Okay, so iTunes is really starting to get on my nerves.

It was already on my nerves because it seems to be incredibly slow. Even on my new spiffy mega-mondo desktop it feels bloated–it's got that bad-comedian-in-a-fat-suit slowness going on. I was all excited at the prospect of a 64-bit iTunes…but after running it for a while I wondered why it had gotten slow again. Then I discovered that the installer was the only 64-bit part. The regular iTunes was still 32. Now I'm not a technical guy (not anymore–I don't count myself in that particular club) but why in the hell would you want the installer to be 64-bit? The only reason I can come up with is that the 32-bit version wasn't playing nice with a 64-bit OS.

Anyway, so that was annoying.

Now I found today I had somehow turned on a feechur I'd never witnessed before nor desired: that of "album ratings." I have MP3s that I've pulled in from God knows where–a lot of old-time radio files, audiobooks and other things. As a result, I am missing a lot of artist and album titles (which I use this previously mentioned method to go through on the run).

[[ Continued ]]

So here's a free idea for you: there's money to be made in somebody who can make a full-on search function that works as a no-brainer, quickly addresses any issues or bugs, and doesn't scare the shit out of you with their privacy policy.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

[[ More this way ]]

This is interesting. So Headspace2, the badass plugin that I'm using over on Needcoffee currently, has a Frame Breaker built into it.

WTF is a Frame Breaker?

Well, you know how when you search in Google Images, you get presented the site below a Google frame up top? The Frame Breaker breaks you out of that frame, natch, so you get served the site without the Google flavoring up top.

I always did wonder about that, so I flicked it on. That was around the 22nd or 23rd of October.

I decided to come back and check to see how it had affected my traffic on Google Images.

Now, let me state this up front. My understanding is that Google Images doesn't update very often. And I also understand that for the majority of my images, I haven't SEO'd them up worth a good goddamn because at the time I was putting them up, I had no idea why I should. (Of course, people still seem to find me and force me to do shit like this.)

So I don't have a great deal of traffic coming in anyway. But let's look.

Google Images spiked the day I turned it on, then went to a reasonable trickle.

As for Google Images.ca? I went from a trickle…to nothing.

Google Images.uk? From an erratic mess to…nothing.

And pretty much on down the line.

Did it do anything to my regular Google results? No. No discernable change.

In fact, if I just do "images" and pull that chart up, I spike, and then crater.

Fascinating. Now. One of two things is happening.

1. Either Google Images doesn't like the frame break and has something built in which makes me show up lower in the results because of it. Or…

2. Google Images needs the frame to show up as Google Images in my Analytics.

I don't know which. If I had a huge amount of Google Images traffic, I would be able to see if my Google hits went up an equivalent amount, so maybe Images traffic was being counted as regular traffic. Just a theory.

Or, if I had Analytics installed on my Version 3 archival part of the site, which has no Frame Breaker, I could see if it suffered, yes or no.

I've heard rumors that breaking the frame caused Google Images to not speak to you anymore, but never really saw that substantiated. And trying to Google terms like "frame breaker google images penalty" and the like didn't really get me anywhere.

Either way, I'm taking off the Frame Breaker. I'll see if it changes anything and if so, how quickly. And hopefully, I'll get Google Images out here to reindex my site with the SEO'd bits I do have.

If anybody has their own experience, I'd love to hear it.

Well, this is frustrating.

For those who don't know (and probably don't care, if you're not a webmaster), there is a secondary set of search results you can get from Google. It's called Supplemental Results. It might as well be called "The Results That Aren't As Good As The Real Results." Nobody but nobody wants to be in them.

A couple of months ago, I noticed that a goodly number of Needcoffee's entries had wound up in the Supplemental Results. At first, it appeared that this was because we had a lot of duplicate content: tag pages, category pages, date pages–all with the same posts. All right, fair enough–I setup a robots.txt that kept the Googlebot from indexing pages that I didn't want, and kept single entries as indexable.

However, stuff continues to slide into Supplemental Results. Right now I was toying with internal links to try and get things under control, but basically Google has effectively blinded me to how well I'm doing. The name of the article should have been more properly called "Supplemental Goes Stealth."

This doesn't fix anything. In fact, it makes my job as a webmaster even more difficult.

It would be one thing if there was a webmaster tool that said, "Hey, Widge, here's what's wrong with your page and why it slid into Supplemental Hell." Then I would go and fix it. However, now I not only don't know why this is happening I can't even see it happening any longer. So the problem has just gotten a lot worse. Google's solution to the problem is simply to make it impossible to see the problem. But the problem hasn't gone away.

