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Slashback: Price-fixing, Borneo, Index
I went down to the sacred store ... While the music industry (odd phrase, no?) certainly has more things to worry about, like not selling shiny disks full of overproduced pap, but dcigary writes to remind us: "The music industry was trying to control prices via their 'MAP' pricing scheme, but the FTC has started to put a stop to that. Discount retailers are responding by lowering prices dramatically -- sometimes cheaper-than-wholesale."
This doesn't find my lovely friend Uyen, though. Admin writes: "Howdy. Nearly 2 years ago, after a year of building the thing, I announced www.theindex.com search engine on Slashdot, which promptly gave it the drubbing it deserved. The reponse crashed TheIndex into the dirt. 2 years and lots of money and hard work later, TheIndex is now finished, and kicks butt. This started when I was whining to my software-engineer son about either having to wade thru "237,542 search results found", 10 at a time, or thru sub, sub sub, ad nauseum, categories. TheIndex has NO categories, (it uses a synonym-search process instead) and gives results 100 links at a time. It has nearly all of the best of the Internet (no one has it all) and the rest will come. There are NO porn or personal websites. Nearly all of the crap has been weeded out. This is a search engine built by only two people that is just as good, or better, than most of the top engines. We would really appreciate another chance on Slashdot, to show what TheIndex can do."
It sure looks promising, but failed to find a few friends whose names I tapped in, and surely that's a frequent search engine task. Anyhow, time to give these guys some constructive criticism again, eh? The more search engines the better as far as I'm concerned!
Cultural differences aren't just for yogurt Reader Leong Chii Kee objected to many of the comments in the story about bringing Internet-linked computers by boat to remote parts of Malaysia, and wrote with some clarifications:
After checking out your post Bringing The Internet To Borneo -- By Sea, which started an entire line of misinformation about my country, I figured I'd write to the source and hope that you would put up a additional description of the situation.Firstly, There is essentially two parts of Malaysia, West Malaysia, which most of you would know is where our capital is, Kuala Lumpur (don't ask me why it translates to "mud cove" - I didn't name it) and there is East Malaysia. West Malaysia is fairly developed, we have our own silicon valley equivalent, and last I checked even those "kampung" (as our tourism board happily promotes it!) houses in the middle of the jungle had a phone line and electricity (and with a cheap copy of linux who said the poor can't afford internet access). But the situation is vastly different in East malaysia, which remains rather under-developed (you know jungles, rain forests, orang utans and stuff).
Secondly, the article deals with how the central government (located in west malaysia - lucky fellas) is trying to introduce the internet to eastern malaysians and NOT the attempts to bring Maylasian citizens into the Internet Age.. So it's nothing more than bringing internet to part of a country that doesn't have it (because it ain't that easy laying fiber optic cables in the rain forest when you have some eco-protection agency breathing down your neck about protecting the forest)... Imagine if you're sitting comfortably in front of your all powerful Athlon server with broadband access and halfway across globe someone calls you a spear wielding, hide wearing native. You'll be pissed too.
Thanks in advance,
CK
I tried the Perl thing too. Ha-ha. Results were similarly useless for a couple other topics of interest to me.
In fact, can anyone find a single search for which this search engine returns useful results?
Are these people serious?? Or was I just unlucky?
---Bruce Fields
True. But, I'm drunk, and I'm lazy. That's why I didn't say for certain whether it uses IP address or cookies. It's easier for me to ssh to another box on another network and fire up lynx than it is to point and drool round Netscape menus.
In addition, further poking of their 'search engine' seems to indicate that it's cock-up, not conspiracy to blame. And I am talking about the sort of fuckup that, if one of my staff did it, they would receive the highly-coveted 'moron of the day' bog-brush award.
I assumed they just meant they didn't reference Geocities or Angelfire.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
"Whatever it takes," indeed. I'm shocked that someone would actually consider offering better service than the minimum-wage monkey at Best Buy -- and how dare real music stores carry the CDs I, as an admitted music-snob, would be interested in?
I don't shop at Best Buy anymore, and I never bought CDs there; but if $5 CDs at Best Buy mean better service & better selection at the indie music stores I go to, I'm all for it.
Besides, I'll shop at a store with the asshole from "High Fidelity" who knows his music over the Qwik-E-CD with $5 BoyBand-Of-The-Month deals any day.
