Now, I'm not picking on him there for what he said, but because creator, physicist Stephen Wolfram, has suggested that simple algorithms, rather than complex rules and structures, could be at the root of all science.
I should add that reaction to the idea – which Wolfram said could boil down to a computer program consisting of just "three or four lines of code" – was mixed, and some critics felt that Wolfram unfairly refused to submit his theories to peer review. In other words, he's made the claim, but not backed it up with anything to prove it.
That might just be about to change, with the promised release in May of...
According to its creator, the system understands questions that users input and then calculates the answers based on its extensive mathematical and scientific engine. Even though we haven't had our hands on it, one expert has suggested it "could be as important as Google".
Well, I don't know about some anonymous expert, but I'll be eagerly anticipating the arrival of May (or maybe June.. or July... or... well, you know what happens to most release dates), and the first opinion of The Fox, on this not yet even seen, but acclaimed search engine
Picasa3 has a useful gizmo for superimposing text on your pictures. It is very intuitive and needs no fancy toys. The text transfers to Picasaweb Albums - all very nice but it disappears when you go back to My Pictures and of course does not go onto Photobucket. Very nice Gizmo but not a lot of use in the real (digiital) world. Bit like a chocolate teapot which is a perfect utensil until you put hot water into it!
Presume this is the downloaded and installed Picasa3?
I can only see captions in the online version.
Why would they allow text to be superimposed if it is not saved - or do you mean that it can only be seen in your own online album?
If it went to things like Photobucket, then that would alter the original image, and be permanently embedded and not removable, ever, unless you edited it off using a photo editor.
If you want text added in that way, you'd have to do it in something like IrfanView, or a photo editing package, then save that to the web album, so their chocolate teapot appears to work fine... unless you try and give it away to someone else.
But I'm only guessing from the brief description, as I won't be installing the downloadable Picasa - it and I don't see eye to eye on pic management
Yup, the text is imposed on the uploaded version, leaving your original untarnished.
I just tried downloading a Foxbar pic, and it comes with the text, so online people are stuck with it, you, the owner of the original, have a pristine version - which is as it should be.
You never, ever, ever, tamper with the original that comes from the camera. That almost qualifies as Rule 1 of editing.
If you want the version with the text to put into Photobucket as well, download the modified version, and upload that to Photobucket.
This assumes I have read the description correctly, and that your original on your PC does not have the overlaid text, even when the online version has?
----
I see "Link to photo" has reappeared in the sidebox to the right on Picasa. Here to stay by the look of things.
I would have thought they would have thrown ina save button as well as the Apply button giving you the option of adulterating your pics. Mind you IF you only used Picasa you would not know this was a layer.
The system was demoed and released to a chosen few last month, at which point it was clearly described as being a different beast from Google, and reading to the end of the Telegraph item we find:
Quoted Text
“It’s not a ‘Google killer’,” said Nova Spivack, himself a pioneer of the so-called “semantic web”, which attempts to draw intelligent connections between disparate data. “It does something different. It’s an answer engine rather than a search engine.
Since I wasn't one of the chosen few, I can't predict anything, but I was pottering about in Google's development area, and I found it had "answer functions" buried away in there - not generally released, but there nevertheless, and functioning.
I've been waiting for this for months, since it was announced as per the first post in this thread - however, I have also heard a broadcast lecture by Wolfram, and his arrogance about the search tool he was then developing was frightening.
I remain sceptical. I remember the hooha when Ask.com brought out a new search engine based on new algorythmns a few years ago. I tried it a couple opf times and gave up as it was so biased towards sites with something to sell.
All I want (still) is a search engine that doesn't keep churning out the same sites time after time after time. Can it be that difficult? I really hope Google have cracked this one .......but I am not holding my breath.
Looks like I was right about the stupid media, and the daft headlines about "Google killer" or whatever have already done their damage to Wolfram Alpha.
It is already being hailed as a failure by the some of the meda - because it does not come up with the same answers that Google does (and what use would it be if it did?) - and in a live test on that well-known and highly esteemed forum for testing technology, Radio 4's Today programme, it wasn't able to give comparative figures for the declines of swallows and the North sea haddock live on air.
