At 11:47 AM 3/29/04 -0500, you wrote: Have you used them lately??? This morning I tried to search for a driver for the ethernet card that is built into my Dell GX110 computer. I searched for "dell gx110 ethernet driver download" instead all I get are ads such as "Buy pcmcia to pci WindWire Wireless". Do you see anything in the search string about "buy" or "pci" or "pcmcia" or "wireless"? That wasn't the only result like that, they were ALL ads for soemthing totally unrelated to what I wanted. I went through 6 or seven pages or results and didn't find anything close to what I was looking for. Joe

At 06:18 PM 3/29/04 +0100, w. wrote: It looks promising. I tried it with the same search and the very FIRST item that it diplayed was what I was looking for. Thanks. Joe

Actually, that's less offensive to me (at least the "out of stock" part of the issue--how would Google know?) than the sites that seem to make a business out of indexing eBay auctions, so when you click on the Google listing expecting to find a retailer, you get blasted to a site that then forwards you into eBay for a used/garbage item, or worse, a bunch of irrelevant items. :-/ But then, if you're looking for a retailer, have you tried Froogle? This is driven by feeds from the listing merchants, and my sense is that it's a good bit more current than the generic index for stock level and availability. --Patrick

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:29:58 -0800 (PST) steve <gkicomputers(a)yahoo.com> wrote: The nightmare I have experienced recently is trying to get any information on older Laptops. I.e. I have taken a liking for Toshiba 2100 series 486 laptops. If you try to search Google for anything relating to them, i.e. to find out what speed processor they have in them, what video chip they use, you're deluged with Laptop Battery ads for batteries priced at 2-5 times what you paid for the laptop.

Quothe steve, from writings of Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 06:25:25AM -0800: It seems as though Google has changed so that an annoying amount of unwanted, and typically irrelevant, commercial web site listings are displayed first, as though they have first preference. Before that change, Google was a much better search engine for performing any type of research. -- Copyright (C) 2003 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved | My VAX | an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & www.rddavis.org | runs VMS & | her other creatures, using dogma to justify such 410-744-4900 | doesn't crash!| beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Joe> At 11:47 AM 3/29/04 -0500, you wrote: >> >> Joe> Does anyone know of a good internet search engine? I've been Joe> using Google but they have gotten LOUSY in the last couple of Joe> months since they've decided to sell the "right" to companies to Joe> be first in their search results. It's gotten so bad that I can Joe> no longer find anything with their searchs except ads for Joe> totally unrelated items. Joe> Have you used them lately??? This morning I tried to search for Joe> a driver for the ethernet card that is built into my Dell GX110 Joe> computer. I searched for "dell gx110 ethernet driver download" Joe> instead all I get are ads such as "Buy pcmcia to pci WindWire Joe> Wireless". Do you see anything in the search string about "buy" Joe> or "pci" or "pcmcia" or "wireless"? That wasn't the only result Joe> like that, they were ALL ads for soemthing totally unrelated to Joe> what I wanted. I went through 6 or seven pages or results and Joe> didn't find anything close to what I was looking for. You must be using a different Google.com than I am... :-) I just tried that exact string. I get a page that reports 129 hits, and the very first one is a Dell software download page. Not the right one, I think -- but it does seem to have all the words on it. I don't see any windwire ads. I do see three "sponsored links" on the right side of the page, which is something I ignore 99.9% of the time. Remember that a query of the form you used finds pages that contain the words you mentioned, anywhere in the page. That explains why the first hit is a download but not for the gx110 driver. The query that seems to work is simply: "gx110 driver" download paul

FWIW I have fairly few problems. I never put in common search words, only unique identifiers. Start with fully quoted strings E.G. "Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic", then back down to concatenateds, +Heuristically+Programmed+Algorithmic, or possibly just +Heuristically+Algorithmic then move to more common terms, like HAL 9000, which is what I suspect everybody does anyway. Having trouble finding out about a DEC LPS-11, however. (There simply may be too few sites having it) New topic... John A.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/pdf/dec/pdp11/PDP11_1976PeripheralsHbk.pdf Page 389 ("4-360") has the LPS11 section. paul

John> Does sound great, I've been trying to access that for over 24 John> hours. Al says there's too much traffic right now, like John> there's a rush on his site for some reason. I just tried it, it works for me. Perhaps a problem at your end? paul

I'm normally loath to post ebay links, but: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/ eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4120552110&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:UK:1 DEC T11 Development Boards - working, with chips and boards and manuals and prints, and the original PSU... 5 days left, it's on ?5 at the moment. If anyone in the US wants it i'll act as a re-mailer for you ;) alex/melt

Glen> <rant> Glen> Shortly after that I took out a Google AdWords ad -- these are Glen> the pay-per-click ads which Google displays on the right side Glen> of the screen. I ran the ad campaign for several weeks and got Glen> a lot of clicks (which I had to pay for) ... There was an item in the news a few days ago about a guy who was arrested on charges of blackmailing Google. He supposedly created a robot that would click on the ads that Google had placed on various websites, thus causing Google to be billed for those clicks. He offered to stop doing that if paid a suitable sum. It may be that you were the victim of something similar, perhaps vandals rather than blackmailers but using the same mechanisms. paul

Joe, by the way, do those listings have a colored background, or are they on a white background? The listings at top with the colored background ARE sponsored placements. I ignore these most of the time when I'm not specifically looking for a retailer or supplier. --Patrick

At 10:05 AM 3/29/04 -0800, you wrote: They're the main listings on the white backgroung. I ignore the others completely. FWIW I just did some searchng for info on a CD to Dc converter made by Integrated Circuits Incorported. I searched for "integrated circuits incorporated" and it was in the first link that Dogpile found. The same link was buried in the Google results. Joe

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 19:00, Patrick wrote: For the most part it does a good job, but it does seem to have become far less reliable at ranking pages over the last year than it used to be. Google can't do case sensitive searches, as far as I can tell, which annoys the hell out of me. Sometimes I've needed to search for something that's an acronym, which just happens to be a legal word too. There's no way that I know of filtering out the junk and just searching for the acronym in capitals. Similarly, Google trying to be "helpful" can be a real pain, when it goes and tries to be clever about finding results (returning not only matches to what you searched for, but other things it considers close). "Stemming" they seem to call it. Trouble is there seems to be no way of turning it off... A search engine that just returns what you ask for from the web would be nice - no indexing of news, mailing lists etc, no ads, and no trying to be intelligent by stripping out words, modifying words, randomly inserting or removing punctuation etc. cheers Jules

I once had occasion to search for some NeXT stuff and ran into exactly this. I sent them mail about it. Got a boilerplate ack but nothing more. (Not an autoack; it looked human-sent, but reeked of boilerplate.) I spent quite some time struggling with their "sponsored links" when I was looking for a music typesetting engine called "smut". They appear to believe that it's beneficial to throw up sponsored links even when the search specifically indicates that it does not want those links. I wrote to them about this too. Their response? Not to fix it so that they don't return pages including terms the search specifically indicates are to be excluded - but rather to add "typesetting" to a list of words that (I infer) turn off "spam your results with pr0n ads" when searching for things like "smut" that I infer are commonly searched for by people going cruising for pr0n. Made it _very_ clear to me that they aren't there to help people doing searches (which I imagine is what a lot of people think); such people are no more than eyeballs being sold to advertisers. Obvious in retrospect.... Yeah. Problem is, where do you find the philanthropist to fund the petabytes of disk necessary and the farm of machines to search it? Google pays for that with advertiser's dollars. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B