I don't mean to sound unconcerned about indie shops going out of business; that definitely does suck. But if Best Buy steals all the generic-pop-music fans from "my" music shop, more power to 'em.
checked site. tried searching for "dragonball"
21 results
non-noise or interesting results:
5 generic anime sites
1 personal site half devoted to dbz
1 personal site that happed to have its own tld
1 hentai site
hmm.. maybe this could be useful.. someone (not me,i cant code, i am ashamed) could write a script to do your search on google and theindex, then return the google results minus the theindex results. the S/N ratio would improve dramatically!
Oh, and note that that search returned both personal pages and pr0n. good job.
wisconsin does not exist.
Perhaps a better slogan would be "Turning your web into a TV set." By filtering what this guy calls crap, he is excluding some of the best information repositories from his index. It is the non-commercial, private sites that are interesting for end-users (and often hard-to-find). If I want to buy stuff, there's already lots of portals for me to choose from.
As I'm testing this thing for missing sites, I have a hard time finding one that is listed. Slashdot, RIAA, no relevant hits. Microsoft, the first relevant hit somewhere at the bottom: "http://www.microsoft.com/office/outlook". The result list doesn't have ratings, doesn't show URLs in output either. So what is it exactly that took you two years? Ah, "filtering the crap", and adding the descriptions, I suppose. Thanks, but no thanks. If this wasn't December, I'd think this is an April Fool's joke.
I think we have a potential fucked company here.
--
Um, I think you used the "refine this search" link. It was trying to refine your red search with blue ones.
I suspect you missed the fact that the search box at the top of the results page begins with "Refine this search:". So, you're getting fewer and fewer hits because you're asking for a smaller and smaller subset. You need to return to the front page to do a new search.
A search for porn from the front page returned 95 hits.
The state isn't stored in a cookie or anything, it's right in the URL, take a look.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
First, the *primary* search method this engine uses is by the keywords specified by the *person submitting the site*. If they don't supply a word you are looking for, it won't come up.
Now, how many non-lesbians and gays (OK and the above-average intelligent literary types =p) know who sappho was? Of those, how many have webpages? Of those, how many keyed that word in when they registered their page?
Second, yes, sometimes it does still show the wrong search. If you look carefully at the URL, however, you'll notice that if you search for "red", you'll get: search?words=red. Now, do another search from here for blue and you get: search.pl?words=red&subs=blue Looks like it's getting into secondary proceedures/refining/whatever -- I looked but couldn't find very good documentation on this.
theindex.com obviously has a long way to go. Yes, it would be nice for them to open the source. Yes, they need to start a database of relevancy or something, say, have a two links next to each result, such as "this was helpful" or "this was useless" and let the userbase refine which search options come up first.
Reguardless, it's a good start. I generally try not to critisize something (especially code) unless I know for a fact I could do it better. Somehow, based solely on your comment, I don't think you could *grin*
DranoK
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Have you considered Pricewatch.com? It's takes into context price conscious consumers while providing you with a crap load of stuff.
Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or
personal websites".
There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.
So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?
- Contact info for the author, instead of a
generic webmaster@ ??
- Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
- Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
- Not selling any products?
- Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
- A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
- Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?
Of course, what I'm really wondering is if my little site will be countable? I just tried their submit url page, so maybe I'll find out if I count for anything. I submitted the url for my 8051 microcontroller page, so maybe that'll not-personal enough for them?Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
sure my hobby and choice of music may be a little obscure, but it's the semi-obscure things that i want the internet for.
Right on! That's what so many people failed to realize before all the .coms starting dying. At the peak of the frenzy I was heard to say on more than one occasion that "I miss the internet the way it used to be--obscure, intellectual, and hostile".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
it doesn't list me near the top of a search for my own stuff!
TheIndex.com does not list pornographic or personal websites. According to the Submit URL page:
TheIndex seems to be a directory with a good search feature rather than a true search engine. It leaves out all the personal home pages that have the real scoop on countless subjects the big boys that sell banners just won't touch.This is why I'm sticking with Google.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you use the box on the search results page, you're refining the search, not searching again like all the other search engines do. Many people (including me at first) seem to be stumbling over this. It'd be nice if they had one box with radio buttons that defaults to "new search" or something like that.
Anyhow, I don't see how a search engine that doesn't spider can be very good.
--
Could not find any matches for your search terms.
Try broadening your search to category names or using more general terms.
New sites matching your search will be located and indexed as time and availability permit.
Thank you for using TheIndex.
Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
I spent (er, LOST) about 30 minutes of time before I found a place that would sell me one online.
Thats funny, I went to pricewatch.com, searched for "k6-2 500" and came up with ~180 results. Most of them were CPU only (starting at 43USD), but some were complete systems.
