't be deleted till 2038: "This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes." Are they "a secretive, hyper-competitive company with no respect for the personal privacy of its users"? Are other search engines better behaved? And is this the beginning of
search ethics?
posted by theplayethic
on Apr 14, 2003 -
60 comments
Google.ac is some kind of fake Google site that seems to return nothing but sponsored results. Is it supposed to fool somebody?
posted by hammurderer
on Mar 28, 2003 -
14 comments
Teoma takes on Google?
Ask Jeves launched its new search engine yesterday aimed at challenging Google for the best search engine on the web. Teoma offers options to narrow your search using "subject-specific popularity."
For example, if someone searched for the name "
Bill Clinton," Teoma offers ways to refine your search, showing links to topics related to your search, such as "Clinton Scandal" and "Monica Lewinsky."
Will this search engine replace Google as the SE of choice for the Internet savvy? Also, what other search engines do you use?
posted by DragonBoy
on Apr 2, 2002 -
36 comments
Search engines sued over pay-for-placement. "The maker of a popular weight-loss system filed suit against four search engines this week, alleging that their policy of letting advertisers pay to appear in top-ranked search results violated federal and state trademark and fair-competition laws." [from CNN]
posted by tranquileye
on Feb 4, 2002 -
14 comments
"Google effect" reduces need for many domains. Dan Gillmor says effective search engines can and should stop people from freaking out that "Wah! All the good .com names are taken" and compulsively registering all the .biz, .info, .tv, .to, and other .crap domains which the registrars would like us to believe are vital.
Bob Frankston agrees, [link via Ev] adding that reducing our dependence on semantic (i.e. keywordy) web addresses will improve the stability and usefulness of the web.
(I agree too!)
posted by Tubes
on Jan 14, 2002 -
5 comments
AltaVista to be closed down? I guess their über-portal strategy failed. no big news here. but closing down the search engine entirely? i guess you don't need 100 folks to run the spider and indexing machines.. ok.. there are hardware and network/bandwidth costs associated.. but closing it all down?
no question. there is
competition out there. and the googles and
fasts are the new benchmarks.
but i sure remember the days when AV was super-fast (also in including submissions into their live index) and super-relevant. but in those days, the internet was much smaller and AV was owned by digital (compaq).
those were the days when infoseek tried to compete and hotbot tried to rise to stardom.
times changed. but i sure would miss AV.
posted by HeikoH
on Oct 8, 2001 -
11 comments
Picsearch is (as the more linguistically adept might have guessed) a search engine designed expressly for images. It's only been live for a month, so it hasn't spidered nearly the volume of
google's image search, but it's on the right track. Are there others I don't know about?
posted by gleuschk
on Sep 4, 2001 -
14 comments
From the googlebot FAQ: "For most sites, Googlebot should not access your site more than once every few seconds on average"
I thought it was a mistake at first, but they go on to say that you should contact them if "we are placing too high a load on your site"
Do they really hit some sites that hard? If so, is it really necessary?
posted by Nothing
on Jun 5, 2001 -
17 comments
It's become second nature for many of us to head straight to
Google when trying to find something, and more people seem to be discovering the site all the time. These days, savvy New Yorkers are
Googling for love.
posted by Aaaugh!
on Feb 9, 2001 -
32 comments
Where are search engines headed? Paid inclusion seems to be an increasingly popular strategy among search engines and directories. In addition to Yahoo and the ones listed in the article,
Go.com and
NBCi have recently implemented paid inclusion systems. Should we expect even more search engines to head in this direction? Does this worry anyone?
posted by Aaaugh!
on Jan 5, 2001 -
10 comments
Monster.com ,
careerpath, hotjobs.com etc, etc... While these sites offer tons of jobs, I wonder if I will actually be able to find work through them. Does anyone have experiences they'd like to share about finding internet jobs through the inernet? How about smaller, more focused sites, especially regional ones?
posted by chaz
on Aug 2, 2000 -
15 comments
Ever wondered how much it would cost to have your listing pop up on a particular MSN search? According to Micros~1's
keywords.com (as of a few minutes ago), you can get
sex for $795.20/month,
mp3 for $175.66, and
Bill Gates for a mere $8.96 a month!
posted by tregoweth
on May 23, 2000 -
3 comments
"When you visit a site, you can't take that information and use it for your own purposes, especially for commercial purposes," the lawyer says. Is it just me, or will
this ruling render every single search engine illegal?
posted by jjg
on Apr 17, 2000 -
13 comments
Everyone's favorite search engine
Google has opened their
GoogleStore. They've got shirts, mugs, and bags, some with the "I'm feeling lucky" slogan, but the strangest thing for sale? That'd have to be the
Exercise Ball, which I suspect secretly carries
Happy Fun Ball-style disclaimers.
When not in use, Google Exercise Ball should be returned to its special container
and kept under refrigeration. Do not taunt Google Exercise Ball. [thanks
RasterWeb]
posted by mathowie
on Mar 18, 2000 -
4 comments
Steve Champeon, one of my personal favorite Web-type people, has a good article over at Webmonkey called
RTFM: A Guide to Online Research. The gist of it is "look it up on the Web before you ask a stupid question on a mailing list", but it goes far beyond that in providing sources one can use to find answers to all sorts of questions.
posted by jkottke
on Feb 23, 2000 -
0 comments
I've always wondered why no one has made a search engine that indexes URL's and nothing more. Network Solutions has just released
their dot com search engine, but unfortunately a few test searches came up with some pretty dismal results.
posted by mathowie
on Aug 16, 1999 -
0 comments