I noted its difference to Google above, and hinted, not in as many open words, that the stupid masses of the public would not bother to acknowldge that it was not Google, or even the same as Google, and I've been proven right in only a few days
I may have considered Wolfram the man to be too arrogant about his creation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't (or won't develop into something that will) do what he claims, or deserves to be slated by the ignorant. One significant feature is that it probably meets The Fox's criteria for producing one answer to a question.
Try entering "Where did Marilyn Monroe die?" in Wolfram Alpha and Google, and compare the responses
I don't have Google any more unless I open it specifically. I used to have it twice in the headerbars but IE8 come with Microsoft Live Search which is apparently able to tell you that there are no results if you have misstyped something before you have asked it to search. Maybe I have stumbled upon the Holy Grail of Search Engines
I was very underwhelmed by Wolfram Alpha, it seems to be very overhyped. I listened to one report about it and they described it more as a calculator that could produce and handle figures rather than a standard search engine. It was also very American biased so it would produce some really obscure American statistics but fall down when asked about quite simple non-American things.
Unfortunately the biggest problem with Google is the commercialism. It can often be almost impossible to find the website of a company using Google. A search for British Floggle Toggle Manufacturing Ltd will give you companies offering to sell you Floggle Toggles in every town, village and hamlet but is unlikely to give the company website even when it is just the company name with .co.uk or .com on the end.
I can't see the situation improving whilst Google is making lots of money doing this.
Bottom feeders who sell their services to anyone that wants their web site pushed up Google (and every other search engine's rankings) by using the appropriate words and tags within the structure of the page to circumvent fair ranking by the search engines.
While Google et al deactivate and desensitise their engines to the tricks employed by the SEOs, they continue to analyse the engines and revise their methods of pushing thier clients up the ranks without being banned by Google et al.
Far from being responsible for the impossibility of finding a comany website, Google try and make it easier by filtering out SEO tooled pages.
The problem with searching for many business is however not Google, or even the SEOs, but the simple fact that their names are made up of very common words.
You can hardly blame Google (or any other search engine) for the fact that that trying to find the something like the Dunbar Knife and Fork Polishing Company brings up anything but the company at the top of the list, as the incidence of most of those words is so high on other pages across the internet.
There are advanced search techniques offered but no-one bothers with them as far as I can see...
It's a lot easier easier to just jump on the bandwaggon, and blame Google, as usual.
Goggle doesn't make its money from the searches, it makes it from the things that run alongside them, such as sponsored links, affiliates, and adwords that are monetised, and do make the cash registers ring when they are clicked through.
Most of Google's income comes from keyword advertising, the practice of placing sponsored links beside the 'natural' search results for a given term.
Advertisers bid on the search terms in a live auction which means that sponsored links for, say, 'car insurance', are likely to attract a higher fee than something more obscure such as 'string sculptures'.
I'm beginning to get the hang of Wolfram Alpha, and one the things I pulled up was General Motors, who you probably saw mentioned in the news recently after they closed 25% of their dealer network at a stroke etc etc
Give it a try to see their financial record to date (which works for any company listed, if you're interested in others) to watch a company fall from 12 euro to 0.82 euro in a matter of months.
If you wan to try something a little more complicated, then the on-again/off-again fun of the Porsche and Volkswagen family business merger provides another opportunity, again, just feed in the two names to get a picture of the their financial past.
One of Microsoft's more recent acquisitions looks as if it is about to come out into daylight, and might be the magical answer to the Fox's prayers for a better search engine - meet Bing.
You'll have to depend on what those that have been privileged to get their hands on it for early test, and on Microsoft's own video to get a feel for what's coming though, and it's worth noting that even those "in the know" are currently saying it will be anything up to a couple of years before it truly matures and delivers on its promises.
I think thay may be a good sign - firstly because it smacks of realism (everyone promises everything yesterday, and therefore always fails to deliver miserably), and secondly because things always happen faster than promised if they are any good, so we have two measures to judge this offering against.
Although Microsoft is reported to be porting anyone that tries to use the existing Live Search over to Bing, I'm not impressed.
Unless they have yet to create the master search reference database, then Bing has a problem with SeSco - perhaps the embedded Google Map is causing it to be shunned.
I've tried a few subject searched for items that either SeSco is the only decent reference, or there are only two or three other references for on the internet, and for the moment at least, they are simply not being found by Bing.
