Recently in Search Engines Category

I must have been living under a rock for a while as I didn't realise that Yahoo also has a desktop search engine. I'm still in the search for a working dse for the home pc as it is so handy to have things in one place. I really like Googles version - just wish it would actually index the content on the pc and work with a lot more applications that might be stored on a pc.

I'm sure that everyone else has blogged that yesterday was Google's seventh birthday. It is hard to imagine how computer support was before that....actually I can remember - I used altavista instead.

It's taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn't take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn't an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well - Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup

It looks like the Google Desktop software has been updated recently as now the index status does not show how much of the index has been completed (or it has finally indexed the computer). The status on this computer is normally stuck at about 20% complete but this information no longer appears on the status page. However the cpu usage of the desktop search does seem to be often pegged around the 50% mark so something is still not quite right there.
The Antispyware software also seems to have been updated as the nightly scan that ran last night picked up Ultravnc as potential spyware even though it has been installed on the pc for about 2 months and I had previously flagged it as ignore.

Google have released a new version of Google Desktop Search which is still not compatible with Nod32. It does look good from the screen shot on their website though. However the "report a problem" link that the program refers to goes to a page that doesn't exist.

Blingo is a new (to me) search engine that gives you the opportunity to win prizes when you use it to search for stuff. They only count your first 10 searches per day (so I guess you could go back to google after 10 searches) and apparently you could win all sorts of prizes. Angela won a free movie ticket but didn't give her referral code so feel free to use mine instead :-)

Speaking of movies, we went to see The Interpreter last night at the dollar theatre. As it was Tuesday, we got in for 50cents each - thats about 80p in UK money (as opposed to the 1350p it would have cost us in the uk). The seats were the old style cinema seating - no stadium seats or high backs but not bad. It was the first time I'd ever sat in the back row of a cinema but no hankypanky. The film itself wasn't bad - it did go on a bit and it was quite different than I expected. I felt the plot was pretty predictable (which spoils a thriller) but there were still some unexpected moments - I must confess to jumping in my seat when the first gunshot went off. The gruesomest (is that a real word?) scene in the movie was when a bus was blown up - this is too close to the timing of the London bus bomb for comfort really - that scene really hit home and judging from the audiences reaction, it hit others too.
Not a bad movie, but one I'd recommend you see from the comfort of your own home on dvd on a nice sofa.

This blog is now listed on Blogdigger

Google got back to me this morning about the problem where I couldn't find my gnome to say

"Thank you for providing this information. We don't currently have a fix for this problem, but we're working hard to improve Google Desktop Search and hope to offer one in the future. The data you've sent will help us do so. "

Another google related post, but I accidentally closed firefox with a page that I needed and thought I'd use the desktop search to find the word gnome. Out of the 5 web pages it returned, none of them were for the page I wanted. So I then searched for Nebit which returned the page I wanted....and look at the title of the page and the text - BOTH include the word gnome.

I'm sure google didn't use to do this, but now if I enter http://www.google.com in my address bar it now goes to google.co.uk instead. I know you can do this by detecting the language used by the browser but I'm sure they didn't used to do it. Annoying as I wanted to get some prices in america and the searches are mainly coming back with UK stores because of coming from .co.uk!

Google announced yesterday that they will not consider links in a webpage if surrounded by a nofollow tag. The upshot of this is that comments can be surrounded by the nofollow tag and google will not consider these links in pageranking. When I first read this it sounded a great solution to the commentspam problem. If everyone follows this solution, then there will be little point in doing the spam and hopefully it will stop - but therein lies the problem - everyone needs to follow it. Scoble reports that already MSN and yahoo have announced they will also use this tag. Also interesting that they've done this in a couple of days/hours as opposed to having to use a committee to do it.
It will be something that I'll be looking at putting in my MT implementation soon (details from their news page on how to do this) - when I get some time!

As you have probably noticed, the pictures on google have been changing each day and are telling a story. One reader wrote in to complain about the photos (in a funny sort of way) and google responded to the letter

I've dropped the MSN feed for Absoblogginlutely as everytime my reader updates the feed it adds another X number of entries to the feed - again - even though the results are the same as the last time the query was run.

Jon put his own essay on one of his blogs and then submitted his essay to the lecturer. Unfortunately the lecturer ran his essay through google and came up with his essay as an exact match. Shows how quickly google indexes his pages then.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have been projecting song lyrics for church from the laptop. Well I also have the song lyrics on the desktop but unfortunately each song has the filename starting with the number of the song, followed by the book, followed by the title. This is a nightmare to find in explorer when someone says "lets sing 'morning has broken' " as you have to either scan the 500+ ppt files or use the sloooooow search in explorer.
Enter the google desktop. As it now indexes the files, you fire up google (or if smart have the desktop page open already), type in the song title or the words you can remember and instantly you have the results (and in this case we don't have morning has broken typed up into powerpoint!)

I've downloaded the google desktop search program as it looks like a good tool and from the first 10 mins of using it, it looks incredibly fast. Why they chose to use AOL Instant messenger instead of Windows/MSN Messenger I'm not sure. I know hardly anyone who uses aol messenger, and even the people I know who use aol use MSN Messenger. Hopefully they'll rectify this in the future. After all MSN messenger is installed on all new machines by default so it would make sense to include this.
They also include secure web pages in the index by default - I'm not sure thats a wise decision but then again I'm not sure if it would find anything in the default configuration as I'm sure ie doesn't cache secure pages by default.(although on my machine it does cache the page so it might be the default setting after all).
Its possible to set urls to not cache, a good idea might be to pre-store address's of banks such as citibank.
It searches emails - if you use outlook or outlook express - which will suit most people just fine (although not me as I use theBat instead).
It doesn't support firefox's cache which is a big pain as thats what I use for most of my websurfing - again I hope that is a feature to come.
It's pretty cool how it integrates the search results into google.com by basically installing a mini web server.

