ff portable pop it on a thumb drive or in a dir on your work comp. I actually put it on all the computers in the house so can have my configurations no matter which computer I use but I don't mess up the settings of anyone else. for example, my relatives like to see ads and don't want adblock on their ff install. yes crazy.
From Slashdot Apr.16, 2008: Google Crawls The Deep Web
"In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be 'the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines'. For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: 'For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML'. Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.'"
It's interesting that they have it working and released in public (even if only for Wikipedia) already! My guess is we will be seeing more of this kind of thing soon.
Interesting that that's happened. I saw a study (written up on a blog by an academic, not properly published, I don't think) where he got a bunch of his students to do any search they liked on ten themes. They rated the relevance and usefulness of the first return on a scale of 0 to 5.
Searches where the first result was a Wikipedia entry were rated, on average, a full point higher than all others. The author conjectured that there was a long-term problem there: search engine people would realise that user satisfaction is higher when they get Wikipedia, so they'd boost Wikipedia articles. But if people always search Google and get Wikipedia, they might realise that they could skip the Google bit and go straight to the Wiki.
But Google seem now to have avoided this conclusion, by making themselves a better search engine for Wikipedia than Wikipedia themselves.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 04:10 pm (UTC)It searches Wikipedia better than Wikipedia's search ;) Google finds stuff even if you misspell something.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 04:23 pm (UTC)"In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be 'the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines'. For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: 'For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML'. Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.'"
It's interesting that they have it working and released in public (even if only for Wikipedia) already! My guess is we will be seeing more of this kind of thing soon.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 04:51 pm (UTC)Searches where the first result was a Wikipedia entry were rated, on average, a full point higher than all others. The author conjectured that there was a long-term problem there: search engine people would realise that user satisfaction is higher when they get Wikipedia, so they'd boost Wikipedia articles. But if people always search Google and get Wikipedia, they might realise that they could skip the Google bit and go straight to the Wiki.
But Google seem now to have avoided this conclusion, by making themselves a better search engine for Wikipedia than Wikipedia themselves.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-03 06:56 am (UTC)That is interesting...!