Archive for April, 2007
When searching for broad terms such as “pizza” or “karate” one of the top 10 entries will usually be from Wikipedia. However, it appears that Google has tweaked their algorithm so that whenever a user appends the word “information” or “info” (no quotes) to a search, the first result is almost always a Wikipedia entry. Google appears to be parsing out the first line of a Wikipedia entry, and using it as the text in the Google result. When searching for pizza information on Google the first result is:
Pizza Pizza “” … is a Canadian franchise chain of pizza restaurants mainly located in the province of Ontario.
The first line of the Wiki entry is:
Pizza Pizza (TSX: PZA.UN) is a Canadian franchise chain of pizza restaurants mainly located in the province of Ontario. It has over 300 locations across the province, including well over one hundred locations in the Greater Toronto Area alone, and claims to be Ontario’s number-one pizza chain. As well, a small number of locations operate in western Québec and on some university campuses elsewhere in Canada.
You definitely can’t say it’s perfect as of yet though. When searching for “hard drive information“, the first result it brings is about an animated cartoon.
AOL has done some pretty low things in their miserable existence, but this has got to be the worst. In what seems like a pathetic attempt at a web portal, they totally copied Yahoo.com’s design. It’s so blatant, it seems as if it were done to get attention to themselves. Almost every detail is the same right down to the order of the links in the left side bar, and the order of the links above the search bar.
Click here for the larger image. According to Tech Crunch, even AOL employees are calling it the Yahoo portal. However, the official name is AOL 3.0.
This isn’t the first time a major player has copied Yahoo. Back in December Google copied Yahoo’s page that was promoting “optimized” IE7.
Since web browsers are a daily part of our life, getting the most out of them is very important. The more tool bars you own, the less of a website’s content you actually see. That’s where Tiny Menu comes in. It allows you to compress the bar that contains File, Edit, View, etc in to one small button or image. If done correctly you can get rid of the whole tool bar all together. The steps to do this are simple. First and foremost, install the extension. After that, right click the current tool bar and click customize. This will allow you to drag and drop items on your tool bars. If you mess that step up you can always reset it to the defaults. Drag the back button, forward button, and the rest to the bar where the main menu is/was. Once you do that it should be blank, and you can just delete it all together. When successfully done it should look like so:
The plugin does have basic options such as collapsing certain menus while leaving others untouched. You can also use an image for the button instead of the default “Menu” text. Now if we could just get rid of that bottom tool bar it would look similar to Opera :)
To tech savvy computer users experimenting with new things isn’t a big deal. You read on the subject, ask people, or post on a forum. However, a lot of users are afraid to try new things. One of the most useful things for news junkies is RSS. RSS is such an important thing, which I use daily. It really never occurred to be how complex it may seem to certain users. Opening a file and seeing all that XML can be overwhelming. However, I just saw this cool video that explained RSS in normal English. They don’t complicated terminology; it’s all easy to understand and comprehend.
In this video they use Google reader as the RSS client. There are plenty of alternatives, but if you’re interested enough, give mine a try. I coded it about a year ago, so it’s not the best piece of software, however it does work. If you need an RSS feed to get started with, subscribe to mine.
In a press release, Intuit says it will be refunding customers that paid Turbo tax to file their taxes online from April 17 and 18. Apparently during peak hours, which is around a day before they’re due, their servers experienced a critical database failure. Oops. They’re offering to pay for any fees the IRS dishes out, but does not foresee this to be an issue at the time. As of now the IRS has extended the time to file for all Turbo Tax customers by a period of two days.
Intuit worked closely with the Internal Revenue Service and appreciates that it has agreed to allow taxpayers who were affected by the delay to file their returns until midnight on Thursday, April 19, without penalty. Intuit will also pay any other penalties that customers incur as a result of the delay, although none are anticipated.
During the hours before taxes were due, dozens of frantic customers pleaded on the forums for assistance as the clock ticked. Basically there was one administrator on the forums and hundreds of pissed off customers. While she did handle the situation professionally, it seems like an awfully bad situation to be in.