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.