Firefox 3.5 – how to turn off Google Suggest

The horrible Google Suggest feature (now even worse because it’s started including “Sponsored links in suggestions”) returns in the long-awaited Firefox 3.5 final, now available for download. That’s because the FF Blocksite addon, previously so useful for rooting out Google Suggest, does not work in 3.5.

Search veterans who want to turn off Google Suggest should instead use the Adblock Plus addon. In Options / My Adblocking Rules, simply block the domain…

clients1.google.com

This is the server that handles Google’s suggestion keywords. Treating it as adware — which indeed it has now become — turns off Suggest.

Spybot, version .007

Uh oh, the future of open intelligence analysis will be in the hands of bots? Somehow, that doesn’t sound reassuring. DARPA (U.S. defence research) is reportedly to spend $30 million on a bot that can digest the web, and automatically churn out potted reports and data-sets for humans.

Still, it’s said there might be civilian spin-offs…

“However, BBN also expects the program to enable a plethora of new civilian applications, everything from intelligent bots to personal tutors. The system could provide unprecedented access and automated analysis of the world’s libraries, allowing for vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical research”

If you’d like to have your own mini intelligence agency on your desktop, the free Maltego 2.0 application is fun to play with, although oddly lacking in a basic means of identifying which website is hosted in which nation.

An interview with your browser

With the release of the supposedly whippet-fast Firefox 3.5 just two days away, I’m wondering why browsers don’t do a short ‘search profile interview’ when they install. Rather like online dating ‘interviews’, I suppose, but with Google as the object of your affection rather than a Gordon/Gloria.

Then, on certain types of searches (i.e.: the vague ones) your browser would ping Google your carefully-considered ‘search profile’, and presto! — better search-results.

For example, an art historian doing a vague search for samuel palmer shoreham would never have to see results from dodgy poster websites, because the browser profile would say “my user is interested in art history and books and articles containing references”, and Google might also say “samuel palmer was a notable artist whose work is out-of-copyright”, and thus the modifiers -posters -framing -delivery would automatically be added to such a search, and pages with proper academic references would get a boost in the results.

Whereas the person whose browser profile said “frequently spends on home furnishings, subscribes to Homes & Gardens” will get the poster and prints websites pushed to the top, and the 50,000-word thesis on Christian visionary symbolism pushed to the bottom.

Yes, you could have removed those results manually (*) if you’re logged into Google, but you can only do that after the search. And most ‘vague’ searches will happen on searches that don’t tend to repeat themselves often.

( * I had about four poster-sales site in the first two pages of that search, yet I’m logged into Google and have been searching for academic stuff for months — Google seems to have learned little about what I want)

Privacy issues? Well, yes. But what if the browser could seamlessly re-configure a users’s vague search terms, based on their personal profile and known interests, before the query is sent to the engine? Think “search suggestions” on steroids, and without any annoyingly dumb flickery drop-down boxes that don’t have a clue about my interests.

‘Will you be paying in lambs or silver?’

Free access to content from over 3,000 arts and humanities journals not enough? There will still be times, of course, that call for a flourish of the cheque-book or a PayPal ping. Steven Schroeder wanted to spend some money on journal subscriptions…

“You know, for all the moaning journals (mostly university-affiliated) do about how they won’t ever get subscribers, a surprising number of them aren’t making it easy to get subscriptions. I had a little money burning a hole in my pocket yesterday and decided to buy some new subscriptions — my only condition was that I be able to buy them online. […] You might as well be asking [potential subscribers] to chip their request on a stone tablet or send it via Pony Express. By my rough estimate, maybe 20% of university-affiliated journals have the ability to purchase online through their websites.”

Open Monograph Press launches 8th–10th July

The non-profit behind the Open Journal System is about to launch a version for monographs, called the Open Monograph Press (OMP). (Background and PDFs).

Google’s numrange modifier

Here’s a potentially useful search tip for JURN users. Whereas Google’s numrange search modifer doesn’t work with Google Scholar, it does work with JURN. So, for instance…

Mercia Wulfhere 600..700

…will get you articles and book chapters about Wulfhere of Mercia, filtering for pages where the text contains any date between the years 600 and 700 A.D.

UK’s Share of World Research Output

Yet another new (June 2009) Research Information Network research report, The UK’s Share of World Research Output : an investigation of different data sources and time trends (PDF link)…

“we have noticed that the figures provided in various reports for the UK’s share of the world’s production of scientific publications vary enormously. That a seemingly straightforward figure should show such volatility perplexed us, and so we asked Grant Lewison and colleagues in the CIBER group at University College London to analyse the published figures, and explain the differences between them.”

Swiped

Ooh, look! A special edition of Wired…

Heh.

The news item that inspired the faux cover.

The final nail in the coffin of a once-vital magazine.

Basic name authority added to Google News

Google News has just introduced a new feature to find articles written by someone, rather than about someone…

“If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they’ve written.”

With this and the Google News RSS feed, it’s now possible to set up a simple news feed for new articles from your fave journalists. Possibly in the elegant Firefox addon Feedly. Don’t forget to click “sort by date” before you grab the feed.

And since you can plug RSS feeds into pages, you could now set up a public Daily Something page, cut out the churnalist press-releases and just have a select band of top specialist journalists effectively writing for you. This is really going to annoy the newspaper publishers.

And you can also type a simple search modifier into the Google News search-box, e.g.:

author:”Matthew Parris”

And this can be combined with the source: modifier…

source:Washington_Times

‘It’s a long way to Pasadena’

Found on a university library blog today…

“As of July 1, 2009 we will no longer subscribe to a link resolver. This means that we will not be able to hook to our holdings through Google Scholar any more. The Google Scholar instructions will be removed from our web site on July 1.”