A9 - All Fixed Now

As I previously reported in A9 Shows Adult Images in Searches, the new A9 was showing some rather tasteless rssults for innocent searches, such as "Asians".

Well, the good news is that this issue seems to have been resolved, I couldn't find a single innocent search with adult picture results.

Adult searches do still pull up adult images, but frankly I have no problem with this at all. If you are searching for "big $pornwidgets" - well, you get what you ask for.

Good job Amazon.

Amazon's A9.com Search - Showing Adult Images

Amazon's A9 search has officially launched.

Though it uses Google's search results, they've integrated a number of features - one of the more notable ones is tacking on image search results along with the web results.

This is great for travel destination searches for instance:

San Miguel de Allende

However their adult filter is not working correctly.

For instance - an arguably innocent search for "asians" in A9 results in some rather non-innocent results.



Ditto for gay, black women, facials, and even, believe it or not, "bush for president".

I wrote A9 feedback, but let's see how long it takes to get fixed.

Yahoo acquires Music Match

Yahoo is expanding their content distribution network - now adding Music Match to their network of sites.

More here

Web Hosting Company Problems

Web Hosting. The Achilles Heel of web designers.

My former Web Host really screwed up and blocked GoogleBot from my websites.

That means traffic on my sites hosted with this company dropped about 70% - for over 100 sites (belonging to myself and to clients).

Here's a lesson in web economics:

Traffic (people) = Money.
More traffic = Good.
Less Traffic = Bad.

This was a very, very bad thing. And it hurt.

And it was extremely time consuming to look for a new hosting company, upload the site to the new servers, change the DNS information with over 20 domain name registrars and check the error logs and test for broken links, change paths for CGI and PHP and basically troubleshoot.

I will recommend some web hosting companies in the next post - and I will not "out" the company that did this - but always be on top of things and check your logs frequently.