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Update on Deep Purple’s visit to Cyprus

Firstly, I wanted to let everyone know that I am planning to go to the concert. I’ll be ticket hunting during the coming week. Anyone else wants to go?

Secondly, I noticed a strange thing with Google. My blog comes out as the top first result for the query “deep purple cyprus“. I’ve seconded even the official Deep Purple website. Does anyone know how can I make any money out of it? Just kidding. No, actually, I am serious.

Thirdly, some humor regarding the upcoming concert. I’ve heard a few guys talking the other day:

Someone: Are you planning to go to the concert?

Someone else: I’d go only on one condition – that they won’t play “Smoke on the water”. I’ve heard it way too many times and I don’t want to hear it again.

Someone else else: I must be kidding me. They would be killed and tortured by the crowd in so many different creative ways if they won’t play “Smoke on the water”… I’m sure even they know it and they won’t risk it.

Yet another someone else: I’m sure half of that crowd would pay twice the price of the ticket to just hear “Smoke on the water” a couple of times and nothing else. All they want is to hear it from the original source for once.

That second guy: Oh, well. Tough luck than.

Xtra-Google

Xtra-Google – The Best of Google on one searchable page.

Xtra-Google is a page with all Google services on the same page. Enter your query in the search box and click on the appropriate service’ button. Optionally, you can have your search results displayed in a new window. This page is a great choice for a start page of your browser.

Engines for Mozilla Firefox search bar

Most of you probably already know this, but I have just found out myself, so I’ll share just in case some of you missed it too…

Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox have a feature called a search bar. It is usually located to the right of the address bar. By default, this search bar is configured to use Google. That is, instead of going to Google, you can just type your query in that search bar, hit Enter and you will get the search results. This is very convenient and saves a lot of time and clicking around.

Now, if you click o the small Google icon in the search bar, you will be presented with a list of other search engines, that you can use instead of the default Google option. There is also a menu item marked “Add Engines“. If you click on it, you will be taken to this page, where you can find hundreds and hundreds of other engines that you can use. Two that I have been missing the most were Google Images and IMDB.

Check this out and you will most probably save yourselve a lot of time.

P.S.: On Linux, these engines are installed into some global directory, so your Firefox will need root access.

Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl

There is a very interesting article at Perl.com. It is about building a search engine using perl language. The interesting part is that the article is not about the usual reverse index type search engines. It takes a different approach – vector space searching.

Reading the article reminded me of the few things:

The subject of searching is interesting to me.
Perl is great!
Linear algebra is actually useful and I should take it again (and pass it this time).

BlogDigger

BlogDigger is yet another search engine that uses RSS and Atom feeds from lots and lots of blogs to find information of interest for you. Blogs contains a whole bunch of useful staff these days, so this comes as a handy tool.

It’s interface resembles Google very much. It even has the News section, where you can read the most recent posts.