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Something truly terrible happened a couple weeks ago. Something so bad and so apparently permanent, I don't think life will ever be as good as it used to. This terriblest of terribles is Google's ad page. Now, whenever you search for soemthing in Google, you are given a page full of ads to bypass before you get to the actual search results. When looking for information on Birchville Cat Motel, the first page of "results" you're met with is made entirely of ads for cat related products, like maybe a purse with a picture of an adorably fuzzy Maine Coon embroidered on the side or possibly a cabinet to store litter with a hand-painted picture of a couple cute and cuddly Calico kittens or maybe a DVD featuring a totally thugged-out Cornish Rex from Stains.
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To get to actual items pertaining to Birchville Cat Motel, you've gotta scroll all the way down to the bottom and click for the next page. Thinking way way back to the late 90s, the reason Google was able to take over from AltaVista as defacto "for searching only" search engine was largely because somehow, through their link-based heuristic page ranking model, the results you wanted magically showed up at the top. However, exactly how many results for "Birchville Cat Motel" would one have to wade through to get to something relevant to the band/person? Maybe one half of a page? Of course, Google's impending IPO is intimately related to this obnoxious new hurdle to parusing the web, giving not just more ad exposures but more prominent ad exposures. However, maybe it's just me, but closing an animation of Halle Berry in a catsuit before it gets started on Yahoo's main page seems a lot less annoying than waiting for not 1 but 2 pages of results to load before you get to results you need.
Addendum: As is always the case, the fault lies not with the heroic startup company but rather the sloppy 300 lb. gorilla. My computer had some spyware on it that, no thanks to Microsoft's unending pursuit of security, had managed to hijack all my Google searches. If the same thing is happening to you, I'd recommend running CWShredder, as it's the only thing I found that fixed it.
If you have any comments about the site, please send us an email or stop by our message board. Look for our next issue in early September. Thanks a whole bunch.
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