Reaper-X » Internet

Testing Desktop Search Tools

Reaper-X — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:55:39 +0000

Yesterday I just tested 3 free Desktop Search Tools (freeware not free trial) in order to make things easier for me to search for specific words located on many text files on my hard drive. But just in case you didn’t know what Desktop Search means, here are some descriptions about it taken from Wikipedia

Desktop search is the name for the field of search tools which search the contents of a user’s own computer files, rather than searching the Internet. These tools are designed to find information on the user’s PC, including web browser histories, e-mail archives, text documents, sound files, images and video.

Desktop search engines build and maintain an index database to achieve reasonable performance when searching several gigabytes of data. Indexing usually takes place when the computer is idle and most search applications can be set to suspend it if a portable computer is running on batteries, in order to save power.

In other words Desktop Search Tools basically is just the same as your own search engine with the exception it’s used to index files stored on your computer. And the index can grow larger depending on how many files the Desktop Tools indexed

And I guess that’s enough for the introduction part, now here goes the test results (I know that probably some of you don’t like to read long texts so I’ll just put the plus and minus of each program) but first as a note, that this is based on my personal preference after doing some test with these Desktop Search tools

Google Desktop Search (GDS)

Download Link :

Tested Version: Google Desktop 5.7.0801.01629-en-pb

Plus:

Easy to set up, basically all you have to do is just install it and you just need to wait for it to index your files
Support Google product such as Gmail, so you can use it to search your Gmail inbox (you can guess the reason for that)
Support searching across computers (make sure to read the privacy notes)
Support searching Thunderbird by default (since I’m not using Outlook I can’t give you any info about this)
Support many files type
Support displaying files inside archive, and more (rar, zip, etc) with the correct plug-ins installed

Minus:

Takes a long time to index your computer for the initial indexing, because Google Desktop only start crawling your computer when your computer is in idle state only
No Force Indexing button to force indexing your computer even if it’s not in idle state
There’s no GUI to change the default index location, because you’ll need to edit it manually on Google Desktop registry settings

Special Notes:

If you’re using Google Desktop Enterprise which is bundled with Google Group Policy Templates (although you’ll need to import it manually) you can adjust most of the options from there (including some settings that is not previously can only be edited via registry) and you can also adjust it for current user only or for all users. Here’s a screenshot of how the Google Group Policy Settings look like

(Click at the image to see the full size)

Windows Desktop Search

Tested Version : Windows Desktop Search 3.01

Download Link:

Microsoft Windows Desktop Search

Plus:

User can force Indexing of files even if your computer is in use, that means fast indexing of your files
User can adjust the stored index location without the need to open the registry
Search results displayed on it’s own Window or within the deskbar
Support Microsoft Outlook by default without the need of additional plug-ins
Support Network Share
Automatically integrated into Windows Explorer without the need for plug-in but if you prefer the old search function you can always use the Default Search Companion
Configured to index many files by default and you can add desired file extension to be indexed easily within the GUI and adjust it so it’ll display the content automatically or just displaying it’s filename only

Minus:

The default indexed directory after installation is set to User Documents and Settings only so make sure to adjust it
It’s quite disturbing to replace the default windows search companion with the Windows desktop search that requires the folder to be indexed first
Lack Thunderbird support. It’d be better if they could support Thunderbird by default but I’m not sure whether they’ll support it. As a side note actually there’s support for Thunderbird with plug-in but since it’s still has some limitations I choose to skip it

Copernic Desktop Search

Tested Version: Copernic Desktop Search Home Edition 2.3

Download Link:

Copernic Desktop Search Home Edition

Plus:

Support many files type and if you need more you can add it so it’ll be indexed, in other words it can also act as your normal search function
Amazingly Fast Indexing and you can always force it to index your files even if your computer is not in idle state
Built-in support for Thunderbird, Outlook / Outlook Express and Eudora email client programs
Results displayed inside the program window and can also be displayed within the deskbar
You can adjust everything from the configuration window

Minus:

Most archive (other than zip) is still not supported. It’ll be great if they offer support for Rar and 7z file format by default
Program hang when quick viewing large file (tested on 60 MB SQL File) even if the maximum file size for content indexing is set to 10MB (default value) or 1MB

