HERE appears to be some exciting development over at the Google Page Rank Comparison Tool. Earlier today I noticed the addition of several new features, which allow users to evaluate and compare different sites returned for a Google query.

If you are highly competitive when it comes to domination of popular Google searches (frequently the case in eCommerce), have a quick go and use the tool. Enter the SERP (search engine results page) that you aim for and see details of your competing URL‘s, even side-by-side view. For each URL, you can now see:

• PageRank of target page
• PageRank of domain’s front page
• Number of IBL‘s, also known as BackLinks
• Ditto for domain’s front page
• Google Saturation (total # of pages indexed)
• MSN Rank

The script is doing a lot of ‘leg work’, making it a valuable tool to run in the background (tab or separate window). It can take up to 2 minutes to complete a most comprehensive query which investigates the top 50 (maximum) entries for a given SERP.

Related items: PageRank Prediction and SEO Tools

The number of sites with PageRank 10 is tiny when compared to the number of sites with PageRank 0. Conversely, traffic is largely centralised in sites with a high PR (more details)

The command-line is the front line

OT many Linux hosts permit SSH access to one’s own Webspace. There are concerns that the extra freedom and flexibility of the *NIX shell might lead to servers going down. If servers are shared, the problem is somewhat magnified and the threat is just not worth it.

There are, however, workarounds if you use cPanel as I revealed hack. I have also recently been told about PHP Console by its author. That shell can be installed on your Webspace and allow you to do what you otherwise could not.

It is neither the time nor the place to post promotional links, but I am very satisfied with my host that helped me combat the recent zombie attack on 2 of my sites. The attacks have now ended fully and I removed all my defences, namely filtering through re-directions. If you experienced some locational oddities recently, this must have been the cause.

Several networks have covered this story including CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — Evidently “Star Trek” actor James “Scotty” Doohan took the catchphrase “beam me up” very seriously — his cremated remains will be launched into space in accord with his last wishes.

Related item: Internet Teleport

The post is addressed to readers who are not using a PDA yet. I would like to briefly describe the advantages of life management that is assisted by pocket-sized computing.

The acquisition of a first PDA, may it be a Palm, a Pocket PC or a Zaurus (there are many more), involves transformation of long-standing habits. It is an evolving process — an adaptation if you like — of what you have become accustomed to since childhood. Tasks are being managed and flagged by a machines rather than the brain. Then again, many of us use notes to manage and organise our lives, so the transition may be primarily a ‘digitisation’ of existing information management.

The key idea of using a PDA properly is this: program your tasks as you see fit, then obey in accordance with reminders from the PDA. It is as if the PDA commands its user what to do and when, relying on and benefiting from cyclic events and ensuring that nothing is ever forgotten or becomes a mental burden. The mind is left available to think and expand its horizons rather than record information. Let us face it, machines do a better job at registering without ever ‘forgetting’. It has been their very basic nature, since the early days of computers.

All your knowledge (and far more) in less than 1 gram

I can think of many advantages of using a PDA when compared with paper-based ‘life organisation’:

• Automatic archival
• Easy search
• Easier re-use of data
• Natural hierarchical abilities (not linear lists)
• Less clutter (e.g. no crossed-out items)
• Cyclic behaviour simplified, e.g. annual birthday notifications
• Vocal reminders/alarms
• Simple backups and duplication to prevent data loss
• Collaborative exchange of data, e.g. Wi-Fi, synchronisation, IR port

I could think of a few more, but these should be enough to convince you why the popular Hipster PDA (famous paper-based equivalent) can never be matched. It better fits technology paranoids.

Refuse to explore and stay a monkey forever

oogle algorithms are very complex at present. The very core of these remains PageRank — a mechanism that often gets misused and leads to disasters (referrer spam among other link spamming techniques). For my recent zombie attacks I blame:

• Google – for unintentionally leading to ‘link greed’, not understanding or anticipating streetsmarts and penetration of second- and third-world countries into the Internet
• ISP‘s – for apathetically harbouring traffic that is pure spam or targetted attacks
• Microsoft – for creating an operating system that is so easy for crooks to capture

Google’s algorithms have become like a horse that has lots of decorations upon it, but is nothing more than a brute-force horse underneath. You can take a pig, put it in a dress and take it out for dinner. But it’s still a pig in dress, not a girlfriend.

