RasterWeb!

The Guardian Unlimited has an article about the whole weblogs/Google controversy, and this one line really stood out to me:

It is a simple task for us to switch search engines if our trust is abused.

Is it such a simple task? Sure, I’ve set my default search engine to AlltheWeb right now, and there are others to choose from, but this really only handles the basic web searches. If you use the Google Web API for anything, you probably know it’s a cool thing, but do other engines offer anything similar? Would you have to re-write your apps? Does AlltheWeb’s Advanced Search match up against Google’s Advanced Search? People use the term google as a verb – “Did you google for an answer?” and some recently released browsers have a Google toolbar built into them…

Don’t get me wrong, Google is a great search engine (I’ve even got a Google t-shirt somewhere, and have been known to wear it from time to time) and I still use it, but I’d really prefer to not become completely reliant upon it. Reliance upon any one entity for something isn’t always a good thing. (Microsoft, Apple, etc.)

So back to the statement, that it will be a simple task to switch search engines, for some people it will be simple, and for some applications it will be simple, but if Google disappeared from the web today, could you easily switch search engines and not notice a difference, and still find what you’re looking for?

Like Russell said “I’m in Wired News” in a piece titled Search Results Clogged by Blogs, there’s a quote from me. Here’s part of it:

He believes the trick to achieving prominent search rankings is fairly straightforward: “update frequently and provide good content.”

Yes, that’s me quoting Wired News quoting me… and that’s the so-called secret I tell everyone who wants a popular site. Of course ‘good’ is going to mean something different to everyone, this isn’t rocket science, right?

Aside from that though, it really seems like the old saying “any publicity is good publicity” right? I mean, what’s the difference between being famous and infamous? Well, supposedly if you are infamous then you are somehow bad, but ultimately they both mean “well known” right? I suppose until the search engines can start to determine the meaning and context of words and phrases we’ll be seeing the infamous alongside the famous. Which might actually be a good thing…

I’ve been reading O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions. The plot is a little thin, but it’s got some great characters…

A quickie on traffic stats, it seems that for April 2003 we served up the RSS feed for this site three times more than we served up the home page, and the RSS feed accounted for over 25% of the page requests. Oh, and NetNewsWire was by far the most popular aggregator. (Way to go Brent!)

Today an intern wanted to ask me some questions. He was working on a page that was giving him some problems, and as I looked at the source, and asked him some questions, he said he was authoring the page in XHTML Strict. I commended him, and asked about the debate of whether or not the Content-type should be text/html , application/xml, or some other variant, and while he wasn’t up on the subject, it just warms my heart to see the kids embracing the standards…

My friends, there is hope for the future…