Friday Q&A

Questionable Suggestion

Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome to another edition of the Friday Q&A. As usual, I'm glad you're here. Even if you disagree with what I say, this is the time for us all to come together in a state of national unity. In the spirit of patriotism and goodwill, I want to temporarily extend an olive branch to my detractors. This isn't the time for petty bickering.

Q: Why the sudden change of heart?

A: Isn't it obvious? A huge blight has scarred the American way of life. I'm talking, of course, about the recent changes made to the search engine Google. In case you were completely oblivious, Google has been hard at work trying to make its user experience more ridiculous. You may recall my reaction to the first of these changes, a useless sidebar (cloned from competitor Bing).

Q: Are you going to rant about how you hate the new Instant feature?

A: I actually don't mind it that much. At least Instant can be turned off fairly easily. I'm much more alarmed about the new GIS. They changed to a horrible new format some weeks back, and I've been looking for a reliable way to turn it off permanently. A few methods exist, but I'm not particularly happy with any of them.

Q: What is your solution to the problem?

A: So far, the best workaround I've found for the GIS issue is to use another search engine. Finding a replacement can be tough, but there are alternatives. Bing is the obvious first choice, at least if you support corporate fascism. Yahoo is another option, at least their image search page has an a decent layout. I also recently discovered that Lycos.com is still active. Presumably, that site allows you to search for content exclusively from 1999 (the last time that engine was relevant).

That's all for this time, gentle reader. As usual, thanks for stopping by. I hope you didn't mind this brief diversion from the topic of Fark, but image searching is integral to creating a good Photoshop. I tried photographing all the sources myself, but it's a dangerous hobby these days. If you go around snapping pictures in our society, you eventually end up on some double-secret terrorist watch list.

Stay tuned for more infrequent flying from the Doctor!