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Cold calls, cold responseNovember 15 2008

Every few days cold-calling salespeople show up at our office unnannounced to pitch us on insurance, lease deals, laser toner, office supplies, voip plans, bottled water, etc.

We have an open office. So when they enter, 11 people immediately look up at them. This can apparently be somewhat intimidating, based on their flummoxed reactions. They usually ask for a business card so they can call us later. I sometimes offer them mine, since my card doesn't have a phone number on it. Then they beat a hasty retreat.

Lately we've been trying a new tactic - not acking their presence when they come in. There's no receptionist (of course), and it's not clear who they should attempt to speak with. None of us really want to listen to their pitch or take their flier anyway, so playing the game of chicken with the other folks in the office sort of emerged as a default behavior. Who will be the first to crack at their nervousness, make eye contact, and thus become the dupe left holding the flier or handing out their business card?

I almost feel sorry for them. Almost!

Microsoft bias in MSN search results, surpriseApril 24 2008

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN:

Lame! Falling into an inferior lex position and a lower overall relevance page to boost their own network results...give em credit for being old school. :)

...

I found my bug on Yahoo Search. I had tried a lot of smaller engines first because I didn't think a major would have this bug. You can't search for 0 on Yahoo. You can search for all the other numbers, but not 0 ...

Why?.. Because 0 is false. It suggests Yahoo is using a scripting language to front their search form, and a programmer did something like if ( $query ) rather than if ( $query ne '' ).

Microsoft "hits back" at Google with re-launch of 4-year old NewsbotApril 17 2008

The memecrowd sure has a short memory... maybe I'm just showing my age here, but still.

CNET: Microsoft hits back at Google with Live Search News
Search Engine Land: Microsoft Launches Live Search News
Search Engine Watch: Windows Live Search Offers Google News Alternative

MSN Newsbot? Anyone? From 2004:

CNET: Google News faces Microsoft rival (Jul 27, 2004)
Wash Post: Microsoft Deploys Newsbot To Track Down Headlines (Aug 1, 2004)
Geeking with Greg: MSN Newsbot review (Jul 27, 2004)

AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finallyApril 10 2008

Google's AppEngine is being compared to Amazon's EC2/S3. But Google deserves credit here for coming up with a pretty differently-positioned product. There may be overlap for many users of course, but it's really operating at a whole different level of the stack.

Folks that want/need more control over the environment, ability to manually manage their own machine instances, run code other than python, etc. will stay with EC2. EC2 is a step above RackSpace.

But rather than thinking of AppEngine as a step above EC2, instead I think of it somewhere around Myspace. Or "Ning 1.0", as Zoho points out.

In the beginning was GeoCities... No, even further back, in the beginning was Hypercard. Hypercard was a pre-web application for Macs that let you design a "stack" of pages - a website on a floppy, really. Popular stacks got traded far and wide. Hypercard stacks existed for every imaginable purpose - "Time Table of History", games, crossword puzzles, the Bible, etc.

The thing about Hypercard was that it wasn't just static text and images like base html. It had a scripting language, a database, and the Apple UI built-in, so you could create mini applications.

It feels like the web has been trying to claw its way back to the simple utility of Hypercard ever since Mosaic. GeoCities was the

Cuill is banned on 10,000 sitesApril 9 2008

Be careful while you debug your crawler...

Webmasters these days get very touchy about letting new spiders walk all over their sites. There are so many scraper bots, email harvesters, exploit probers, students running Nutch on gigabit university pipes, and other ill-behaved new search bots that some site owners nervously huddle in forum bunkers anxiously scanning their logs for suspect new vistors, so they can quickly issue bot and ip bans.

Cuill, the search startup from ex-googlers anticipated to launch soon seems to have run a rather high rate crawl when they were getting started that generated a large number of robots.txt bans. Here is a list of sites which have banned Cuill's user-agent "Twiceler".

A well-behaved crawler needs to follow a set of loosely-defined behaviors to be 'polite' - don't crawl a site too fast, don't crawl any single IP address too fast, don't pull too much bandwidth from small sites by e.g. downloading tons of full res media that will never be indexed, meticulously obey robots.txt, identify itself with user-agent string that points to a detailed web page explaining the purpose of the bot, e