Lately however I’ve been experimenting more with Bing and Yahoo. They seem to be the same. So much so that they have the same results for the search terms I’m using, in the same positions. Makes me wonder…

Anyway, on to my point. Bing, your search results are awful. I select ‘Results only from the UK’ and here’s a slice of what I get, for the search term ‘school signage‘:

• Position 10: they can’t even spell the word ‘signage’ properly (they spelt it ‘sinage’), yet you have them at position 10? They’re also position 21, apparently duplicating content, you allow that do you?
• Position 42: is a PDF file leading to an article. Surely when searching the web, I’m looking for websites?
• Position 63: Nothing to do with school signage.
• Position 72: Nothing to do with school signage.
• Position 82: Nothing to do with school signage. The title even says so!
• Position 95: Nothing to do with school signage.

Ok so this is the first 100 results out of 19,000. Admittedly no-one looks past the first three pages (if that!).

So my reasoning for this was because I was looking for the company I work for, GRS Sign Company, for their results under the same search term. Limiting this a little to ‘school signage lincolnshire‘, again on Bing, here goes:

• Position 12: Finally! We’re on there, but oddly not the GRS category for school signs, why is that Bing?
• Position 13: Lincolnshire tree services? Are you serious Bing? And again at position 20?
• Position 25, 26, 30: Council web pages?
• Position 29: A school?

Ok so why is this happening? Surely a simple search term like ‘school signage‘ should net me only those websites and webpages that deal with ‘school signage‘? Out of the 16,400 results above, the first 30 have at least 5 bogus (maybe bogus isn’t a good word, let’s say ‘inaccurate’) results…

I read that Bing (and Yahoo) both set their store by how many incoming links a website has, to grade and position them in results. How is that useful? That’s easily manipulatable by scammers, and companies as large as yours should know that. How easy would it be to create an innocent page on say, breakfast cereal, get hundreds if not thousands of incoming links, let it sit for a month or two, then swap the content out for mobile telephone offers, or worse, porn?

My family’s business chooses not to have outgoing and incoming links to competitors, or related businesses, because we want to stand alone on the product we produce. There is nothing wrong with that. Google seems to agree, our links are fairly high on their searches, but not on yours (and Yahoo’s).

Can someone please clarify a little? How can I structure the website to better gain rank on their search listings? It is well written HTML/CSS/PHP/JQuery, I try to follow all the rules, but because we don’t want to clutter our business pages with incoming links, we’re penalised?

E = mc²

As many documentaries tell us, as you approach the speed of light, you become heavier, until at the speed of light you are as heavy as the Universe. Thus, you cannot travel faster than light.

Except…

What about light itself? If this is the case, why aren’t photons unbelievably heavy?

The past few years have been an era of expanding hard drives (now you can get 3TB drives!), but the solid state drives, despite what we have heard, are going a bit slower. I mean, you can get a 1TB SSD but the price is a bit high (£1622).

I think I’ll wait.

Of course, I could wait for the flying cars they promised up forty years ago…

It doesn’t work.

A week or two ago I was called at 11am, 2pm, 7pm, and when I picked up, there was just static and a second or two later they hung up (I think it was a computer doing the calling).

Then the next day, again at 11am, 2pm and 7pm, some marketing company called me, asking me to participate in some questionaire. So clearly, the do not call list means nothing. Why do we bother having it, or funding it, if it doesn’t work as designed?

Also, when they call and I don’t answer, or I’m not in, the number that is recorded by 1471 is 00000 000 000 – isn’t that illegal in some fashion? The week before that I had a call from someone in the UK from an area code that was ‘reserved’ and not in use.

Not sure why it’s plastered across every news site in the world, because they’ve known this for years. Neutrinos are detected just before the light is detected from a supernova, thus are faster than light.

Anything else that their experiment indicates other than something we already know?

But… A week or so ago, I had a real nasty computer problem, the computer just went black and started to reboot, over and over. I took one of the drives out, it was dead in the water. Luckily I have one of those external docking stations. But regardless, I had to reinstall Win7 back on the good drive.

I was a bit puzzled about it, and when I plugged the second drive into the external station, Win7 said it was an ‘invalid drive’. I reformatted it and continued to use it, but in the docking station.

Today, I thought that I’d fix it permanently, and put the drive back into the computer. Using the same slot, the same SATA port, I booted the computer up, but Win7 didn’t think anything was there. Moving cables around, testing different things, I moved the SATA cable to another port on the motherboard and voila, it saw the drive, everything is fine.

So this great Republic of Gamers Maximus III Formula motherboard now has a wonky SATA port. Anyone come across this? I know I have six more ports, so it’s not a great issue, and I can live with it until I get a new computer put together in a year or so, but still, it’s strange and something I’ve never experienced before. Is this a common failure?

Btw, this isn’t overclocked. Chip (i7) wasn’t affected, nor was the memory.

He called tonight with dreadful news, his computer had been hit by a virus and there was a screen telling him to buy some software to clean, credit card number out please. I knew this would be something not easy to say, but I told him to shut it down and go find an expert in his area.

I knew I couldn’t tell him how to fix it on the phone, we’d still be on the phone hours later. He’d be getting more and more irate, and that wouldn’t be my problem! Much easier for him to find someone to fix it where he is, about 300 miles away.

Bloody malware…

Interesting to note, this only applies to the US. The FCC, despite what some Americans may think, only works inside the borders of the USA, the rest of the world could give a sh*t less. But what the US does, others eventually copy. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…

Also something to take note of today, Murdoch is getting closer to purchasing and controlling BSkyB. Is it right that our news is controlled by one person, shouldn’t there be plenty of competition to keep these barons honest? The EU seems to think it won’t affect competition; we’d better write to the Lancet, we’ve found a group of people that seem to have developed collective blindness all at the same time…

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