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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Cranky.com (for Searchers Over 50)

Eons.com, a web portal trying to target people age 50+, created a search engine called Cranky especially for this age group. Eons claims “that the new search engine will yield fewer search results and rank them based on their relevancy to older Web users.” It does return less results (if we disregard the remarkably large ads), though I wonder how successful they are in determing “relevancy to older Web users.”

On a somewhat related note, an interview with Italian author Umberto Eco comes to mind. Back in 1995, he was asked about the internet and its enormous possibilities, and he replied (my emphasis):

I am enormously interested in what is happening. I am trying to establish all possible services on Internet here at my institute, and to push young people to work in this direction. (...) Personally, I do not use those technologies. For a very simple reason. At my age, first, let us also say, at my level of ’visibility’, my problem is to avoid the message. (...)

Otherwise I will be destroyed by the number of messages. My problem is not to answer the telephone; my problem is to destroy the fax; the unrequested fax as soon as it arrives. Even if, or rather, when in the near future, I finally get an e-mail account, my problem will be how not to receive anything. Because if there is something that has to reach me at any cost, it will. There will be some way by which I will be informed. (...)

Once, when I was younger, I said that after 50 a critic or a scholar mustn’t be concerned any longer with avant-garde movements, but to write only about Elizabethan poets.

Google Talk Skins

Google Talk already includes “chat themes” (in Settings -> Appearances), but if you want to skin the application itself, this tutorial with sample skins might come in helpful. It takes some EXE hacking with a resource editor to get this to work though...
[Thanks Sankar Anand in the forum!]

Top Google Custom Search Engines

If you’ve created a Google Custom Search Engine, you can now check if it appears in Google’s (traffic) popularity chart. Here’s the current top 10:

  1. Soundclick.com Search
  2. e-Words Search
  3. MozillaZine KB Search
  4. Macworld
  5. Google Earth Community
  6. New Advent
  7. Antoloji Arama Motoru
  8. AreaConnect
  9. Duowan WOW Search Engine
  10. New York State DMV

Other CSE directory categories include Bloggers, Cool Tricks and Google Picks...

[Via Google’s Custom Search Blog.]

Weird Google AdWords Layout

Marcus spotted a weird Google ads result in which the blue ad unit overlays the right-hand side, white one (I was able to reproduce this searching Google.de for technikversand). I guess this always happens when there’s 3 ads in the blue unit and only 1 in the white unit? [Thanks Marcus!]

World’s Highest Website

Here’s the world’s highest website. The creators claim it’s 18,939 kilometers high, and they’re using the following CSS:

div#whws { font-size: 100cm; height: 18939em; line-height: 1.0; }

[Thanks David Hetfield!]

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