Ask Jeeves sucks ass, and the Violent Femmes kick it.

8.21.2005

Ask Jeeves a question, and he will not provide you with any relevant answers. What did you expect, he's just a butler. Ask Jeeves has to be the worst search engine I have ever used. Jeeves uses the sub par Teoma search technology. It is (or maybe at this point was), my wife favorite search engine. So I started to play around with the piece of crap. First knock. No matter how I search, my site does not come up. WTF! My site appears in every other search engine I have ever checked, but not here. My site is now 9 months old, and if you know anything about web crawlers, it should have been picked up 6 months ago. Second knock, it very rarely gives the kind of relevant searches that I am looking for, where the other big three (Google , MSN, and Yahoo) do. So I wondered why.

Teoma use "Subject Specific Popularity", for it's searchs. What is this, besides a bunch of bullshit jargon?

Instead of ranking results based upon the sites with the most links leading
to them, Teoma analyzes the Web as it is organically organized-in
naturally-occurring communities that are about or related to the same
subject-to
determine which sites are most relevant. Teoma is the only search
technology
that can locate communities on the Web within their specific
subject areas, as
they actually exist. And this allows us to finely tune our
search process,
providing more precise results.

So wtf does that mean? That mean Teoma tries to find how many subject specific links go to my site. OK, so JesusMan is all over the web, with links to this site. So type it in not only does my site not show up, but neither does Bigger than Cheeses, which is a webcomic, that has a Jesusman character that has been on the web since the late 1990's.

I think my wife is now going to abandon Jeeves. Last night we were looking on the web for this resturant, that had opened about 6 months ago, that we wanted to try. Cal's Roast Beef. No show on Jeeves. So she assumed they had no website. I forced her to google, and had her type in "cal's roast beef' . . . guess what was the first search result.

Jeeves you bastard, ever wonder why you only have 1.2% of the searches?

Last night, I went to see the Violent Femmes at McFadden's, in Providence, RI (which by the way, if you want the good bohemian college town scene, is better than Boston). They cordoned off their parking lot, and there were probably about 1000 people there. I saw the Femmes in 1994, at UMass Dartmouth (which is the cooler cousin of UMass). They headlines the first Umassapalooza with They Might Be Giants. They of course were pretty good, but were in the process of one of their many break ups, and just kind of went throught the motions.

Last night, I was blown away. Victor DeLorenzo has always been a bit of a spaz, but this 40-something as usually, went nutty on his Tom, stand up base drum, and cymbal (that is it, he does not use his feet, except to jump around, the set). Gordon Gano was his usual nasally, whiny, nutty vocalist, and has grown into a pretty good guitarist. But I was amazed by Brian Ritchie. Always been a decent bassist. But the nutty stuff he pulled put him in league with Les Clapool, and Flea. He did some absolutley amazing stuff (especially since bass is the lead), with multple instruments, including a broomstick thin 1 string bass, and a electric washtub bass. An the Angry Piper would of loved his kilt. He looked like if Roddy Piper and Henry Rollins had a kid.

Amazing. The played for about 1 hour and a half, played all their big hits, their experimental sutff, and their most recent avant garde stuff. This makes me rethink their place in music history. If you have never hear the Femmes, what rock have you been living under? BTW, Dr. Murk, that was me who called you last night.

RubberSuit Studios Updates

We have a new sydicated feed. You can click to get it on the main page. It is being handled by Ice Rocket, and I couldn't be happier. The RSS builder gets the Malach seal of approval.

Still working on some new site for clients, I will post them when they are mostly complete.

I am going to be doing a RubbeSuit Studios site redesign, nothing major, but a bit more fun and organized. I am also thinking of branching out Stool Sample into it's own website.

And one final thing, and this is not a complaint. Since Aug 13, but daily hits have gone form about 1800 per day to averaging 6000 per day. I don't know why. But thanks buckos.

Malach has left the building.