Even well-known subjects with oodles of web pages about them fail to return any SeSco pages in their number at the moment.
And, as noted on the Forum News, the Admin has had to bar the search engine bots for the time being, so SeSco is going to get a raw deal from Bing!
I realised the other day that I have been binged! Searches show up in the history as Bing despite the screen telling me that it is Microsoft Live Search.
Bing places my website 4th. in a keyword search - below the Polis [booo] but above wikipedia [hurrah!]. What a pity the [3 days late with the news] Evening Times was 1st. and the SNP 2nd. [whit?]
McBing being rather appropriate Fox as the Scottish use of the word 'bing' refers to a heap of dirt and other surplus debris brought up a colliery shaft as a necessary part of winning coal undergound. Many a happy day was spent playing on local bings when I was young. I have a rather interesting pic from 1947 of German PoWs bringing in the harvest with a huge conical shaped bing towering over them. We played on that bing not many years later, the Germans having been sent home I'd imagine.
Now you know why cars have such odd names, as the manufacturers try and get one that will work around the world, and not mean poo in one on them.
Those who follow the Touring Cars, but weren't keen enough to follow them to their first visits to Knockhill won't have seen the fun they had, when the guys that did the driver's names for the car windows added "mac" before all the names, and the live commentator tried to remember to use the new Scottish names.
Somebody suggested that Bing! was an imaginative name chosen to mimic the sound of bell ringing when you have a good idea.
There is often a bit lost or gained in translation. Example from Lidl " Nougat Pillows ". These do not sell very well here as few people fancy nougat. If they were called " Caramel Pillows ", which they are, they would sell much better. I reccommend them if you like sweet breakfast cereals.
Well, having been binging about for a few weeks Bing may indeed be the Holy Grail of search engines as it does not seem to repeat pages already listed. Hooray for the creator.
Well, having been binging about for a few weeks Bing may indeed be the Holy Grail of search engines as it does not seem to repeat pages already listed. Hooray for the creator.
Is that a recommend then ? Has the google-isation of planet earth been thwarted?
Yes I think it is a recommendation. It is hard to compare the info it puts up with other engines but it seems adequate to me but the real bonus is not getting the same site up time after time just because your search words are on the site more than once.
You might think this an odd selection from the pool of possible serches, but you might like it.
All I can suugest is giving at a try - ignore the language since the original is in German - and just throw your search terms into the obvious box.
After a few tries, it should be fairly obvious the way it lists stuff for you, and groups with totals found, rather than giving a long listing of stuff.
As an example, my first search brought this up in the Pictures section, a surviving Bofors gun inside an AA battery. I wonder how much a British setup resembled this? Still haven't vound a decent online pic of one - maybe one day...
Interesting pictures! Bofors - original design from Sweden, made under licence elsewhere. Did you spot that the Finnish gun was made by Alfred Graham & Co. Ltd. London?
It's NOT a search as such, so don't look on it as such, or you will not do very well.
If you know what the Magic 8 Ball is, then you will something of an idea of what Hunch does.
At the moment, it's only been running for a week or so, so obviously suffers from a lack of input, but you never know, it might be crazy enough to work...
Yasni is the world's most popular people search engine with more than 10 million visitors worldwide each month. More and more people turn to Yasni to find information about old friends, co-workers, business partners, job applicants, neighbors, prospective mates and much more. Yasni crawls more than a hundred people related websites within seconds and provides you with any publicly available information such as web links, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social network profiles, pictures, videos and news.
The alarm is not so much about having a search engine geared to finding people and personal information, wherever it may be scattered about the web (though I find it makes a great source for starting an Identity Theft assault without having to tax my abilities too hard), but more because it quickly shows where I appear around the web.
I know the handful of places where I've publicised my "real" self and some of my research, and after running through the most basic yasni search for myself, am amazed to find where I have ended up, appearing on web sites and being quoted in places I've never heard of, and on web sites I wouldn't touch with the proverbial barge pole.
Ye gods, that is worse then the directory enquiries site I found that suggests for a fee it will give extra information on exdirectory numbers. It also shows the subscriber's house on Google.
Bing is not as good at rejecting pages already shownas I thought at first but it doesn't seem to show duplicates very often.
