A loveletter to Google <3
I think it was about seven years ago that the lecturer of my computing elective at uni introduced me to the wonders of Google. I still remember the very first search I ran, hahahaahah - I'd been hunting for the website of the French Green party on AltaVista, with no success, and he told me to try a site I'd never heard of (he had to spell it for me): www.google.com. I didn't know which button to hit, so I pressed 'I feel lucky' - and the page it showed was the very one I'd been searching for fruitlessly. And at that moment I fell in love.
Over the years, Google has come up with ever more awesome services that I love - I can no longer imagine life without Gmail or Google Docs, for instance. But the search engine has always been the most useful of all - I use it constantly at work, run probably hundreds of searches on the average day.
Anyway, today I stumbled across something which is going to revolutionise the way I search:
Google Custom Search Engine.
You can build your own Google: tell it which sites to search/prioritise and which to exclude. You can label the sites you enter, then search only sites with that label. Imagine a world with no more junk results, a world where the sites you trust and prefer appear at the top of your results. A world where you can narrow down searches not just to a single site, but using any criteria you wish.
There are no words for how much love I have for this. It's like some kind of utopian vision of search, something so perfect it never even occurred to me to wish for it. I am so gleeful I may cry. I was meant to be writing this evening, but clearly instead I am going to be building custom search engines. One for work first, I think. And then one for Supernatural. And then... oh, the possibilities are endless. OMG, Google, never leave me. <333
My great geeky Google glee aside, all is well here. How are you, my dears? Speaking of which, a few people seem to have friended me recently. *waves* Hello, hello! Feel free to friend and defriend at will, I don't take offence at that kind of thing. If you'd like me to friend you back, your best plan is probably to comment and introduce yourself - otherwise I have to spend ages working up the nerve to ask whether you'd mind, if it looks from your LJ like we have things in common. Or if you're just here for the fic, that's cool too, though I should warn you I'm rather unreliable in that respect - I'm in a writing phase at the moment, but before that I went almost a year without posting anything. Anyway, hi! :)
Over the years, Google has come up with ever more awesome services that I love - I can no longer imagine life without Gmail or Google Docs, for instance. But the search engine has always been the most useful of all - I use it constantly at work, run probably hundreds of searches on the average day.
Anyway, today I stumbled across something which is going to revolutionise the way I search:
Google Custom Search Engine.
You can build your own Google: tell it which sites to search/prioritise and which to exclude. You can label the sites you enter, then search only sites with that label. Imagine a world with no more junk results, a world where the sites you trust and prefer appear at the top of your results. A world where you can narrow down searches not just to a single site, but using any criteria you wish.
There are no words for how much love I have for this. It's like some kind of utopian vision of search, something so perfect it never even occurred to me to wish for it. I am so gleeful I may cry. I was meant to be writing this evening, but clearly instead I am going to be building custom search engines. One for work first, I think. And then one for Supernatural. And then... oh, the possibilities are endless. OMG, Google, never leave me. <333
My great geeky Google glee aside, all is well here. How are you, my dears? Speaking of which, a few people seem to have friended me recently. *waves* Hello, hello! Feel free to friend and defriend at will, I don't take offence at that kind of thing. If you'd like me to friend you back, your best plan is probably to comment and introduce yourself - otherwise I have to spend ages working up the nerve to ask whether you'd mind, if it looks from your LJ like we have things in common. Or if you're just here for the fic, that's cool too, though I should warn you I'm rather unreliable in that respect - I'm in a writing phase at the moment, but before that I went almost a year without posting anything. Anyway, hi! :)