Google has a funny view of time

Monty Python fans will particularly appreciate the last one, but I have to say that the skidoo one is pretty darn good, too.

It looked like a nice set of knives, and I was thinking about buying them. But the seller, mr.fareira1980, totally lost me with his rant about all the lazy sellers who steal his photos. This was a listing with a starting bid of $550! Not surprisingly, there weren’t any bids placed.

A note to mr.fareira1980, if you happen to read this, polish up your listings a little bit, please. I don’t care how unjust you think it is that other sellers steal your photos; what I’m interested in is buying some nice Wusthof knives. I’m most definitely not interested in sitting through a rant about how upset you are about what some other sellers are doing.

This conversation occurred during a 2-hour drive on the interstate, so rather than let the question lie, I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the question. It turns out that Craigslist does indeed charge for some postings — they charge for job listings in a handful of cities, and for apartment listings in New York. That’s it.They pay their expenses, and I’m sure they make a nice profit, but surely they could make a lot more than that.

Even if all they did was place a single unobtrusive Google AdSense ad on each page, they would reap a heckuva lot of money. They could make even more with some private paid advertising, affiliate marketing, and charging for more classifieds postings. Craigslist is one of the highest-traffic sites on the entire Internet; they could be raking in the dough.

So why don’t they?

“Users haven’t expressed an interest in seeing ads,” said Jim Buckmaster, according to an article in a NY Times blog post.

When an analyst wanted to know how Craigslist planned to maximize revenues, Buckmaster replied, “That definitely is not part of the equation.”

That’s just weird. Why would you not want to make money?

A couple of days ago, someone searched Google for:
how to sue somebody on trumped up charges

My business blog at tropicalwebworks.org turned up #4 in that search. The person actually clicked through to the page, even though it’s clearly not about suing somebody on trumped-up charges.

The KYPost.com reports, “A Franklin County Circuit judge last week ordered the transfer of the domain names of 141 illegal Internet gambling sites to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in an effort to stop illegal and unregulated online gaming.”

The article quotes Gov. Steve Beshear maundering about the dangers of gambling, saying,“Unlicensed, unregulated, illegal Internet gambling poses a tremendous threat to the citizens of the Commonwealth because of its ease, availability and anonymity,” and “The owners and operators of these illegal sites prey on Kentucky citizens, including our youth, and deprive the Commonwealth of millions of dollars in revenue. It’s an underworld wrought with scams and schemes.”

But further down, we get to the meat of the matter: “Unlicensed Internet gambling significantly undermines and threatens horseracing, Kentucky’s signature industry and a key tourism industry, by creating unregulated and untaxed competition.”

There’s no concern here about the citizens of Kentucky being scammed out of their money, or the dangers to the youth of Kentucky. It’s all about the money — the money that Kentucky scams out of its citizens from the lavishly taxed horseracing industry.

This judge is so overstepping his bounds — he’s not only ordering the seizure of domain names prior to a hearing; he’s ordering the seizure of domain names that aren’t even based in Kentucky. Supposedly, he wants online gaming establishments to block access to their sites by Kentuckians.

Judges who have no clue about the internet should not be permitted to hear cases relating to the internet. There is no reliable way to block access by Kentuckians, and even if there were, I’m sure that the good citizens of Kentucky would have no trouble finding proxy servers they can use to disguise their location. Further, I can’t imagine how this judge thinks Kentucky has any authority over domains belonging to sites that have no nexus in Kentucky.

This ruling is wrongheaded and boneheaded on so many levels. The judge should be tossed out on his ear.

They claim that its index is 3 times the size of Google’s. Great!

They say it focuses on on-page content for relevancy. Great!

I would love to see a good solid competitor for Google. I would love to see a search engine that focuses more on on-page content and less on backlinks.

I ran a few searches on Cuil. The results were nothing to write home about. Some key search terms brought up zero results. Other searches brought up tons of spam. Some searches brought up reasonably relevant results. But the search results were inferior — vastly inferior — compared to Google. Cuil’s index can’t possibly be big as they claim, and it’s obvious the algorithm needs polishing. But that’s okay; I would expect a brand-new search engine to need fine-tuning.

I like the thumbnail image that Cuil displays with each result, too. Well, I would, except that the images seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the search results. What on earth are they doing, showing random, unrelated images as thumbnails next to search results?

But why oh why is Cuil using a scrolling div to display search results? I have my default text size in Firefox set big enough that the entire search result set doesn’t fit on my screen, and the scrolling div means that after I perform a search I then have to click with my mouse inside the scrolling div area before I can scroll.

And, in case it’s not bad enough that Cuil is using the scrolling div, they’re also displaying the search resuls in columns.

Why oh why is Cuil using columns? I have a choice to use two columns or three, but honestly, there’s nothing wrong with a single column. I hate hate hate scrolling down then up then down then up then down then up. A single column doesn’t force all that up-and-down — I can just scroll down through the results until I find what I’m looking for. But two or three colums forces two or three down-and-ups. It gets more annoying each time.

In Google, I have my options set to display 100 results at a time. Cuil doesn’t offer this option. They may in the future — but imagine scrolling down through 33 results, then back up all that way to the top of the second column, then down through another 33 results, then all that way to the top of the third column, then down again. Egads! This is not user friendly.

I wish Cuil the best of luck. Google has far too much power in the world of search. But for now I won’t be using it.

First up: A new regional service provider for an association of professionals. I have nearly a dozen clients whose websites depend on a datafeed, which was provided by the previous service provider for this association. The old datafeed was excellent — clear and concise, comprehensive, and easy to use. The new provider first hemmed and hawed and offered vague responses to direct questions….. Somewhat important questions such as, “Will you still provide us with a datafeed?” If this service provider was not going to provide a datafeed, I would have to rewrite all the programming on my clients’ sites to use a different datafeed from a secondary source, which wasn’t as good as the one we were currently getting, but at least it was something. If the new provider would be providing a datafeed, I needed the schema for it as soon as possible, because the old datafeed was going to cease on a particular date, and any new datafeed would likely require rewriting my programming.