I dont think its the search engines that are the problem. I think it's the user in this case.
Mark Duell
They did say no porn and no personal pages...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The only similarity is that Best Buy appears to be taking a loss on certain CDs, perhaps with the intention of undercutting and ruining their competition. Microsoft's use of this technique (giving IE away for free), was a relatively unimportant action.
The DOJ and a federal judge thought otherwise.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm Dennis Branch, admin for TheIndex. I'm gonna have to get registered here. TheIndex DOES have personal sites, the one above sounds like it will become another one. The problem here is that 99 and 44/100ths percent pure of all personal sites are also pure crap. 12 year old script kiddies and so on. I can state this as a fact after wading through over 100,000 of them. It took damn near forever, so we decided to stop putting so much labor into them and screen them ALL out. We WANT good stuff. Any of you have a good techie website, Please Do submit it, to: http://www.theindex.com/theindex/submit.htm. Thanks!
Searched on "php" (since I'm currently playing with it).
Neither php.net nor zend.com were found in the first 100 results.
Google returns php.net as #1, and a sub-page of zend.com somewhere before #50.
Unfortunately, that's a problem -- a search on topic "x" should return the official "x.net" site near the top and getting the related developer "we-made-x.com" site is also good.
I fear it's going to be a tough row to hoe. As for me--I'm content with Google, and would need a very compelling reason to switch. But hopefully TheIndex will eventually provide that level of performance.
Still, a new search engine from scratch by just one man is quite impressive (to me, anyway).
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I'm thinking that 2 people have no hope of managing the task at hand. I give em credit for trying though.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
But they're not "savages in the jungle" ... IANAE*, but I reckon if they keep their eye on the ball, Malaysia could be a rich country in the next 10-20 years ...
* I Am Not An Economist
My hell sakes in a handbasket!! There were TEN porn sites, not one. We've been all through those links before, and how those got in I'll never know, but thanks for pointing that out! They've been deleted on the admin server and will be gone from search results sometime tonight. THANKS!
There are twelve (count them, 12) "Drexel University" sites for a search for Drexel University. I don't know what you did wrong, but you did something.
There are 284 mysql sites on TheIndex. I think all the "zero" search results may be caused by ping timeout. We'll fix it.
"Exclusively for locating commercial, professional, technical and academic information, products and services." Well, ok, that's nice in practice, but how exactly are you goint to differentiate the millions of pages of the web. What's to say someone's personal site with some technical information, information that's more useful than something provided by Sony.com will get indexed.
I looked for several different things following that search engine and did not find a single item I was looking for. It seems that instead of limiting the searching area for us, it should simply index everything (like our favorite search engine) and then allow us to whittle down the information by whatever means we find neccessary. Allow us to use '-'s to get rid of information you don't want, don't do it for us.
That is all.
--
RumorsDaily
Well, ok, we censor sex links, scriptkiddie junk, "All about my dog Bunky" and so forth, yeah. Do you really want to see that stuff? Great. you can find it most anywhere. But that ministry site merely happened to come up first. Personally, I think we have too many ministry sites, but we don't censor religions. We even have Satanism.
You might want to change that UI. "Refine this search" doesn't imply to me what you want it to imply. You could make this a new search instead but put the previous search terms in the input area so the user can refine by adding more terms on the end. Or you could have a radio button that toggles whether the new search is a subsearch.
I play Nerd-Folk!
i agree. it doesnt even reflect itself. try http://207.202.129.66/cgi-bin/search?words=theinde x ..it returns no hits. thats stupid.
Ok, so i tried some searches.
Searching for linux quake returned 12 hits, but not linuxquake.com.
Searching for mpaa decss returned nothing.
Searching for sony aibo also returned nothing.
I like what these people are trying to do; I just think the implementation isn't that great yet.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
I did a search for "dog food" and it came up with Great Subs and More!. This is the funniest thing I've seen!
I tried "danni ashe" as well, and it came up with Boob-Ville! (regrettably, nothing behind that URL). Heh, "No Porn" indeed!
(Suddenly, I'm struck with a thought... what if this search engine isn't supposed to be funny? What if this is deadly serious?)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Can someone please tell me what they HAVE succeeded in finding with TheIndex? I must search for the wrong things.
Failed searches:
flail (no appropriate results in first 50)
user friendly (no results)
sluggy (no results)
comic (3 useless results)
guernica (no results)
pieta (no results)
hieronymous bosch (no results)
germany (1 useless result)
white house (no results)
operation overlord (no results)
fantasy combat (no results)
backstreet boys (no results)
I did find some good results for "poultry" buried in there... Which seems to be in keeping with their philosophy of "most of what we return will be garbage, you need to look for the pearls". I just wish they'd give me more garbage.
