work seems to be keeping me rather busy
Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)
however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )
I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.
I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding . Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about . I’ve replied suggesting but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).
Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to , Virtual Earth .
So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating and . Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..
I really don’t use Facebook for anything more than filling 5 minutes of boredom. I can find no PRACTICAL value for it…