Posts tagged “google”

Search is broken, yes?

For all the credit we give Yahoo and Google for fighting off Search Engine Optimization (SEO) how long has it been since looking up a hotel in either search engine worked? Years, I think. If you want to search for a hotel by name, you’re going to get dozens of hits that are from hotel reservation sites (often the same site under a variety of URLs) and have to look hard to find the actual Ramada page, or the actual Hyatt page. Sure, it varies by hotel, city, chain, etc. but for the most part, the promise of those search engines to bring you what you are looking for – in this particular category of highly consistent search – is totally broken

Blogger Help : Known Issues?

Blogger Help has a sidebar entitled “Ask Support”

Can’t find what you’re looking for in Blogger Help?

First check Blogger Status and our known issues page, then write Blogger Support and we’ll see what we can do.

Of course, when one tries to write Blogger Support, ie, submit a report of something not working properly, there are really two choices:

  • Ask for help or instructions
  • Submit a feature request or suggestion

Telling them that something is not working is not an option. They don’t seem to want to know about problems. That’s one way to keep the bug list down, just keep the users at bay!

Thanks, Google!

New Google feature

southwest - Google Search 8 11 2005 9 04 29 AM.jpg
click screenshot to enlarge

This is an interesting new feature from Google. At least, I’ve only noticed in the last few days, and I haven’t seen it mentioned on the usual blogs that hype every new thing that Google does (I guess this is just an improvement in searching and that’s just so – yawn – less interesting than other Google improvements or innovations).

Looks like the top result for a search (but only certain type of searches – it doesn’t work for portigal or portigal.com – is it only for sponsored?) come up with not only the links to the site, but also a selection of links to other pages in that site. Interesting tradeoff between useful and clutter. I’m not sure yet what I think; I imagine I’d typically want to open the page anyway, and then use the context of that page to choose my subsequent links. But I guess if you knew you wanted to do something specific on that site, like check arrival times, if there is enough info in the link shown in the Google result, you might try that.

We’ll see what happens. Nice thing about the web – companies can try out new features easily and take them away or improve them easily (sure, it’s not easy exactly, but if you wanted to do this with a car feature, that’d be a lot harder).

Unsupportive support

Have you seen this trick?

When using a website to report a problem (in my case, there was a new feature in Blogger that wasn’t working properly), you are asked to enter all your information (name, email, system used, description of problem), and then will receive an automated email almost immediately.

Sometimes those emails are simply acknowledgements. We’ve got your request; it’s in our system, a real person will get back to you ASAP once we’ve had a chance to look at it. Have you looked at our FAQ? But more often I’m seeing a little phrase stuck in at that bottom warning casually that if you STILL need help you have to do something (click on a link, hit reply, etc.). It’s very easy to skip over that warning since it’s buried and not part of the standard dialogue, in which case your request for help will be discarded.

I went through that with Blogger (or “Google” as they are also known) and many days later they posted on their status page that the problem was fixed (in fact, the problem had been in existence for several days but this hadn’t appeared on their status page, the fix announcement referred to the issue appearing briefly which was rather optimistic of ’em). Several days after that, they send me a generic email in response to my support request, suggesting that the problem may be fixed, or it may be solved by a fix listed at a website they point me to (not relevant to my problem), and if it’s still a problem, I should just submit a help request again!

Wow. I mean, really the problem has been solved and that’s great, but to suggest I start all over again when it feels like I have to jump through so many hoops to get them to even acknowledge my request – yikes. Talk about frustration.

I acknowledge that Blogger is free for most, and there are some millions of blogger pages, and when a piece of the service goes down they are likely to get an incredible number of support requests, and so the logistics of actually providing support are tremendously demanding for them. Fair enough. But – just looking at the customer side of it, the chipper tone in the email doesn’t really help when it doesn’t feel like they are listening to me.

For Blogger support, I’ve mostly been using a third-party site – a community of Blogger users and experts and enthusiasts called BloggerForum – if nothing else, this allowed me to determine that my problem was widespread enough that others were experiencing it, and that eased my concerns significantly – I figured they are probably working fixing it if it’s a bigger problem than just me. But I couldn’t get that reassurance from Blogger (though if they had posted the problem on their status page immediately and not 3 days later, that could have helped), and that’s too bad.

11 Japanese infected with hepatitis E after wild boar barbecue

Eleven people were found to have been infected with hepatitis E after barbecuing and eating wild boar meat in the woods of Nagasaki Prefecture in March last year

And Google Ads on that page included:

Old World Smoked Meats
Sausage varieties, hotdogs, jerky. Specialty meats, elk, venison.
www.buntingsupnorthmeats.com

Premium Elk Meat
Succulent, tender, protein rich and lean farm raised gourmet elk meat.
www.jamisonfarms.com

Safari Snacks
Big game and exotic snack sticks Great taste, premium quality
www.safarisnacks.com

Alligator Tail Meat
frozen, vac-pac delivered overnight to your door.
www.lintonsseafood.com

Mmmm, tasty!

usenet archives

You may have heard that google has unleashed the USENET archives back to 1981. Here’s one of the earliest posts from me that I found. Another is here and one more here.

Groups I was active in during the 1990 to 1993 period include:

alt.folklore.urban
rec.arts.movies
alt.sex
alt.rock-n-roll
alt.tv.muppets
talk.bizarre (though for some reason, those posts aren’t showing up in Google. Although I did win #25 most frequent poster of the week in the USENET stats post, including 76% of those posts to talk.bizarre – so I’ve got “proof” just no evidence)

I found some early (and tame) flame wars, some morally indignant posts by me, many smart-ass posts, quite a few questions about who sang this or acted in that (and my own share of answers), and some real newbi-ism. And, the .signatures from back then – oy! Star Trek references abound…

Series

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