But anyways, they made Cuil. Or is it Cuill. Though you pronounce it "cool." Yeah, that name choice will certainly work out for them.

Zealot: Hey, you should try Cuil. It's so awesome. OMG. It's a "cuil" way to search. Hehehehe.
Random Guy: Umm, ok.
Later, Random Guy proceeds to try cool.com. Fails. Then Googles cool. Gets Wikipedia articles and a Gwen Stephanie video. Says screw it, and goes about doing something more productive. Like watching pr0n.

With their $33 million, you would've thought they might have been able to secure cool.com or at least think of a less retarded name, but I guess you can never underestimate the genius of 2.0. Obscure names are just as cool as they are useful!

But name-fail behind them, their product is this totally, completely awesome, and web, no wait, world changing technology. Not.

Let's just try a generic search of 'paintball':

Google:

Cuiooooll:

Notice how Google's is really relevant, while Quillllll just isn't? Let's go through the problems, shall we:

1. Explore By Category. Paintball Markers? Good. Pneumatic Weapons? Not Bad. Commodore 64 Games? Umm, not really. Marvel Comics Supervillains? No. Towns In New York? Yeah, Huntington would be Huntington Beach, which is on the other side of the country. 1990's American Television Series? Ok, now you just lost me.
2. Result box positioning. "Hey, let's just put the result right under each other, ignoring length." "Great idea. Computing something to make the results seem orderly would be hard."
3. Results. A parked domain, tripod site (they seem to still exist), a canadian store, 3 spam sites, 1 wikipedia article (hey, that's useful), and a couple of actually relevant sites. Yeah, that's really sad.
4. Crappy bottom toolbar thing or whatever the hell you would call it that takes up 33 pixels of the page to display a 2/3 columns switcher, which both are horrendous, and the pagination part, since going to page 2 is so useful after not having seen page 1. They have so much confidence in their first page that they know you won't find whatever you're looking for on there.
5. Black or white. Pick one.

And they're just trying too hard to be Google, but want to look like they aren't. Really simple home page, but it's different because it's black and blue instead of green and white. And instead of being centered, it's kinda off centered, because that's the king of usefulness. Results are still blue link, black description, and green url link. But the results are in columns, which is so much different. Usability be damned.

They also decided to add random pictures to random results.

Where the hell did they get that picture from? I've never seen it before. And what are they? Drawers? What does that have to do with xrho.com or sites. Pretty sure this will cause some problems with people not wanting to be associated with whatever picture is next to it. I personally don't want this site to be associated with some sort drawers, unless they're really awesome ones, which these clearly aren't.

Then there's this:

Don't know what the hell happened there. The second page just says it can't find any results. Great coding there guys.

Also, what's with this TRACKID cookie you're pushing to my computer. I thought you only saved my preferences which was sent with each request and you didn't store any user information. What the fuck? Something called TRACKID definitely doesn't fall into this.

Editing the 'cols' cookie is fun though.

Uggh. Whatever. I'm sure there's so much more fail that I probably missed. Anyways, you guys should've stayed "stealth" (as dumbass Arrington calls it) forever.

Note: I don't read TechCrunch, just saw the shitty headline in TechMeme.

Hello! I am (bored|tired) tonight. I am (nice|23 yo) girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at [A-z0-9]@[A-z0-9].info only. (You will see some of my private pics|Don't miss my naughty pictures|I would like to share some of my pics).

Is anybody else getting a lot of email consisting of just this? For the past week or 2, my spam folder, thankfully not my inbox, is getting filled with these emails. They all follow the same template, with nothing straying from one another. It's always bored or tired, nice or 23 yo, and it's always a .info domain for the email. Maybe I'm weird, but it just seems weird. They aren't trying to make me buy some stock, click their referral/ad link, steal my credentials from wherever, make my p3n15 huge or have a rich, dead uncle in some random country. They want me to send an email to a different email address than the one that was sent (It's usually a Yahoo address, that actually looks to be sent by Yahoo). I just don't see the usefulness in it.

First off, their google dork isn't even right. Index of /wp-content/plugins should clearly be intitle:"Index of /wp-content/plugins" or else I'll get your's and this shitty post in the results.

