Always Get Better

Jumped on the bandwagon and tried out Cuil today.  The verdict - more development time needed.

1. Result counts are wrong
I searched for the (rare) name of a friend and found 3 results.  The search engine counter said 4 results were found.

2. Duplicate content
I searched for the bizarre phrase ‘fell in outhouse’.  The first 3 pages were nearly identical results.  For a time I wasn’t certain I was really changing pages.

3. Named after a Salmon
Apparantly ‘Cuil’ is a gaelic word referring to knowledge and hazel - they talk about a salmon of wisdom.  I’m not sure how that sits with me…

I chalk up the high server load and weird results to the infancy of the product and expect that it will improve over time.  The column interface is sleek and attractive.  The results clustering appears to be advanced although similar to WebFountain.

Right now, though, I don’t understand why Cuil is being touted as the next generation search engine that will replace Google.  The press coverage and their own site confuse me as to whether the big deal is the size of the search catalogue (apparently 3x that of Google) or the fact that the company’s leaders are made up of former Google employees.

Time will tell, but as of launch today I don’t see Cuil becoming my default search provider any time soon.

As confident as we may be that we’re the only ones using our computers, the truth is we can’t ever be completely safe. For my own part, I was smug in the knowledge that because I ran an up-to-date antivirus program, didn’t hang around the web’s so-called “red light districts”, and didn’t download software I was unsure of, I had nothing to fear from those nasty virus things.

Wrong.

Just Being Careful Won’t Protect Your Computer From Attack

When NIMDA hit, I really felt violated. Even though I did nothing to cause my computer’s fall from glory, there it was. Where once I had the illusion of control over my space, all of a sudden it was shattered. It’s a brave new world.

Unless giving up the Internet is an acceptable alternative, we have to live with the risk of having our computers compromised at any moment. Apparently there are legions of “zombie networks” just waiting to be activated and used for evil – computers with hidden software controlled by enterprising criminals interested in nothing but a quick dollar.

Maybe it’s because I’m naive. Maybe it’s because I get paid by the hour so long virus-cleansing sessions don’t cut into my dinner plate. But I have to ask – how much of a problem is this? If my regular actions aren’t putting me at (extra) risk, what benefit will worrying bring?

Never Visit a Trojan Page Again

Fortunately Google exists to protect us from evil-doers by scanning the web for so-called “badware”. When performing Google searches and attempting to access one of these “bad” sites, Google presents us with a warning and gives us the option to bail or continue with the site.

Thank goodness for that! Let’s all uninstall our antivirus software now.

Search is one of the most basic features visitors expect when they come to a web site. This is especially true in e-commerce where your ability to make a sale is directly related to your customer’s ability to find the product they’re looking for.

Using Third-Party Solutions

Many first-time site owner choose to go with Google Custom Search because of its easy setup and because of Google’s incredible indexing reach and results. I don’t like the standard edition of the Custom Search because of the branding – your search results advertise Google and provide links to competing content. For an e-commerce site to lose control of such a critical function, the results can be costly.

Don’t Give Up Control

Especially in e-commerce, it is best to never give up control over any content. Advanced users may choose to ignore your site’s search tool and use Google to get at your content anyway (via the site: directive) but in the general case there is great potential to keep selling useful products to your potential customers even while they search your site for other items.

Incorporating a decent search tool into a web site using PHP is dead simple. All it involves is a database table with 3 or more rows and a little bit of an eye for layout. Even if you don’t consider yourself a designer, having a look around other search engines will give you a feel for how results should display.

Creating the Search Tables

Let’s get started. Our simplistic database table (PRODUCTS) will consist of the following columns:

Obviously this is just a simplified example, but the product ID, name, description and photo should be enough for the purposes of our demonstration.

The SQL to create the table looks like this:

Add the Full-Text Index

In this example, we’re interested in searching the name and description fields of our products. In order to add the full-text index to our table, we use the ALTER TABLE command:

Alternatively, we could have created the index along with the table in our original CREATE statement like this:

Searching For Text

Now that the index has been created, we can go ahead and search the database. To activate full-text search, we use the MATCH () AGAINST () syntax like this:

That’s all there is to it! Anyone with access to a mySQL database should be able to incorporate search into their sites without too much difficulty. Of course this is a very basic introduction, but should be more the sufficient to get going with.

Because the program code I’ll be posting on this blog is hard to read when in the form of long colourless unformatted lines, I’ve looked around at various plugins to help make my work more readable.

Wordpress suggests using a port of the syntaxhighlighter Google Code proejct by Alex Gorbatchev (http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/how-do-i-post-source-code/) but I found this plug-in to be too robust.

For my purposes, I plan to demonstrate HTML, C#, C++ and some Java, so my goal was to have a very scaled-back method of posting code.

A Google search brought me to Sean Deasy’s blog (http://www.seandeasy.com/code-syntax-highlighting-in-wordpress/) which pushed me in the right direction.

The WP-dp.SyntaxHighlighter:source code syntax highlighting plugin supports a good breadth of languages and has a minimalistic look - perfect for my needs. It can be found at:
http://blog.rubypdf.com/2006/09/28/wp-dpsyntaxhighlightersource-code-syntax-highlighting-plugin/

I recommend this plugin to anyone who, like me, needs a decent syntax highlighter without a lot of the bells and whistles found in other packages.

[Edit: The plugin file for this tool has 2 lines of whitespace at the end, after the "?>". If you install this tool, you will want to remove these extra characters (you can do this from right inside Wordpress' editor page after uploading the file to your server).]

[Edit2-Feb8, 2008: I had problems getting the originally suggested Highlighter working the way I wanted. I eventually settled on this one from OpenSourceBrain: http://erik.range-it.de/wordpress/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/ ... it's the same idea but implemented much more cleanly]

I noticed lately that I’ve been having issues accessing my GMail account.  These issues have come and gone in the past but in the last several days it’s turned into an occurrence every time I log into my account.

For anyone else sharing in this problem, here is my solution:

1. Try clearing the URL (e.g. if your address bar reads http://mail.google.com/mail/#, change it to simply http://mail.google.com).  Sometimes this will “trick” your browser into re-loading the page.
2. Go into your Internet Options and clear your browser’s cache.  On Firefox this works nearly 100% of the time; for Internet Explorer continue to step 3.
3. Close all running copies of your web browser (after clearing the cache) and then re-load and log in again.  This is normally my last step and hasn’t failed yet.