Megalomania.me

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbsHZuSQLgM

I searched in Google for [farmers renters insurance]:

The first result is on www.farmers.com, which I would expect. Weird breadcrumbs, though. I wouldn’t expect them to be www.farmers.com > Products > Home. Instead I’d expect something like Home > Products > Renters Insurance, but whatever.

Second, third and fourth results were all on www.statefarm.com. This is rubbish.

I always tell people to “take the Bing challenge,” which is to use Bing as their default search engine for a week or a month and see how it works (and see how complex search engines are, and by extension how complex search engine optimization is). I’ve done it, but no one has ever done it on my suggestion.

Now Microsoft apparently thinks that Bing’s results are good enough, or close enough to Google’s, that they’re ready to get the average person to compare Bing and Google search results head to head.

Putting aside the abominable SEO issues on bingiton.com, I Binged it on. Of the five search results pages that I compared, Google won blind in three cases, and Bing won blind in two cases. So Google still comes out ahead.

The tests, however, were not really blind for me. I do hundreds of searches a day, so I get to learn how search engine result pages work fairly quickly for different types of queries. Google has a certain way of including news results; Bing has a certain way of showing image results (and of showing the wrong Quora page when searching for a specific person’s name).

I would like to know whether anyone else Bings it on and whether Bing actually wins for anybody.

Time to spend seventeen weeks wallowing in misery.

Hail to the Redskins.

Excerpt from a book called A World of Hillbilly Heroin (linked from Best of the Moment, now going by the name “The Browser”):

The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl — 80 times stronger than morphine — Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result.

Slate:

2006: Phar-Fetched “Pharm Parties”: Real or a media invention?

2008: Down on the Pharm, Again: Debunking “pharm parties” for the third time.

2009: The Pharm-Party Meme: It refuses to die.

2010: Still More Pharm-Party Phoolishness: The meme lives!

Surly Muni driver just made an announcement that there would be no announcements.

Go to your Google account settings, scroll down and select “Delete Profile and Google+ features.”

You know, just in case Google plus ever gets less awesome than it is now.