This article is from the June 2004 issue of Update.
When you put a search into Google i.e. Atkins+diet+"bad health" it comes up with no search results, but when you don't put plus signs in: Atkins diet "bad health" it comes up with about 400 results! I thought that the default for Google was the AND operator! Why doesn't it find any results the first time around?
This is a really straightforward one, and you'll kick yourself when I explain it. You're right to say that Google defaults to the AND operator, so you don't actually need to put the + sign in anyway, since it's redundant. The first search that you ran didn't have any spaces, so Google was searching for the entire string as one word. By putting a space between the first word and the + sign (Atkins +diet +"bad health") you'll get the results that you expect. However, as I say, you can just ignore the + sign completely here. You're better off using the minus sign to exclude words from your search, which will result in a much smaller set. The + sign really only needs to be used to force Google to include stopwords, and you can see the results if you try searches for to be or not to be then +to +be +or +not +to +be and "+to +be +or +not +to +be"
Please do you have a list of news web pages?
Depends on what kind of news you mean, to be honest. If you're after newspapers and current events, a good site is the Paperboy (www.thepaperboy.com.au/welcome.html). Other good listings are at www.dmoz.org/News/ and http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/ Between them, they should cover most of the main sites.
I get a lot of automated emails sent to me from websites telling me that I've sent an email to them with a virus attached. I've run my virus checker and it hasn't reported anything wrong. I'm concerned that I might still be infected. Can you give me any advice?
I also get a lot of these automated responses. You can rest assured that if you have a good virus checker and it's up to date, you almost certainly don't have a virus (unless it's such a new one that the virus checker hasn't recognised it). What is happening here is that someone who is infected with a virus has had their email address book used by the virus, which sends itself on to a third party, but uses your address to make it appear as though it has come from you. Consequently, you get the bounce back message. If you view the headers of the email you may be able to work out where it actually originated from. Since you're the innocent party there's really nothing much you can do about it yourself, except delete the automated response(s) that you're getting. It's a nuisance, but it's life, I'm afraid.
Site of the month
My site of the month should be of use to all of you who spend a lot of time stuck in traffic. The Real Time Traffic reporter (http://tinyurl.com/2cgq5) displays maps of the M25, Birmingham, Kent, Leeds, London and Manchester and provides informative data on the real-time average speed of traffic simply by putting your mouse cursor over various sections. It's very useful to use prior to the start of a journey.
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Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. New: visit Phil's Weblog (www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html)! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header 'column query'.