But that's not even that good. It only applies to people with their blog hosted in the root directory. If you have it in the blog/ directory, you don't get hit.

So now, the query should be intitle:"Index of"+intitle:"/wp-content/plugins". This returns about 50k more results.

But what about the usefulness of this?

Let's say there is a vulnerability in the "Share This" plugin.

We can try the directory way that's supposedly so vulnerable. intitle:"Index of /wp-content/plugins" share-this.php 40 hits

Or a better method. We know that the plugin adds a link called "Share This" to every post. Don't believe me? Scroll down a bit and you'll see it. So we can search for "Share This" on pages with the word wordpress, since that's usually in the footer, but not if it uses the word plugin, since it's probably talking about the plugin itself or have wordpress or Share This in the title since it's likely to also just be talking about the plugin itself. wordpress+"Share This" -plugin -intitle:"wordpress" -intitle:"Share This" 3.3 million hits.

Sure, there will be false positives, but there's a much greater changes of having a much bigger impact. Who cares about the false positives? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Just move on. You could start it at night and have tried all the sites before even waking up, well, maybe, probably not, but you'll have a lot more than 40.

I'm thinking the severity of the whole directory being exposed is a little dramatic. Yeah, it's probably better if it wasn't indexed, but it's not killing anyone. Now, if you have a password in there, that's a different case.

In fact, here is my plugin directory. (I have indexes off by default, mainly because netfirms doesn't use Apache's indexing thing)

% ls -lA wp-content/plugins
total 1400
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  8 18:41 404-notifier
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    4667 May  8 18:41 404-notifier.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  3 2701791  552     512 May  7 22:18 PostToTwitter
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    2134 May  7 22:16 PostToTwitter.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 Apr 21 16:03 akismet
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  8 18:41 comment-relish
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    3536 May  8 18:35 comment-relish.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  7 22:18 easy-auctionads
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    7542 May  7 22:16 easy-auctionads.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   54904 Apr 21 15:20 goog.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552    1024 Apr 21 16:20 google-sitemap-generator
drwxr-xr-x  5 2701791  552     512 Apr 21 16:49 gregarious
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552  109199 Apr 21 15:49 gregarious.tar.gz
-rwxr-xr-x  1 2701791  552    2025 Oct 25  2006 hello.php
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    5152 Nov 16  2006 ol_feedburner.php
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    1861 Jul 24  2006 sem-unfancy-quote.php
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  8 18:40 share-this
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   14032 May  8 18:35 share-this.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  7 22:17 stats
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552    5213 May  7 22:16 stats.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  3 2701791  552     512 May  8 18:41 subscribe-to-comments
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   16017 May  8 18:36 subscribe-to-comments.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 May  8 18:40 twitter-tools
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   17148 May  8 18:36 twitter-tools.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  4 2701791  552     512 Apr 21 21:47 widgets
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   26579 Apr 21 20:48 widgets.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x  2 2701791  552     512 Apr 21 16:20 wp-cache
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   47104 Apr 21 15:21 wp-cache.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552   31091 Jul 26  2006 wp-db-backup.php
drwxr-xr-x  4 2701791  552     512 Apr 25 12:54 wp-syntax
-rw-r--r--  1 2701791  552  309747 Apr 25 12:56 wp-syntax.tar.gz

Yes, I download the zips then convert them to tarballs, that's why all of my widgets are available in both formats.

But it also raises another question, how many of those do I have enabled?

404Notifier? No. PostToTwitter? No. akismet? Yes. Comment-relish? No. Easy-auctionads? Hell no. Google Sitemaps? Yes. Gregarious? No. Hello Dolly? Fuck no. Feedburner? Yes. Unfancy quote? Hell yes. Share this? Yup. Stats? Yes. Twitter tools? I had to check, but yes apparently. WP Cache? Yes, Wordpress is too slow without it. DB Backup? Yup. WP Syntax? Yes, I likes me fancy highlighting.