Also, it would be nice to be able to initiate a new search from the "Suck it down, bitch" page.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
Search for "soviet computer" (hoping to find anything on the history of computer science in xUSSR) and what do you get? Namely (I just love the number 1; does theindex.com have a hidden agenda, anyone?):
1 : Russian Immigration Services and Adoption Agency for Russian Orphans
Russian Immigration Services offers many free services to immigrants from the former Soviet Union. RIS supports Russian orphanages and is a licensed adoption agency for Russian orphans.
2 : East-West Technology Partners Ltd. technology search and transfer service specializing in technologies from Russia and the former Soviet Union.
3 : Kent International page frame-placeholder for index.htm
Providing management experience and the financial support to unlock the value of target company assets.
4 : High School 116 (Odessa, former USSR / Ukraine) Home Page
www.116.org
5 : Intel Russia
Online technical support for the Soviet Union.
6 : FarPost - ??????&
FarPost - VIRTUAL RUSSIAN FAR EAST.
The rest are as ludicrous, esp. 4 and 5.
E-e-excuse me?!
I wouldn't really call them under developed. :)
well i thought i'd try out this "theindex.com" thing with a quick little search of what interests me. i'm a dj and i spin two types of music: UK Hard House and Nu-NRG. i search the web for all sorts of things related to this hobby, and there are lots of pages out there on the subject.
theindex gives me:
Nu-NRG: nothing.
UK Hard House: one site. one site, completely unrelated.
sure my hobby and choice of music may be a little obscure, but it's the semi-obscure things that i want the internet for. i'll stick with google methinks.
(i should note however that my search for "stropharia cubensis" did turn up one link, and it was related, but one link is hardly enough on this subject).
- j
Stop Post- You're not evil. You're incompetent. I just did a search for 'Lesbian' and it returned '9 sites found for sappho'. You are maintaning state information. But only because your back-end software sucks harder than raw vacuum. All I have to say is 'open the fucking code. You need the help badly'.
Make sure you go back to the main page to do a new search, otherwise you will just be refining your old search results. I.e., search for sappho:
10 sites found for 'sappho'
then enter lesbian in the box "refine this search"
9 sites found for 'sappho'
Perhaps this is what you did?
Type computer driven cars into google and you get lots of relevant hits.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Just, um, curious.
Search for "linux ip masq". You get NOTHING. Search for "google". You get NOTHING. If you search for "theindex", you get NOTHING. Theindex isn't even self aware... WTF?? If you search for "theindex" on google you get paydirt on the second hit. If you search for "google" on google you get google as the first hit. Makes sense to me. I'm sticking with google...nuff said. -Ironworks
I did a few searches and the engine seemed to practically return random links. I searched for google (didn't return google at all), sex (alright, so it's a "Family Oriented Search Engine) which had the #1 result of the James Group Ministry - which is an amazing 1 page website that has 1 link - back to it's self, and CNN, which although it did return CNN's website, it didn't return the front page (come on, this is a pretty simple bonus to raise the front page of a site up to the top!)
I did find one search result which seems to return more relevant results than google: "fax repair new york". Is this the type of search this site's designed for? (Google get's too many fax phone numbers in there for this to be useful).
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
OK, let's look at some of the things (some already pointed out by the AC) that are required for an information economy:
I got a lot of those from William Wresch's Disconnected. It didn't get great reviews here on Slashdot, but I think it's a worthwhile read if you honestly think that going from impoverished 3rd world nation to IT industry is that easy.
shop at goto.
I looked for "AMD K6-2 500"
my first try... after about 20 seconds...
when you want to buy something, don't waste your time looking on yahoo/google, or altavista, or theindex.com (god forbid). I don't understand why anyone would really spend time trying to help the poor suckers who somehow decided that the world needs YET ANOTHER search engine/portal. This isn't about barriers to entry, it's about functionality- why should users humor a new entry into a space where there's already a clear winner?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
This comment wouldn't be coming from the country that consumes those Happy Meals? That recently killed an agreement to control global warming? That consumes more per capita than any other country in the world...?
http://www.acooke.org
It doesn't cover "personal pages", which makes it a pile of crap. A huge chunk of the genuinely interesting stuff on the net is off the beaten track - not to mention the fact that a large number of such unimportant unknowns as Kernighan have their main presence on their home page.
