Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
Q Could you suggest a site that I could use that provides me with free webspace? I’m starting to design a site and I just need some space to play around with to try things out, but I don’t want to (at this stage) spend money getting hosted webspace.
A It’s worth checking with your Internet Service Provider to see if they include any website in your subscription – many do these days. Alternatively you could try a service such as 741 (http://www.741.com/) which gives you free space and a domain name of your choice in the form of http://www.something.741.com/. I’ve used them myself in the past and it’s a good service (although advertising-driven). However, there are plenty of other such services as well – just do a Google search for ‘free webspace’ or ‘free web hosting’ and you’ll have lots to choose from.
Q How can I see what other people are searching for?
A There are a number of different utilities that will show you, real time, what people are searching for on their search engines. For the curious, you could try Metaspy (www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/) or the Google Zeitgeist site (www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/archive2005.html) or the Lycos top 50 (50.lycos.com).
Q Search engines give their results in order of what they consider to be the most appropriate result first, with less relevant after that. Most of the time this is fine, but are there any search engines that let me rank results myself?
A There are a number of engines that currently allow this; it can be useful now and then to see sites that you’d otherwise have missed, particularly if you’re having difficulty in finding what you’re looking for. I’d suggest the following: Exalead Advanced (http://beta.exalead.com/search/C=0/2p=1) re-ranks by date, MSN Search (http://search.msn.com/?qb=1) has search builder, which re-orders on update, popularity, and accuracy. Google Personalized (http://labs.google.com/personalized) ranks according to interests that you have specified. Finally, ZapMeta (http://zapmeta.com/) re-ranks on popularity, title, source, domain.
Site of the month
My site of the month is rather less a site, and rather more a utility. It’s called Jybe (www.jybe.com/). You download the software, and install it as a toolbar in your browser window (IE or Firefox) and you can then start a session. Another Jybe user logs into that session, and you both have a chat window at the bottom of the browser screen to chat in. The person running the session can then move to different webpages, and the pages are viewed by everyone else in that session. It’s all run on their servers, so there are no security implications on your machine. It has a few teething problems (it doesn’t support tabs or scrolling at the moment), but it’s a very clever (and free!) training aid. Or, if you want to show an aged parent how to use eBay, it’s good for that as well.
Updated: 20 April 2005