search engines

Search Engines
04 Jun

Google Squared: Google's answer to Wolphram|Alpha?

in databases, queries, search engines, smart searches

I know many of you have been keeping tabs on Wolphram|Alpha, the "long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone." Well, looks like Google has responded with their own tool called Google Squared. You can read up on Google Squared on the official Google Blog, but here's the scoop:

29 Aug

Caching Enabled on Kairosnews

in kairosnews, search engines, spam

Kaironews was shut down tonight by our ISP for very excessive use of CPU resources on the server. I believe the problem was caused by spammers and ill-behaved search engines (I found one such instance of the latter).

Since those of us who use the site don't want this to happen, I've

  • Temporarily enabled the bad behaviour module. This blocks some spammers at the Drupal level; it may or may not help reduce CPU usage.
  • Banned the offending IP range which occupied 11 of the top IP's in terms of page visits this month at Kairosnews and used .99 GB's of the 4.7 GB's used this month. (Sorry Platypus Matt. If that happens to be you using multiple computers at your insitution to see if anyone replied to your posts, you are now effectively blocked at the server level ;-) )
  • Limited news aggregator and search access to logged in members.
  • Enabled Drupal's caching and throttling mechanism for anonymous users. If you are logged in, it won't affect you. But if you visit Kairosnews without logging in, you may not see the most recent content as Drupal will pull some pages directly from its cache. This should help as these tools were designed specifically for drupal.org and other popular sites using Drupal to survive a Slashdotting.
13 Apr

Finally! Google Calendar

in microsoft, search engines

I've been using Google's gmail and reader apps for some time now. They're easy to use and very reliable. So, I'm very happy to see that Google has done it again with a Calendar App. I just learned about this on Slashdot a few minutes ago, so I haven't been able to fully test it, but it appears to have an easy MS Outlook import feature and gmail integration. I'm sure I'll be putting this thing to good use, because I don't have Outlook at home (and it's a pain juggling those appoi

12 Apr

Microsoft's Answer to Google Scholar: Windows Live Academic

in bibliographies, microsoft, search engines

Microsoft has launched the beta for their Windows Live Academic search engine, a Microsoft version of the popular Google Scholar. For those that are just learning about this, check out Jinfo's quick review.

16 Mar

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

in kairosnews, search engines

Just finished experimenting with Rollyo, a web-based service for building a personalized search engine index. As an experiment, I built a searchroll including some of the sites in the Kairosnews weblog list and news aggregator and then added a search block for it in the right hand navigation.