soapbox

4 Responses to “Don’t pick on the morons, don’t pick on the morons…”

1. Holly Says:
   September 26th, 2009 at 3:02 am Using Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 on Mac OS X

   Heh. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve told a student, “Try googling it,” I’d be, well, about $100 richer. But still. I find it strange that sometimes it seems like they get all their answers from wikipedia rather than the course textbooks, and yet they can’t find any info on the obvious “just google it” topics.

2. Michael Says:
   September 27th, 2009 at 8:34 pm Using Safari 531.9 on Mac OS X

   (a) that’s some really weird spam, or was it legit mail?
   (b) speaking of Google, has anybody tried B1ng? I’m not spelling that word properly for fear of spam bots, but just thought I’d check. Apparently they have a (desperate) reward program where you get serious cash back (5+%) on items purchased from their search results – I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a potentially useful reward system.

3. Nathaniel Says:
   September 28th, 2009 at 12:33 am Using OmniWeb on Mac OS X

   Microsoft’s little search engine is what’s been killing dactyl for the last couple of days. They’re apparently trying to get it up and running with very recent info and the result is that their spider is hitting the web hard. Add the fact that they don’t follow the industry standard of having spiders/web crawlers/whatever follow the rules in robots.txt (they claim it has to be Robots.txt) and it’s kind of a nightmare for low-powered servers.

   Yeah, and it was legit email. From someone who is a full professor at Johns Hopkins in addition to having a position at STScI. He just sort of figured that having someone else spoon-feed him the information was OK given his status. (he has some odd other quirks too, like being VERY friendly with the African-American secretaries. Ms. Merkel, the president is here to rub your shoulders.)

4. Michael Says:
   September 29th, 2009 at 12:13 am Using Safari 531.9 on Mac OS X

   Here’s a month-old post on the ignoring-robots.txt problem:

   The good news is that Brett Yount says that they are already working on the problem although as of the moment it will be a good idea for everyone to start checking whether pages you want to stay hidden are being indexed by Bing or not. If you encounter the same problem there is no need to fill out a content removal request since, as Brett Yount says, it is a problem on Bing’s side. All you need to do is email Brett Yount at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line and send an explanation of your problem and any proof (if any) that MSNBot is indeed the one causing the problem. Note that even without any proof (if understood it correctly) they will still look into your problem, however, for expediency’s sake it would be better to provide them with helpful details such as clips of your log file.

   and here’s another with a bunch of links… http://www.jatinmahindra.com/2009/08/04/is-bing-ignoring-the-noarchive-tag/

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