Not even in the last place I looked…
November 12th, 2003While doing a mass purge of my Inbox, I found a link I sent round in December 2001 to a “Design Your Own O’Reilly Book” generator. However it is now dead.
So I did a a Google search for it, but instead got a lot of random weblogs mentioning the same defunct site, with no real data. I just gave up after a while.
Andrew Orlowski has written recently about how blogs distort Google. Although a lot of his stuff is slightly on the scaremongering side - on how a cabal of technerati are threatening to take over the net - his point is a fair one - Google’s indexing system is biased towards mutually-referring pages of the type found in the Blogosphere. This point was hammered home when I made a Google search for Orlowski’s article, I got lots of blog entries discussing it, rather than the article itself.
Google have said they’re tweaking their algorithms, but the above two examples show they’ve still got a bit of work to do. In the meantime, leaving aside the point that I shouldn’t use my blog to complain about how blogs are ruining the internet (Ric, just don’t even think about it!), if anyone knows if the O’Reilly generator is still out there, or if legal/bandwidth issues became a problem and killed it off, let me know. It was quite funny…