Today Google launched a blog search engine today. It gathers blogs from pings sent to weblogs.com and puts them all in quite a nice search engine. It gathers from spidering. Also, it is possible to search from within Blogger – and now on the Blogger homepage it displays the latest updated blogs, also the Blogger navbar has an option to search all blogs now.
Google Blog Search also fully respects robots.txt and nofollow/noindex meta tags, if you don’t want your site listed. Currently, Google Blog Search is indexing posts back to around June, or the time at which you submitted your blog for inclusion. Google says it’s working on ways to include earlier posts.
Blog Search also adds extra search operators (nifty things you can do…) like inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl: clever things you can do with these is search for blog authors, or even a post about trainspotting by a man named Bill! (why, I have yet to know). It is also possible to restrict the results to one of 35 languages on top of that SafeSearch is supported.
Another feature is that you can subscribe to searches as RSS/Atom feeds. Most engines do this, interesting.
What interests me is how Google is so late into all new technologies; only releasing a VoIP tool recently for example. Even Ask Jeeves beat Google in blog searching, with the searchable Bloglines. At the moment, Google Blog Search is on the Google Homepage – but when it reaches there Google will get the blog searching menu, right from Technorati.
One interesting thing is Google currently isn’t serving ads, so what advantage does this service have to them? Perhaps it will provide Google with better statistics, or perhaps as it’s beta they will not put ads in. I hope it stays that way, I also hope Google provides the stats publicly like the Zeitgeist, but I hope it will be instant. Then again, I support companies like Technorati over faceless mutli-national ones like Google.
Perhaps this move will shape The Web 2, and see if old big companies will remain dominant. It will be interesting to see progress.
Greasemonkey 0.6.2 is now available in a beta build for Firefox 1.5, it will only work in 1.5. I really like this; though old JSes aren’t imported.
It has a far nicer user interface without all the pop-ups like This script is now installed please refresh the page… it is now in the status bar. Clicking the Greasemonkey doesn’t switch GM on/off but it opens up a really pretty menu. Also, GM 0.6.2 doesn’t use.
I really love Greasemonkey, and I’m happy it now works with my current build and is prettier.
I don’t know how people live without Greasemonkey, really, it makes web-browsing far nicer.
I love userscripts.org to get my user-scripts.
As I reported on Thursday 8th September eBay was considering buying out a VoIP provider, Skype. Well, it’s happened.
The Beeb is reporting that eBay has agreed to buy Skype in a US$2.6billion (£1.4bn) deal. eBay says it would pay half this amount (£0.7bn) in cash and the other half in stock, to create “an unparallelled e-commerce and communications engine”.
Other players in the VoIP market include Google (Talk), Microsoft (through the recently purchased Teleo), AOL and Yahoo.
“By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the net.”
Hey, I see that. Offering a free Skype service for contacting rogue sellers on NPBs would be good 
. No, on a serious note I think this deal won’t be that bad, unlike when another faceless mutli-national corporation buys something out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see eBay results integrated into Skype though, which I wouldn’t really like.
I think eBay, Paypal and Skype all put together nicely could create an effective VoIP/IM system, and I dream that things such as online purchases could be made through this, while under the security of eBay. Like a friend could sell a friend a video game, live, over the internet; without anyone else having the change. I like this idea! I hope eBay reads this and picks up on it .
Speaking of eBay I’m currently auctioning two domain names, 1pound34.co.uk and onepoundthirtyfour.co.uk . (the max price for the new road charging scheme in Britain). Go bid!
This is my first ever caption contest. The image is quite well known, and I think it is from when Bill Gates got caught for speeding and driving.
The winner will get a link, and if they already have a link I will give you 25 chips in BlogShares (which can be swapped into 500 text ad impressions).
I’ll be on holiday next weekend, so I’ll give the winner next Monday.
According to smh.com.au Microsoft patented double-clicking on 27th April. This has been in the news since 4th June, but not many people have found this.
While digging today I came across this. Microsoft claims it invented double-clicking, which is stupid, as it most probably didn’t.
US Patent Office
An alternative function of the application is launched if the button is pressed for a long, (e.g., at least one second), period of time. Still another function can be launched if the application button is pressed multiple times within a short period of time, e.g., double click.
This will annoy operating system developers, especially Linux ones, who will have to use the sigle click system. Personally I prefer double-click, as if I slip the program/file loads.
The inventors appear to be Charlton E. Lui and Jeffrey R. Blum.
Last year, M$ patented the FAT file-system. The Public Patent Foundation has formed a formal request for this patent to be revoked; as it hinders competitors improving on it.
Next thing you know Microsoft will patent breathing while typing.
Tags: microsoft, mouse, click, double-click, M$, MS, patent
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