Hrm, someone needs to fix that link to http://slashdot.org/www.theindex.com in the third paragraph...
__
I'll go along with this. I've been doing a lot of work with qmail recently and usually when the documentation or the links from the qmail site have failed me a quick search in Google has bailed me out of the shit. A lot of the useful scripts, examples and so on I've found have been on personal homepages. I've just tried similar searches on theindex and they've failed to bring up any links to useful information.
--
I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
Getting searching right isn't just something minor, y'know. It's incredibly important.
Indeed. My gf is a librarian + spends a considerable chunk of her time training people to use search engines effectively. (She works in an academic library) Often the information is out there, but getting to it can require a lot of skill and background knowledge that most people don't necessarily have. Phil--
nosig
So why are they taking this action? I would argue that they are being pressurised by the Western Capitalist Countries, especially Singapore and the USA.
It is well known that Singapore would like to be at the centre of a far Eastern e-commerce hub, and so is trying to 'develop' Malaysia, Borneo, Laos and other neighbouring countries.
The dictatorship of Singapore is backed by the USA, of course, and so yet again Human Rights abuses are occuring in the name of capitalism. I would like to see Malaysia left alone to focus its resources as it sees fit, on the poor and needy. Just because it has socialist leanings, this does not mean it is an enemy of the USA & Singapore.
This may seem controversial, I suppose, but I really felt it had to be said.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Can someone tell me the definition of Borneo? Thanks.
Especially if it was a family search engine for porn. I'd use that. This site, theindex.com, is nearly useless. I've got absolutely no use for a search engine like this, although there might be some who would. What I wonder is why the fsck this guy would want slashdot opinions when it's obvious that /.ers would loathe a search engine that is so business oriented, not to mention butt fucking ugly.
:wq
You have to wonder wether or not the discounting of cd's while nice in the short term will actually benefit or harm the variety of music available.
Don't forget to mention their bullshit "synonym syntax(tm)" technology. This site shouldn't even qualify for mention on slashdot.
:wq
"spear wielding, hide wearing native"
As if that were a bad thing...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What do they have to trade -- except those planet-wide essentials?
I don't like this search engine, because it doesn't list me near the top of a search for my own stuff!
um, quite a lot of the really good resources on the net are at people's personal homepages.
for example, this site, which provides all sorts of info to USQwest DSL users.
is it really a good idea to silence the voice of the masses like this?
--
After 3 sample searches, while one of my nick that returns many results on most other "top search engines" returns none on TheIndex.
Searching for another search engine (google) returns 89 results, while the top hit does not even have the string "google" in the content, while it has the google affiliate box on the page this is not what I was looking for. The biggest penalty is this site: http://icannot.org which does not have the string "google" in the content, display or embedded in the HTML. Anywhere. Violates point 3 of their read me first , that states all terms must be in the article.. Now maybe their cache is old. Either way it's wrong.
3rd search was for an arbitrary string "motorcycles". While the search took quite a bit of time (maybe slashdot has something to do with this) most of the sites had nothing to do with motorcycles. A lot of them had to do with bicycles. Nice idea, the synonym engine -- too bad it doesn't work.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I couldn't find any links about cars that drive themselves (computer driven cars) there. But then I can't find anything about them on other search engines either. You'd think something that nifty would be on the web somewhere, hrm? ;)
http://207.202.129.66/cgi-bin/search?words=theinde x+sucks
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
theIndex found nothing for this, but it did find 3 items for "teen porn".
OK. No porn. So, I search for 'sappho' It returns a bunch of non-porn gay/lesbian links. Good so far.
Then I search for 'x-33' (a cool aerospace failure). No returns.
Then I search for 'porn'. One link. A lesbian resource site that turned up in the first search.
Then (getting suspicious) I search for 'molniya' (both usual spellings) - a type of satellite orbit(OK, it's a bit obscure). No hits.
Next, it gets interesting. I try 'sappho' again. ( I got more than ten hits last time). I get no hits. Now I'm suspicious. So, I try a few other things. (telnet into another box, try it from there, etc). This thing *clearly* maintains state information. I *think* it does it by IP. It *may* do it by cookies.
I am suspicious. Show us the source. How does it work?
*Anything* that adds state information to HTTP and claims to be *new* needs some investigation.
To the people who run TheIndex: If you want help from people here, show us the source. Some of us will help if you do that. Until then, I will advise people to be aware that you are gathering information from visitors without telling them you are doing it.
