You know about using quotes to get an exact text string including spaces between words.
You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.
And there’s site: url
And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.
But there are tons of these things. You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.
A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com
One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected. Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them. You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras! And move them about!
Here’s a myspace blog entry where this guy lists many examples of this.
Here are some example google queries from the post.
In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user. The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats. Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser. We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff. Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way. But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.
Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.” Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.” I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup. So let’s do it!
Quotes from the Article I mentioned:
“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”
“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”
I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog. My response:
I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.
If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.
A weekly roundtable discussion about the DataPortability Project in specific, and efforts involved in data portability in general. The show is produced and hosted by J. Trent Adams and Steve Greenberg.
I recommend Episode 7
QUOTE:
We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.
We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.
The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.
Danny regularly posts on the following sites:
- Talis: N2 Blog
- Talis: Nodalities Blog
- This Week’s Semantic Web
- DannyAyers.com
- DataPortability & Me Video
Also mentioned in the episode:
- Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
- Talis: Semantic Platform
- Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
- Tabulator data browser
Planet RDF
Yahoo! is working on a Semantic Search platform. That’s all I know. I suspect that it will be cool.
HERE’s an interview Paul Miller did with Peter Mika from Yahoo Research for the Talking With Talis Podcast.
(Lately I’m realizing that good companies and orgs have watchlists so a post like this one serves as an open letter to the company, unless of course, they’re not listening, which of course is their problem, a big problem.)
I love that you’re providing all of these stimulating and informative videos. Thank you for that.
But why did I just spend five minutes clicking around on ted.com, looking for a “Podcast” or “RSS” link?
I was thinking “C’mon! You MUST have a feed here somewhere!!”
Finally I decided to search the iTunes Music Store for TED… There it is! WTF? Why are you hiding your feed?
I’m so glad I found it. But you need to put a link somewhere on your site so people don’t waste their time looking for what’s not there.
Please?
-Andrew
Lately I get about 100 organic hits to my blog per day, which isn’t bad considering…
Yesterday I posted an ad on craigslist (Free Stuff in the North Bay/Marin Area) in response to an item being offered for free and I included a link in the ad linking to the rant I posted here about it (the painting I wanted). In the first half hour or so I got around 100 hits from craigslist! And it keeps coming…
If I was a spammer, which I’m not, I’d seriously consider trying to leverage craigslist’s community and traffic.
Web Pyramid Schemes, “Gifting Programs,” “Phil In New Mexico”
If you’re reading this, and you found this page via a google search, I think it may be prudent for you to go read this wikipedia entry on Pyramid Schemes.
The other day I glanced at the gigs section of the local CraigsList, and saw an ad titled
“Internet Marketing, One Person is All I’m Looking For”
the copy of the ad was like this:
This is a gifting program. If you would like proof from me, I can show you proof of the program’s longevity and seriousness, and, if you like, its legality.
For your marketing efforts, for every visitor who signs up I will pay you 20% of the relevant price point. Price points start at $500, to $10,000 max.
Thanks very much for your interest.
2informew@earthlink.netReferences or proof of work required, please.
I wrote to 2informew@earthlink.net which was included in the craigslist post and asked what it was they are looking for help with, since I’m pretty hip to Web Marketing.
Phil Blumberg aka “Phil in New Mexico” responded:
Hello Andrew–
I need to drive as much traffic as possible to the gifting site.
You can go to the splash page (without signing up) the URL is www.overnightcashexplosion.com/3/PB59736
You can go directly to the main site the URL is www.overnightcashexplosion.com/PB59736/tour.asp/
It would be great if you get a chance to read the text or most of the text on the 2nd site.
Each visitor who joins decides what level to come in on: $500, $1000, $2500, $5000, or $10,000. Whatever the newly signed-up’s level, you would get 20% of that amount.
So check it out. I really look forward to your responses.Sincerely,
Phil in New Mexico
2informew@earthlink.net
philinnewmexico@earthlink.net
ME: So… Where does the other 80% go? And what do people get for signing up? I mean what is their incentive?
PHIL: The websites are mine because I’ve already joined the program. The 80% is mine for the same reason, and because I’m choosing to spend money to market the site. The people I bring in pay me directly; those people will bring in people of their own who pay them directly. When you can, check out the main site. Thanks–Phil
I googled the email address and found some really ugly websites and other craigslist ads, all seeming to be for the sake of promoting this “system” for generating money. Notably, SimpleGiftCash.com and FreeLunchRoom.com. Go take a look! They’re fun!
To me this looked like a Pyramid scheme. But rather than ask Phil if he realizes that pyramid schemes are illegal, I thought I’d try to get some more information:
ME: Has it worked for you? How much have you made from the program so far?
So far, he hasn’t written back.
This got me thinking. If I can take advantage of people who are naive, and I can get them to send me $500, in the hope of getting rich themselves, should I do it?
I think not. I generally have problems putting value on knowledge. I generally have problems operating in a capitalist scenario, where scarcity is so important. I generally really want to help people and it’s impossible to put a monetary value on empathy. I certainly don’t want to take advantage of people. I hate this kind of thing. It makes me sick.
On a lighter note, here’s some really fun images:
Want that watch? I bet you do.
I can’t believe this is still going on. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to these jerks to do this, as they continually cash in on the occasional newb?
I won a free laptop? Really?
This one was compelling to me, thus the few minutes I decided to waste posting this.
I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you want to call this thing) is being infiltrated by Robot Blogs. What they appear to be doing is crawling the web and scraping excerpts of blog posts and reposting the excerpts, linking back to where it came from. They usually say:
“[KeyWord] wrote an interesting post today”
Since they link back to the blog post they scraped, they show up as a trackback in the comments area of the original post. This way, the unsuspecting blogger is linking to the fake blog. The fake blogs seem to be set up in an attempt at monetizing traffic via adsense ads.
I googled the phrase “wrote an interesting post today” and the top hit was (I probably am the top hit now) some blogger talking about filtering any comment that contains the phrase “wrote an interesting post today.”
I had decided to change my little tagline thingy to this exact phrase as a sort of inside joke for bloggers, but found myself wondering if being associated with that phrase will adversely effect my findability. Perhaps Search Engines or Spam Filters will begin to look out for that phrase?
Already, I bet there are tons of bloggers who filter out comments containing words like “viagra” or “casino,” assuming that there is absolutely no context in which these words could be used in a legitimate discussion. The fact that I am using those words here is proof that there is such a thing as a legitimate discussion which contains them.
Filtering for a word or phrase seems to me to be a slippery slope, especially if we’re talking about Search Engines, since they act as our main interface to the Web.
Google: Please don’t hate me because I said Viagra. I’m not a spammer.
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