Doctor Recommended

Blogmatcher redux, RSS Search, Microsoft, HTML Tidy and Sebastian

A couple days ago I mentioned Ryo and his pet hermit crab: BlogMatcher. It appears that the crab has moved into a roomier conk shell, as Ryo stated:

I completely rewrote the searching/matching code in C (instead of PHP), and results pop up in less than a second now (in fact, often < 0.5 seconds). I've also added pagination for easier navigation.

I've refined the search algorithm a bit, partially inspired by your comments. I added some very basic statistical analysis in the scoring algorithm so that common URLs are scored down while uncommon URLs are marked up (at least in theory). It's still a little skewered for your blog, but I think the results have been improved somewhat. Also, the index has grown to 2900+ blogs (and I'm sure it'll continue to grow).

I gave it another whirl and was impressed with the results -- best of all there was no bitter aftertaste: Pure, Clean & Fresh.

Ryo was good enough to put enough an FAQ for your reading pleasure as well. The only major change that I would like to see added, is some sort of static page, to where people can click and automatically see the search results (as opposed to typing it in everytime).

In addition to BlogMatcher scanning Weblogs.com, no less than three other services do as well: Organica, Metaweblog and Penthouse (notice how everything semi-important with me always degenerates into something to do with sex).

RSS Search - as the same suggests, it is a search engine that scours RSS feeds. Now just like Feedster, typing in my name reveals that Tim Robbins is the Big Man on Campus. Again, he's a great actor, but in the blogosphere he best step down. Submit your blog here and hope for the best.

While looking for some dirt on the Opteron, I stumbled upon this article at ExtremeTech discussing the research and development projects over at Microsoft. Yes, despite my disdain for their business model they still work on some neat-o projects. One that I was particularly interested in was the StuffI'veSeen project. This software basically tracks and tags every bit of digital information you bump into throughout the day -- I'd like to see this installed on John Poindexter's computer.

Be sure to also visit Microsoft's Research Project page, the Terraserver is the same one I used to come up with my GeoURL.

HTML Tidy - This handy piece of software fixes those annoying incompliant markup schemes that people like myself create. In addition to the downloadable open-source version of the application, you can also use this browser-based online copy.

I'll end this with a remembrance for Sebastian, the pet hermit crab my younger sister gave me 7 years ago and I forgot to feed... Let us never mention his name again:

Posted by Tim at April 22, 2003 11:34 PM | TrackBack