On the whole, I've been impressed by Bing - despite the name (which I think is just too cheesy) and doesn't lend itself to being used as a verb in the way that Google does, even though I never have, and never will, google, or be caught googling something.
There are too many "ings", and binging something just sounds terrible, and doesn't roll off the tongue neatly.
Clusty - despite not suffering the same high profile - continues to provide search results the supposed "leaders" don't find, and still remains at the top of my tree.
Here's an interesting review/summary worth remembering when you can't find something (and even good ol' Clusty gets a mention - but so small, but Bing is so small too)...
There's no shortage of choice if you want to search the web, but most people stick with one, or at most two. In the US, the most diverse market, the research company Compete gives the rankings as Google 74%, Yahoo 16%, Microsoft's Bing 6%, Ask 2% and AOL (powered by Google) 1%.
That leaves about 1% for the rest to squabble over, though that still translates into 100m searches in one month alone – and that's only in the US. Worldwide, in the past quarter Google has more than 80% of searches, while Yahoo and Bing have 9% and 5% respectively, a situation Microsoft hopes to change next year.
But there are many other search engines for the web. Altavista, Excite and Lycos – ancient names from the 1990s – collectively still have about 0.1% of the market globally.
It's the new names, though, that are raising interest. Cuil, launched by ex-Googlers to great fanfare in July 2008, has gained little traction since. Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a "web resource" whose aim is to "make the world's knowledge computable" – in effect, be a search engine that can be accessed by computer programs rather than humans. Other specialist search engines include Scour, Clusty (which "clusters" results), and, for those who want a visual presentation, Kartoo. Nationally, Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China far exceed Google for market share, but are almost unused outside those countries.
However, there is one "search" that Google covets more than any other: Twitter's. Though the archive of what has been said on the fast-growing message service now barely stretch back a fortnight, Google executives have repeatedly expressed a desire to integrate what Twitter knows about current events into their search engine. Rumours of a linkup persist; it will be interesting to see whether the Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up prompts Google into a similar marriage with Twitter.
"For the past several months a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search," said the company in a statement on one of its blogs.
"It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."
The company claims that significant changes to the way the system works will improve the experience for users, but the work has a magical plus-point, and will also send shockwaves through the community of marketers who try and optimise their results to appear higher up in Google's index.
I hate these people (known as SEOs, search engine optimisers) with a passion, and the news that their "hard work" (conning people into paying them vast sums to push their names up the search ranks artificially) is music to my ears. I would gladly line them up amongst the front ranks of my "First against the wall when the revolution comes" club.
The Fox should hate them too, as they are solely responsible for skewing search results (not Google, or Bing, or Yahoo etc) to provide useless high-ranking answers when you try and do any serious online research, meaning you have to create "imaginative" search strings to weed out the ribbush and return what you really want
I haven't used this much, but have found it to be a handy jumping-off point to get to other search engines as it lists many of them, so saves yoy fro remembering their names, or having umpteen links.
Also, well worth looking at their offerings on the "Advanced" search option link:
I have to report that Bing is no longer the Holy Grail of search engines. As time goes by more multiple showings of the same sites appear. I imagine that given time the bots dig deeper into sites and find more mentions of the search word(s).
Aw, that's shame, but I believe your appraisal is correct.
Still, on a more positive note, I can still say that my engine of choice - Clusty - still does a nice job of trawling up responses that the the big two fail to catch.
In fact, some of them never find the same results, which is a little odd. Even doing a fairly tight and targeted search using them fails to bring up some of Clusty's finds, which suggest there is some sort of bias or selective blocking in place - and that's just a little worrying, be it on the part of those searching, or those being searched.
Although I'm not a Google user - seriously, I don't have to use it because almost everyone else does, so there's no point checking anything "new" I'm told about there, since that's probably where it will have come from - but I did come across an interesting tie-up between a Google search and a Wolfram Alpha search, where you can have the two covered simultaneously and side by side:
It's a bit of gimmick in some ways, but to be absolutely fair, it is also rather good if you are searching on something which has factual and numerically quantifiable results, as the Wolfram Alpha results stay in view, helping to rank and dismiss the mass of results returned by Google
Yes. I tripped over one of the developer's blogs, with the correct names, so it seemed time to clear out the old.
