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I just ran into a big problem of today’s web search technology. Sure, Google made things a bit easier compared to the early players in the market like AltaVista (who does still remember that?) but if you search for something of which you only have a picture in your mind, Google fails totally.

I was after an image I had seen once, most likely on the site Worth1000.com, of a photo-shopped MC Escher picture, drawn by a very young Escher and graded by his art teacher.

I remembered that I might have seen it on BoingBoing.net, but, can you believe it, I did not find a search function on that site! OK, so Google has BoingBoing probably indexed in its entirety so I searched for worth1000 site:boingboing.net but did not see any search result that might be the right one.

The search function on worth1000 also was of no help.

What now?

I remembered that I had this image once published in a post of a long defunct web site. I rarely throw data away because storage is so cheap, so I was off to some Google desktop searches because I was sure that the source files for that web site were still somewhere on my machine. To no avail, but I guess mostly attributed to the fact that I misspelled Escher as Esher – darn, how Americanized I am! But then again, I just tried again and there are indeed no search results for Escher on my computer either.

Back to basics: go to the top level directory where that image file might be if it was indeed  there, use the windows 7 search for all *.jpg files and display thumbnails.

And there it finally was!

With the textual information in that image “Dream House” and Maurits I could finally locate the whole series Childhood Renaissance 3 on Worth1000. After all this effort looking for this image I certainly had to look through – and enjoy – the rest of the entries to this contest, and this one here I liked the best…

I heard recently a rumor that Google actually attempts to remedy the shortcomings I encountered. This rumor told that Google is now starting to attempt to OCR the images in its index and adding whatever it finds as textual, searchable info to its index. Would not have helped in my case as I did not remember that the words ‘dream house’ and Escher’s first name were in the image, but I can imagine that it will help many.

One of the money-making enterprises on the web is our Tie-Dye Clothing web site. We had a very nice run after a bigger women’s magazine featured our shoulder and buddha bags. Sales went down two weeks after the buzz caused by that article ended and I thought that was to be expected. But when sales went away totally, I knew something was wrong and I started to investigate.

A Google search of ‘tie-dye clothing’ had shown us on the first page of the search engine results pretty consistently. But when I looked yesterday we were nowhere to be seen.

Did I make a Google-Boo-Boo that I was punished and sent to the end of the line?

Sure looked like it. But I could not imagine what I might have done there – always tried to be a good Google citizen. Sure, I had to do some more investigation.

Next thing to try was the search term that always showed us very much at the top of the SERPs – ‘tie-dye bags’. Yeah, we were still there but it was not right either:

First of all it did not say anything about tie-dye bags in the title and then look at the URL at the bottom – there is an extra .com tagged to the end of the correct URL, and that, obviously did net get a user to the right web page. Made sense now that we had not sold any bags lately.

Then I wanted to know when the main page had been indexed last. Firefox has the Google toolbar installed and next to the page rank indicator there is a drop down, one of which is ‘Cached snapshot of page’ which I often use to inspect how Google sees my pages and to find the date of the last cached version, which should be about the time when Google came visiting the last time.

To my great surprise, when I clicked that link, I got to the error page that indicated that the link pointed to – again -

www.thaidye.com.com

Now it was clear that Google had a bug and it was costing me money!

Next stop of my investigation was the webmaster tools – could not find anything wrong here, and then I was off to the webmaster forum, where I described the bug, Google has, and asked for help.

The answer was quick to come. Bob Gladstein set me straight, real quick – not Google’s fault but all mine.  Here is what I realized after seeing Bob’s observation:

When I had learned about the canonical tag a while ago, I thought that this was a great idea and I found a plugin for my blogs quickly to utilize it. On the ThaiDye web site, which is completely hand crafted, I thought that I implement that as well and I added this line in the header section of the main page

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.Thaidye.com.com” />

proud as can be about how smart I am, not noticing that in copy and pasting I got that extra .com in there. I actually don’t know how long ago I did that, but it finally bit me in the butt. I found out that the product page, which might be hit by quite a few different URL – with parameters, etc. – also had the double  com canonical link command but is now back in it’s old beauty as

• http://www.thaidye.com/products.php  to show all our amazing tie-dye in the right way

 

I just wish there was something in the Google webmaster tools to correct the boo-boo I made, like the URL removal tool, but it does not appear to be the case. So I just sit tight and wait for Google to come by and read my corrected web pages.

The guy with the big sombrero told me about Nurph – or nur.ph – but without telling me what it actually is.

He made me try it!

And the mystery he created did indeed work and it caused the link up there on the left side of the page.

I will continue his course of action and also not tell you what it is but send you on a quest to find out.

Just ran into the wordpress app in the android market, installed the app while I am waiting for my oil change – more correctly, the oil change for my car – I am creating this post here on my G1.
By the way, the OS update this morning was not to 2.0, just to 1.6!

Today was an exciting day for me.

A few years back I realized that there was something missing on the world wide web, something essential – commenting without the consent of the site owner.

There are many web sites – including this one here – that allow comments on all articles. But these comments are definitely censored because the site owner can easily delete comments he does not like.  Good web sites will not misuse this power and allow opposition and controversy to stand, even though spammers and pure nuisances will be removed.

But imagine a site like that of the IRS. Could you imagine how the comment section of this site would look like if only spammers and flamers would be removed? Could the site speak of its ‘service’ and still be credible if you could read thousands of comments describing incompetence, evil and injustice?

That is where I started to plan a system that would allow – through a toolbar widget or similar – to attach comments on any website. One of the basic features of this mechanism would have to be that it could not be centrally shut down, but instead would have to be a distributed system where a part that went down would be replaced immediately by a redundant site on the other side of the planet – a kind of SETI for accountability.