Stop Post- You're not evil. You're incompetent. I just did a search for 'Lesbian' and it returned '9 sites found for sappho'. You are maintaning state information. But only because your back-end software sucks harder than raw vacuum. All I have to say is 'open the fucking code. You need the help badly'.
Share and enjoy.
PS - if you don't want to open the code, and you have a *lot* of money, I may be able to help. But check that it's a shedload of the folding stuff before you call - I may be easy, but I'm not cheap;-))
Hmm... for a company begging the slashdot audience to review it, you'd think slashdot would actually be in their index:
Search for Slashdot on TheIndex.
Thats it, /. Has really gone down the tubes now. The Index is just a capitalist conspiracy to drive the personal home pages off the net once and for all. Rumors have been spoken that they're involved with online retailers and consulting firms to woo people with the promise of a bloated result list and ugly design, then smack them with a bunch of boring links to useless "call here for more information" pages.
Its all a Plot I tel you! beware The[EVIL]Index!
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
The Index is pretty bad... a simple
search for "slashdot" turns up 17 sites, none of them slashdot.
A search for "microsoft" turns up lots of pages, but none of them toward the top that i quickly scanned were microsoft's homepage.
Maybe this is because no one's submitted these pages, but, how about a decent spider?
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
...and into the oven monopoly. I'm referring to the CDs. Think about it. How many musicians work at "Best Buy" and are happy? How many starving musicians work at record stores and at least don't totally hate it? How does Best Buy stack up as a cultural center vs. your local record store? Where are you more likely to find out about the local scene? How is this any different from MS bundling IE? Will the government bring a case against Best Buy now for trying to lock record stores out of business, or will they wait until all the record stores fold, thus doing a good job for lawyers, but leaving everybody else high and dry?
I think we know the answers to these questions.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
For example, tonight I needed a K6-2/500 processor to upgrade an old motherboard I have. I knew these would be for sale somewhere. I spent (er, LOST) about 30 minutes of time before I found a place that would sell me one online.
A lot of searches on popular sites for "K6-2" would turn up systems containing K6-2, on places that wouldn't sell the CPU alone. And then there were sites ABOUT CPUs that don't sell anything.
(brainstorming) Maybe the next generation of search engines should take context into account. If I want to buy something, I want to look only at sites that sell things. If I want unbiased information, I want to look only at sites that don't sell things. And a lot of the problem with the net is that it can identify where things are, but not where things AREN'T.
All the search engines have their own algorithms. None of them, AFAIK, will allow me to implement my own algorithms. Maybe I WANT Google's approach mixed with a little extra, like the addition of META tags. Maybe just the first three META tags. Maybe leave out META tags but only show me content from sites where the keyword appears on other subpages of the site.
I don't know, but something oughta be done!
--
eco-protection agency breathing down your neck about protecting the forest
Sorry - you loose all respect from me with the above display of ignorance. Maybe it would be better if you mowed the Rainforest down to raise cattle for a local McDonalds? Dont forget the chemical spewing plastics factory to produce PokemonPlasticPrizes for Happy Meals.
I just ran a few of the searches I recently used in looking up some Java info (like 'jar manifest class-path'), and it came up pretty empty. I have to say that mandating all of the words appear is quite a limitation, especially considering how well I spell.
I'd also like to throw in my opinion with everyone else that a lot of useful things are held in peoples home pages. In fact I'd be more interested in seeing www.nottheindex.com, that JUST indexed personal home pages and ignored corperate web sites (perhaps you could allow magazine web sites). That would probably filter out 99% of the useless links I get from my searches...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't even have to use obscure Japanese stuff. Just type in 'xxx' and the 5th link you get is http://majesticescorts.com/.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You need to index everything possible!!! not just the stuff you like.... Personal web sites are a lot better then many coporate shit sites. I tried lots of warez sites and they are not in the index either. INDEX EVERYTHING the trick to a good search engine is massive content that is easy to filter through.........
It's cause Kuala Lumpur was/is a swamp. I remeber reading about it in an article about the skyscraper there. Don't worry, Washington, D.C. was also built on a swamp.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
This thing sucks. I tried a very general catagory like linguistics (after a no-hit "Rhetorical Structure Theory") and it gave a hug pile of unrelated crap:
1 : Pennsylvania Sports Hall Of Fame
2 : (no title)
3 : Short History Of Machine Tools
4 : Korea Ssireum Research Institute
5 : Darice Inc.
6 : Captain Forbes House Museum
7 : (no title)
8 : Annwn Alternative Celtic rock.