I'm not sure if it's Sony, but Google have a deal to bundle their Chrome browser so that it can later be integrated with some of the Google toys that they host. Stuff like their word processor and spreadsheet, mail etc, and with their other services, so it can be optimised for speed and rendering.
I didn't really pay too much attention though, as another browser has all these things well covered already
I like Chrome and it's simplicity, and hope they keep it that way.
IE and Opera clunk along like skips on square wheels. And The World is ok, but is just a re-packaging of IE, but that probably means its less clunky
I admit my Firefox installation is now a heavyweight with so many options that no-one but me can understand all the options - but I live in it like a second home.
Chrome is the little sports car I take out at the weekends for fun
Searching is taking on a new look at things as Bing launches Visual Search to differentiate it from the others - which will of course copy it.
Allowing users to search with pictures rather than text, at the moment only a small number of topics will return a visual display. These centre around popular categories like entertainment, famous people, shopping and sports.
Unfortunately, the original link given for the Beta test version of this option appears to have evaporated, and I don't see any mention of an alternative address or means of accessing it, so you'll just have to look around for it yourself, and keep an eye out for any news:
We’ll be expanding the Visual Search experience over the coming months, so make sure to check back often and explore the Visual Search beta yourself at: http://www.bing.com/visualsearch and let us know what you think.
Even though I'm doing all I can, and never use Google search (since I have no interest in merely finding what the sheep have found) unless I come up empty elsewhere, which is actually a very rare occurrence, it seems that my efforts are not enough to keep the alternatives happy
Microsoft's relaunched search engine has received a disproportionate amount of attention in recent months - not least because journalists are desperate to cover every cranny of its conflict with Google - but it turns out that Bing may not be the thing. According to figures from StatCounter, Bing saw its share of the search market decline in September - down to 3.25% of global searches from 3.58%. Yahoo was also down, to 4.37%, while Google rose to an astonishing 90.54% of all search traffic worldwide.
Bing's struggles come alongside more bad news for Bill Gates. According to the new Forbes rich list released this week, Gates remains America's richest man - despite losing $7bn ($7bn!) over the past year. Other technological tycoons Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen all figure in the top 25 (of course, the vast majority of their wealth is tied up in shares, so it's a paper fortune - and a paper loss too).
I put Johnstone Castle into Bing the other day and got the usual range of rubbish which had to be searched through to find useful information. Since my FF comes with Google I did the same there and it found the nuggets and a set of pics. I don't know how much of this is down to FF.
It's down to Google - it's bots crawl the web and ferret away info all the time.
Simple credit where credit's due, and Google's bots simply do a better job and are more up to date than the others.
But I tried Bing and my own favourite for Johnstone Castle (with nothing else added) and they came up with much the same as Google in the top ten or so - that said, as the bots crawl and the master database is updated, you can get a completely different set of results a few minutes after getting nothing at all, or rubbish after noting some gems.
I've fallen for the latter, and paid the price of lost time by not noting something rare as it was found, and then being unable to find the same thing half and hour later.
Isn't it nice to know that Google is reading this forum, and paying attention to The Fox's appeals for ways to reduce the number of irrelevant results?
The new options - nine in total - are hidden in the left sidebar and allow users to filter results by the past hour or a specific date range; they can be specified to look only within blogs or for reviews; and enable the user increase or decrease the number of shopping sites they get in the results. Up till now the search results could only be reduced to news, images, videos or certain languages.
...
On Monday, Google announced that it was adding its "Hot Trends" feature to its main page search, allowing users to see how popular their search is at any given hour. Now, when you search Google and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, it shows you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information – like how popular the query is, how fast it's rising over time, and other useful data.
Google's new search is another setback for Microsoft's search engine Bing, which still delivers better image results, but doesn't allow you to refine your search results in the same interface. Bing recently faced its first monthly decline as its share fell to 3.25%. Google globally has a quasi-monopoly with a market "share" of 90.54%.
DAMN!!!
I may actually have to start using Google searches if they carry on like this.
I wouldn't read anything into Bing grabbing market share - Microsoft have stuffed it into !E7 in place of Google. Most people like me just use the one provided.
