Peeking into the rock

I do a lot of searches in an ordinary day. So I naturally have a lot of o[pinions about google.

This thing that google does -- where they highjack your search and replace it with something they thing you ought to be searching for instead but you're too stupid to have typed it correctly -- it bugs me no end. I've decided to complain every single time they do it, each time pointing out that I do, in fact, know what I am looking for.

I don't mind the suggestion "did you mean . . .?" it's the outright refusal to search what I asked for that pisses me off.

I've also decided not to take the aggressively misleading keyword practices of websites lying down anymore. Today I complained when a search for "vintage mothers day postcard" turned up an image of a woman crying over the body of a man whose head had been blown off. That is not a vintage mothers day postcard. ("mothers day" merited a mere "did you mean mother's day? rather than a highjack, by the way, while "googie motif" -- as in googie designs -- merited a highjack) And when the first hundred or so images for "Mexican Independence Day" returned mostly images for the fourth of July and a handful of racist jokes from the e-cards people, I sent feedback on that too. It's not that I expect a search engine to return none of those images. I just expect the first hundred images to be more accurate than that. If I say Mexican, I expect the results to be at least remotely exican. And you know? Images of the Alamo are not a good substitute. I understand why they would end up there (if the website has a narrative that includes both the Alamo and the Grito, which would be a reasonable thing to happen). But again, not all up in my first hundred instead of something to do with Sept.16 and the Grito, or May 5 and the mariachis and stuff.

Google doesn't acknowledge any of the questions in the help forum, and doesn't ahve a way for people to get actual support or answers to themselves, but they do, apparently, edit their "known issues" page after enough people come up with the same problem.

The suggestion was to sign out, clear the cache, and sign in again. I had actually done this before, with no effect, but this time, it worked -- kind of. Still no tray icon and no popup chat window, and I still get return messages as if they were email and not chat.

But I am no longer cut off from the European continent.

My new game is The Google Image Labeller!

Very cleverly, following the lead of the distributed proofreader movement and citizen scholarship everywhere, Google has developed a system where we do their work for them.

What happens is you and another person are shown random low-res images and you propose labels for them blind -- you don't see theirs and they don't see yours, until you match. Then you get points. If you can't think of any more labels, you pass, and get a new picture. The images are way too low-res for me, and some of them don't even come up for me at all, so I have to pass a lot. But still I have accumulated 25890 points tonight! It's more fun than f-bomb, color box, bunch or word worm!

On another front, we went to see the Pigeon Point lighthouse get lit up for its anniversary last night. We were late, but all that meant was that we got to walk around under the beams for a long time after the early birds were gone, and that traffic was less insane when we did leave. As always, it was a cosmic experience. The only thing I need now is to get inside a first-order fresnel lens.

Also, we bought a case of tomatoes. Tomorrow: I guess it's time to put up tomato chutney. And chili sauce if I feel like it. Chutney for sure.

I washed a lot of dishes and folded a lot of laundry but I did not write anything. I did get holiday thingies for Frank's box.

Oh, and Nazis in Prague are scarier than you thought. On the other hand, antifa.

So (personhead)redbird says the google hitson my name might have been mostly people searching ritaxis, and so I decided to look at that out of curiosity's sake. It was about what I expected: about evenly me and the nice fellow in the first few pages, and a sprinkling of Frank's bbs activity and his Pokemon D&D thing, and one hit each for Meribel Taxis and some art student in Canada who signs his Deviantart page ~ritaxis. And then there's one or two references to a misspelled gastropod of the Caribbean and Florida shores also called "Adam's Baby Bubble," which is a dumb name for a snail.

Okay. That's not bad. But there are two or three hits to nonexistent sites which reference my private webstorage space. Get that: nonexistent. By private, I mean there are no links to that space anywhere that I know of. Of course I know that it's not deeply hidden: but it would take a bot or someone who knew me to uncover it. You shouldn't be able to find it by casually messing around not knowing what you're looking for. It's storage. Even though both of those sites are nonexistent, the references on Google do contain the whole address of . . . a novel that's being stored for safety in that space, and which is not meant to be read in that space, because it's in submission for normal print publication. I tried to get Google to remove those two dead pages, without success. I get cannot be displayed errors when I try to use the auto remove thing. Maybe I'll call them on the phone.

I looked at the cached pages, and they are identical. It looks like they were two attempts to create the same Mp3 site, and that they did use some kind of bot to gather links for the band featured on the page, which has the same name as my file (but not my novel). I wonder what they thought they were accomplishing by having such badly-vetted pages.

Look, I know I don't have my stuff stored in a top secret place, and I know it doesn't really harm me if someone gets a peek at my unpublished stuff. But, still: it shouldn't be that easy to find the stuff I'm not trying to show you.

On another front: I just got a call and I might be going out to check water quality on Soquel Creek around midnight tonight. NOAA is calling for at least .1 of an inch of rain stretching down to Monterey. This is thirty days, I think, since we got First Flush in Santa Cruz.

What do you call it when you get exactly one result for a Google search? I got it for google-imaging "shovel nomenclature," and it's too bad, too, because it's a userpic for a motorcyclist's forum, showing, naturally, a guy and his motorcycle.

It was a sincere search: I was trying to be reminded of the correct name for the little ledge thing on the top of the shovel blade, the place where you put your foot when digging.