Congratulate Jack Booth on his footballing success – as shown in Liverpool Echo website and in the Echo on an ongoing basis it seems. (See http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0200sport/0250amateurfooty/tm_objectid=16595390&method=full&siteid=50061-name_page.html for latest triumph- Derby Double for Brilliant Booth)

And it’s got good pictures of him in the double page spread of the print Echo.

Jack has also got a contract with Preston for when he’s old enough to leave school, but he’s got an injury at the moment, which we hope is sorted for his next match.

Some suggestions that could be coded into search algorithms:

• put some categories for the type of information you want – e.g. news, sport, academic, media, hobbies, tech, shopping, and so on. Put a dropdown list by the criteria box to choose the type of sites to search.
• provide results that actually fit into the type of search request. Don’t make me go into detail
• If it’s an academic text, why not miss out all the links that are just book adverts or that tell you you can access the information if you have access to blah university’s intranet.
• miss out all the refs that are just code in someone’s database

OK I think Google et al do a fantastic job, given their limitations. However, more human input might make search results make more sense. If this would be too expensive to implement, why not have every site mark the areas that they wanted people to be able to find – not just keywords or descriptions and so on, all too easy to manipulate by experts – but some addition to the w3 standards that say just search the real content bits. If sites mess about by manipulating this, that would probably have to be by having content…..

There is so much competition for what is the spawn of the devil. Search engines probably are among the top candidates. It’s easy to test this thesis. Look for something that you know exists on a useful web page – but which isn’t something MSN or similar will have good links on and that you didn’t get the links from google in the first place – there is a much more than even chance you will never find it.  You will find obscure pages that used one of your search words in 2001. If you are lucky.

Surprisingly (note heavy use of sarcasm,  in case you don’t recognise it), according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4659228.stm the Parliamentary commission to review ID cards says they wouldn’t be any use against terrorism.

That being more or less a given, why would the UK government pursue the crackpot idea any further? Sadly, it looks like they’ll make another stab at it.

Well, it looks like the 5th season of 24 will be starting in the UK on, or around, 12 Feb. Almost wish I had Sky TV. (Can wait until the DVD box set comes out though)

SEO seems generally useless.  In some cases a so-called SEO company promises money for what you’d get for free in any case – a listing in the next 6 months.

However, there must be some mysterious reasons why a site that apparently matches your search criteria in every aspect comes in as entry 34,672 out of 40,000 while a load of sites that don’t even mention any words in your search can be in the top ten.

Someone must have the secret, so anyone with a website that they hope will get the occasional visitor is fair game for any promise of a listing. 

At the same time, learning all the wierd tricks to optimise your search engine ranking seems a difficult step with no certainty of success.

Well, continuing the rampage against SEO and the companies that provide these services – today I stumbled across http://www.submitplus.com/ (note: although they do offer an affiliate service we dont have an account there and this link is without any refid or similar. Clicking it will not generate anything for us). Continue reading →

During this recent discourse about the All-Mighty-Google and its competitors, I got wondering. 🙂

Imagine, you are the best software coder on Earth and you have come up with a program of amazing elegance and simplicity that will spider the internet, database the results and produce a fantasic search interface. Could you compete with the main players? Continue reading →

Google is fine but much too dominant. There should be a wider variety of styles of search engine sites with a wide variety of ways of ranking.

Google’s search criteria are anything but transparent. That is fair enough if it’s meant to stop people easily manipulating their rankings. It’s also fair enough if MSN and similar sites are always easy to find.

However, the end result is that the big sites get bigger through being the biggest. Smaller sites that may have more relevant content don’t get a chance. Who is going to look at page 379 and choose a site from there?

And sometimes, it’s almost incomprehensible why there are pages of results that bear only a passing relationship to the query string.

A reliance on page descriptions can be even worse than the older user of metatags. The description has to make some sort of sense, so it needs standard English words that contribute nothing (and, the, a, as well as introduces, presents, shows and so on). The small word limit makes it very difficult to explain anything about your content, if you have any variety in it.

Following on from the interesting post about Google vs MSN, I have to ask the hidden question there. Is there any point in search engine optimisation – especially paid for SEO.
At the end of the day websites fall into a few categories. Commerical Sites where some one wants to sell something (tangible product or service), ego sites where some one just wants to talk about themselves (blogs etc :)), information sites where some one knows something they want to share with the world and advertising sites where some one (normally a company) want a site just to show off how great they are. Continue reading →

Well, daring question I suspect.

For the last couple of years Google has reigned supreme in the arcane world of search engines. For most new websites “getting listed” on Google is the number 1 priority and, helpfully, the Mighty Goog offer lots of services to assist. (Sitemaps, stats tracking etc.) This is backed up by an almost relentless SEO industry in which business will either lie (guaranteed placing in Google) or be honest and admit they can offer nothing of value.
All well and good.  Continue reading →

Well, as previously mentioned I had planned to install a few server OSes on the windows 2003 server and the linux box. Well, thanks to a variety of work related issues I havent managed to do that yet. However I did try to manually instal apache on the Windows XP box.

I say try.

For some insane reason the installation was beset with problems. This is something which, on Linux, is easier than picking your nose. On my windows XP machine it was harder than putting a man on Mars. The insanity that comprises our SOHO network continues unabated.

I think the ideal solution will be to reformat every PC and do complete re-installs of everything. Makes you want to cry really….

This is a mildly interesting topic. Basically, because so many people leave their electrical gadgets on standby when they are not in use, it is using around 7TWh of energy – the equivalent to two power plants worth of production.

From my experience, this is something made much worse by PC users – who often leave their equipment switched on for hours at an end (overnight etc).

It is interesting to think that a little lifestyle change (switch off at night for example) could have an actual significant impact on your fuel bills and in the long run the whole planet.

Further reporting available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4620350.stm

Excellent, and interesting resource on Physics – http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ – well worth a visit.

Living over here in the UK, it is far from easy when it comes to finding out about new TV series. Does anyone know if there is going to be a new series of 24 this year?