m-i-l

I've built (what I think is the first) open source search engine and search as a service for user-submitted websites: https://searchmysite.net/ This instance is focused on person…

I was surprised at how modern many of the themes in both Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air are, from (in Keep The Aspidistra Flying) the negative effects of commercialisation and mass a…

The old newspaper empires typically operated at the national level, rather than global level (even the Wolff/Reuters/Havas telegraph cartel operated within specific geographical boundaries).…

> There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from …

Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we b…

Bear in mind that there is a vast amount of clicking on "wasted" adverts, i.e. paid adverts which would have been the top result of an organic search anyway, e.g. eBay spending $20M a year o…

I'm sure there would still be plenty of advertising based search engines for them to advertise their content in. See also the high street vs library analogy - if you had great public libraries yo…

Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information? Putting it in pre-internet terms, it'd be like walking …

I reckon there's a surprisingly simple solution: build a search engine that penalises pages containing adverts. If a page is heavily manipulating SEO to get your attention, you can bet it is load…

The Google outage is one of the top BBC headlines now, so it has become mainstream news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55299779 "The outage started shortly before no…

One you might like if you haven't seen it already (it is from a couple of years back) is "The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company": https://news.ycombinato…

Not in this article, but in the BBC article[0]: "Both NHS workers have a history of serious allergies and carry adrenaline pens around with them." [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/n…

Looks promising. But how do we know you are doing your own indexing and not simply buying in the results from Google or Bing like pretty much all of the other search startups? And if you are doing you…

"Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet ... [but] Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped…

Would be interesting to see how the comments change colour over time. A while back, when I used to read and reply to a few comments on the topic, I reckoned there was a bit of a pattern to voting - no…

That's awful if true. I guess technically the headline is still correct if you're talking about a millionaire in Rupiah terms (but 1 million Rupiah is only about USD 70). So is the man who b…

Its still pretty new and I'm working on it in my spare time, but my side-project https://searchmysite.net/ seems pretty close to what the author is after: - "100% of the sof…

According to a comment on stackexchange.com[0] "the message was Printed on a Color Laser Printer and photographed (or scanned)... The 'hidden message' is a result of a previous print le…

> the loudest people tend to be the ones that desire/require the most validation from their peers I have a theory that IT is split into "doers", i.e. the people who do things, and …

> everyone wants to get rich by renting shop space to shovel sellers. That would entail having to own and maintain physical assets (assuming you mean physical shops rather than virtual shops). Is…

You can watch any film in ASCII with VLC and a video file[0]: vlc videofile.mp4 -V aa [0] https://wiki.videolan.org/Video_Output/ …

A basic listing for free, but a paid-for listing with additional benefits, e.g. greater control over indexing such as the ability to trigger a reindex on demand.

> "I would love to see Apple build a search engine just as a feature for their products rather than something to stuff to the gills with advertising and make money from. That would completely…

> "A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported." Not necessarily. Firstly, you might not wa…

Interesting. It seems the concerns are about restocking rather than poisoning, and the warning signs don't mention the risk of contamination, although it seems advisories are put out when there i…

Although you could argue that Russia was only able to remain in the war due to intelligence: Moscow didn't fall in Oct and Nov 1941 because of the arrival of reinforcements from the east, and tha…

Isn't there a risk of amnesic shellfish poisoning[0] in that area? Looking at the wikipedia page for domoic acid[1] Pismo Beach is even mentioned by name. Could that be part of the reason why the…

> "It started with the loss of religious faith in the 19th century and peaked in the late 1930s, a period of dislocating social change and mass bereavement following one war, with another see…

Corn is any cereal grain used for food, e.g. wheat, rye or even (in parts of Scotland) oats, not specifically maize (aka corn on the cob).