The new provider, though, simply couldn’t seem to tell us if they would be providing a datafeed or not. First the answer was “yes,” then it was “no,” then it was “maybe,” then it was “yes, and it will be compliant with the national standard,” then it was “if you pay us for the custom programming we will.” I was just about at the point where I would have to use the other available datafeed in order to get my clients’ sites updated by the deadline, when this new provider made a datafeed available.

And when I finally got a look at it: Oh boy, does it suck. First of all, and I’m actually very glad of this, the datafeed omits some of the crucial information that my clients need. I couldn’t believe that a large professional service provider such as this one would omit such critical information from the datafeed they provide to their members. Keep in mind, the members, including my clients, provide the data in the first place, and pay the service provider handsomely to maintain it for them. This isn’t some free service where you get what you pay for.

As I said, I was glad they omitted this information, because it allowed me to recommend to my clients that we use the secondary datafeed from a different provider. My clients wouldn’t have understood, or cared, about my other objections to the datafeed, but the missing information they understood and cared about.

And what are my other objections to this new feed? Well, first, it completely ignores the flexibility of relational databases, and has never even been in the same room with the concept of normalization. As an example, for a particular feature, the datafeed has 5 fields for characteristics of that feature. What will happen when 6 characteristics are needed? The datafeed will have to be restructured to add a 6th field, and my database that uses the datafeed will have to be restructured, and the programming code that selects the data and displays it in a web browser would have to be re-written (again) to accommodate the 6th characteristic. And then a 7th characteristic will appear at some point, and I’d have to go through that pointless exercise all over again. The datafeed is structured this way for about 9 different features — and it’s almost certain that these will need to be changed on a regular basis.

It also means that for a feature, say, “surface,” a particular characteristic, say “fuzzy,” might appear in field #10, or field #11, or field #12, or field #13, or field #14…. Well, you probably get the idea. There’s no consistency at all with respect to what goes where in the database. So that if I wanted to search the database for items that have a fuzzy surface, I have to write the code to search multiple different fields. This is both stupid, and highly inefficient.

The previous service provider understood relational databases and had structured their datafeed so that they could add a 6th characteristic, and a 7th, and even an 8th, 9th, and 10th, and it would continue working with my database “as is,” with no re-programming required. It’s not that I’m lazy — when re-programming is required, I do it. But I have better things to do with my time than waste it re-writing code that shouldn’t need to be rewritten, and my clients have better things to do with their money than pay me for that time.

And they did silly things like break up a single 1,200-character text field into 5 separate text fields, breaking up the text between words in a sentence, if needed, to fit them into the shorter text fields. That’s easy enough to handle in my code — I would simply concatenate all 5 fields into 1 in my database query. But it shouldn’t be necessary

The complete lack of normalization, and the moronic handling of the large text field, are indicative of a programmer who doesn’t know jack shit about databases. And that was my biggest concern of all. Even if I were to use the database as provided, what would they do with it down the road? They might decide to remove or add fields without telling anyone, or make other changes that would totally break the sites that depend on the datafeed.

We ended up using the secondary provider’s datafeed. It’s not as good as the previous one we were getting, but it’s infinitely better than the datafeed from the new provider.

Second: eBay, of all people! You would think a company the size of eBay would have highly competent programmers who know what they’re doing.

News flash: They don’t.

I have a number of sites that earn affiliate commissions from eBay’s Partner Network program. I can view reports on my earnings within eBay’s ePN website. I can also download those reports, for importing into a spreadsheet or database.

I want to be able to view and manipulate these reports in different ways than the ePN interface allows, so I’ve been working on a program that will import the downloaded reports into a database and allow me to search, sort, and analyze in a variety of ways. I think it’s a very cool program, and I may develop it further in order to release it publicly.

But the transaction reports that I get from eBay made my shake me head. One day, the report might contain 9 fields, and the next day it might have 11, and on another day it might have 13. I think there are some other possible permutations possible, too, but until I get such a report in my account I won’t know exactly how many fields it will have or in what order.

This makes it much more difficult to import the data into my database. I can’t just “LOAD DATA INFILE,” nor can I simply parse the files and do a standard INSERT query. Instead, I have to parse the files and check for the number of fields, and check to see what headings the fields have, and write several different MySQL queries to use, depending on the results of the parsing.

These are basic tab-delimited files. eBay’s programmers should know enough to just put a zero or a null value, along with the tab, for the fields that aren’t needed for a given report — such that all downloaded reports would have exactly 13 fields, always, and they would all have the same fields, in the same order, always.

I sometimes feel overwhelmed and outclassed on the programming forums where I hang out. There are so many extremely competent, highly skilled programmers who can toss off a complex INNER JOIN of 5 different tables as easily as I can type my name.

These programmers would laugh their asses off if they were to see these datafeeds and reports that I’m dealing with.

At Beer Stuff Here, you’ll find collectible beer cans, supplies for brewing your own beer, beer steins and beer mugs, and more… more beer stuff than you ever imagined existed!

There’s camo stuff in the expected places, of course: camo hunting gear, camo tents and backpacks, and so forth. Nothing surprising there.

But there are camo window blinds and drapes, camo knives and multi-tools, camo dog beds (for hunting dogs, obviously!) — even camo wedding and party supplies.

Anyone interested in buying anything camouflage from eBay would do well to browse through this site. These items can be awfully hard to find in eBay — it took a lot of custom-crafted search queries to bring in all the camo stuff.

This kind of site is a lot of work, but I’m pleased with the result.