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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

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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

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

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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

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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

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While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008.  When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run.  I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.”

At first I thought that this might be due to some permissions shenanigans revolving around my AD/OD setup, since the logged in user was not a local admin, but had been granted administrator privileges through a nested group trick.

After more searching I ran across a post on the forums MacRumors.com pointing out problems when running updates on an Office 2008 install that had been altered by using Monolingual or XSlimmer.

Both of these programs were developed to slim down the sizes of binary applications on OS X.  Monolingual strips the “additional languages” from OS X programs and operating system files, while XSlimmer is designed to remove both the extra language information and the unused binary code in a fat binary.  I have never used either of these programs, since I was not concerned about the amount of disk space they utilize.

After more searching, I ran across a post in the Entourage Help Pages discussing troubleshooting Office 2008 installations.  While this page also mentioned issues with installations being altered by Monolingual and XSlimmer, it also pointed out an issue with a workaround created to handle a bug in how Safari deals with the docx file extension.  While the automator workflow mentioned does not appear to actually affect anything other than the names of files, it did jog my memory about something else Safari related that occured when installing Adobe CS 4 earlier the same day.

While installing CS 4 and the available updates, I was prompted to not only quit Safari, but also to quit XMarks for Safari.  For those that don’t know, XMarks is a great service for synchronizing your browser bookmarks between multiple machines, platforms, and browsers.

On a hunch I quit XMarks for Safari, as well as the browser itself.  No dice, I still got the error.  Knowing how easy it would be to reinstall the helper application, I uninstalled XMarks.  Eureka!  The Office updaters now ran without a hitch.  So, if you are having this problem, try deactivating or removing anything plugins that effect the default nature of Safari.

Apple, Mac OS X, Software

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Up to this point most of the client customization I have talked about for Adobe Contribute involved changes that affected only the user interface. Outside of the custom plugin, none of them had any real effect on the usefulness of the client itself.

This customization is different, and like the addition of the Dublin Core plugin, it can have usefulness even if you are only using the Contribute client itself without the need to deploy it to multiple users in any enterprise situation.

When you create a table in Contribute, you can always setup the style of the table in the normal way by selecting the various rows, columns and cells and changing the backgrounds, font colors, etc. However, this process can be quite tedious when styling a large table, so in order to make this process easier Contribute has a Format Table feature that allows you to apply a pre-set or customized style to the entire table. This dramatically speeds the process up, but if you continually apply the same custom style to tables on your site you might like to add this to the list of pre-set table formats.

In order to do this you need to edit the file tableFormats.js. This file contains the individual table formats listed in the Format Table dialog and can be found here:

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Commands

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Commands

There are two main sections of formats defined in this file:

• Alternating Rows – table formats where each row has a different background color; may also have a different color for the header row.
• Non-alternating Rows – table formats where each row has the same background color; may also have a different color for the header row.

Instructions for the creation of new formats are contained as comments in the javascript file, however there are a few things that are not mentioned:

1. You should define a new variable in the Localized Globals section for you new table format; this is used in the Formats array when building the dialog box.
2. The values for topRowTextStyle and topRowColor control the look of the header row. If you set these to the null values then this row will match the look set for the variables firstRowColor and will be assigned no special text attributes.
3. While the supplied formats only show the rowLimit variable set to either 0, 1, or 2 to indicate the number of rows set to each color on an alternating row design, you can actually use larger numbers if desired.

As an example, here is the format used for the table on the Valdosta State University Calendars page:
//VSU Colors Formats[++i] = new Array(); Formats[i].name=alt_vsu; Formats[i].firstRowColor="#CCCCCC"; Formats[i].secondRowColor="#FFFFFF"; Formats[i].topRowTextStyle=BOLD; Formats[i].topRowAlign="center"; Formats[i].topRowColor="#C80F0A"; Formats[i].topRowTextColor="#FFFFFF"; Formats[i].leftColTextStyle=BOLD; Formats[i].leftColAlign=""; Formats[i].border="2"; Formats[i].rowLimit="1";

Adobe Contribute, Software

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In my last post about customizing the Contribute Client I talked about customizing the Welcome Page.

Well, if you recall, I mentioned that the Welcome Page is built on the fly from a Dreamweaver template. More than just this one page is built this way. Each of the special, dynamic pages are built in this fashion. Below I will list the file locations for the various dynamic pages that you can alter.

Draft Console

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/DraftConsole

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\DraftConsole

Placeholder

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/Placeholder

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\Placeholder

External Edit

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/ExtEdit

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\ExtEdit

Adobe Contribute, Software

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In this article I will briefly discuss the customization of the Task Panel.

On the Welcome Page, in the bottom left is a nice section entitled How Do I… that contains handy information on how to accomplish a whole slew of tasks in Contribute.

What I found during my research into customizing the client is that this section of the page is controlled by the contents on an XML file. Each of the categories and their items can be changed to suit the needs of your deployment and your users.

The files for the Task Panel are located here:

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/Tasks

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\Tasks

The XML and CSS files controlling the Task Panel and it’s contents are

• Tasks.css
• Tasks.xml
• TasksLayout.xml

The TasksLayout.xml file contains the table structure definitions of the Task Panel, since like many other components of the Contribute client, this section is controlled and populated using HTML.

The Tasks.xml file contains the actual text of the category structure. Each category is defined with a unique ID number and each task is defined within that category node along with an ID number and associated HTML file containing the content of the task. Each of the ID numbers are sequential.

The HTML files are named sequentially by default, but this doesn’t appear to be necessary in order to make everything work properly.

If any of your custom tasks have images associated with them, they need to be placed in the images directory so that they will be found. The images need to be referenced with the source relative to the location of the associated task HTML file.

Adobe Contribute, Software

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I just got finished reading Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin.  In it there was this great conversation about the firing of Ross Levinshohn by Peter Chernin, the soon-to-be former COO of News Corps.  Here it is: “You’re not happy, are you?” Chernin said. “No, I’m not,” Levinsohn agreed. “This isn’t working out, is it?” Chernin said.

“No, it’s not,” […]

Miscellaneous

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As some of you might have noticed, I have just recently moved my WordPress installation into a subdirectory of arfore.com. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that I would like for my blog to become a component of my website rather than the blog being the entire site.

Moving the WordPress installation itself […]

arfore.com

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