Archive for: search
IsoHunt Behind China’s Great Firewall
China is no stranger to Internet censorship. The country’s Great Firewall includes many well known sites, but up until now BitTorrent sites have never been blocked.
There was a short blocking incident two years ago when Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were hijacked and redirected to the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu. However, this issue was solved in a matter of days without an official explanation.
In the years that followed the Chinese government mainly targeted local BitTorrent sites, leaving the previously mentioned sites unharmed. According to reports from isoHunt’s owner Gary Fung, this tolerant stance might have changed as visits from China to isoHunt have plunged dramatically.
The drop in traffic is so significant that any technical difficulties have to be ruled out. Last Saturday, isoHunt had only 1,349 visitors from China compared to 131,362 the week before, a massive 99% decrease.
Despite the signs that this ban of isoHunt is intentional, there hasn’t been any official word from the Chinese authorities on the situation. Whether it has anything to do with the recent P2P site crackdown in China, where the authorities shut down hundreds of local sites including some of the biggest BitTorrent trackers, is unknown.
IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that he recommends that Chinese users who want to continue using the site should access it through a foreign proxy. Gary said that China was never a huge source of traffic for his site, but sees the ban as a “big deal” for the ongoing net censorship debate.
Although China’s authorities are not known for their democratic principles, speaking out against the ban might help. “China has flipflopped between site bans, so putting on pressure and people voicing opinions do matter,” Gary added, referring to China’s previous banning and unbanning of websites such as Wikipedia.
How Do I find an Old Wall Posting on Facebook
Facebook is always changing to keep up with users and what they are looking in their social networks. Wait sixty seconds and the newer stuff will appear on the top of the page and push the older content down. At the bottom of the page, things just “vanish” into the ether. Sure you can click on “Older Posts” but what if it’s something from days or weeks ago?
So where’s it all going? To find old wall posting following the below steps:
- Click on “View my Profile” and you’ll then see generally what others would see if they looked at your profile and were already friends with you. Click on the “Wall” tab:
- Now you should be able to scroll down and find your witty joke and all the comments your friends left.
- Instead of clicking on “View all X comments”, click on the date and time information. Surprise! It takes you to a page that has your original Wall status update and all the comments that everyone else has left. I find this trick darn useful when I want to archive the commentary for later reference, btw.
- Oh, and if you find that your status update isn’t on your Wall, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see our friend “Older Posts”. Click on it and scroll down again.
Hope that helps you out and I hope your girlfriend finds your joke witty! If you need more Facebook help, do spend the time to poke around here on the site.
TrendsBuzz: Latest Trending Keywords from Google, Yahoo, etc
A big part of writing online, and even just being alive today, is knowing what’s happening around the world. One way I do this is to set up Google Alerts so I know what’s happening in my field. Another way is to use an online tool to see what’s being searched and posted on the Internet such as Trends Buzz. This is how many news firms pick up stories in far away lands quickly.
As you can see from the screenshot above, it takes note of what people are searching for in Google and Yahoo!. They also have Twitter monitored so you can find out what’s happening there too which is significant considering news spreads fastest on Twitter. Then, smaller sites such as the New York Times and Alexa are covered followed by smaller search engines.
The service is currently in public Beta and it will be interesting to see what the team comes up with once its ready for the full launch.
Will AT&T’s Buzz Search be a Success?
Back when the internet was gaining huge amounts of users at the turn of the millennium, everything was about the World Wide aspect. But now, it’s worn a little thin. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still useful and connects people and companies all over the planet. But local search is where there are big bucks to be made. Think about it, aren’t you more likely to click on an advertisement when it’s a 20% discount for the Chinese restaurant around the corner, instead of an offer for the Chinese HiPhone?
All the major online services have caught on with Twitter being the latest having launched Local Trends. Now, Buzz.com looks to catch in on the local .com boom. At the minute it’s still in Beta testing. But more and more tech blogs are talking about it.
