Sep 10, 2010

Life's Too Short for Instant Search

GOOGLE has recently rolled out their very own instant search, branded Google Instant, for most signed-in users. The cool thing about it is that it can potentially save a lot of time for people all over the world. All this time adds up--every time a behemoth like Google shaves a few seconds off the time it takes people to use it, it's probably saving many years and millions of dollars of aggregated time and money the world over, thanks to the sheer number of people using it all the time.

Sounds nice, so I was pretty benign about the new technology, which shows you results while you type your search--until I saw that it insisted on showing me only 10 results at a time. No matter how many times I went to the preferences (Search settings on top right corner) and changed it back to 100 results, it always went back to 10.

So I turned it off (option available also in Search settings). In my opinion the instant search is not worth the trade-off of clicking through many pages of results, if I'm looking for something that's hard to find. I mean sure, Google is good, but it happens to me all the time that I have to do quite a bit of searching and sifting through the results before I find what I'm looking for.

Who knows, maybe in the future they'll improve it to the point that they'll be able to show a thousand instant results even before I've typed my search query. But until that happens, Instant Search stays off for me.

 

Mar 29, 2010

Blogging Sensitive Stuff, and Some Whining

I THINK I've blogged before about not wanting to post private,
personal stuff. But I've been lumping some other things as private
as well--things I've been doing recently that are pretty
interesting (to me at least), but I don't want to post here
because that might lead to some awkward questions. But if I were
to post them in a few months' time, it'd be fine.

So I've decided to start blogging those things, as much as I can,
and keeping them saved privately as drafts. If all goes well, I'll
be able to publish them when the time comes with just a couple of
clicks.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually looking forward to typing
out some of these things and keeping them somewhere; I'll be able
to go back and look at them any time and remind myself of what
I've spent my time on. It's too easy to let the days pass by in a
blur in the normal 9-to-5 work, home, work, course of things.

On another note, though, I'm really missing the convenience of
blogging through Windows Live Writer. Still can't believe there's
no equivalent on the Mac that matches it for features and price.
As it stands, I'm using my favourite
text editor
to type out the posts, log in to Blogger, and then
submit them.

So, an appeal to the internet: can someone please just write a
Windows Live Writer clone for the Mac? Thank you! :-)