This, frankly, sucks. And this is me, Google enthusiast and defender, talking here. Why is Google doing this? I run AdSense on Needcoffee. Why would they make it harder for people to find pages on my site and thus harder to get at the ad revenue that I could potentially bring in? And this is not just my site–AdSense is all over the place, and this affects everybody's sites. It would be in Google's best interests, I would think, to provide us with the tools so we can make our sites work better with their search engine, so everybody wins. Again, I'm not one of this whiny assholes who thinks Google owes me this–they owe me jack crap. It's just hard to understand why they would respond to a problem by, instead of using their vaunted resources to throw at it, to make it look like it's gone away and hope nobody bitches.

Somebody help me understand how this is a good idea.

Here are the bits in their terms and conditions that I thought were interesting:

5. Exclusivity. For any webpage or RSS feed that includes the Ad Code, you agree not to display or link to any other advertising (including but not limited to any listing) that is mapped to or responds to the content of the Ad Page.

Fair enough. It kinda blows what plans I had to use YPN as an alt ad for AdSense. If one AdSense ad unit pops over to YPN, and not another–I'm in violation. So I'd have to run YPN exclusively on certain pages. I checked Google's terms of use and didn't see anything in here about this.

From 9, though, here's where we get the problem others have run into:

g. you are a US-based business and you are operating Your Site and/or Your RSS Feed solely for viewing and use by users within the US; and

Wait, what? I thought those other reports were kidding, but being an internet site that gets traffic from six continents I can't "warrant and covenant" this in any shape or form. Nor do I want to block non-US users. WTF is this? And people actually call Google arrogant?

From 13…

d. the right to use your information for any internal business purpose; and
e. the right to crawl, copy, index or otherwise use the content of Your Site and/or Your RSS Feed(s), as applicable.

"Internal business purpose"? And I have no problem with people crawling all over the site. Indexing is what search engines do, and they copy as well when they basically hold a cache of stuff. The Internet Archive copies for crying out loud. Just the fact that they feel the need to include this creeps me out a bit. Because basically they've given themselves the right here to print off hard copies of my site's content in hardback and sell them in bookstores. That would be kinda cool, and of course they don't want to do that, and of course anybody could probably go do that anyway–but it just seems odd they've given themselves such a broad thing here in writing.

14. Reserved Rights. In addition to any right not explicitly disclaimed or waived by Overture, we reserve the right to:
a. investigate you, Your Site, Your RSS Feed(s), your owners, officers, directors, agents, contractors and employees, at any time;

Whereas Google promises to investigate if they feel something's fishy going on, and then it's "activity" and the use of software to screw with clicks, YPN gives themselves the ability to poke into anything they want having to do with me. Man, they might find out I use pseudoephedrine! Oh shit!

And here's a fun one, from that same section:

c. provide Ad Units that contain content other than ″pay for performance″ advertisements, including, but not limited to, Ad Units that contain advertisements or links to Overture or Yahoo! services, charitable or non-profit organizations, blog posts, blog search results and web search results, without including such advertisements, links or results in the basis for payment under this Agreement, even if we receive payment for them.

They can hit me with ads and not pay me for them. Nice, huh? With Google I can opt out of charity ads if I feel like it. With Yahoo, they can advertise themselves all day long and I can't do shit about it. Nice. And I don't see anything in the Google TOS that says that those Google Checkout ads are freebies. Maybe they are. Maybe I'm making a penny off of them if anybody clicks. I dunno.

But as I'm reading this, by signing up I'm giving Yahoo the right to make me US-only, copy my site's contents and use however they want, investigate me, and basically make me run ads for free as they so desire.

No thanks.

And for the record, yeah, I like Google just fine. Some have problems with them, but some have problems with lots of things. But I'm not writing this to cheerlead for Google. I just thought I'd double-check the TOS for Google to make sure I wasn't being paranoid for YPN at a different level that I was for Google. And I don't believe I was. If somebody knows something I missed, let me know.

Dear Google:

The idiots who are suing because they don't want you to help promote their books now think that the Perfect 10 case, in which you might be impacting mobile porn as a burgeoning revenue stream, gives some added ammunition to their lawsuits.

Here's an idea. I realize you're trying to make everything on the planet searchable, but for these idiots who don't want you to help them sell their books, I suggest you adopt this policy:

Fuck em. Just fuck em.

Why not help authors who like you make shitloads of money then we can laugh when the others come crawling back to you for aid and succor? I'll make the popcorn…

Found via Slashdot.

Can you hear Warner Music's teeth grinding as they look at this?

Google might help them sell some music! Or generate some interest in their dying industry! It links to lyrics sites AND online music stores! Oh Christ, the humanity of it all…

Found via MetaFilter.