While Buzz.com will rely heavily on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, At&T have stressed that they have not built a social networking site, although you will be able to share many things with friends and family. By indexing what people are talking about as well as working with companies and advertisers, buzz.com will provide people will accurate search results for things like clubs, restaurants, shops, deals and much more. It’s like social media for local businesses.
I can’t wait until Buzz comes out of private Beta. It sounds like a great service to get the skinny on what’s going on in your locale. If you want to try your luck at getting a private invitation, click here.
Want to know the best places to go or businesses to call? Let buzz.com help you tap your social net for business recommendations from the people you trust most – your friends and family. – Buzz.com
Top 4 Real Time Search Engines
OneRiot looks almost like a conventional search engine. It mixes search results from various sources on the search results page. Sources used include blogs, Twitter, forums or Friendfeed and popular websites such as Userscripts or Digg. The results can be sorted by Pulse or Realtime with Pulse displaying popular results while realtime concentrates on fresh results. The results page looks a bit messy which can be mainly attributed to the avatar icons and the two different link colors that are used by OneRiot. The results look almost like Google Adsense ads which by default also use two different colors for their links.
Collecta is the final search engine of this article. It will also display realtime search results and auto-update the page just like Scoopler. It comes with a pause function which is very handy as the results are displayed in rapid succession if a popular search term has been entered. The service uses four different categories that can be filtered in the search options: Articles, Comments, Pictures and Updates.
The results are displayed in the main column of the page. A little bit irritating is the orientation of the page as it is aligned on the left side of the screen and not centered. A click on a result will display the full message in the right column from where it can be viewed and processed further.
Feedmil offers a few features that the other realtime search engines do not offer. It comes with a slider that can be used to define the popularity range of the results. It is for example possible to concentrate on popular sources for the results only. The service can also filter results by type so that only results produced by a certain type of website or service are displayed. The types include blogs, micro-blogs, podcasts and social media among others.
Feedmil divides the search results page in two columns. The main column displays search results based on time and popularity while the sidebar column displays hot feeds related to the search term. The presentation of the results is excellent although they seem to be filtered before they appear on the page (we would have expected more Twitter results of the past four hours for a popular search term such as Google). It would also have been nice if the pages would not have to be reloaded when switching between the various news sources.
Scoopler divides the results in three different columns with two showing results related to the query and one displaying the hot topics of the day. The main column displays the search results in realtime which becomes apparent as the posting time is usually less than five minutes ago. It will display results from a variety of sources including Twitter, Youtube and blogs. The main column gets updated that frequently for popular search terms that it is almost impossible to keep up.
The right column displays popular results and can be filtered to display only images, videos or links.
The auto updating page strongly emphasizes the realtime aspect of the search engine. It would have been nice if there was a way to pause the search results from being updated or to add certain search results to a personal area where they could be accessed at a later point in time.
ReelSurfer Makes Video Searching Easy
Ever watched a movie clip around two years prior then needed it for a project or something? Me too.
Things like documentaries, famous speeches and old fashioned shows are hard to find on sites like YouTube and Vreel – especially when all you have to go on is a quote or extract.
ReelSurfer however aims to change all that. They take a huge volume of content from the Internet and break each video up into thirty second segments. Then, they index all spoken words on the video as though they were text. Thus, when you search for your quote the thirty second segment pops up. You may be asking, why do they bother splitting up the video at all? Well this is purely so you’ll hear your keywords right away. Imagine watching an entire movie whilst praying it’s the right one!
This is similar to AnyClip, however there is one core difference. ReelSurfer will allow you to create your own account for your company or college thus allowing you to upload meeting, lectures etc… This would come in very handy for students looking for information on a chosen topic while revising or an employee quickly catching up on the conference call he missed.
