Month: December 2009

For those of you who are into browser plugins, you may have run across a plugin called Inquisitor.  According to the website, Inquisitor:

speeds up your searches like no other

While this may be true after several searches I determined that I wanted to go back to using the default Safari search plugin features instead.  Unlike the XMarks plugin, the Inquisitor plugin doesn’t come with an uninstallation script.  The Inquisitor FAQ lists the following instructions on removing the plugin for Safari on Mac OS X:

• Navigate to your hard drive device
• Select the “Library” folder
• Select “InputManager” folder
• Delete the “Inquisitor” folder
• Restart Safari

My experience with this was not quite as nice as the FAQ would lead you to believe.  The main issue was that I had to actually logout of my user session before the bundle was released and could be emptied from the trash.

The second issue I had with the instructions was that they are incomplete.

Like many software developers on the Mac, David Watanabe, did not provide a complete uninstaller for the plugin, he just told you to go delete a few files.  I find this a very poor practice when writing software.  If you installer writes files and preferences to particular locations, then you should provide an uninstallation routine that removes those files.

After some searching, here is a list of the files that you need to remove in order to completely expunge Inquisitor from your system:

• /Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor/
• /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Inquisitor/
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitor.pkg
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitorPreflight.pkg

However, since this is a plugin for Safari that gives you options to configure, you should also take the time to remove the entries added to the Safari plist file.  The plist is named com.apple.Safari.plist and is stored in the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ directory.

Here are the entries to remove from the plist file:

• kInquisitorAutocomplete
• kInquisitorBeaconEnabled
• kInquisitorNumberOfResults
• kInquisitorNumberOfSuggestions
• kInquisitorOrdering
• kInquisitorRepairDefaultShortcuts
• kInquisitorSearchHistory
• kInquisitorSearchSitesA
• kInquisitorSearchSource
• kInquisitorShowSearchViewA
• kInquisitorVersionCheck

Computers, Mac OS X

• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Technorati

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

One Response to “Uninstalling Inquisitor”

Leave Comment

In the old days of the Internet search engine business you had a vast multitude of places to visit. There was Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and many others. You had the search engine aggregators, such as Dogpile and HotBot.

What you didn’t have was a single source to use to search the whole of the web. When Google came along they created a way to analyze the relationships between pages to produce more useful results. The search results were no longer just a mishmash based on how many times a word existed in a page, now the results had a certain relevancy.

Then Google added advertising into the mix, providing users with a way to find products or vendors that had some correlation with the keywords entered. This was a great tool for the layperson and researcher alike. Along the way Google has added shopping results, images, news, videos, and maps. However they seem to have forgotten their core product: a clean, easy-to-use, clutter-free search engine.

The latest improvements, if you can call them that, are the inclusion of web history and “real-time” results. In addition they have added the shopping, news, and related searches to the main content of the search results.

While I was initially disturbed by the addition of Google’s sponsored links, ad-words and ad-sense programs, I know that they are a for-profit company. They have a need to sell a product of some sort in order to continue to provide me with the search results that I know and love. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten why most of us came to Google in the first place: pure, unadulterated search results. We wanted to find things, and Google became the best tool to help us accomplish this task.

Now some people may find it immensely satisfying to see a stream-of-consciousness included in the results. In the blogpost Relevance meets the real-time web, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow (and according to the New York Times, the master Google’s ranking algorithm), introduced us to a new feature that “bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.” The post goes on to say that “Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.” There is are two embedded YouTube videos that give you an example or two of the end product as well as fanfare from the Search Event presentation from the Computer History Museum.

At the end of the post is the following statement

As we’ve written before, search is still an unsolved problem and we’re committed to making it faster and easier for people to access a greater diversity of information, delivered in real-time, from across the web. I’m tremendously excited about these significant new real-time search features.

The problem with the above statement is that with each successive “improvement” Google has moved further and further from the core product that brought most of us to their door step. Don’t misunderstand me, I love information and being connected. I have accounts on Google Voice, Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking and informational services. I have an iPhone that I constantly check. I watch CNN, read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I have several e-mail accounts and I check them all with regularity. I even work in the Information Technology Division at a Valdosta State Unviersity. I am not some luddite who is afraid that technology is going to be the utter ruination of our civilized society.

What I don’t like is that for some reason all of the new “features” have found their way into the clean, pristine waters that I used to love to drink from with each and every search. Now the results are polluted with a non-stop flow of Twitter and Facebook results, their clear surface marred with jarring image, news and shopping results content.

There is a reason that the links exist at the top of the Google page. If you want images, news or shopping, then click on those links. Why do I need to have predictive text attempt to steer me into popular areas of search terms when typing in the desired keywords to summon to me the knowledge that I seek? Is there a place for all of these features? Sure, but at least give us a way to turn them all off.

When I want to search for images, I click the images link. When I want shopping choices, I click the shopping link. When I want Twitter, I will check TweetDeck for the things that I follow. When I want news, I will surf CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or even possibly Fox News.

When I want clear, clean search results, I use Google’s search engine, and make no mistake, that is all I want from the search engine. Don’t force me to try and use other services that provide inferior results, just give me the option to turn all the extras off.

Please, I beg of you: give me back my search!

• Moving into the cloud (0)

Technology

• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Technorati

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

4 Responses to “Google breaks the best search engine in town”

Leave Comment

Lately I have noticed that when browsing the web my external hard drive would spin up when there seemed no need.  I had just given into the mysterious and not concerned myself with this until yesterday.

After a few searches, I turned up a post on Apple’s discussion boards entitled Safari pauses & spins up ext HDs with ATS Autoactivation errors.  While I have not found the errors in my logs refered to by the OP, I have noticed the exact same symptoms.

Using the symptoms and discoveries by W. Raideer and strangebirds as a guideline, I found a solution to the issue.  While this may in fact be a bug, it turns out that if you disable Spotlight on the external drive this activity ceases, at least in my case.

To quote the Help documentation for Font Book on the Automatic Activation feature:

Note that if you turn off Spotlight searching for any folder or disk connected to your computer, Font Book can’t find and enable fonts in those locations.

After listing my external drive in the Spotlight preference pane section labeled Privacy, I have ceased to have this particular issue.  While this may not be advisable or desirable, depending on the content of the external drive, I have noticed no detrimental effect by disabling Spotlight on the drive.

Apple, Mac OS X

• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Technorati

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Leave Comment

I noticed something today in the new iTunes Store interface.  When you hover over a song in the store you are presented with a nifty play icon that replaces the track number in the album listing.  This is quite similar to the iTunes Store interface functionality on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.  Clicking on the play icon or double-clicking on the song title starts the 30-sec preview of the track.

Just like the iPhone version, the new iTunes Store desktop interface then displays a round blue icon with the ubiquitous stop square with the progress of the 30-sec preview rotating in a contrasting blue color.

Clicking on the stop square does not always stop the playback of the preview.  What should happen when you click on the stop icon is that the preview ceases to play and the icon goes away to be replaced once again by the track number.  On some albums in the store this function works.  On other albums it does revert back to the track number, however the preview continues to play until it finishes or until you hit the pause button in the iTunes window.  Also when you let the preview play out to the end, the stop icon does not disappear either, to release the icon you must click the stop button even though the preview has completed.

This definitely seems like a bug in the interface.  I have confirmed this in both the Mac OS X and Windows versions of iTunes 9 running on Snow Leopard and Windows Vista, respectively.

Apple, iTunes

• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Technorati

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Leave Comment