I talked to some potential partners, as this was too big a project for a single fighter, but have to admit that I failed to get it off the ground.

Today I read about Google SideWiki! Could this be what I had felt was missing, could this be the one feature that would keep people away the dark side of the force?

The fact that it is Google is definitely a disadvantage, as Google has been bullied into doing things that were against the mantra of ‘doing good.” Let’s just hope for the best.

Besides hoping for the best, there is a nice test in progress that investigates the freedom of speech and opinion of this new feature. Somebody posted a pretty nasty post right on the main page of the IRS’s site, wondering how long it will be there. Let’s all go there and observe.

The post is not a nasty post in itself, it is just something that I could imagine the site owner would not want to be on his site. It talks about so-called tax protesters and gives the web site of one of the more grounded protagonists. In all fairness this post also mentions a site run by – probably – tax attorneys chastising the whole bunch of cooks calling themselves the tax honesty movement. But then again, we are talking about lawyers here and then those that deal in taxes and probably love the system as it feeds them.

This post goes even further and introduces the philosophy site Free Domain Radio, that introduces the idea of a society based on voluntary interaction instead of a government run bureaucracy that is backed up by violence, claiming a monopoly in initiating violence.

I will certainly keep an eye on the IRS web site to see if this article disappears. If this post stays there that would be akin to the wikipedia entry for the IRS containing a section about the tax honesty movement, the thoughts that the tax law as written might not apply to most American and thoughts on how society could work perfectly well without an IRS and a central government.

Cory Doctorow of boing-boing introduced me, and I believe a whole bunch of the boing-boing readers to the BBC comedy series “The IT Crowd” from which I learned the most important lesson for all IT work: “IT – - have you tried to turn it off and on again?”

Up to the beginning Cory had been very good in reminding us all to check the torrents whenever a new show had aired. Poor people outside the UK had to resort to that sort of piracy as the BBC online viewing was confined to the UK.

After quite a bit of a hiatus after the end of the second season I was ready for my third season and I immediately find the first show of season 3 and enjoyed it immensely.

But, Cory, either I did not read boing boing with enough attention or you slacked off because I did not learn of the following show.

Finally I remembered the other day, went ISO hunting and found out that the third season was already over. Sad in a way, but good in another because there was a torrent with all six episodes in one file.

Believe it or not – I had an IT Crowd marathon that night and it was so good that now I am revisiting the first two seasons again. For all of you, to save you the searching, here are all three season in one place…

• Season 1
• Season 2
• Season 3

Each of the files is about one Gig, so be prepared for some download time – but it’s so worth it.

If you can’t beat them, invade them – or something to that effect, right?

Microsoft installs, without asking, an extension in Firefox to “make things easier for users” and, I guess, to protect our children.

Thanks, Robert, for the instructions to remove it. Here is the short form:

Registry:

Delete
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions

in Vista 64-bit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions

Firefox: about:config in the address bar
set to empty string:  general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet
set to false  microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch.

Filesystem:
delete files under: \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\

I liked this a bit different view on the Mac ending in “The  Mac killed my inner child” but alsp praising the Mac for its ease of shutdown, I paraphrase: You just have to work, you are working along and it’s suddenly all gone – shut down! No button to press, just gone.

But see for yourself…

I sometimes ask myself, if this blog has a theme – and I usually come up with the result that it does not, at least not in the way as internet marketers, bloggers and SEOs define it.

It certainly has the theme of showing all the things that irk or interest me – but I suppose that is a category that is only relevant to me.

Now I got reminded again through Steve Pavlina’s blog article “How to Make Money From Your Blog” that, in order to be able to monetize a blog, it needs some kind of focus on some niche. Does that mean that I will never be able to monetize this blog which has pretty good search engine ranking?

So far I have used this resource of good standing with Google to tell the search giant to come by and take a look at a site that I needed to get indexed quickly. One of these sites was our tie-dye clothing site ThaiDye.com that, whenever I mentioned it here on this blog, gets a visits from Mr. Google the next day.

With a site as broad as this – I mean what could be broader than all the things that irk me? – I probably have to do it the other way around – get a real niche site going very strong and then this can drive traffic to my catch-all site here. And then I might actually be able to monetize this site – huh, maybe…

In the beginning of the World Wide Web transferring data was slow and costly so methods were devised to minimize the amount of data transmitted and still convey the message.

One of the results was the ‘Smiley’ – an icon consisting of only a few characters and thus very cheap and fast to transmit. The added advantage was that with just three characters you could indicate that you were smiling    or frowning    instead of writing a little novel to express that this was your emotion when writing an email or quick instant message.

Since then bandwidth has become a lot cheaper and the reason to reduce the amount of data is not relevant any more. But in our illiterate times it is still necessary for many people to have the means to simply express if they are saying something humorous or threatening…

• I’m going to kill you   
• I’m going to kill you   

Obviously, specialized areas of the www thought that they require such symbology as well, and today we show you one area where such iconography was very successfully implemented – in the description of the female breast – a never-ending interest of the male population.

Without further ado, here are the your breast smileys…

Perfect breasts

Fake silicone breasts

Perky breasts

Big nipple breasts

A cups

D cups

Wonder bra breasts

Cold breasts

Lopsided breasts

Pierced Breasts

Hanging Tassels Breasts

Grandma’s Breasts

Against The Shower Door Breasts

Android Breasts

Martha Stewart’s Breasts

UPDATE: I am totally surprised how many of you have found this post – it is totally amazing! WSo, I thought that, if you got here in search for enhancing somebodies breasts – maybe your own, you should check out the pastic surgeon who really makes beautiful breasts. (Full disclosure: I run Dr. Orloff’s web site.)

keep looking »