Thursday, December 23, 2004

Battelle’s Look Ahead

John Battelle looks into his Searchblog crystal ball and sees the near web future.

Battelle’s Look Ahead by Philipp Lenssen

Search Google Ads

If Google would only contain sponsored links, it would behave like this search engine. [Via SER, InsideGoogle, and Dirson.]

Search Google Ads by Philipp Lenssen

Google Video Search?

Mats Carduner, new general manager of Google France, revealed that Google Labs is working on a video search – at least that’s what I make of it*. Surely 2005 will see a real Google video and audio search (and knowing Google, it will be a notch better than everything we had before).

*Zorgloob pointed to this passage from a French interview: “Pour le multimédia, la mission de Google reste d’organiser l’information et de la rendre accessible. On vise le web sous toutes ses formes : le texte, les images et demain l’audiovisuel. Les Googles Labs travaillent d’ailleurs sur cette notion d’indexation de la vidéo.”
If you know French better than me and can give a good translation on this, please share it.

Update: Justin helps out with the translation.

Google Video Search? by Philipp Lenssen

Quick Jesus Survey

This interesting Google ad promises to aid those searching for Jesus...

Quick Jesus Survey by Philipp Lenssen

MSN Search Wiki

The MSN Search team now offers a Wiki for everyone to discuss the Microsoft search engine. (I’m afraid it’s not a “real” Wiki though, as you can’t edit without logging into it.) On a related note, some people believe the MSN search page may soon look like this.

MSN Search Wiki by Philipp Lenssen

Google Zeitgeist 2004

Google just released their interactive (Flash-based) 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist.

Google Zeitgeist 2004 by Philipp Lenssen

Freeware Utilities

Here are the “46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities."

Freeware Utilities by Philipp Lenssen

Bad Experiences With LinkWorth

I signed up with LinkWorth a while ago but I’m really disappointed by now. The idea is that I get paid for links I put on the right side of my blog. So far that’s fine, but there are several problems.

First, their usability is low – you need to provide several parameters for your site including your “LinkRank”, even though it’s hard to understand what this is (the online help wouldn’t reveal anything meaningful). I wouldn’t bother if their control center was just bad-looking (screaming blues and yellows), but it also hides most of its features under pop-up navigation (and it’s next to impossible to tell what’s a link). These are all small pains if the rest of the system would be in perfect shape.

Now the first link partner I approved and linked to from my site turned out to be a credit card fraudster. And even though the system apparently had this information, they still offered me to put up a link and approve this partner – only to tell me, right after I clicked, that there were “problems” (I had to write to the LinkWorth support to get to know just what kind of problems these were).

After a longer period of waiting because no one wanted to advertise on my site I lowered my price and received another offer. This time everything seemed to be OK and I put up a link to the right on all of my pages. Today I got a strange automated message from LinkWorth, and they tell me they can’t find the link on my site (even though it’s clearly there, and a standard HTML link).

Wanting to complain to their support email and hitting “Reply” in my inbox, I get a “Mail could not be delivered.” If this wouldn’t be frustrating enough, when I went to the LinkWorth site to find a working support address and clicked on “Support”, I’m presented with this error message:

“Fatal error: eSupport Template Engine: [line 7]: syntax error: invalid attribute name - ’Array’ in /home/sp3nt/public_html/ help/admin/smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 1685”

Now what? I will remove the link I put up, and stop accepting offers from LinkWorth. If anybody else knows good, working text-link programs, I’m happy to hear about them in the forum.

Update: LinkWorth sent out these explanation to all customers (emphasis mine):
“Last night our server was upgraded due to a virus going crazy around the internet. During this upgrade, the system seemed to have sent out many erroneous emails saying links were removed and several others. PLEASE DISREGARD THESE!!! We’re ’hoping’ [sic] this was a one time incident but we cannot rule out it will happen again tonight. We will be monitoring the system to be sure any bugs are caught quickly.”

Update: Ron W. of LinkWorth comments on my criticism.

Bad Experiences With Link ... by Philipp Lenssen

Gingerbread CPU

What do computer geeks give for christmas? A gingerbread CPU, of course. [Thanks Markus R.]

Gingerbread CPU by Philipp Lenssen

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