Conclusion

Although Windows Desktop Search and Copernic have many similarities, in the end I choose Copernic Desktop Search Home Edition for my desktop search tool because it offers the same features like the Windows Desktop Search Tools, but it’s much faster when it comes to crawling files stored on your hard drive, and I like the CDS interface better compared to WDS

But of course if you prefer to have them both installed (WDS and CDS or any other combination), because you want specific feature that is only available on that program, you can choose to install them both and configure one program to index specific area while let the other program do the rest, for example set Copernic Desktop Search to index your Mozilla Thunderbird email messages while at the same time let the Windows Desktop Search to index your other files

As for Google Desktop Search, since the crawling speed can’t be adjusted, I choose to uninstall it (I’ve tried searching around the web for this and still couldn’t find anything that can allow Google Desktop Search to index files even if your computer is not in idle state and have tried playing around with it’s registry setting without getting good result)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Search Engine, Software

Defensio Spam Filtering Solution

Reaper-X — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:30:28 +0000

Looking for a replacement to your current spam filtering system ? then i’d suggest you to try Defensio Spam Filtering Solution (free of course unless you get more than 50K comments per month)

Okay … i assume that you’ve installed another spam filtering system like Akismet, or Akismet in conjunction with Spam Karma that behave exactly like Defensio (a centralized spam filtering solution except for Spam Karma of course), so what’s the point to switch into another spam filtering solution if you ask me ?

The answer is easy, Defensio has better management interface so you can easily distinguish spam comments and innocent comments that is caught by your spam filtering solution, so you can restore those comment easily if there are innocent comments get caught by Defensio. And like most (if not everyone) knows that there are no spam filtering solution that gives you 100% accurate result (heck even GMail spam filtering mark message sent from WP mailing list as spam) so in the end it’s up to the users itself to mark the message manually, and in this case Defensio gives you a good user interface so you can manage your spam list

(you can sort by spaminess, post date or comment date)

But what if i already use another spam filtering solution that has good management interface (Spam Karma for example) ? well than the answer is depend on your decision, but if it’s for me … i prefer a centralized solution / remotely hosted solution that doesn’t take up any unnecessary server resources especially in this case

Other than that, Defensio also gives you two rss feeds (one for spam comment that get caught by Defensio, and the other one is for innocent comment) that you can check via your favorite rss reader … but since that is private, i can’t show you on how it look like

That’s all about their positive points, and now here comes their negative point :

I sometime get a small number (usually between 1 – 6) of comments in my moderation area that Defensio can’t process (most of them were spam), although i’m not sure on why this is happening but after reading their post i can assume that probably their server was down or something. But thanks God because of the process button … i can process all of them easily …
You’ll need to train it first (which is true especially on your very first day of using Defensio) in order to get optimal result … or at least that is based on my experience

And that’s it basically about their negative point, but as a side note, when i first activated their plugin i get an error message saying that Defensio can’t be activated because they use short open tags at one of the file, although this can be fixed easily but i’m not sure if casual users who use shared hosting and using strict php configuration (that is defined by their host) can fixed this (for most people first impression does matter) ;)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Webmaster Tools, Wordpress

Message from Google Adsense Optimization Team

Reaper-X — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:30:50 +0000

Okay so yesterday when i checked my adsense account, i just noticed that there’s a message on my adsense reports page … and to be honest, this is the first time ever i saw this message because previously it just left blank until yesterday (actually at first i thought that the Recent Message section on the reports page is just for decoration purpose only lol)

But the question is … what is the subject of the message actually that makes me interested on posting it ?

While here’s the actual message read :

Dear Publisher,

Here is your optimization report for the month of November. After an automatic review of your sites, we think you might be able to improve your monetization using the following tips:

You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site.
How can I fix this? Dismiss this tip.

We hope these tips are helpful, and encourage you to experiment using different layouts and formats—no two sites monetize the same way!