9 : Panama-California Exposition, 1915-1916
10 : Kyler Dedicated to Kylers and Kyler genealogy.
Can we get any worse?
If you want a real search engine that handles synomyns, try oingo.com. There backend is supported by a true ontology.
Anm
Well, CDs are $10 in the US if they're from the Dischord record label. All their CDs are labelled clearly, something like "This CD costs $10".
Dischord was founded by Ian Mackaye, among others, whose band Fugazi makes sure that all its concert tickets cost only $5.
No pr0n huh? I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
"You point your finger at the moon, the fool stares at your finger."
The Ugly website for finding boring stuff!
Seriously, while I think pr0n filtering is a good thing in a search engine (since pr0n types seem intent on spamming them), it should be disableable.
Also, you're engine seems to do nothing but find links to bussnesses, and nothing more. a search for "Perl" turned up one link for swimming instruction, and about 99 links for web design companies. looking for "COM ATL" (a microsoft technology) came up with 6 hits, all of them companies (web design companies actualy, witch is strance beacuse ATL is only tangentaly related to the web).
It seems pretty worthless for anything I'd do, I'm not in the market for a web design company, and I haven't been able to find anything but that...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Definitely a family search engine when the first result on a search for "sex" is a ministry :)
:) to intenseromance.com... maybe not so much of a family engine after all?
Course, link #11 is a broken link (shame on them
Various ramblings
I think I'll stick with google.
Hey, alright! Even if we get price gouged for all of our computer accessories, televisions, appliances, etc., at least we can get the new Backstreet Boys album for $10!
I'm excited - are you?
MAP wasn't the first attempt to prevent low-price competition. Repeat the Beat in Detroit is a really good used-CD store, and they had to fight the music industry over a similar issue: No advertising money would get shared for any ad that mentioned used CDs. They ultimately won their anti-trust fight. I don't mind paying for CDs, but $17 for a $1 piece of plastic is a little too much markup for my tastes.
BEE GEE's RULE!
just a little happiness from the ORIGINAL member of tewwetruggur
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
"Right now, the discount retailers are just absorbing the loss, but this is worrying for everybody in the industry because it sets the tone at the consumer level that CDs should be $10 or less," said one music distribution exec.
Well, CDs should be $10 or less. And now everyone knows that!
sulli
RTFJ.
While it looks like this will eventually be a good place to look for stuff, it's failed several tests so far, and jumbled all but one.
... games, white wolf by its self) failed to bring up White Wolf
A search for "sancho games" failed to bring up Sancho Games
A search for "White Wolf" (... productions,
A search for "Disney" brought up Disney-MGM (not quite their home page, but close) as the 677th result, but never actually turned up www.disney.com
Searching for "Slashdot" failed to turn up Slashdot, though it nabbed a bunch of knockoffs and generic linux info.
I could understand a search for microsoft not turning up anything, on the basis that Microsoft isn't family-friendly, but of 3096 hits, doesn't Microsoft (for any reason, good, bad, *or* ugly) deserve at very least to be in the top 25%?
Success!: A search for "In Nomine" brought up Steve Jackson Games, as did a search for "Steve Jackson" but "sjgames" got me bupkis.
A search for "Milton Bradley" came up with AXIS & ALLIES - Games from Hasbro Interactive and Hasbro as the first hit. To be fair, the second search result that comes in when I search for "Hasbro" is a game by Milton Bradley. While equitable, I'm not sure this is what people are looking for...
While I commend you guys on the effort, and several years of dedicated work, it's got at least a few more years' worth of work to go before it starts getting usable for everyday searching.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I make Copernic use them for me. hmmm, do they have a linux version? I am too busy to look. ;-)
Okay, so I had to check, seems they don't, but hey, it's a Canadian company
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
All my searches came back looking like yellow-page listings. Nothing but businesses. It should be "thecommercialindex.com"
Now if they added a radio button to switch between "show only commercial sites", "show only personal sites", and "show all sites". That might be usefull.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
The TheIndex people didn't say what underlying technology they're using, but so far, I'm not impressed.
;) without manual sorting. It seems as if TheIndex fundamentally relies on manually sorting webpages into "good" and "sucky" piles. That means that it will never have as many pages indexed as Google (or altavista, or inktomi, or...). In the few trials I've done, TheIndex not only does worse than Google, but also worse than other popular searching tools.
The fundamental idea that underlies Google (and many of the new ideas in information extraction) is the idea of references with authority. In other words, you are only a good webpage if other good webpages point to you. Maybe, two years ago, you might argue that doesn't work, but today the evidence is right there are www.google.com.
