Search Engine Inanities 9/22

Not webcomics either! So we'll bury this in other posts to get it off the webcomics.com homepage.

Google wants to run a giant cable across the entire Pacific Ocean. This is not a joke.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the emoticon, Ask creates search pages for emoticons that display one single result which Ask wrote. You will be :-O to learn that ":-)" means a happy face. Look, I know search engines strip out the punctuation, so searching for :-) is impossible unless you change how the whole engine works. But if you got nothin', guys, don't act like you got somethin'. Okay?

Google has committed a crime against all humanity! The crime is... having a name that can be read upside down as a series of numbers, 319009. Which resemble someone's social security number if you use your imagination, and add four three more numbers. No, I am not making this up. But what's even crazier is that The Register actually thinks this lawsuit has a shot at succeeding? Sorry, guys, I know being British makes you superior, but Americans aren't that stupid.

World of Search 9/12

Polish man facing three years for Googlebombing, which is more of a civil rights issue than it sounds like.

Speaking of civil rights, how closely will Google watch Canada?

Whither Google Ads?

Over In Search Engines...

Some sad news: Steve Kirsch, founder of Infoseek, is facing a terminal disease, albeit with dignity.

On a lighter note, this panel of experts actually seems pretty enamored of Ask's approach to the whole search thing. They seem to be saying that Google's simple, just-ten-text-snippets approach is yesterday's news (and it's true that even Google's getting away from that a little, integrating their book scans and videos into their search results). According to them, Ask needs to experiment to set itself apart and it can do so without fear because it has so much less to lose than Google does-- and viewed in that light, its bizarre advertising and overhyped but distinctive "3D" model actually make sense.

I still think it's a crazy mad scientist. But these guys have convinced me it might be a crazy mad scientist with a CHANCE.

Webcomics News & Things 8/30-8/31

Congratulations to August J. Pollak, whose Some Guy With A Website is now featured on the Huffington Post. The HufPo is the fifth most popular blog on Earth according to Technorati.

Here's a contest that's actually respectable: "Pitch Your Game" from The Penny Arcade Expo.

More Wikiscanner fun: state governments discover their employees are filing paperwork on 8-Bit Theater.

Censored: This Opus installment. Newspaper editors continue ever vigilant for the next cartoon jihad, sort of the way Homeland Security keeps watching for the next kamikaze hijacker. (Lightning will strike twice ANY DAY NOW!) Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that this is not a portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed or even of a Muslim woman, but a moonbat trying on multiple identities, but whatever.

Comics installments: Uh oh. Okay, I'm just going to give up guessing where Brad Guigar is going with all this. Also from Brad: the best pun I've seen in ages. And I don't need to tell you why I like this one, do I?

My favorite comic of the day: Shaenon Garrity asks, "What if Edward Gorey drew Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles?" Apparently it would be AWESOME.

Miscellaneous: "KNEEL BEFORE BARGAINS..."

GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY

It's like Jeffrey Rowland is giving a seminar titled "How to Separate T Campbell From His Money." I haven't bought a merchandise shirt in over a year, but you better believe I'm buyin' this one. I was sold before I even knew it was for charity.

Other stuff from all over:

Penny and Aggie on a tablet PC, via Wowio.

I suppose congratulations are in order to Jorge Vega for winning the Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge, even if the headline "millions of votes received" looks pretty shabby if you know that "voters" were encouraged to "vote as many times as they liked." But Vega's Gunplay does have an interesting pitch and early fragments look promising. Some good may yet come of this. But Jorge, prepare to spend the next year being known as THAT GUY.

Stuff Sucks is ending somewhat awkwardly and abruptly as Liz Greenfield struggles with the slower connections in her new digs. I suppose the transition between this strip, where the lead resolves to stop jumping from relationship to relationship, to the most recent two, where he dives right into a new relationship, is appropriate to the character's aimless pattern. I suppose the fate of the record store is kind of funny. But it's a disappointing ending to a young-relationship strip that looked like it could have grown to give Questionable Content tough competition. I hope Greenfield refines her art a bit and comes back with a brand-new winner in a year or two.

The Paranormals webcomic helps kids learn to read.

A couple days ago, I suggested that nobody made that big a deal about webcomics anniversaries anymore. Then somebody made a huge deal about The Joy of Tech's 1000TH STRIP DING DING DING DING! The universe mocks me.

