Remosi’s Rants

My list of feature requests for google web search.

1. In search results when you click on a link, it should take you to the nearest #target, it’s annoying having to search within a page to find what google is pointing you at.
2. Provide a page like the sitemap status page where google suggests things about your page. Eg, “/index.php has a broken link on it pointing to /404.html” “/broken.html is pointed to by offsite page http://www.example.com/”, “foo.zip is served with a plain/text content-type” “/foo.xml is served with an xml content-type, but doesn’t validate as xml”, etc. I’d fix problems on my website if I knew what they were.
3. Provide a mechanism to exclude part of a page for being used for search words. eg, the wlug wiki has/had the sites RecentChanges on a page. If you googled for “SNMP” it would return you the samba page, why? because the samba page had a very high page rank, and included the “SNMP” page in the RecentChanges area. I want google to crawl the links in recentchanges, I just don’t want it to consider terms in there as being relevant. No, rel=”nofollow” doesn’t cover it.

I really don’t like writting blogs about random cruft that isn’t relevant to anyone, so I don’t blog what I saw a dog do to this other dog today, or anything like that, I try and keep this place for my rants (as suggested by the title). But today I feel I’ve accomplished some stuff that I should advertise a little. I probably should do this more often, it at least means I “release” my programs properly.

Conference bot

A bot that links together google talk users into one public conference room.

This bot has been used as the basis of many bots for google talk

TV Renamer

Guesses the episode numbers of a set of files and renames them to a standard pattern.

TR

TR is of course my traceroute mesh program used for visualising multiple paths through the Internet. See also my whois webscript for doing various common lookups and queries.

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve noticed: Most of the influential people in the IT industry have had backgrounds in either muds or IRC. The important thing is to get people involved in a community. This (IMHO) has big impacts for how people should be looking at getting people involved in projects and communities.

If you want to get involved in an open source project, the best thing to do is to find out what IRC channel(s) the authors hang out in and listen to what they have to say. Often you’ll hear about little things that need a bit of work here and there. People really like it when you answer all those commonly asked questions for them. Write up FAQ’s and Documentation if you can’t/won’t/don’t like to code.

So now onto Google. Well, they are at a clear disadvantage at the moment, MSN has the userbase mostly all tied up, everyone has a MSN account, mostly because Windows practically forces one apon you when you use the machine. So what should google be doing? They should be emphasising the users they do have. I’ve written a conference bot which lets multiple people join a public chat room and talk to each other. There have been quite a few people that have turned up and said “I added this conference bot coz I don’t know anyone else that has google talk”. They’ve then found a few people to talk to from chatting in the channel. I’ve met quite a few interesting people with all kinds of various interests from the bot. Surprisingly many are Chinese, I suspect because IRC being the only real public chat system around doesn’t support CJK languages at all well so they’ve not had anything at all like it.

It’s a pity that IRC is so overstretched and nothing has stepped up to take it’s place. I think it’s a very important part of the culture of the Internet.