Harsh J

TorrentFreak has run an article claiming that Google has begun ‘censoring’ the auto-complete and instant responses of its search bar for terms that have anything to do with popular sources of downloads of copyrighted content, like ‘torrent’, various download sites, etc.

What they don’t realize is that auto-complete and instant result generation for keywords that involve such terms is plainly useless (as are many others, which must be filtered away to save some load too). It isn’t censorship, but an optimization.

The search still returns results when queried in the proper Return-key manner. The only thing blocked away is to see highest ranking terms in auto-complete, which is worthless cause there are so many new releases made in those streams that it makes no sense to process, rank and display them in an order via auto-complete, or stream cached results while the user looks for something.

Google Instant is a good tool if it can predict what you’re going to search for, and is a great tool if it knows when it should do so. Which it does.

TorrentFreak just isn’t what it used to be. I dislike a couple of its authors. It isn’t worth linking back to their article, which can be searched on their site — unless they’ve ‘censored‘ it away. Meh.

Google Buzz’s spoiled the whole Google Reader experience. For starters, I don’t want to see comments from people I do not have on my contact list – I simply don’t care what they have to say since most go “Good one” when there’s a damn Like button they can use.

And if Reader’s linked to Buzz, sync’s supposed to work bi-directional since comments do so. Reading articles and comments in both places is just not good use of time. So until someone comes along and tells me this is done, Buzz’s turned off in my inbox. Like I care.

Well, since I couldn’t fix a particular bug myself and the other developers think all is working well with Yahoo under KDE’s Kopete software, I had to switch over to the second best way to connect to IM networks – BitlBee via Konversation. This post is merely a note to self for adding Jabber accounts for GMail and Google Apps Mail accounts in BitlBee, once setup.

To add GMail is easy, using the Jabber protocol:

account add jabber username@gmail.com password

To add Google Apps Mail needs one more step:

account add jabber username@domain.tld password
account set 0/server talk.google.com
# You may want to replace '0' with your account number via 'account list'

account on and have fun with your now-more-powerful IRC Client.

Been a while since Google launched its Public DNS service and having used it for that long, I felt it was very unreliable. I had issues opening websites that had a lot of external items in it, and the most frustrating experience was with BBC UK’s site whose newsimg sub-server failed to resolve when using their DNS – I do much news reading on BBC during my random bursts of surfing.

However, I noted that these failures in resolving (or could be something else) were very odd, happening even after I’d successfully opened a web page. Switching to my former DNS, OpenDNS, makes all the issues go away, making me certain about the fault lying within Google’s service. I’m continuing to use OpenDNS here-on, until a good news article about the other trickles down my feed reader someday.

I leave it to my lurking readers to identify an oddity in the speedometer image used on Google’s DNS page.

More than a decade ago, they gave you that magical and free text-box which you till date use to have a sense of direction on the web. They then decide that since most are doing X, lets give them X ourselves, or lets make X better. And slowly that became a large number of X-es, in amounts similar to its name. While they couldn’t conquer everything and have had to retreat from a few fronts, they have indeed conquered a majority, a comfortable majority. A slice big enough to crunch most of what you do in your day, right from your first few keystrokes till your last few keypunches.

There have always been many others in its ranks, some once even better than it and some existing more years than it has. What it didn’t initiate first, was evened by them aping what it did.

Whichever would be the champion in the end, if there always has to be; know that you would have been knocked out of the web by then. To being a mere user, yet again.

10¹°° is large, and sparkling like that diamond under bruting thus far, it does make you feel uneasy a few times in a year.