Sincerely,
Google Adsense

and here’s the screenshot :

Based from the above message, it seems that some of the url’s listed on my Google Adsense Competitive ad-filter might be able to improve my monthly earnings, and fortunately since there are only several urls listed on my competitive ad-filter page i can guess on which one to remove :D (beside i just put those url’s several days ago)

Anyhow … i’m really glad when i saw this message, because it really save my time from testing the competitive filter list :)

As a side note, i’m not the first publisher to receive this message because there are some other adsense publisher that receives this message as well … such as Dave Taylor from Askdavetaylor and Rusty Brick from SERoundTable

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google Adsense, Journal, Making Money

My Google Pagerank just dropped

Reaper-X — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:07:32 +0000

It seems that i didn’t pay enough attention at all to check the pagerank value of this site because i just noticed that this site PR (Google Pagerank) dropped from 5 to 4 today after reading various website that says their site Google Pagerank dropped, lol

Back then Google assigned a PR 5 to this site early this year in January 2007 when there was a Google Pagerank Export update going on, but it seems that this site no longer receive that PR 5 again since last month update (October 2007)

Based on what i’ve read on various web sites (such as Techcrunch and Andybeard), most of the sites that lose their pagerank usually caused by selling text link ads on their web site (via direct advertising or third party broker such as text link ads). But i’m 99% sure that this site doesn’t sell any link and all links placed on this site are genuine (back then i have 1 – 3 text link ads placed on some post but since i never earn money from it, i’ve removed it since looong time ago) and just in case you didn’t know a lot of them are complaining because of this issue, and probably because they think if they lose their pagerank they’ll lose their traffic too or my best guess is they complain that if their site pagerank dropped they can’t sell text link ads anymore because of their low pagerank value

So what might be the source of the problem that caused this site pagerank to be dropped ? the only thing i can guess is that most of the site that link to this site gets their pagerank value dropped by Google, because i never bought any link on another website, never sell links (except for once but that’s a loong time ago but i never make any money from it because i coulnd’t reach the minimum payout and that’s why i choose to removed it)

But does this site lose it’s traffic ? … Thanks God … the answer is no, in fact this site traffic for October 2007 increased by 150,183 in pageviews and also gets an increased in terms of returning visitors compared to previous month (September) ! and here’s a screenshot just in case you want to see it directly (using my Google Analytics account because Google analytics often give you the lowest results compared to other site tracking service, for example my wordpress.com stats tracking account, though there’re no big differences between it … because my wordpress.com account says this site receives 353,278 views for October 2007)

October 2007 Site Statistic :

So the question is … should you worry about your pagerank ? … the answer is of course depend on whether you are using your site pagerank to earn you some money by selling text link ads or not :) but of course if your site loses it’s traffic because of pagerank drop that’s another story, but i always believe that if you put your site visitors above anything else, eventually you’ll see the result of your hard work :)

At last just in case you didn’t know (based on what i saw that most people seems to forget about this because all they do is just blaming the recent Google Pagerank update / export) …

Actually pagerank value gets updated more often than you think before you can see the actual value / exported data in Google Toolbar (if you are using this) or in any other site that offers pagerank checking or various seo tools that is updated 3 months or probably more which mean the pagerank value you saw is different from the pagerank value that is stored in internal Google machines … just as Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) said :

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing).

0x87485B96 | Tags : Personal, Website

Baidu hijacking traffic from Major Search Engine ?

Reaper-X — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:11:31 +0000

I just read this yesterday (based on my local time of course), about an ISP in China automatically redirecting search query that goes into Google Blogsearch, Live.com and Yahoo into their own local search engine named Baidu.

According to comments posted at techcrunch, it seems that some people also experiencing the same redirect problem, while some other don’t … although this comment posted by Serge looks interesting :

I lived in China (Beijing) for quite awhile and hosted my own dedicated servers at China Netcom data center.

Here is the story with Baidu:

It has a partnership with both China Netcom and China Telecom to redirect all invalid (or blocked) dns entries to baidu. In practice that’s how Baidu gets all of its users. What you see is probably not the change that Baidu made but a recent blocking of Google Blogsearch in China – and yes, this affects the whole mainland China (since China Netcom covers north and educational networks, while Telecom covers the rest).

As a note, Danny Sullivan also wrote about this issue too

While i know that Baidu is the #1 search engine in China especially to those who loves searching for Warez / illegal stuff, but automatically redirecting people who pay for their internet access service into Baidu is just a dirty trick, because they just tricking their users especially to those who’s can be considered as newcomer to the internet world (read: those who didn’t know that major search engine like Google exists) thinking that Baidu is just the same as Google, Live.com and Yahoo Search

I think it’d be better for them to show a page telling that this site blocked as shown on below image for an example instead of using DNS Redirection at the ISP Level to prevent confusion for some people

yes,i live in hangzhou, and i found the same thing like this, when a visit google blog serch, i found it was baidu’s page. i thought my computer had something wrong, and i know the reason now.

