Wednesday, November 02, 2022

If You Submitted an Absentee Ballot in Pennsylvania (Old information unfortunately)

I'd worked on a few elections in Pennsylvania, but the last time was in 2016. Some rules about absentee voting changed after that, but I was unaware of the change as I hadn't worked on elections in a few years. I apologize to anyone who read what I'd written here as it was wrong. And you have no idea how much I hate to be wrong. Thanks to Janet Lunde for the current information.

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

The Downfall of Google (or Alphabet)

Source Forge encourages people to write reviews of software products.  While I was once a strong Google evangelist, I'm not anymore, so I reviewed Google.:



"Google is now a paid-ad search, not a data search"

Edited 2022-02-02 (Moderated: pending)

Pros: It used to be very useful and still can be at times. Google used to base its catalog on relevant data found in the Web site, and this is still true in some subject areas.

Cons: Paid ads and Wikipedia references can dominate search results in some subject areas and are sometimes irrelevant to the search. Google is practically useless for finding travel information. Sites like Tripadvisor and booking.com buy so many ads for so many tourist sites, a casual user might think the only way to visit certain areas is to go through third party sites.

Overall: For the last few years, Google has been putting paid ads and Wikpedia over actual search results. While I have been a daily user of Google for over 20 years, I'm going to use other search engines in the future. Google search results page should have three columns - one for actual results based on page content, one for ad-based results and one for Wikipedia.