Multifox Offers Your Browser Multiplicity in Functionality
Multifox, Firefox exentsion
Firefox is the crown jewel when it comes to extension friendly browsers. In the beginning IE could not compare, but more recently other browsers have started to adapt to extensions, but Firefox is by far the leader in this field. Many of us have tried to switch to other browsers like Chrome, but we felt naked with out the extensions. Personally it was a hard transition for me, but over time I’m getting used to it.
Top 12 Torrent Sites of 2009
At the moment there are several torrent sites that are leading in the way of popularity, but some are being taken down and having to delete illegal files. Here is Crenk’s list of the top torrent sites for 2009.
- Mininova – Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.
- Isohunt – Currently in a legal dispute with the Canadian Recording Industry Association, Isohunt is a longtime favorite of P2P users. The community at Isohunt also helps police abuse within their network, and reader comments and votes help to identify those torrents which should be avoided.
- The Pirate Bay – April 18, 2009: the Stockholm district court has sentenced the four Pirate Bay founders to a year in prison, and over $USD 3.5 million in fines. This is as punishment for violating their country’s copyright laws.
- Torrentscan – A “meta-search” engine, which is a search engine that searches other search engines
- YouTorrent – Still in beta testing format, this new torrent site claims to be the largest legal torrent search engine today. Accordingly, the result sets are much smaller than the “pirate” counterparts, but definitely try this site for yourself.
- Kickass Torrents – the new player in the market with some great technology and fast indexing.
- BTJunkie – One of the leading torrent search engines with great syndication across other torrent search sites.
- Bitsoup – Bitsoup is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders.
- Alive Torrents – Alive Torrents is a relatively new site. It focuses on torrents that have distinguished themselves as having a solid swarm base and an active readership.
- Torrentreactor.to – Torrentreactor has made a comeback from a hijacking and an uncooperative hosting service. They have moved to a different server setup and a Tonga country domain outside the USA.
- Fenopy (formerly Bitoogle.com) – the ‘original’ bittorrent search engine, which has now morphed into a metasearch engine. The results from your Bitoogle searches will point to various other torrent search sites. This site has been redirected recently.
- Torrentz – very quick torrent search engine with great indexing.
Pet Finder: A Great Site for Finding and Looking After Pets
Pet Finder is a website which has been running for well over a decade helping to find homes for animals and to educate owners and potential owners. It’s owned and run by a very reputable media company called Discovery who operate the Discovery Channel network and several other media forms.
Obviously, the focus on profiling numerous shelters and homes across the US. All of their current animal listings are combined into one via the search function of this website. You can narrow down these results by telling the search function what kind of animal you would like, what breed, age, size and gender and your locale. You can find normal cats and dogs here but they also lists horses, reptiles, rodents and wild animals.
Some search results are displayed below. As you can see, they provide basic information about that dog as well as other information such as whether that particular dog would be a good match with kids.
The site also has a huge library of information to help new and potential owners. Things like training, health and lifestyle are covered in particular detail. Several blogs and columns are kept on the blog for enthusiasts. You can check it out here .
Online Shopping Search A Bit Dull
It’s the holidays, Cyber-Monday is tomorrow, Black Friday is behind us, yetpeople just can’t seem to have enough stuff. If that’s you, and you’ve scoured the likes of MySimon, and various online store sites, then perhaps you’d be interested in finding what you want via a shopping search site called Milo.
Google Images Has a New Search Product Called Image Swirl
Google Image Search is used by most of us when we want to find an image for our blogs our websites – or even our desktop wallpapers. I’d like to introduce to you a new type of image search (currently in Google Labs) called Image Swirl. It’s a new way of displaying search results and it make the whole process much easier and more…fun!
When you first search for a term, the results are divided up into categories and are all stacked together as shown below.
When you click on one of these stacks the results are shown in a swirl format like below. At first, only one circle is displayed but then you click on an image that circle is moved further down the swirl and a new circle appears. This process repeats itself until your left with a huge swirl of results and the main circle has only one image left in it. When you click on that you’re brought to that image’s page.
A cool new way of searching for images. Check it out here.
