Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Google, Bing, other search engines OpenSearch link missing?

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

When did that happen? In a demo that reminded me of days working in large software houses, I showed my brother-in-law how he could add Google to his IE9 search engine list by just going to Google's homepage and right-clicking the search engine drop-down list for the "Add Google Search..." ...

Spider.my simple mobile version

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1038" align="alignright" width="237" caption="Spider.my mobile search on my Nokia 6500 Classic"][/caption] Spider.my really wasn't working very well on any of our mobile phones (handphones as they're called in Malaysia), as the search had been using a terrible cross-domain javascript hack to fetch results from the back-end. A couple of things ...

OpenSearch – the best search feature with no browser support

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

[caption id="attachment_1000" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Suggestions in Firefox from the spider.my OpenSearch facility"][/caption] I've been working on spider.my for too long with no updates, so I've moved a recent version of the site online. I don't have enough spare resources for a separate development system, so it may occasionally appear to be ...

Maybank2u Agent M with Pidgin on Ubuntu

Monday, March 30th, 2009

[caption id="attachment_270" align="alignright" width="234" caption="Maybank2u Agent M"][/caption] The Malaysian web can be a frustrating experience if you're not using any Microsoft products. Maybank2u have an 'online banking buddy' to help their customers ask questions and avoid giving them answers. We were recently wondering about changing online merchant payment processors, and considered ...

Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm: Levenshtein with transpositions

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

I'm still working away slowly at Spider.my, and spotted a funny loop in the search suggestions: [caption id="attachment_117" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Search for Teusday - how about Thursday?"][/caption]The helpful hint is "maybe 'thursday' would get more results?". I'm using a simple Levenshtein distance algorithm to provide hints when only a few results ...