This concept helps Google avoid porn and stupid webpages (unless that's what you're looking for
Conclusion: TheIndex sucks, the suckiness is due to a fundamental technological inadequacy. It does not push the state of the art, but, rather, is a step backwards.
Here are a few theindex search results:
Search on "Jerome Russell" (A company that makes hair color products, hoping to find "www.jeromerussell.com or a company that sells their products). No results found.
Search on "hair color". No results.
Search on "hair". No results.
Search on "color". No results.
Search on "poultry". No results.
Search on "pig". No results.
Search on "anarchocapitalism". No results.
Search on my name ("Glen Raphael"). No results.
Just think of all the time I just saved not looking at any useless web pages! I think I'm sticking with Google for now...
I play Nerd-Folk!
"Discount retailers are responding by lowering prices dramatically -- sometimes cheaper-than-wholesale."
Too bad the music only retailers are doing the opposite. Chains like Sam Goody's, Coconuts, Waves Music, and other are now moving prices on albums to the highest prices ever. It is not uncommon to see a new album on "sale" for $17.99 at these stores, with regular prices in the $18.00-$20+ range.
In the long run, this is likely to kill the music only retailers. Because the Best Buys of the world can dedicate more floorspace to albums than most record stores, they have a much larger selection.
This will eventually kill the small store chains, leaving only the giants to compete. At that point people will only be able to go to those stores for music, allowing prices to move back up.
Of course if we can make sure that the RIAA does not manage to get legal control of all online music distribution it will be a moot point, as musicians will slowly become more and more able to sell online...
Searching for my name pulled up zero hits.
Searching for my mud, 'Alter Aeon', pulled up many hits - none of which had anything at all to do with my mud, and none of which seemed related to each other.
Searching for 'dikumud' returned zero hits.
Searching for 'diku mud' returned 3 (!!) hits.
I seriously gotta wonder about the very concept they are using here. You can't just take the search terms, look up synonyms, and expect to get meaningful results.
I suppose there will always be a place for the traditional strict search engines. For the time being, they certainly are more reliable and sane.
-dentin
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
There are NO porn or personal websites.
Then why did it turn up http://members.aol.com/toomuchsug/mp3.html? Obviously a personal website.
If you are going to create a family oriented search engine, don't print things like:
'Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions.' -Woody Allen
when a search fails. "Mommy, who's woody and what's sex?"
wish
---
They'd better worry, because CDs are dead.
Think about this:
- In five years will anyone sell CDs?
- In ten years will anyone still sell CDs?
Why would a music-only store base its business on a model that has, at best, only ten years of life left?Maybe... but the primary revenue from music will begin to shift to a new distribution channel by then. It shouldn't take long for the major labels to figure out how to "Napsterize" their own music. It may take them a little longer to understand that they need to go from artificially propping up the price to seeing at what the market will bear and only selling songs people want to hear.
No Way, except for the way they sell vinyl now for a few freak bands or for the acoustic snobs who want to hear "pure" music.
Those stores will see profits fall as the industry cannibalizes itself, until a new distribution method emerges. After that, it is all over but the crying, IMHO.
Yeah, right.
So I tried out theindex.com by sticking in a reuest for fractal, fractals and fractal generators. What I got back was a few hits on used oil and bookmaking programs for horse racing fans. One hit on fractal generators. It certainly works wonderfully on weeding stuff out. It weeded out all the information on fractals. Maybe they're pornographic. Back to alltheweb.com and I'll do the weeding.
Who in the hell wants that?!?
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
I did a serach for some PL/SQL commands. The first was "TO_DATE TO_CHAR" which yielded nothing. I then just did "TO_DATE" which yielded soem strange results, as if it were seaching for "to date".
End result: I'll stick to Google and Altavista to find technical stuff.
-no broken link
Okay, if I was at the right place, this new search engine has some real issues. Searching for "linux" was the only search I did whose first hit was one of the sites I'd expect to see. Even a search for "Slashdot" comes out a bit behind. I tried a few others and wasn't impressed.
I even read some of their online FAQs... one said a search for "poultry" will turn up sites related to chickens, ducks, geese... er... I searched for "poultry"... no such luck.
They don't say anything about the technology; perhaps they just need to crawl around a lot more sites before getting some things straight. I'm definitely in support of more alternative search engines. Google made heavy inroads late into the game; there's no reason someone else can't too. But so far, theindex.com isn't one of those innovators.
Keep trying!