The blog with no name

'640K should be enough for anybody'
Bill Gates, 1981

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Single male (red hair, long arms, interests include hanging in trees and grooming) seeks female for long-distance relationship and possibility of meeting up in future to help save species.

Zookeepers in the Netherlands are planning to hook up Dutch and Indonesian orangutans over the Internet and believe the link could at some stage be used as an online dating service where apes could get to know one another and keepers could work out whether they would be compatible mates.

Full article

I don't like Google anymore for a few reasons, firstly it has become too big and important and therefore arrogant. Secondly it does not always come up with results relevant to the search or with the quality that you would like to see.

I'm not an expert in search engines as I'm not an expert in most things but from what I've seen and read Google uses an algorithm which is as secret as the Coca Cola's recipe but we know that it also uses the number of inbound links a website has to calculate its popularity, something that as we know it has been exploited in the past see Google bombing.
It also used something called keyword density to decide which websites will appear on top of your search's results page (besides those that pay to be on top). The number of times the keywords you have used for your search appear on a given website does not guarantee its quality (it might be a very repetitive website) and also penalise websites that talk about different subjects as it's the case of your average blog.

Following the success of Web 2.0 and community driven websites such as deli.cio.us I think Google lacks the human touch. I'm pretty sure that if I click a link in deli.cio.us that has 2387 subscribers is probably a decent website and not one that tries to sell me timeshares.

Now we have Snap that is supposed to be a search engine that among other things monitors users behaviour, for instance which websites are clicked after a search, how long people linger on a site and also you can vote to say whether you think a website matched your search or not. On top of that it has a good interface and you can preview websites before you visit them.
So far I've been happy with the results but we will have to see, I suppose they realise that their system can also be exploited and have ways to prevent this, although I don't see myself spending days and weeks searching for my blog to give it a positive vote, I'm not that sad

Boss: Do we have Google installed on our internet?
IT guy: We put it on your machine yesterday.

from
Overheard in the Office