My friend and I were arguing about what type of search strategy for information providers (in this case search engines) was preferable. We were divided on the issue of accuracy of search results. My friend didn’t want the search engine to determine if the information it was finding was wrong or not, in other words, he didn’t want the likes of Google to gauge the accuracy of the information it was indexing and searching. He just wanted it to present the information and allow him to make up his own mind. I disagreed, I felt that information seekers want and need authoritative and relevant information. Search results usually fall across several pages, but rarely do most seekers click through all the pages. If inaccurate information that falls below a high standard of veracity is given an equal footing with authoritative information, the information seeker is provided with less high quality results.

Some of you may balk at the term ‘authoritative,’ by which I don’t mean ‘established dogma’ or the quashing of alternative perspectives on history or poverty. At present, if using a search engine to find information about (or , cows, cows, and cows) you’re more likely to find all sorts of cow related products information than what it is you were actually looking for (full disclosure: I tried to use first, but ironically I found high ranking authoritative information for it, though only limited - Google turned out to be less relevant than Yahoo, probably because it’s more often the target of SEO). What you actually want will be spread out across the many pages of search results, outnumbered by the commercial product and service results. Possibly relevant information unfairly competes with the other results that are only trying to sell you something or trying to get you to click on their ads. You’ll probably not even see what you wanted to find, even if it’s right in front of you.

The web is highly commercialized, and the numerous commercial sites on the web depend on search engines to bring their business. Commercial sites have the resources and incentive to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get higher rankings in search results. Non-profit oriented sites that only provide information do not have resources nor the incentive to invest in higher rankings. The US Government created firstgov.gov, a site meant to be the #1 portal for government information and advertised it on traditional media (TV and radio ads) because, in part, searching for information about government information leads seekers to anything but what they were looking for. Search for , , , information, and more, returns 99% junk sites that try to sell you something (and sometimes masking themselves as being a government site) and not the information you as a citizen have a right to (although checking these search results, it seems that things have improved). Search results are questionable because they can be manipulated, often through underhanded means such as link spamming and link injections.

My friend is willing to determine the accuracy of the information himself, but he has a lot of work a head of him. His job is made tougher by the many spam results he has to filter through. He also may have a biased perspective because he’s a programmer and technology searches return relevant results far more often than non-technology oriented searches because of the prevalence of technology information, especially web technology, on the Internet. If he where in a different profession and his primary concern were to look for something else, such as food related items or toys, you name it, he’d have a tough go at it. Also, because of his technology background and his work with search technology and databases, he’s more capable than most to create competent query searches, and has an unrealistic appreciation of the search experiences of most people.

Another issue is that of intellectual freedom. Search engines are operated by profit oriented corporation that have their investors concerns at heart, not necessarily that of the information seeker. If MSN Search is willing to help the Chinese government block information for the selfish purposes of the authorities, then what’s to stop them from working behind the scenes with undemocratic forces in your world? To what extend can we trust that search results were not manipulated behind the scenes when the search process is a closed and secretive one?

I often argue that the web has a need for a non-profit oriented search engine that strives to provide authoritative results. The commercialization of the web has made this difficult, but in the mean time there are options for people who want to bypass the trash they usually have to put up with. Library websites often are great portals to authoritative information, and I urge you to look up your local libraries web page, or that of a major near by city (will probably have a better site) if you live in a rural area.

I’ve been trying Mozilla Thunderbird for about a month now, and today I realized how much I missed Outlook 2003. Thunderbird is not nearly half as powerful as Outlook. All you can really do with it is read and send email. Some issues I have with Thunderbird:

1. I can’t assign complex rules to senders, or subjects or mail content that lets me automatically direct the mail into a folder, flag it for importance, or create an alert.

2. I can’t run Thunderbird minimized in the taskbar.

3. Norton Internet Security’s (yes I use Norton, sue me) spam filter doesn’t integrate with Thunderbird.

4. Annoyingly, if I wanted to forward an email, it would do so as an attachment.

5. The window where the email list is displayed, the email browser I suppose, is about as useful as a rusty fork embedded in my neck. Sorting mail is difficult.

6. The address book doesn’t have functions you’d think it would.

7. It’s just not as powerful as Outlook 2003. With Outlook I can create tasks from emails, I can create rules, I can do many things. I can create alerts that let me know I have to get something done. Etc.

Now, technically some of these things that are missing in Thunderbird could exist, if someone programed an extension for them in XUL, but nobody has. The extensions for Thunderbird are either unnecessarily geeky such as creating the option to modify the SMTP headers or trace the Internet route that an email took to get to you, or they’re completely useless like my favorite, converting the text in an email to look as if it’s been written by a swedish chef. Great. Nothing very useful extension wise for Thunderbird.

But switching back after a month from Thunderbird presented a challenge. I needed to reclaim my inbox. (Ha ha) You can’t simply import into Outlook from Thunderbird. A bit of Yahooing however did the trick, and because you, oh faithful reader, read my blog, you are spared of having to doing the dirty work of searching for a way to convert from Thunderbird to Outlook. (Because I know so many of you have been dying to convert back to Outlook from Thunderbird.)

Just check out Unic0der’s trick. It was simple enough that even I could do it.

I’m still a Firefox user though, I’m not giving that up!

The Web Professor’s list of 73 things he’s learned or praticed this year is a good read.

My personal favorites:

• Just because someone can argue well online doesn�t mean they know jack…
• Don�t be afraid to be wrong and listen to the counsel of those who are honest.
• Google is not as smart as it seems.
• Try your best not to flame people or sites. It does you no good and makes you look bad.
• Most people are good.
• A good listener is well rewarded.

According to the suit Rates Technology Inc. remains uncompensated for patented technologies utilized by Google Talk. threadwatch.org emphasizes the Rates Technology belief that Google’s patent infringement was motivated by its ‘arrogance’.

Good luck on trying to find Rates Technology’s website, I can’t find it on or . I can’t find it even if I search for (I for Inc). Maybe I lack the necessary skills or maybe they don’t have a website, imagine that.

Apparently SearchEngineWatch broke the story when it uncovered the court docket.

More on this from

This is a continuance from …I got tired of crashing and uninstalled it again. Firefox hasn’t crashed since. I noticed though, that a lot of the crashing happened when the Java 2 Platform was running. Since the uninstall, however, it hasn’t crashed again, even when I was recreating the situation with the Java 2 Platform that caused Firefox to crash previously. didn’t turn up a lot of buzz about problems for other people. Maybe it’s just something I have that’s incompatible with it. I wish I knew what it was.

I changed the template a bit on the blog. I hope I didn’t disable anything important. I just changed the width to 100% and removed all the stock images. Those looked terrible. I don’t really like the colors right now as they are so I’ll change those as well and create a logo for the top. That template just was so skinny it squished up all my text. Seems that most of the new templates are these skinny centered strips of text. Well, I’ll update it some more later…