If you took a very heavily spam-influenced search engine like Bing for example and removed the first 1 million results for a query, how good would the result be?
How about doing the same thing to the best filtered search engines available?
Well someone got curious and made the million short search engine.
What this new service does is remove a specific # of search results and show you the remainder.
I became immediately curious about a few things:
- Where are they getting their crawl data from?
- What are they doing to searches where there’s only a few hundred results?
- Where is the revenue stream? I see no ads?
Given the lack of advertising I was expecting them to be pulling search data from another site?
There’s no way they are pulling from Bing/Yahoo, there are 14+ sites paying for better spots than we’ve earned on Bing for our terms..
And while the top 10 list looks a bit like DuckDuckGo, we’re seemingly banned from their rankings, and not at #6 at all. It’s funny when you look at their anti-spam approach and then look at the #1 site for ‘seo services’ on DDG. It’s like a time machine back to the days of keyword link spam. Even more ironic is that we conform to DDGs definition of a good SEO:
“The ones who do in fact make web sites suck less, and apply some common sense to the problem, will make improvements in the search ranking if the site is badly done to start with. Things like meta data, semantical document structure, descriptive urls, and whole heap of other factors can affect your rankings significantly.
The ones who want to subscribe you to massive link farms, cloaked gateway pages, and other black hat type techniques are not worth it, and can hurt your rankings in the end.
Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, is probably is. There are some good ones, and also a lot selling snake oil.”
We know the data isn’t from Google either, we have the #1 seat for ‘seo services’ on Google and maintain that position regularly.
So what’s going on?! This is the same company that gave us the ‘Find People on Plus‘ tool and clearly they know how to monetize a property?
My guess is that they are blending results from multiple search engines, and likely caching a lot of the data so it’d be very hard to tell who’s done the heavy lifting for them?
All that aside, it’s rare to see a search engine that blatantly gives you numbered SERPs and for now MillionShort is, on the left side-bar, showing numbered positions for keywords. That’s sort of handy I guess. 
You can also change how many results to remove, so if your search is landing you in the spam bucket, then try removing less results. If your search always sucks, and the sites you want to see in the results are on the right, you’ve apparently found a search phrase that isn’t spammed! Congrats!
Weak one: Google Drive
Well my enthusiasm for Google Drive just flew out the window on my second week using it.
<em title="I wanted to transfer a large 4gb file to two machines in the US, and I knew both have high speed coax/fibre connections so rather than piddle around uploading from my capped connection to both machines, I uploaded it to Google Drive and then tried to download it to the remote machines.
What a joke! If you are a Chrome user, the inability to resume a broken download WILL make you weep tears of Shakespearean grade irony.
If you install Google Drive as a service, the download is attempted once, and then it fails, with no further action. You can re-try to sync failed files, but it just fails again.
I’m going to try the download in FireFox now, and hopefully it’s boasting about resuming downloads isn’t all crockery. “>UPDATE: Turns out the disk was full and Google Drive has no feedback at all. Thanks FireFox for telling me WHY the download failed. Oh man.
View original here:
Search Engine Experiment in Spam Surfing
Well Google Drive has been making a lot of headlines about ownership of files, depth of file privacy, virus scanning, archive support, etc.. etc..
One item I have not seen anyone mention is the installer/login system that Google Drive is using.
As an SEO who has to be able to test a multitude of browser versions, I’ve managed to work myself into a neat situation where each time IE is called upon to render something I get a warning message about the version I have installed.
The warning message is great because it lets me know when an application is cheating and using IE for displaying information vs. using default system calls built into windows. The most common application I see doing this is VMWare’s ESX console which has a very graphical summary of the virtual devices.
So imagine my amusement yesterday when installing Google Drive and seeing this:
“O RLY?”
Ownership of Files
A certain technical news source (rhymes with SEENET) that’s famous for publishing outright false information, misleading articles, and brainless technical pieces, one-up’d itself yesterday by trying to scare people away from Google Drive by publishing a hard hitting new post about Google Drive an it’s terms of service.
In order to make the story work however, they had to omit the first sentence of the section they were complaining about. Anything less wouldn’t make the post seem worth writing, much-less reading. After considerable hate from readers they actually had the nerve to ‘tack on’ the honest truth, at the very bottom of the post, instead of removing it entirely due to it being completely worthless.
The bottom line with Google and privacy is that NOBODY would use them if they abused your trust so you can rest assured that Google is doing everything they can to keep your files safe. The clauses in the TOS that state Google has rights to your files is clearly there so they can more accurately provide services that interest you.
If you take a lot of high resolution photos of animals, Google knows you work with animals. If you upload videos of cars on a race track, Google can guess you like race cars. Etc..
I’d much rather have my screen space wasted with info about the next WRC event than see a bunch of adverts for a local dog grooming outfit (I don’t hate animals, but I also don’t have pets).
File Privacy
Lots of folks are wondering how private the files are in a Google Drive.
The truth is that unless you’ve changed something from the defaults, every file uploaded is private to you. You can share files and folders with a few clicks, and there’s multiple options for how files are shared (read-only, contribute, full control), but it’s up to you to manually allow sharing.
One fellow even claimed that Google Drive was modifying the JPG files uploaded from his digital camera!?
I tested this on my own this morning with a 5.8MB .JPG @ 3968 x 2976 resolution. Yes, indeed, if I choose to view or preview the image Google isn’t going to waste my time viewing a 6MB .JPG, and instead it renders a much smaller preview to get the image on my screen quickly.
However if I choose to download the image I get the exact same file I uploaded with no changes whatsoever, EXIF data included!
Archive Support
So far I’ve had no problems with .RAR and .ZIP archives in Google Drive, and I have the option of opening the archives which means downloading individual files inside an archive is very easy. I’ve only tested Google Drive with Windows and Ubuntu so far, but as expected it’s making things very easy to share between the machines and the OSes.
