Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
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Is this 2000 Once Again?
Sitting here reading feeds. Two consecutive posts from TechCrunch:
One is about real value, real innovation where investments will generate real return, where the other is pop piggy-backing on services piggy-backing on trends with a monolithic trend beacon still not generating revenue. Yet the pig is snubbing out $6 billion?
Are we already knee-deep in the next IT bubble waiting to burst as a horrid aftershock to the economic crisis a few years back? There’s so much money being funneled into non-revenue generating business these days… These months… These years…
Just me?
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Stacking Turds – Or How I Learned that Homeless People are More Fortunate than ASP.NET Professionals
DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to read may contain harsh language. It contains stories of feces-throwing gorillas and crying children. Opinions will be biased. Proceed at your own risk!
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Make Google Searches Suck Less with the Help of Firefox (on Ubuntu)
As Google Search gets smarter, it gets dumber, too. And extremely annoying. Yes, I meant “mobil”, not “mobile”, that’s Danish, so please stop rewriting it and forcing me to click and confirm that yes, I did mean “mobil”.
Are you, too, tired of having Google rewrite your queries? Well, if you take a closer look at the request querystring that’s generated when you correct Google’s “corrections”, you’ll notice a token, “nfpr” (or None of those Fucking Pathetic Rewrites, as that acronym must clearly mean) that’s set to 1, i.e. true.
So, using this, combined with the knowledge gained from fixing the broken search accelerator in Linux Mint, we can add this token to our defaults so that Google will revert to its previous, less intrusive, and less retarded behavior – the simple link “Did you mean blah blah blah?” placed just under our search input box.
$ sudo nano /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml
And add,
<Param name="nfpr" value="1"/>to the list of parameters. Exactly where doesn’t matter, just anywhere. Ctrl+O to save. Restart Firefox.
Probably there’s a Windows and Mac OS equivalent file, but you’re gonna have to find it yourselves
Now if we could only have a token, like poracawmq=1, for “Please Only Results that Actually Contain All Words from My Query”, Google Search might just start to be genuinely useful again!
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The Fall of Google
Lately – and by that I mean in the last year or so – searches on Google have yielded less and less useful results. The most prominent problems have been,- Google Trends farmers that produce bogus and useless content based on search popularity statistics harvested directly from Google Search itself. These results will clutter most of any searches for new trends, new products, news, well -anything new, really, and you’ll often find that Twitter is a better search engine for getting genuine results instead of wading through hordes of useless spam on Google.
- Google apparently chosing to revert to mid-90s behavior with OR’ing every word in a search query to produce more results rather than AND’ing them to allow the user to refine and narrow down the search to achieve more accurate results.
I experienced a rather “amusing” effect of the latter example yesterday, where removing two words from my search phrase reduced the search results from about 1,000 results to two results. That’s a smoking gun right there. I forget the search, as I was busy working, but just now I was trying to find out how well the podcast aggregator app Juice would work when installed under WINE (Linux middle-layer for running Windows apps).
Searching for “juice wine”, well obviously that would not yield very useful results, and Google is no target for blame on that account. Lots and lots of tips on making wines and juices.
Second try, “juice wine podcast”, well ok, there are lots of podcasts provided out there, even for people making wines and juices, so I take that one on me as well.
Third time’s the charm, right? “juice wine install“ had to be pretty much unambiguous. I mean, you would never install wines or juices, would you? But, of course, as it turns out, I now fall prey to the newfound mid-90s style of searching that Google is currently practicing. Let’s ignore that “install” keyword, shall we?:
Now, we should always expect search results that aren’t exactly what we wanted. Words mean a lot of things, you know. But note that just one of those pages actually contain the word “install” in their body text. Just. One. And this is the first page of Google’s search results.
I don’t know about you, but I’m desperately looking for an alternative to Google Search these days. Bing is even shittier. What to do?
UPDATE 2011-04-25:
Missed the screening of “Littlerock“, and wanted to see if there’s a torrent out there to fetch instead. Of course, Google insists on “correcting” Littlerock to “Little rock”, and usually when this happens, I try to explicitly tell google not to give me any of these results by prefixing this with a minus (means “exclude hits that contain this text”). Don’t know about you, but this result provokes me:
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Is Google Taking Away our Flash Media Downloader Extensions?
Funny thing. Just finished installing Maverick on my server, and installed Chrome while I was at it.
Set up synchronization, and all my usual extensions were automagically added. Except for one: Getflash. Or Flash Video Download, I can never remember which it is that I use.
Well, no deal, me thinks, I’ll just go to Chrome Extensions and add it. Push in “download flash video” in the search box, but nada zilch nothing related to downloading flash video shows up. Hmmm… I try some other combinations of words, and finally end up searching Google itself instead.
All I get is a link to chromeextensions.org for Flash Video Download. The exact same words I searched for… And on chromeextensions.org they also sport Getflash. What the hell? When did these magically disappear from the Official Chrome Extensions offerings? I have a sneaking suspicion it was by the stroke of midnight today, actually, as I just installed Maverick on my other computer during the night, and indeed I had my Flash media download plugin ready.
What gives? Are we being restricted here? Is this the new Apple Store?
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A New Coat of Chrome Just Hit My Desktop
Just did an apt-get update & upgrade, and saw a new version of Google Chrome was being fetched. No biggie, me thinks, happens regularly. Except this one is really different.
This new version that hit my desktop, 6.0.472.53, is quite awesome, to tell the truth. Visually, it’s become even prettier than before, even more screen real estate is being used for content instead of controls, menus and other crap (hello, IE?), and those of us running KDE 4 are obviously happy to see it fitting even better into our Oxygen or Air themes.
An annoying drawing bug that has plagued Chrome for awhile, but only on my laptop with integrated Intel graphics, weird white blocks covering tabs when resizing the window or opening new tabs, is gone.
Font rendering is absolutely stunning. This is funny, because recently I desperately tried to get better font rendering in all of my apps. Had this been Windows, all my fonts would’ve seemed fine, but having Linux, and then being presented to the FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts, DAMN! Nothing else will seem pretty anymore. In Firefox, I forced all font families to FreeSans, FreeSerif and Liberation Mono to get pretty fonts, but this is not really a fix, so I’ve been looking for a proper fix, getting “regular” fonts to render more nicely. With Chrome, I didn’t have the same option to override font families, so I had to settle for proper fonts with strong hinting and jagged edges. This new version, everything looks beautiful!
Oh, and the speed… I mean, was this a minor update? I think not! It’s so extremely fast now that I don’t know where to start. I’m thinking it might somehow have to be related with the fixed font issue, really, and I’m suspecting that maybe now Chrome pulls more from your fontconf and GTK stuff. But really, I’m just talking out of my ass here
Oh yeah, and Ctrl+Shift+I now opens the “Chromebug” pane
Either way, here’s +1 from one happy camper!
If ChromeOS is going to be anything like this, hmmmm… Why not?
Fantastic font rendering, fast HTML rendering, sweet experience all the way
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