OOGLE’S Search Quality Team pushes on with an initiative to remove pages which contain hidden text, JavaScript re-directs and the like. The main intention is to penalise sites that use questionable, if not black-hat, SEO techniques. It is rather encouraging to know that much effort is being put into refinement of search results — an effort considerable enough to justify formation of an entirely independent team.

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.”

There has been a fair bit of fuss about Microsoft’s use of Open Source software. In the past few days, I have come across numerous articles describing how Windows relied on some BSD network components in the early nineties. Above all, the incorporation of Open Source software for Message Passing Interface (MPI) in their server software makes many among the Open Source community bitter.

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft Corp. has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products.

Related item: Software Communists – referring to software patents

Photo from around 1984

ORDS have leaked to my ear that I may have won this year’s rowing competition at the Midland Hotel health club. There is no official announcement yet, but I am rather excited to have heard it. I will definitely take a shot of the prize after the official ceremoney is held.

Having worked out consistently for 10 years, I am now managing to win a pleasant reward almost every year, which I am ecstatic about.

That’ll keep everyone away for a few hours

O anyone who wonders why I have not posted in 24 hours or so, I am working on a new Mandrake Linux machine at home (photo). The work primarily involves setup, customisation and data migration. The nature of my ‘disappearance’ is symbolised by the amusing picture above.

I have been settings everything up so that I can seamlessly work from all locations, including a Ubuntu machine (photo) at work and the SuSE machine (photo #1, photo #2)¹ at the University. In this state of affairs, I can handle data quite uniformly, keeping files and settings in a single place. I also need to work on installing some peripherals like scanner, digital camera and a Palm handheld. Linux on the desktop has made so much progress recently. Installation is, quite frankly, easier than that of Windows, assuming no prior experience with Windows. It is no wonder that Dell is beginning to ship pre-installed Linux machines, much as I predicted a several days ago and also mentioned briefly some months ago.

¹ I’d post pictures of my children when I am old enough to have a family. In the mean time, may computers be equivalent to kids ? I’ll take the risk making that perverse ,very sarcastic statement!

ULTIPLE sources I have come across are citing the same article from Reuters (first John Dvorak, now Slashdot). The facts are truly unbelievable. If it had not come from Reuters, I would not have quoted it. Judge for yourself:

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

…

“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,” Barton said.

“Googlebombing” is the term used to describe a situation where inappropriate SERP‘s get returned due to intentional (hence unnatural) intervention with the Google algorithms. Anchor text of links (text in the vicinity of a hyperlink) gets heavily used for classification of pages and this observation can lead to overt misuse.

I can recall that in the past, due to large amount of poker-related spam, bloggers decided to link en masse to the Wikipedia page on poker, which in turn made it a prime search engine result for the term “poker”. Therein, poker and gambling were discouraged as well as the practices they use to promote themselves, destroying cyberspace in the process.

More recently, there has been a lot of talk about binding between the term “failure” and the White House, in particular George Bush’s official page. The voices of witnesses have grown loud enough to justify a post in the Google Blog.

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns…

My vague recollection tells me that several years ago, Google humour got involved when searching for the term “weapons of mass destruction”.

This afternoon, as I was watching over the front desk at work, I had no alterrnative but to use an operating system called Microsoft Windows. It did not have a good browser installed. I once installed Firefox on it, yet somebody insisted on removing that ‘spyware’. In that browser that ended up using, my site looked corrupted at times. There were no tabs either and when opening a context menu over a link, I lacked the ability to use key bindings, which would open a link in a new window. The experience was a very frustrating one. I felt imprisoned for that long time period, namely half an hour.

Most annoyingly, at the top of my Web log, I noticed Google AdSense advertisements, which usually get blocked in my Firefox installations owing to some nifty CSS. The advert I got served in my own site occupied two AdSense slots that clearly stated:

Linux versus Windows

Windows performs better than Linux according to independent studies

Guess where the link pointed? It pointed to Microsoft’s Get the Facts Campaign. I took no screenshot as the process is rather laborious under windows: print screen, paste in paint.exe, crop, then save.

Let me clarify a few facts:

• AdSense is Google
• Google is competing with Microsoft whether they admit that or not
• Google uses Linux only and runs Linux servers
• AdSense should preferably be kind to my visitors, not drive them away
• AdSense should reflect on site content, not oppose it
• Visitors seek the truth. Look again at the link above

Now, why would Google have my site point to that garbage? Can it not sense the Microsoft bashing that is contained heavily in a decent proportion of the pages? Are they trying to make me, as their client, promote false propaganda that feeds the same lies which I strongly oppose and detest? If Microsoft are allowed to infiltrate, by the means of money (verging the notion of “bribery”), a site like mine, then how can their deceitful campaign ever reach an end? Linux bashing on my own turf?

My writings are rather blunt and honest. I feel rather disappointed and filled with mixed feelings about AdSense, which can be outrageous at times, although not voluntarily so.