.7z (7ZIP) support is not enabled yet, but at the moment the format isn’t very widely used so I doubt many users will mind the fact that you have to download the whole archive vs. opening it on-line. Obviously anti-virus scanning isn’t available on archives that aren’t supported.
Protected archives are also supported in that you can browse the unencrypted contents, but Google Drive doesn’t make any attempts to get passwords out of you, which should help with all the tin-foil-beanie types.
Limitations of Use
This one is yet to be determined. Google clearly won’t allow you to upload a 4.7GB DVD and then share it public with no limits, that would be amazingly poor insight from a company that takes great efforts to plan each move.
How much ‘sharing’ you can get away with seems to be an unanswered question at the moment, but given the lazy pirates around the globe I’m sure someone’s going to put this to the test immediately.
Another rumour floating around is that the largest single file you can store on Google Drive is 10GB. While that’s a MASSIVE file allowance for a single file, it still seems odd that such a cap would exist since you would have to be a paid user at that point. Since the cost of trying the commercial version is very low I’m going to give it a whirl and see what I find.
More to come!
Beanstalk Minecraft Map Contest!
I haven’t been flogging this very much, which is bad form given my profession, but we still have a glorious brand new Android tablet with Minecraft PE installed to give away!
How do you win this approx ~$300 prize? You play a video game, and you have fun creating a map that will be displayed and recognized by fellow gamers on our website. Yeah, life is rough eh?
Our initial contest winner of the $50 prize, Faragilus from the Ukraine, got his prize this week and we will be featuring his work with the rest of the winners at the end of the contest.
For more information please look at the original post here: Beanstalk Minecraft 1.2 Contest
PPS: I know this is a REALLY long post today but I had to toss in a Google Chrome video that really is neat. While Microsoft is spending time and money trying mock it’s competition, Google’s having fun with demonstrating it’s products and how they help people on-line connect in real life.
Go here to read the rest:
Week One with Google Drive
When I was a teenager the coolest speakers on the planet were made by AVI Sound International in Vancouver BC and they stood out from other manufacturers because of how they used rare earth neodymium magnet structures.
Using these rare materials in speakers intended for bass was a first in the world of audio products, and AVI has helped many enthusiasts win at international competitions with their exotic products and no-compromise ideas. Even at the time the cost of using these rare minerals was really crazy, and AVI only produced limited quantities before totally stopping production.
Fast forward to 2012 and US federal authorities tasked with resource forecasts are already predicting a world-wide shortage of neodymium, and other rare minerals, that will be outpaced by our needs as early as 2015! The transition away from these magnets for things like traditional physical HDDs will help, but our needs in just the electric-vehicle industry alone is causing concerns.
Enter: Planetary Resources
It is speculation at the moment, but when you take someone with the resources and imagination of James Cameron, pick Peter Diamandis (the X Prize founder) to lead the operation, stir in some wealthy Google executives, and call it ‘Planetary Resources’ you are begging for speculation.
When Earth runs low on rare resources, the value of reaching into space for those resources starts to match up with the cost of doing so.
The trick is to find a way to mine without having it cost more than the minerals are worth.
It’s for this reason that we’re not likely to send Bruce Willis, or any humans, off to space with a pickaxe any-time soon.
The first industrial space mining is almost certainly going to be done by robotics, and guess who’s behind a new robot fighting show on TV called “Robogeddon”? Yes indeed, James Cameron is lending his experience in robotic battle cinema to the new show which will be hosted by Mark Burnett from Survivor and Shark Tank.
Is it really financially feasible to mine asteroids?
Back in 2005 Peter Diamandis did a TED video discussing how a single asteroid full of nickel-iron alloy could be worth “$20 Trillion” on the precious metals market:
(Oh Canada .. @ 8:35m)
When you look at the resources we need to continue advancing clean energy technologies like photovoltaic panels, electric motors, batteries, etc.., these items are all based on rare minerals we are rapidly running out of on this planet. By as early as 2020 we will start hitting a crisis of supply that nobody doubts will impact our current clean energy initiatives drastically.
So at this point we already know we can’t afford to not take this next step into space exploration and mining. The gains in science and development of the entire human race alone make the case for this work.
Another factor is the privatization of space exploration with NASA stepping out of the publicly funded access to space. This lack of a publicly financed effort makes room for all the private companies who now can see the value of the investment and competing for the business in this new sector.
I don’t need to tell the reader how excited and eager I am to hear the full ‘official’ announcement of Planetary Resources’ plans which should be coming as early as next week!
Speaking of Competitions..
April 15th was the final day of our Beanstalk map making contest in Minecraft.
While we were really impressed with all the effort going into the maps we know that most map makers are still trying to finish the maps they started.
At this point we have confirmation that all entries past the date of our prize change are interested in extending the competition.
To make things as fair as possible Dave has agreed that we will give out the original $50 prize to the best map we have now, and then give everyone until May 31st to finish their maps for the main prize.
This should be plenty of time to finish all those ‘runaway trains’ of details and tweaks that map makers find as they start to complete a major build. I know that on the demo map I could probably spend a week just detailing the cloud structures and leaves on the Beanstalk leading up to the giant’s castle.
Congrats to Faragilus for his floating castle and beanstalk map submission! We’ve sent out an email to confirm your win and will be shipping out your prize once we’ve confirmed your address info.
Faragilus’ map will also be featured along with the top finalists, and he is welcome to re-submit an updated map at any time if he wishes to also compete for the grand prize. Because the competition is still on-going we won’t be featuring any winning map content until the May 31st closing date.
Good luck and have a great time making your maps!
The rest is here:
Robotic Asteroid Mining for Rare Elements