Search must Evolve. A flawed or limited principle at the heart of something is bound to fail no matter how many bits you hang atop to patch it up and improve it. This is why traditional page indexing is not a good method for approaching the problem of information extraction and discovery. Microsoft’s operating system, for instance, suffers from the very same problem where a flawed and too complex an operating system was build from ‘code spaghetti’. It was recently heard through the grapevine that Longhorn was thrown away and reverted merely to ground zero to be based on the XP-related Server 2003 code. This comes to show that weekly updates were merely patching a mordid mess. Microsoft recognise their inability to complete with Linux performance (uptime, flexibility — the a reason for Monad). Linux just took a right approach — a right paradigm if you like — all along and was therefore able to sweep along all the best programmers in the world.

Returning to Google, by relying heavily on PageRank and making ad-hoc improvements, no real innovation will be made. This is why I intimated Iuron a few days ago. It ought to turn a large pool of indexed page into actual knowledge and provide definitely answers rather than a linear scatter of related pages.

Also comes to mind are AltaVista and other antiquated search engines with very fundamental and not-so-cunning methods for scanning pages. These were very quickly relaced by backlink-based engines, i.e. link counting in 1998. No progress has been made in nearly 8 years, however. One may begin to conceive a Google killer rather than a Windows killer. The required resources, however, in particular data centres, make the (financial) entry barrier too high to initiate a substantial enough threat. Proprietaries, however, are no concrete barrier, in contrary to the case with operating systems. So, I remain optimistic and I might soon meet some professors whose expertise is the semantic Web.

With reference to the famous 3-monkey image on top (I also have one on top of my monitor), those who refuse to evolve (Ballmer) show ‘zoo symptoms’ already. I vividly recall the day when Scoble quoted Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, saying that RSS has no future. This was roughly 7 months ago. Ballmer also said that Google would vanish in 5 years and promised that MSN search was bound to ‘kill’ Google. I say: live in the past, be the past.

Moving on to a different topic, the latest article with the theme of aging at Microsoft came out on the day when I first composed this item: Pity poor Microsoft’s midlife crisis. Another recent article I have just been informed of is At 30, Microsoft Grapples With Growing Up.

Recommended reading:

• Insightful Microsoft Hatred FAQ – snippet below

Q: What about all the people in the corporate environments who are forced to use MS products and aren’t allowed the option/choice to use Mac/Linux/UNIX?

A: Kick your boss’s ass, or, choose to work for a company who have decisions that you liked.

s some of you may have read, my site came under a large-scale denial-of-service (DoS) attack some while ago. It managed to endure it, but I was used as a ‘human filter’, getting sporadic exercise, sleep and food for a couple of days. Below I present the aftermath in my logs, which leaves lessons to be learned.

Click image to see it full-sized

As you can see, the motives of the attacker may have been high Google listings through referrer spam. However, as my site was requested for around 50 GB of dynamically-generated pages in just 1 day, there might be more to it. I suspect that the hundreds of hijacked Windows boxes were programmed to primarily wreak havoc; they were targetting my heaviest pages specifically.

A long time ago I mentioned top software design/usability bugs. It occurred to me yesterday that there is yet another common deficiency, which is the inability to undo selection and deselection of files, entries and the like. This should become a very fundamental functionality in my opinion.

How many times in the past did you use the CTRL or SHIFT keys to establish and highlight a collection of files? One wrong click and the entire selection is gone, leading to a habit whereby files are handled in subsets, i.e. in smaller batches. In all operating systems I have come across, a selection of files, for example, forms a newline-separated list of the files with their full path. All of this is stored in the clipboard, so implementation of an undo stack should be trivial and incur no efficiency penalty.