0x87485B96 | Tags : Internet

4 Things to do after creating your first Website / Blog ever

Reaper-X — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:56:32 +0000

So you just finished registering your own domain name for the first time ever, and you got yourself a good web hosting company and already created / use some custom themes for your website. But you’re confused on what you should do next in order to get your website listed on various search engines and in the end you’ll get some nice traffic from those search engines ? or even better you could make money from it ?

1. Create / Write a useful content first

This step is the most important thing you should do first, because in order to get your site listed on various major search engines, you’ll need to create a useful content or two. Of course the best thing you could do is create a unique post that your site visitors think it could be useful for them

2. Avoid placing advertisement on your website

Most people think that they can make money directly right after they just created their first web site / blog ever which is wrong. Because when you just launched a new website, you’ll need to create a good impression to your site visitors, and ads are well known to drive visitors away from your new website (especially to those who dislike ads)

3. Ask for honest opinion about your web site from your friends

After finished with the above two steps, now you’ll need to ask some of your friends to visit your new web site and ask them for their honest opinion about your web site, and you’ll need to listen to their opinion carefully because they are going to be the first one who’s going to visit your web site and perhaps can also helps you to promote your web site

4. Make other site link to your web site

Back then getting other web site to link to your website can be considered as hard task, but now you don’t need to worry about that anymore and that’s all thanks to various social bookmarking web site that can be found easily on the web, such as Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg

Those social bookmarking website of course can bring an incredible amount of new visitors to your site especially if you can get your site listed on their frontpage (the worst case is your server might get overloaded because of the huge incoming visitors). But even though your site didn’t make it to the frontpage of those social bookmarking website, you’ll still get a backlink to your site, and that’s really help your site to get listed by major search engines

That’s it … and of course if you know some other good tips to those who are just creating new website, feel free to write it in the comment area below :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Guide, Website

Wordpress 2.3, tags, categories … and duplicate content

Reaper-X — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:19:48 +0000

I guess you’ve already heard about the new tags feature (basically it’s just the same as site categories) that is built into the core of Wordpress 2.3. But now if you’re wondering does the new tags function can really give you some benefit from Search Engine and your site visitors point of view ? The answer of course is depend on your site visitors itself and whether you care about duplicate content or not, so it’s up to you to decide it ;)

The first is all about tags / categories (since both of them offer the same view so i consider it to be exactly the same). Do you really think your site need to use tags if basically they just shows you the same content ?

Previously Google Webmaster Central published a great article about duplicate content issues and how to prevent it but in this case, here are the most important point you should take note :

Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

Understand your CMS: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.

If it’s for me, i’d rather choose to block it (the category page i mean, because i’m not interested on using tags on this site) … and of course that’s because i always believe that most people came to this site mostly from search engine, but what would happen if those visitors arrived at your categories page and couldn’t find matching article because search engine shows them the old description from your category page / tags page ? well … there are two possibility for this :

They’ll use the search function on your site
They’re going to leave your site by pressing the back button on their browser and continue with the next results

Though most people are going to choose the second option instead

Of course the above points does not applies to your site if you consider your site at the same level as Darren Rowse of Problogger (because you’ll always get many links to your post) just as Aaron Wall of Seobook said on how to get your blog out of Google’s supplemental result :

If you get strong editorial deep links from other bloggers that should also help search engines crawl that portion of your site better to make up for any information architecture related issues that may be causing certain portions of your blog to be inadequately crawled.

As a side note, according to this site Google Analytics for the previous month, this site only received a total of 265 Pageviews from only the Category view, while the total pageviews for the previous month reached 200.718 to be exact it’s 200.453 with the category view excluded … so if it’s for me i believe that most people who browse this site isn’t interested on looking at the category view page (although i’ve made it so it’ll looks like a tags page … and that’s all thanks to my big mistake i made when i still hosted at wordpress.com)

0x87485B96 | Tags : SEO

Why forcing user registration to view a single article on forum is bad …

Reaper-X — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:18:17 +0000

Did you know that forcing people to register on your forum just to see a single article on your forum is bad ? If you don’t know about that already, here are the top reasons on why you should make your forum available to search engine and at the same time also allow normal visitors to read some articles on your forum without registering first …

