Posts Tagged "search"

In the Internet limelight for a brief moment

Posted by Alex on 26 Nov, 2009 in My Stream | 0 comments

So I wrote this post about how Twitter’s new retweet design is broken and offering a different suggestion of how they should have redesigned their retweet interface. Dave Winer (inventor of RSS and prominent blogger) wrote about the subject on scripting.com, and recommended people read my post! Wow. Now, I’ve just checked Google, and when you search on “twitter retweet design” my post comes up first, above the post by Evan Williams, founder of Twitter about why they designed it the way they did.

If that’s not an endorsement of what I wrote I don’t know what is! Now, at the risk of stroking my ego too much, I will stop. But it’s nice to enjoy a moment of Internet “fame”.

Google getting closer to real time search?

Posted by Alex on 17 Jul, 2009 in My Stream | 0 comments

Interesting.. Much is made of how Twitter is better than Google at real-time search. Yet I just got this Google Alert within 10 minutes of posting the tweet.

Are Google getting better at realtime search? Or did I just get lucky that they were scanning/spidering at exactly the right moment…

Google making use of Web History Data

Posted by Alex on 1 Jun, 2009 in My Stream | 0 comments

via flickr.com

Just spotted this, first time I have seen Google actually doing something with the “Web Search History” data. Could be actually quite useful. Although depending what you search for, you may now not want to check Google News with friends/colleagues around!!

When to use something other than Google

Posted by Alex on 8 Jul, 2008 in Articles | 2 comments

When Google invented PageRank, they became the best search engine on the Internet, a default place to find anything online – and I like many other people changed my search habits from trying multiple engines (AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Webcrawler, Lycos etc) to just one. What I am starting to find now though, is that while Google is still the best for straightforward keyword based searches, there are a few specific types of thing where Google is not my first point of call:

“How To” videos

I have found that VideoJug is an excellent place to find really good quality instructional videos. Recently my wife and I held an Egyptian-themed murder mystery party and I used VideoJug to find this excellent video on how to tie a turban. Just today, I was looking for something I could make out of paper as part of my present to my wife for our first (“Paper”) wedding anniversary and found just what I was looking for.

General overviews of a topic

If there is a topic, person or area which I know nothing apart, I have found that it is far quicker to go directly to Wikipedia than to bother searching Google.