Live Search was always Microsoft, rebranded recently as Bing, so they can't really be accused of "stuffing" it into their own browser since it is their own tool
Since Google is competition, it not true to say they stuff Bing in in place of it.
I find it, and Yahoo! a particular nuisance, as many software writers bundle it in with the "free" software, and if you don't vet the installation, you have the damn things polluting your screen space and removing a whole row's worth of real estate that can be much better utilised for displaying what you actually want to see.
Not to mention the hassle of having to run an uninstallation routine to get rid of the useless things as well
Did you know that if you click a search from those installed searchboxes in the browsers, rather than manually navigating to the search site's own page, the browser owner gets paid each time you make a search?
I used to have a Google box in the top right which came with XP. It was changed in an update becoming Live search and then Bing in another revision. I didn't choose this, it was foisted upon me.
I didn't know about the payments not that it makes any difference to me. There seem to be a lot of mysterious payments on the web. I don't understand where they all come from as BB users only pay a flat rate monthly.
I was curious, I don't see IE very often now but I see I have already edited to use Clusty, so I've no idea what might have been there before.
Firefox has a search box in the same place, but mine now has a dropdown with all my selected searches in it for quick selection, and is further modded to revert to Clusty if not used for 60 seconds, and to clear itself of the last search string - something that used to irritate intensely if I started typing something, and it tacked itself onto the end of the previous search text.
The payments are sponsored by the search engine provider, and paid to the browser creator, so that would be eg from Google to Mozilla.
Strange world isn't it? Considering that MS had highjacked my old computer, junked the Google searchbox in favour of Bing without asking me, I was rather surprised that a new replacement came with a Google searchbox top right as well as a Google tool bar with another searchbox. Bit of overkill I would say. The toolbar was the first thing to go.
If you choose to use the Internet Explorer Browser and allow the updates and fixes to be installed automatically each month, then Bing is installed as part of their software.
I don't allow the updates to install themselves without my say-so.
I'm not sure where the setting is, but it should be fairly easy to set up of you have a look for "Automatic updates" in IE.
In there, there is the Automatic Update, which downloads and install all the updates automatically for you, and is the MS recommended option - as you would expect.
Below this is the option for Automatic Downloading of the updates, but which excludes the automatic installation. This will alert you when the updates are ready, but does not install them untill you vet the list, and select the ones you want, and deselect the ones you don't.
I use this because there are quite a few large for MS applications I don't, and will never use, so there's no point in me bogging things down with the files which I don't need, so save space.
The thing to watch for is reputable, free softeware - if you take advantage of it.
I do, and the authors supplement their benevolence by including things like the Google toolbar (as I'm sure do PC makers) and if you are not careful and read each step of the install/setup of new softeare or PCs, you can find all sorts of free things you might not want.
By coincidence, I recently found I too had the Google toolbar - which is a worthless waste of screen space - after upgrading a software package.
It's reputable stuff, so not a problem as it's only a few clicks to dump it, but it served to remind to read those install screens and options, even those I have been using for years. One of the even gave me 50 free MP3 downloads - again, all reputable, but all rubbish too, simply because I hadn;t paid attention. I now select the upgrade option that doesn't even include these each time.
My point really is the inconsistency of Bing with an update and loads of Google with a new machine. I suppose the machine might have been lying about for a while since it is Vista.
You would have thought that a fairly silly and relatively innocuous name choice such as Bing! would have been fairly safe, and that Microsoft would have been spared the usual parade of hangers-on, but when your coffers are as large as Microsoft's, then you can expect any little player that sees the prospect of a few million being awarded to them by a court, then no matter how tenuous the claim, it must make some sense to after the big player...
They're not serious, because of the really were, then why aren't they also announcing that they are suing each other, since their various claims that Microsoft is infringing their use of the Bing! name must be equally true for the case between each of the parties which is suing Microsoft.
Or are they only interested in chasing the potential payout - which none of them would be worth if they did sue one another.
I wasn't going to bother about this one, then I noticed one of the early comments:
Quoted Text
While I haven't noticed any real-time results (which, I suppose, is kind of the point), the reason seems simple enough for me: they're displayed up there in that junk area that daily use of search engines has trained me to ignore.
You know, that block up top where sponsored results, shopping links and other such spammy fluff that I haven't asked for lives, and which I automatically skip over to get to the information I actually wanted.
