Waxy.org is the sandbox of A Google search for "onion" doesn't return The Onion homepage anywhere in the results. A little more digging reveals that the Onion homepage isn't in the Google index at all. Any idea why? Maybe Aaron knows.
Googling the Onion
Posted May 14, 2002
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal
— the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities
Google Chrome OS Demo
— a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video
(via)
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices
— funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait"
— Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly
(via)
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions
— starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines
— they were recently added to Excel
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey
— a subtle change, but a big improvement
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy
— he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go
(via)
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk
— don't miss the product photos
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E
— from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight"
— warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project
— Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days
— this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug
(via)
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns
— his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good
— they're switching to DHT instead
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago
— Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory
— the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash
(via)
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games"
— his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun
(via)
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement
— nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web
— "more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform"
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files
— along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response
— there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity
— only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday
(via)
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd
— great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from
(via)
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy
— I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely
(via)
Numb3rs on IRC
— "Luckily, I speak l33t."
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank
— hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data
— the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia
— simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames
— sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for
10:35 AM
they've got an anti-robot meta tag in their source. :)
<META NAME="robots" content="noindex,follow">
10:40 AM
Well, that answers that. I looked for a robots.txt file, but didn't think to look at the META tags. Thanks!
But it begs the question, why would The Onion want to exclude all search engine referers from their site?
10:44 AM
that -is- a good question. and thanks for fixing my meta tag. :-) you'd think, if anything, they'd want to generate more traffic. maybe it has something to do with the caching that google does? though it's not specific to the googlebot.
12:18 AM
Google shows 13K links in and Blogdex shows them as the #11 all-time entry; maybe they feel like they don't want to risk giving the milk away for free if so many folks are already advertising their particular cow for them.
I understand they start writing every article with the headline and work backward, so maybe they want to ensure they register your impression before you even get the punchline, y'know? If there were a way to read their stuff without suffering the increasingly invasive ads, I know I would do it. ;-)