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.
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.
