Sunday 29 March 2009

Oops Earth Hour - Damn Annoying Google

So who remembered ‘Earth Hour’ last night, we forgot but strangely about 8:45pm I happened to turn off the lights and left them off for the rest of the night. It was this morning reading the paper that I realised that we part of ‘Earth Hour’ by default. Woohoo a little green without effort (or thought)! It’s not hard to be a little greener by switching off electrical devices, lights etc, however I still find it hard to switch off the computer when I’m not using it, guess I just like the convenience of it being on so I can check my mail, read the news and generally just for searching or checking things out.

Speaking of searching I’m looking for a good search engine, Google just frustrates me these days with its relatively useless security feature that I assume is to stop ‘bot’ searches. I regularly get this damn security page asking me to enter the character shown in the blurry box and I usually find that I’m not sure what one of the character are, so I type zero instead of o, or I instead of l so the damn security pages shows its ugly face again. I guess Google going to join my list of discarded search engines, some of which have disappeared without a sign, some still linger in murkiness that we know as the net. AltaVista is still around but I believe Yahoo owns it now, Wombat’s still around if you like the Aussie thing. As for Gopher from my Minnesota days, I’m not sure. There is a Gopher search engine but it doesn’t seem to be the true ‘Gopher’. And there was Inktomi, but I really just liked this one because of its name and connection to Native American mythology (most commonly spelt as Iktomi in relation to mythology). I vaguely remember some search sites from my undergrad day, ‘Dog Pile’ and ‘Ferret’ pop to mind and again I think I just liked the names.

Oh who should I use for my internet searches, out with Google in with ???. Maybe I’ll try this new look Gopher or search out the new site, unless they all appear to be a dog pile, then maybe I just use dog pile. It’s a shame dog pile isn’t where Google is, it would much funnier to say ‘dog pile it’ then ‘Google it’.