More Google Wrongness

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:28:37 GMT

I’ve never really figured out why, but Google really likes me. Or, rather, it likes this blog. I keep showing up amazingly highly-ranked in common Google searches. Today’s example is treo wifi. In order, here are the top 10 results, out of 2.2 million possible matches:

  1. TreoCentral: No Treo WiFi
  2. TreoCentral: Treo 600 and WiFi?
  3. .:UNEASYsilence: Treo 650 WiFi
  4. PDA News: Treo 650 WiFi, Verizon announces XV6600, PalmOne…
  5. scottstuff: another WiFi solution for the Treo 650
  6. Slashdot: Enthusiast Hacks WiFi Into Treo 650
  7. CNet: Treo 650 Update WiFi-less
  8. Engadget: Add WiFi to your Treo 650! SD WiFi card drivers hacked
  9. Engadget: some random search page
  10. PalmInfocenter: HOWTO: Make that palmOne Treo 650 Even Better!

So, as I see this, Google sees me as a better source of information then Slashdot, CNet, Engadget, and PalmInfocenter? It can’t just be PageRank–from what I can see, I’m just a lowly PR5 this month, while Slashdot and CNet are PR9s, and Engadget is a PR6. It can’t be the number of links in Google’s database, because no one links to my Treo WiFi page. Can anyone explain how this works?

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Apparently Google likes me too

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:51:42 GMT

A few months back, MSN’s search engine decided that this blog was a great source of information on Paris Hilton videos, and decided to feed me tons of traffic.

Today was Google’s turn. One of my SpaceShip One entries is showing up on the first page of search results for “spaceship one” on at least a couple of Google’s servers. Surprisingly, this is only generating a couple dozen hits per hour this afternoon.

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Zoe

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 06 May 2004 17:59:00 GMT

I’ve looked at Zoe once or twice in the past, but it never quite grabbed enough of my interest for me to bother installing it. If you aren’t familiar with Zoe, it’s a Java-based email search proxy thing that they’ve never really been able to explain on their website. Yesterday I was searching for more information on Near-Time Flow, and came across a blog entry by Tom Malaher titled “Google your Email”:

Who needs GMail? You’ve got your own CPU and Disk space, use it. ZOE lets you read and search your email (with Lucene), without supplying helpful related advertising. Not to mention that it also has a very cool non-linear email access metaphor. Forget Inbox/Sent Mail/…customFolders.. you just browse.

Ah, finally–someone explains the point of Zoe. It’s basically a personal email search engine. Once I got that, I grabbed a copy and tried it out. It’s trivial to install–just extract the files from the archive and double-click on Zoe.jar. Zoe runs its own web server on port 10080, and automatically fires up your favorite browser when it starts. The web interface is intuitive and reasonable attractive, and it’s easy to add new POP or IMAP accounts and have Zoe import mail from them. While it’s possible to use Zoe as a web-based mail reader, it’s not really very good at that–it doesn’t do folders at all, and I can’t figure out how to get it to do threads, but that’s not really a problem, because it’s not supposed to be used for normal mail reading: it’s a search engine, not a mail reader.

I probably have around 100,000 messages sitting in assorted IMAP mail boxes in various places, and Zoe is the first program that I’ve found that is actually usable for searching them. OS X’s Mail program isn’t very good at searching huge volumes of mail, particularly when most of it lives on IMAP servers.

The big problem with Zoe is its resource needs–it’s written in Java, and wants at least 70 MB of RAM when it’s running on my laptop, plus a few hundred MB of disk space. I just don’t have enough free RAM on my laptop to add another 70+ MB program, so I’m going to try running it on one of my Linux servers at home and see how that goes.

A couple points about Zoe: while its UI is predictable and easy to use, its documentation is nearly non-existant. Like Asterisk, you’re stuck using Google to search mailing lists and third-party wikis to find details. Zoe really needs a more detailed configuration interface. As it is, a lot of less-common features need to be controlled by editing Java property files.

It’s an easy install, though, and it’s very usable right out of the box, so I’d recommend installing it and checking it out.

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