Duck flies to Moscow…

DuckDuckGo is now sporting a flash in the corner of the search results page, “In partnership with Yandex”.

Common Crawl updates

Common Crawl now contains 3.01 billion web pages, and has newly added…

“a side crawl [containing links located] within a maximum of 3 links (“hops”) away from […] a list of university domains collected by a Common Crawl user”

Added to JURN

Airo (Portugese Society for the Study of Birds)

Raven, The (Virginia Society of Ornithology)

Sea Swallow (Royal Naval Birdwatching Society, not currently well indexed by Google)

Biotika (All-Russian Research Institute of Phytopathology)

Seriously, Google?

Oh, the joy of the colourful semantic do-dahs…! But erm… no results.

DuckDuckGo results. Telling Google Images to quack off…

Added to JURN

Colloquium : New Philologies

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Scientific Drilling

On the Grid

National Grid Reference Redirect is a simple free service that takes your UK Ordnance Survey Grid Reference map location number, and then whisks you to the equivalent string of geo-coordinates on the large public mapping services such as Google Maps. Sadly it doesn’t yet work with the excellent OS-based footpathmaps.com or the historic maps.nls.uk.

Usage: make sure you use the six-number format, e.g. SJ882359. If you have a more precise eight number OS Grid Reference — such as SJ882?359? — then you’ll need to lop off the last ‘?’ number in each block of four, and then cross-reference with the same spot in the OS-based footpathmaps.com and maps.nls.uk to work out the precise spot.

We could really use a Web browser plugin that streamlines all this, and intelligently discriminates between six and eight OS digit map references. Or the big mapping services could just start being able to handle OS map references.

Nope, you can’t go there…

The Firefox Web browser’s ever-increasing security nannying is starting to become very annoying. It’s now currently refusing any connection whatsoever to Google Scholar…

No option to say “sod off and let me continue, you stupid bot.” This has happened too many times, recently, with other mainstream sites.

Firefox has an ‘abandon or keep’ fork-point coming up with version 57, when it will start point-blank refusing to run add-ons it deems ‘insecure’. With their officious nannying the makers of Firefox are risking an exodus to the Opera or some other browser, it seems to me. Security I control and can turn off is one thing, but handing it over to some always-on dumb-bot is quite another.

On the slide – how to block Google’s “More Info” slide-out panel

Are you regularly annoyed by Google Search’s spammy slide-in panel labelled “More Info”? It’s also known as the “Local Info” or “Info Panel” among marketeers.

I have no use for it whatsoever, and it’s just another whizzy and distinctly spammy distraction from proper search. It tends to appear when doing local searches, but I’m almost never searching for an eatery / hotel / venue ‘to book’. Instead I’m looking for pages that give long-range advance details about forthcoming events, such as conferences, events which are set to happen locally over the coming months or even into next year. So I can feed them through into special-interest local Facebook groups. In which case Google’s panel becomes yet another annoying example of dumb auto-suggest getting it wrong.

How to block it? In AdBlock Plus, with the Element Hiding Helper installed, this slide-in panel can be blocked for Google Search UK with…

 google.co.uk###rhs.slideout

Presumably

 google.com###rhs.slideout

… etc, would also work.

Added to JURN

Acta Neophilologica

Design Science

Knight Letter, The (Lewis Carroll Society of North America)

Idyll

Idyll is a new “friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages.” Interactive diagrams in academic papers, that sort of thing…