The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Where do you search for information? If you are like me, for the past 2-3 years I have turned to Google for my daily fix of searching. My home page is set to the Google Advanced Search and 100 results per page. If you are a regular searcher for the same set of information, you may have noticed that the quality of results has declined. Pages you might have seen on the first page have disappeared or moved back a few pages. Google is still the leading search engine but there are other engines that you should examine.
Beta MSN
Microsoft has been working on its own search engine for a while. It is believed to be the engine presently at http://beta.msn.com but may have moved to http://www.msn.com by the time you read this. What do you think?
recall.archive.org
You must bookmark http://www.archive.org, otherwise known as the Wayback Machine or The Internet Archive. It stores a copy of your site at different times in its history. If you want to see how Melb PC's site looked in 1997 - or any site, chances are that it has been snap-frozen at archive.org. It does not copy the entire site, and in many cases may not copy images, so it is definitely not a backup. Now it has a handy search engine at http://recall.archive.org.
Social Networking
Yet another social networking experiment was launched by a Google employee named Orkut Buyukkokten, who named it after himself. See http://www.orkut.com. Google employees can use up to 20% of their paid time to build personal projects and some of these are absorbed into the main Google portfolio if they are popular, e.g. Google News. Owing to Google's endorsement, such sites have a better chance of commercial success than others.
Orkut is similar to sites such as Friendster, LinkedIn, or Ryze where you can make contact with your instant "friends". There is a lot of controversy (about privacy) and cynicism about these sites and Orkut has its share of critics. It had to shut down briefly because people discovered how to send a message to everybody on the system, so that loophole has been plugged.
I am sceptical about these systems but I try them. I have made several business contacts through them (I hang out mainly in business forums) and acquired one client whom I "met" virtually. One novelty about Orkut, at least for now, is that you and I can create a new forum of our own. Other networks offer very few features unless you pay to become a "full" member - Orkut is free. I don't release any information about myself that isn't already on the Net, so I recommend that you don't. There is no need to supply your full date of birth, ethnicity, religion, etc even though some systems have fields for that information. Some of these sites are also used for dating, so there is some relevance there.
Google and Plagiarism
Last month I mentioned that someone had copied my article and placed his AdSense code next to it. He subsequently confessed to me with a lame excuse that he was merely testing how high the page would rank. Unfortunately for me, Google refuses to say whether it will reimburse me for those clicks in spite of his admission. It will respond to a subpoena should I wish to take the plagiarist to court. Yeah, right, as they say on TV.
I suspect that the amount concerned is not more than $10-$20, so litigation is out of the question. Now if I were to click any AdSense ads on my site, Google would not only expel me from AdSense, but withhold any unpaid monies owed to me. You read about this happening almost daily. I was really testing whether Google would bother to protect an author's rights when they had a written confession from the plagiarist whose account is intact.
Leaving Melbourne?
One of my Committee portfolios is Membership. Did you know that if you recruit a new member, your membership is extended by one month? Sometimes our members move to another state. If you are in this situation and have a Melb PC Internet service subscription, then you'll be pleased to know that you can access the service from any part of Australia as a local call. So there is no need to find an ISP in your new city - we have already been judged the best in the country.
Networking
If several family members use the Internet in your household and you don't want to share one PC, the answer is to set up a home network. Simply put, it is a wired connection between all the PCs and the cable modem - you don't want to share an analogue modem, as it is slow enough for one user. This issue has more than enough information to satisfy your curiosity.
Reprinted from the March 2004 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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