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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
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.
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Um, I think you used the "refine this search" link. It was trying to refine your red search with blue ones.
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!
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.
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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"?
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
"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
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]=-
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?
"spear wielding, hide wearing native"
As if that were a bad thing...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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?
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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.
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;-))
...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"?
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
in fact, this doesnt mention that the wholesale price is dropping, so the record companies are charging the same price they always have...
doesnt matter to me a whole lot anymore, ive pretty much stopped buying that mainstream crap, and i couldn't be happier... small labels are cheaper, and the musics better...
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
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
"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.
. I would like to see Malaysia left alone to focus its resources as it sees fit, on the poor and needy.
Um, how exactly do you expect it to 'focus' resources without trying to develop them first. If Malaysia can develop an information economy, they would have a lot more money to throw at social problems.
It amazes me that people fail to realize this...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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)
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.
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
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hmm.. I disagree with your conclusion that music only stores are dying. Actually what I see happening is CD stores still existing, but focusing on smaller, local bands and special edition "collector's item" CDs, released by the band itself. the selling point is not the CD but the included extra information.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Can someone tell me the definition of Borneo?
dictionary.com says:
An island of the western Pacific Ocean in the Malay Archipelago between the Sulu and Java seas southwest of the Philippines. It is the third-largest island in the world. The sultanate of Brunei is on the northwest coast; the rest of the island is divided between Indonesia and Malaysia.
3rd largest island in the world; in the western Pacific north of Java; largely covered by dense jungle and rain forest; part of the Malay Archipelago
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!