10 out of 16 enabled. Does it mean that they can't be exploited without being enabled? Not necessarily, but to an extent, yes. It should die when it gets to an add_action call, unless someone allows it to execute other PHP code or include other files before calling add_action. Though they probably shouldn't do it in the first place. include($_GET['file']); comes to mind.

And if anyone is wondering where all the scripts are, I'll have a couple of widgets soon and another couple of python scripts.

Be like Gawker, and put ads in them for all I care. I'm not going to see them, but I'm not going to see them on your site anyways. Or put a link at the bottom of every post, like techcrunch or engadget. I'll actually see those. I'm not going to click them, and can easily ignore them, but some people might not.

But don't, just don't, only provide a partial content feed. It's been shown that full content feeds have just as many click-throughs as full content feeds, so you're not gaining anything. In fact, you're losing some, because I'm not going to read it. The whole offline support of Google Reader doesn't really work. I guess I could star some to read later when I'm online, but that's stupid. I want to read stuff when I'm offline with nothing better to do, not star things to read them when I'm online with better things to do.

I tried to subscribe to about 5 blogs yesterday, only to immediately unsubscribe after seeing the horrible [...]. If I wanted to go to your blog to read the post, I would just go to your blog in the first place and cut out the middleman.

I also went through to remove all partial content feed that somehow managed to slip through or decided to change, which resulted in about 15 feeds being removed. Like ArsTechnica, most news feeds, and GNUCITIZEN. GNUCITIZEN, not sure why the change of heart with your feed, but it's a shame, I really liked your blog. If you change it back, I'll continue reading, but until then, you're not on my subscription list.

I also removed any sites that force you to go to their site anything else. I'm looking at you digg. Reddit, keep up the good work. I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to try to get to the content. But digg, you're pretty much pointless anyways. Going to that site maybe once a week and viewing the top content is more than most people need.

If make the content accessible by your readers, you'll do better than forcing people to your site. People want the content to come to them how they want it. And if they have their own sites or whatever, they will be more likely to link to you, which then, people will view your site. Or just let search engines do their work. People still use those, and they'll view your site. But to loyal people who just want to read what you have to say, give what they want. And if someone wants a partial content feed, offer it to them, but don't remove support for the full content feed.

I put an ad at the bottom of each post when viewing a single post (it has since been removed), and check out my awesome earnings

That's right. $0.23. I didn't even make a quarter. I was close though.

Let's do some math. I had these up for about 7 days, making my daily earning about 3.6 cents a day. It'll take 28 days for me to get to $1.00. But I need $100 before being able to get anything. Sneaky sneaky there Google. Now, I'm up to 7.6 years. Let's say a couple people click an ad (the 3.6 cents a day is just from showing them), we can bring that down to an even 7 years. Luckily, after a year of using Adsense on other sites, I already have $30 dollars in my account after a year. We can cut that down 5 years. Or if we want to count $30 / year, 2 years, but I'm not going to count that way.

I'm going to be rich.

But I run into a problem, I like some of the features, mainly Web History and showing the current PageRank. Finding out about unread gmail messages. And even though I still mainly use regular old bookmarking, I guess the ability to bookmark the page might be useful. Thankfully, there are alternatives to them all.

First, Web History and PageRank can easily be fixed by the Search Status plugin. This shows the PageRank and Alexa rank for the current page/site. What's good about this, Google records the Web History by using the PageRank lookup, meaning that we don't need anything else for us to use the Web History app.

Download Search Status

Next, getting unread count of Gmail messages. There are a few plugins that do this, but the best one, imo, is Gmail Manager. This allows you to check multiple accounts (better than the toolbar), set the refresh rate, and won't take up valuable toolbar space, since it sits at the bottom of the browser.

Download Gmail Manager

Finally, the bookmarking. There are quite a few extensions out there, but I didn't like any of them, so I wrote my own Greasemonkey script. You'll still need something to view the bookmarks, but bookmarking a page is as simple as a key press. Hit the Pause/Break button and the current page will be saved to Google Bookmarks. Nothing else. You need Greasemonkey to use this.

Download Google Bookmarks via Key Press User Script

And now I don't need the Google Toolbar anymore. Yay!