1. Most people are just lazy, and in the end you’ll risk losing potential returning site visitors

I’ve to admit that sometime i don’t really like when i have to register a username first just to check a forum, even for a big forum that has incredibly large userbase such as Webmasterworld, but in my case that’s because i just love to read without registering first (eventhough i have automatic web-form filler in place and ready to use) although that may change depending on the forum itself (if i see lots of friendly people there, of course i’ll join the discussion too) … and you know what ? most people also think that way

2. Say goodbye to search engine, and any search engine traffic

Eventually you’ll realize that your forum can’t be found anywhere in the search engine although you have some good content in your forum that is created by your regular visitors, and that’s all thanks to your decision to prevent search engine from visiting your forum by forcing user registration

3. Forget about monetization

Although making a forum can be considered as an easy task, but paying your monthly hosting bill and other bills can not be considered as an easy task, and that’s why you should monetize your site at least to pay your monthly hosting bill and your internet bill, but because you didn’t allow search engine to crawl your forum, you just missed another opportunity to monetize your forum. Simply because even though those visitors (read: lurkers) are just reading your forum without registering, your statistics still counts. And just in case you didn’t know, those statistics can be useful especially if you’re going to monetize your forum later

Now … the question is … are you going to force user registration after thinking about it carefully ?

0x87485B96 | Tags : Opinion, Website

Google slow to load …

Reaper-X — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:25:13 +0000

Just when i thought i’m the only person who’s experiencing this problem, someone create a new thread over at Digital Point forums saying that he’s also experiencing slow loading problem when accessing various Google services such as Adsense, GMail, Adwords or the Google Search itself

All the Google features such as GMail, Adwords, Adsense, and just plain old Google Search have been lagging a little more than usual for me. Google has something going on. I think soon Google will surprise us with a bunch of new features. Just be patient all you PR fanatics! Can you say algorythm update!

With the exception that i don’t think there’s PR Update going on … i just think that there’re some network issues somewhere. Other than that i also noticed a slow loading time when accessing my adsense account page or searching the web using Google although i don’t really have problem with the GMail or Adwords simply because i don’t use it (well i’m using Google hosted email and using POP3 to retrieve all emails)

I don’t know if it’s just me or does anyone else who visited this site also experience delay especially at the Javascript part which is comes from the Google CSE, but recently i’ve been thinking on moving the Javascript over to this site … but i’m not sure whether if it’s going to break Google rules or not (i know that this vps is nothing compared to the Google server, but it just bothering me because whenever i try to access this site, i always see some delay when loading the Google CSE Javascript code)

Forum Discussion over at DigitalPoint

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Journal, Personal

Chitika RPU … Rocks !!!

Reaper-X — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:11:45 +0000

Well … perhaps i’m a little bit overreacting over this Chitika RPU, but just in case you didn’t know that i’ve used Chitika code since last year and haven’t actually made any money from it (from that Chitika eMinimalls thing) and constantly removed and re-add the chitika code into this blog just for testing purpose or as cosmetic purpose since i don’t use too many images on my post

But … you know what ? ever since i got accepted into their RPU program which is still in beta stage currently and you’ll , i’ve seen an increase in my earnings from $0.00 – $0.02 (most of the time it usually stays around this area) into $2.00 – $4.00 which is not bad at all considering if i could make around $120 per month (unaudited and it could be lower after get audited, but let’s just hope that i could at least get $100 / month from it), i could pay my monthly hosting bill from Chitika only or even better i could move this site into a dedicated server from VPS (thought it’s still not necessary for me to move into dedicated hosting)

So what next ? are you interested on trying Chitika RPU too ? if you’re interested that’s great but unfortunately unlike the normal Chitika eMinimalls, your site needs to fulfill these requirements first in order to get accepted into their RPU program :

Be a current Chitika Publisher who has made at least $100 with us (i do not pass this requirement just as i said before because i haven’t made anything with them)
OR Have a site or blog that receives at least 50,000 page views a month (we use compete and alexa to determine this)

Since this site generates more than 100.000 pageviews per month, i’ve decided to contact the Chitika team directly and ask whether they can accept me into their RPU program … and ? thanks God i got accepted by them (and ooh don’t worry Chitika staff are friendly and also response quickly to your email, so you don’t need to worry about it)

So to those who’s previously running Chitika eMinimalls and haven’t tried Chitika RPU yet … i’d suggest you to do the same and try Chitika RPU on your site ;)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Income Sources, Internet, Making Money