The Core

OK, the title is a bit misleading... my front room now sports a Sony VPL-HW20 projector (onto 100 inch screen) - it's amazing for movies and is hooked up to a silent PC for lazy surfing.

Onto real monitors, when will they go beyond 2560*1600? I'm stuck at 2048*1200 currently as I'm waiting for larger before I upgrade (and using multiple monitors is less appealing - tried it but does not suit me, probably need to give it more time).

I really question my hazard awareness at times...

Just did some recycling, part of which is flattening cardboard - a particularly tough item which needed to be folded too made me do the following:

Fold item as far as it goes by hand
Place item across thighs to give some purchase
Punch item very, very hard to flatten
Fold over in agony as punch makes it all the way to a rather sensitive part (parts) of my anatomy.

Why I didn't just stand on it I don't know!

At least I can laugh at myself.

Got a new external drive today, chose eSATA after seeing that USB3 doesn't handle lots of small files as well as it does large transfers.

(bear in mind both ends are commodity mechanical drives rather than SSD's) A copy of 486GB (63,000 items) is happily progressing at 100MB/sec - makes regular local back-ups a painless process.

I'm sure that could be improved dramatically (say using raid on both ends and 6Gbit SATA) but for simple drive to drive connections eSATA is ideal.

There seems to be a fair amount of discontent building about the quality of search results on Google; so, given the huge task that general search is, what alternatives do you see as worth exploring for any competitor to Google?

I'd take an approach that isn't as commercial as Google, by lowering the commercial expectations it frees you to make choices that favour the results rather than the bottom line. An extreme way to do this would be to drop advertising completely - the best set of results for any query should surely not have adverts in it.

So a question from me, how would you monetise a search engine that did not show any adverts?

On the ranking side, it must surely mean that sites are whitelisted and blacklisted based on some form of human judgement in addition to automatic factors - how would you do te manual scoring? (big potential problems there)

Of course, if you move away from covering all searches you can adopt different ideas more easily. An idea I'm toying with for verticals I run is to show everyone, and automatically collect data about each company from their website (if they have one) but should a company wish to control what shows on their listing, they would have to pay a small fee (by ticking what services they do and don't offer as well as places they cover). I'm thinking that the fee should be trivial and a yearly "subscription" which does not alter their position for searches.