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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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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
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 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]=-
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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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;-))
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.
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.
Who in the hell wants that?!?
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
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!