oogle results page (SERP‘s) have been unstable recently. This may have affected anyone using Google. It caused a great deal of distress to many Webmasters while others observed a significant, unexplainable surge in traffic. Unlike the many rumours, an article from WWW Coder draws a clearer picture:

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

It is re-assuring to know that the folks at Google keep maintaining and improving their highly-ubiquitous search tool.

Firefox and Thunderbird do not integrate well under Linux. In order to associate the mailto protocol with Thunderbird, follow the steps below:

• Download this small shell script and put it somewhere sensible in your hard-drive
• Change line 3 to include the path of your thunderbird directory where it was initially installed, e.g.:
  export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="$HOME/Main/Programs/thunderbird"
• Open Firefox and enter the page about:config
• Add a new string; name it “”network.protocol-handler.app.mailto” and set its value to the full path of your new script, e.g. ~/scripts/tbmail.sh

Google are making significant changes to their ranking system. The changes have recently been entitled the Bourbon Update and a Google employee spread (leaked) the following information:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well. So my “weather report” would be a recommendation that rankings may still change somewhat over the next several days.

Considering the date of this message, the search engine’s behaviour should have stabilised by now.

Google search sometimes requires the ‘scanning’ of many entries. There is no need to step page by page looking at just 10 results at a time. The following will display 100, which is the maximum number:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Your_Search_Term_Here&num=100

To get a more concise view containing just the page titles:

http://www.google.com/ie?q=Your_Search_Term_Here&num=100

It truly is a powerful option.

his entry does not concern spam, but rather the management of mail which belongs to a different ‘classes’, e.g. academia, work and play. It is a simple efficiency tip.

Experience has taught acquainted folks and I the value of possessing several E-mail addresses (7 in my case), which can be checked at different intervals (varying from minutes to days or weeks). Different accounts are designated for mailing lists, subscriptions, people and so forth. This reduces the number of disturbances since there is always a choice as to which account/s to check.

Broader E-mail messages often have labels such as [Linux-Group] which ease the process of flitering. Several mailing lists can reside on the same E-mail account; by defining rules for re-direction to boxes, all messages wind up in the right place automatically.

click image to view in full size

Above is an example from Horde. Messages initially appear in Inbox and only new ones get listed. Once read, a single click on the filter icon will archive them in the right box. Messages marked as spam will wind up in Trash. With this strategy, one can read the subject of — and archive dozens of messages in just a few seconds. Personal messages go to separate accounts which can be checked every 1 minute using POP.

Have you ever carefully thought about your Google cookie? It can perpetually keep information about:

• Your address/es
• When you are logged on if you Google frequently enough
• What you search the Web for
• Which sites you enter (from SERP‘s)

That is an excess of information, so where has privacy gone? I used to block the Google Cookie, but it resulted in inconveniences when using AdSense. The blocking was matter of principle; there was nothing particular to disguise.

Google co-founder was once asked about the information bound to each cookie identifier. The answer is still unknown. Microsoft are doing something evil by sharing the information listed above across their empire (see related item).

eer-to-peer (P2P) and the World Wide Web (which we most commonly perceive as hypertext — HTTP) are separate. When one uses an Internet connection to directly communicate with a remote machine, then traffic is uncensored, often not monitored, and there are no restrictions imposed on the exchanged material. This justifies the potential illegality of P2P networking.

There are less controversial ways of obtaining media. When it resides on the World Wide Web and hosted by a trusted source, it is then subjected to copyright laws. For this particular reason, it is safer to download MP3 files from trusted Web sites, many of which distribute music for free in interests of self-promotion. Downloads are also far faster because data is delivered by a Web server. An older item explains how to automatically (READ: recursively) download music from the Web.

I have just discovered an inexhaustible source of music, which is also delivered as an RSS feed. That source is the MP3Blogs Aggregator. You must read this entry on the subject in order for everything to make sense. The gist: infinite amount of freely-distributed music reaching your hard-drive on a daily basis.