I've been meaning to link to this quote for a while: "Hello registered user! I am the semigod for this artificial pocket universe. Please select an option." The background of that panel is truly inspired.

Strips that are hilarious, but only if you know the series in question: example one, example two.

I thought this Wordpress plugin was pretty funny too.

Wait-- Sproose can't be "user-powered search!" Mahalo is already "human-powered search!" Unless... USERS ARE NOT HUMANS...

New webcomics magazine. Gisele and I have agreed to be interviewed for issue #2, so I'm totally biased, but it's by Michael Rouse-Deane, who's an old hand at this by now.

I wonder how many cartoonists might benefit from this quick how-to about image optimization for search engines?

Search Engine Inanities 8/28

Webcomics? You want the next post.

If this video series isn't Robert Scoble's Waterloo, it's certainly an error that will cost him dearly.

"Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years."

You can stare at that sentence as long as you want, and I promise it won't make any more sense than it does now. Techmeme is a tech blog, an underdog competitor to Gizmodo and Engadget, all of which serve a niche audience. Facebook, as a social network, is kicking the Google-owned Orkut's ass everywhere except Brazil, but Google's got a much bigger ass than Orkut, baby. Only Mahalo even pretends to be competing with Google, and its "human-powered search" has so many flaws I don't even know where to begin--

Oh, that's a lie: let's begin with "webcomics." No results at all except, um, Google's. Now let's move on to "comics." First search turns up no page for comics, but pages for Dark Horse, DC, Marvel and, rounding out the four... Sin City. Second search, conducted ten minutes later, turned up no results at all. If this is what's going to replace Google, I weep for our future. (And please don't tell me it's just a beta. If you call yourself a search engine and cannot deliver on "comics," it's time to give up and go home.)

For more informed Scoble refutations, I leave you in the hands of Danny Sullivan and Valleywag.

Search Engine Inanities 8/13

It tempts me. It haunts me. Every time I say to myself, "no, I'm definitely done with the search engine comic idea," more stuff like this shows up.

1. Thanks to Nicolas Juzda for pointing me to a better source on the black homepage vs. white homepage energy-efficiency debate. Apparently, the relative power consumption of a black Google homepage vs. a white one varies from monitor to monitor. But in all cases we're talking a difference of one-tenth of a watt, and I think that gain might be offset by the problems of making our most popular search engine virtually illegible.

2. Search engines have been rated on privacy. Ask.com got the highest marks. This was due largely to interview answers about its "AskEraser" feature, which doesn't actually exist yet. Hey, I'm "planning a launch" of a program that'll destroy the nation's social security database! Can I get a privacy award, News.com? Pretty please?

What makes this especially galling is that Ask has been waging a propaganda campaign against Google because oooooo Google collects informaaaaation about youuuuuuu! Now the once-revered CNET is drinking the Ask Kool-Aid. Ask, of course, loses nothing by not gathering user data, because almost nobody uses Ask. It doesn't really think it'll overtake Google or Yahoo, it just intends to carve out a minor market niche for itself by exploiting our paranoia.

3. Of course, it'd be a lot easier to trust Ask if its ads weren't designed by pod people. Via Search Engine Land:

TRUST THE ALGORITHM

Search Engine Inanities 8/10

May God strike me dead if I lie, people have actually argued over whether white homepages like Google's cause more global warming than black homepages. Apparently, the answer is no, it's the other way around. This is great news, because it means that 1) we will be spared lots of ugly white-on-black "envirofriendly" Web design and 2) THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL WARMING HAS FINALLY BEEN SOLVED YAY.

Update: Nic Juzda has pointed me to a more confusing but more accurate account of the black-vs-white debate. Bottom line, one way or another, we're talking about a difference so small that you could probably save more energy just by not thinking about it. Envirostupidity is color blind.

Sergey Brin, Billionaire Romantic

No pre-nup, even.

It's one of my great frustrated ambitions to do a story about the lives of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Last time I tried it, I got about thirty pages out of a hundred done. But I think I'm just going to have to wait until they're a lot older and history's verdict is in.

Also, via Heidi: ginormous guide to comic book podcasts.

And congratulations to webcartoonist Mitch Clem for his mention on PC World's "100 Blogs We Love." I found ABC News' version first, but they copied it over without keeping hyperlinks in the article. SERIOUSLY, ABC, GET WITH IT, GEEZ