It seems odd to me that the supposedly clever researchers appear to have taken this fairly obvious point into account.
I, for one, never look at sponsored results - I'm simply not interested in any link that someone had paid to have pushed up the listing, for the same reason I am not interested in anyone who cold calls my phone or home, and throw out on there ear.
The article seems to reinforce my belief that folk in advertising have some sort of misguided belief that people actually want to pay for and be subjected to their tripe:
It reminded of another article I read only this morning, where I was basically being accused of being a "Bad Person" for using adblckers, and that I was a thief for doing so.
Well, all I have to say in response to the accusations is that I am now a "Worse than Bad Person" - the first thing I did after reading it was go and turn up the metaphorical "wick" on my adblockers and Flash-blockers so they would be even more rigorous that they were before.
The web advertisers crossed the line many years ago, and have only themselves to blame for the popularity of blocking.
Had they not embarked on campaigns of flashy, animated, hypnotic, which (despite their remonstrations to the contrary) are intended to do one thing - draw the readers' eye to them, then blokers would not have become so popular. Same goes for popup windows that suddenly appear than lay themselves over content you are trying to read.
There used to be an unwritten rule among web designers, that the marquee, or self-scrolling text was not "a good thing" and would be ignored. It's seldom seen.
However, even reputable sites are now wasting their own design by employing continuously scrolling "tickers", incessantly showing the latest additions or items on the site - and the worst of these (like most Flas-based adverts) don't have a Stop or Cancel button to make then go away.
Thank goodness Firefox has an addon that gives you a button than can be clicked on ANYTHING on the screen to make ot go away
It looks as if the ad-blocking story might rumble on for a bit - with the people who are involved in ads trying to threaten ad-block users with promises that the loss of revenue from pages with blocked ads will lead to the sites closing down.
In a pig's ear!
I'd like to see their bluff called, and one of the options listed in the following article put into place, namely that the sites publish at the foot of their pages an independently audited (and it HAS to be independently audited, because I don't believe anything an advertiser claim about adverts) summary of the ads blocked, the lost revenue, and a list of articles that the site couldn't publish because it was skint. I suspect this would differ wildy from a non-audited version of the same story.
More seriously, the comments show that folk are reasonable, and while they generally come out against ads, the underlying message is not the principle of the ads, but the their dreadful appearance and tactics:
Quoted Text
I work for a digital advertising agency. Along with microsites, iPhone apps and long-form digital content, I make banners. And I use Adblock Plus. This is because most advertising, online or otherwise, is utter crap. And banners contain some of the worst of the crap. Flickering, squirming, farting, buzzing crap.
I suggest publishers who can, institute aesthetic standards. Try running a garish, badly designed ad for Admiral car insurance in the pages of Vogue Italia. They'd laugh at you. [The Guardian] could insist on what we in the business call "standard" (non-moving) banners. They could insist on a color palette, type size and a number of other standards. This would reduce "cut through" but it might persuade a savvy, ad-blocking audience to whitelist this excellent website.
That sums it it for me, and the first para describes the problem, while the second provides a reasonable solution - ads that advertise, rather than try and win a prized for being eye-catching at the expense of the real page content.
There is a problem though, in that the ad-blocker is now amongst the most widely downloaded add-ons - it may be too late to counter that, even by self-regulating and adopting ads that advertise, rather than ads that irritate.
For example, on one well-known mapping site, I arrived on the page (not using Firefox) to be greeted with the map, an ad-banner along the top, and a number of slots around it that were presumably supposed to have random ads inserted on each page view. Instead, Orange had fiddles something to make their ad fill every space, so I had the banner and six versions of the same phone ad whizzing non-stop around the map I wanted to see. And just for good measure, Orange had disable the option to stop the flash movie playing, so I couldn't stop the animation whizzing their stupid phone along the banner, or around the slots - my eye simply could not hold on the map without being draw away to the movement - advertisers deny they do this, and that the animation its there to look pretty. Down folks! There goes another flying pig!!
The most interesting reflection in the article is that, once again, and established industry can be seen merely to be trying to use old ideas and practices in the new territory of the web, and being thwarted, and trying to use old methods of coercion to get around this, rather than trying to move with the new technology, and coming up with something new and better.
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