I got an interesting result back from my google alert this morning. A post from 1993 to the LANMAN-L list where I provided an answer on connecting sco unix to lan manager on OS2. It has my university email address (which I couldn't remember) so now that I've linked to it, I wonder how much spam it will get.

There is a new beta interface to Google Groups. The first thing I noticed is the layout seems cleaner but there are ads in the new version which are not in the old version. However there are capabilities for bookmarking topics, and creating your own groups.
Update It's definately beta as although the results are shown, some of the results then come back with a "url cannot be found" message. Using the non beta version the results are found.

Technet decided to open internet explorer after I did a search and it went to MSN's home page. In the bottom right under popular searches was the Top 5 search movers (British Open being number 1) and a suggested search - the top 1 being "Gastric Bypass". Now why on earth does it think I need this?

Multi map have announced they have made changes and invited feedback, but they don't actually say what changes they have actually made. One of the cool features is in the aerial views where you see the aerial photo's but as you move over the picture a map overlay is shown naming the roads. Very clever and useful. In the link I posted you can see Brookhouse Lane - a little (allegedly) no through road - that TomTom navigator decided to take me through at 11.30 one Sunday night. There were more holes than road and I exited past the sign which said no entry - oops!

A search for absoblogginlutely on Microsofts new search engine shows some interesting and recent posts so they must be crawling sites fairly frequently. It looks suspiciously like google to me though.

Microsoft have brought out a new toolbar that looks very much like Google's. The beta MSN toolbar includes the popup blocker and links to MSN sites such as hotmail. I've downloaded to try out and use as a popup blocker for those rare occasions that I need to use ie

Thanks to a tip off from Kase it is possible to use a Microsoft page to search security and hotfixes to see what patches are available for a particular product/platform.

Microsoft's technet website is getting worse and worse. I searched on the technet site for 0x00000050 and it came back with no results found. Search all of Microsoft and it comes back with 4 results plus links to more results (4 of them). NONE of these results brings back article A "Stop 0x00000050" Error Message Occurs During an Upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000. Surely the Indexing service should find results. They can't disable number searches as most of MS errors will have a number to query against (otherwise whats the point in putting in on the screen in the first place?) If you use the google interface and search for 0x00000050 it returns 1790 results with the first 3 being different microsoft articles all with 0x00000050 in the subject.

Some anonymous bloke complained that I was abusing Google's page ranking because one of my pages appears second in the search
results for a particular phrase. Seeing as though the other results on the page are all related to the problem I was blogging about and I've not manipulated Google in any way I've no idea why they were moaning. Judging from the email address they left they probably have a bee in their bonnet about blogs.
As an aside, this is more likely to prove why certain results appear higher in google. Just study the html in the page, the search results and wonder no more.

The same day I posted about my search shortcut, Lockergnome talked about the IEHelpers plug-in :: WSIE which does the same thing from what I can tell (although it does more than search this blog!)

By saving and running the linked reg file you can search this blog by typing abso keyword into the address bar of your pc and the keyword(s) will be plugged into the search engine. I thought of doing this after needing to search to see if I'd blogged about Outclass before - it turns out I had.

I tried to setup Feedster to search for references to my blog, but not return my postings. That way I can find out who is quoting/referencing/gossiping about me. I was having trouble getting the tools option to work so I asked Pieter in the ggsearch forums and he pointed me to Feedster Search: ggsearch NOT weblog_title=GGSearch which works. However, if I swap GGSearch for Absoblogginlutely I appear in position 1 Update which is not what I wanted/need. It should have displayed without my results! So sorry Scott - maybe you shouldn't blog this :-) Still yet again, this is the power of blogging getting first rate support with developers keeping an eye on blog feeds :-)

Ever been webpage surfing and came across a 404 error or "page is no longer here" type error message? Well with the bookmarklets at Google Cache Hacking it is possible to add a link to your links bar that will retrieve the page from googles cache. Works great as one of the links on that page returns a 404! which is fixed by going to Google cache

Thanks to Jay telling me to RTFM in my previous post on searching the comments I've now read the manual and my searches now include comment fields.
This piece of magic was made possible by adding the text <input type="radio" name="SearchElement" value="both" /> to my search form.

The interface for searching web pages from the address bar is now in the TweakUI interface rather than in the ie5 tweak utility so you can now make things such as "gw string" search for string in google web pages. Personally I save my settings and export it to a reg file which I then import onto new machines when I set them up.

I was doing a vanity search on seeing who was linking to me this afternoon and discovered that there is a now a link on Google to show you a slideshow of pages that link to your url. For example this shows you my links

There's an alternative to the Google Toolbar, which works on other browsers besides Internet Explorer. It also does a lot more. Check out GGSearch. The author of this program also has a blog at http://ggsearch.blogspot.com/ where he documents his progress with the software and other bloggy things (and he offers a free addon to GGSearch for those of us who link to his blog - which I'm doing - he also joins my Blogroll too).

A new search engine hit the headlines a couple of days, Turbo10. It seemed pretty good when I was using it over the weekend, but when I tried to use it today I got a "sorry our site has too many visitors and we can't cope" message. That is not the sort of thing you want to see from a search engine. I don't know about you but I rely on Google and when you get used to search engines you stick with them. Turbo10 doesn't stand a chance.