I think I’ve seen this and never paid any mind to it. How long Google had voice search on Chrome?
Tag: search
Losing My Google-fu
Yesterday Cathy had the great idea to post the Human H1N1 Swine Flu Map. (there are dozens but this one in particular by a person nicknamed Niman is particularly excellent) I followed her lead and also posted the map because I assume that Domestic Psychology and Reality Me have slightly different audiences albeit with some natural overlap. Her post stayed off the radar and mine jumped to the number one position in Google’s search results, Dogpile’s search results and CNN’s search results for the keywords "swine flu map" which was pretty cool. The post even hit digg (a first for me). The Internet is a fickle place. At the time I began composing this post, I was in 4th position on Google and not even on page 1 for CNN or Dogpile. By the time I finished typing this I was in 5th position on Google. The programmer in me wants to jump over to Cathy’s site and figure out why mine seems to have SEO’d well and hers didn’t. The marketer in me is kicking me for not having redesigned the appearance of Reality Me yet to make it more inviting for visitors to want to continue reading. The bounce rate on this moment of fame was incredibly high. Basically, the landing page gave the visitor no reason to stay on the site. That will have to be fixed…in June. Never judge a web developer by his own site. My time needs to be spent on my clients’ sites. Now back to work!
How is Firefox reading my mind and will it cause cancer?!
In Firefox’s search box, I typed "Mysql error no. 1130" and almost as fast as I typed the individual letters, the drop down box was recommending potential searches. It does this incredibly accurately and quickly for bizarre terms that under normal circumstances would never be put together. How are they doing this?! Programmaticly I can conjecture at how they’ve pulled this off. It’s a very impressive feature! (particularly if it really is using mind reading)
Knox County Schools Wastes Students Time
Knox County Schools wasted an hour and a half of our children’s lives today by having every student walk through a metal detector as they entered Bearden Middle Schoool and randomly searching every eighth student. This waste of money, teacher resources, and student time produced no weapons. Randomly searches are ineffective and counterproductive which is why I begged that that the school board vote no to random searches. This is the beginning to the end of your civil liberties. The principal went so far as to say that we need to get used to this because one day we will have to walk through metal detectors just to get in the grocery store. Seriously?! Are you really that scared?
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.
The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.
[Source, Bruce Schneier – Security Expert, Refuse to be Terrorized]
Know what I fear? The emotional damage you are causing my child by putting him through the stress of a pointless random search.
Need a Likaholix Invite?
I have a couple of invites to Likaholix for those who want to test it out. Likaholix is a new bookmarking service similar to Delicious but you enter why you liked the bookmark(url) and can add supporting images and videos to it. Basically, when searching for information, this lets you read other people’s positive reviews of a site before clicking through to the site. In theory, you can pick the ideal source of your needed information. Likaholix has a stronger social element than Delicious. I like Likaholix and although I do not foresee it replacing Delicious for me, it will certainly enhance my bookmarking.
Google from 2001
In 2001, a search for "Doug McCaughan" brings back 8 results. Today the same search returns 11,000!
In honor of their 10th birthday, Google has made its oldest index available. Search 2001!
Cheap Web Traffic
If you want some unqualified cheap hits to your blog right now, blog something that includes "vp milf" make a mention of "cats" and "guns" and for the kicker link to a CNN article.
Update: Apparently there is a distinction between searching google for "vp milf" which shows Reality Me as the 2nd search result on page one and searching google for "milf vp" in which Reality Me doesn’t show up until the 2nd page. Oooh oh S.E.O.
