Aehso’s Output

Local Irish search

Two “search the Irish corner of the web” sites worth noting:

• Scrúdú - an Irish search engine (supposedly launching in June - errr)
• Gimmiedat - an Irish web site directory

Both could be stressing the “local to the island of Ireland” aspect of their results which I think is a missed opportunity. Something like a real up front assurance that they don’t contain advertisements for irrelevant stateside commercial websites, that type of thing. Hopefully they will - anything that helps ween ordinary web users away from using the “pages from Ireland” option on google.ie can only be a good thing. I cannot count the number of times that my girlfriend/mum/sisters/brothers have asked me about international commercial websites they found by sticking something like “hotel” into that bloody search box and then clicking on one of the many “sponsored links” that infest the results page. Even the old Yahoo! Directory (Ireland) is safer!

Reality check: ordinary web users, the ones that barely know how to use Office and read their email, do not know the difference between an organic result link and a sponsored link. Until the misdirection (and quasi-fraud) by the search engine companies is cleaned up I for one am forwarding family and friends to local directories and revoking my Google-search-related-technical-support-services. Sentences beginning with “I found this on Google…” will fall on deaf ears.

6 Comments to Local Irish search

1. 

   June was wishful thinking. I’m sure you know yourself from Iona/Cape Clear etc. how things can run over time. I’ve put a strikethrough June now and we’re headed for mid-July.

   “Dublin hotel” is a nightmare search term and I have ideas how the results could be tailored to the users desired output…however it would require quite a bit of editorial input and will not be there in our alpha /beta launch.

   The results are pretty good so far, but not quite Google bashing just yet….

   Regards,
   Roger

   P.S I had left this page open in a tab before I started writing the comment. Just as well I copied the comment text before submitting - I guessed right that there would be a time-out on the captcha.
Rogerg on July 6th, 2006
2. 

   Hey Roger,
   Yeah, the captcha implementation stores the expected answer in $_SESSION when the comments page is generated. When the user submits, it goes back to $_SESSION to retrieve it. I guess in your case the session has timed out. (I wonder how are session timeouts controlled in Wordpress?)
aehso on July 7th, 2006
3. 

   I wonder how are session timeouts controlled in Wordpress

   I don’t know - but I can find out for you.
RogerG on July 7th, 2006
4. 

   The PHP session was timing out (the default is 1440 seconds/24 minutes).

   I’ve bumped up the session.gc_maxlifetime to give all you careful comment writers more time…

   See http://www.captain.at/howto-php-sessions.php for good info on managing PHP session/cookie lifetimes…
Aehso on July 19th, 2006
5. 

   What about online mapping services in Ireland? Are there any?
Sutithi on July 26th, 2006
6. 

   Sututhi,
   Online maps of Ireland are terrible, probably because the OSI charge far too much information for what should be publically available information. Most of the country is poorly mapped - http://www.map24.co.uk seem to have the best data (and a nifty Java based map to boot).
Aehso on July 29th, 2006

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