Comments on: Unanticipated Google Hacks

By: Paul Asad

Paul Asad — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 21:33:10 +0000

Hi, you might want to read my post http://truckandbarter.com/mt/archives/000287.html on Google and Known unknowns; my favourite search tool is Copernic http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/ -Paul

By: Russkie

Russkie — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:12:21 +0000

Sort of off-topic: Gmail has a really smart feature – which is that it rewrites URLs contained in email hyperlinks when they don’t match the URL contained in the email text. If Microsoft would put this feature into Outlook it would protect all the naive users getting sucked into phishing scams.

By: Shai

Shai — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:52:32 +0000

It would be nice if they supported PDF; and non local drives without tricking the program. The only feature stopping me from switching to the MSN desktop search is the caching of previously browsed web pages.

By: novalis

novalis — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 17:56:47 +0000

justin: Search for “box model” on Google. One of the first ten hits will be the W3C standard’s description of the box model. The other nine will mention (in one case, at a one-link remove) bugs in Internet Explorer’s implementation of it. The box model is how web pages are layed out. It is fortunate that Internet Explorer has other bugs which allowed the broken box model to be worked around. I think it’s now fixed (after 3 years of brokenness, plus another year of market penetration time to get to 50%), The only good thing you can say about Microsoft’s dominance was that it led to the freeing of Netscape, which led to the absolutely wonderful Firefox. But if the best thing you can say about proprietary software is that it inspires Free software, why not just do Free software in the first place?

By: John Kozak

John Kozak — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 13:26:50 +0000

IE’s dominance has been terrible for the web – the standards it imposed were subtly broken variants of the real ones. Good for MS, crap for everyone else.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:52:52 +0000

About google search, it clashes with Opera. The pages stop loading at one third and various other oddities. So beware. Opera which is, incidentally, the One True Browser, and by a margin, if you’re into multi tabbing and mouse gestures.

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:47:21 +0000

anon: I didn’t say that microsoft was good a search let alone better than google… but they don’t have to be. If its in the OS then more people are going to use it…. and i’m confident that they will figure out search before the offical release of the next generation windows. Everyone said microsoft couldn’t do the internet but they did produce IE, which despite all its flaws was the superior browser for many years (until firefox). And you can argue that microsoft achived this dominance through using unfair business practices… but the reality is that dominance of IE has been good for the web in that it created common standards for developers.

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:11:18 +0000

It caches deleted emails too which can be handy occasionally.

By: Duane

Duane — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:16:44 +0000

Andrew, as a coder you should really be using version control. Actually the same may apply to some of the rest of you, too. Although you only get the full benefits when your documents are stored in a text-based format, so it is maybe not so useful for Word users. Personally, I couldn't work without a version control system, even when I'm just playing around with toy code on my own. It is so much easier to keep track of what you're doing, especially if you leave something for a while and then come back to it. It also allows you to make radical, wide-reaching changes without worrying you're not going to be able to revert back if something goes wrong. At home and at work I use Subversion, which I can strongly recommend. The windows installer should install it with zero-effort, and the wonderful Tortoise client integrates seemlessly with your explorer, so you can do everything by just pointing and clicking. I think you may need to use the command-line once to setup your repository, but that is as simple as doing a "svnadmin create Repository" in the directory you want it. It also has excellent documentation.

By: anon

anon — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:38:29 +0000

justin: Microsoft has shown with the recent MSN Beta that they have no clue how to do search. And can you blame Google for wanting to hurt Microsoft? Not only are they a commercial rival, they’ve done immeasurable harm to the computing industry as a whole.

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 07:27:25 +0000

yeah but google desktop achives this nifty trick by comprimising security and privacy. by the time the next version of windows comes out there will be search built in and that will kill desktop search. personally I think google desktop search is just a way for google to stick their middle finger up at microsoft… afterall they could have worked within the windows security framework and thus around many of the privacy holes, and they chose not to.

By: Mill

Mill — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 07:10:47 +0000

According to Google, they are profitable. http://www.google.com/corporate/facts.html Special Google solutions for corporate clients plus a middleman cut from GoogleAds, I guess.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 07:07:36 +0000

They are making money already – off advertising.

By: Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 05:26:32 +0000

I don’t have a big enough hard drive to support a huge cache like that, but I have taken advantage of Gmail’s practically limitless capacity in order to send a version of papers in progress to myself after each days’ work. Since my academic career is still in its infancy, I could easily store my complete oeuvre on Google’s dime. Has anyone figured out how Google’s ever going to make money? Or is the investing community just taking a massive hit for the sake of the common good?

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 04:04:11 +0000

Yep, I discovered this recently too – bloody marvellous.