Januar 2012
2 Einträge
Google will follow the activities of users across... →
Many Google employees seem to be unhappy about... →
November 2011
1 Eintrag
Google puts it's users in a search bubble, making... →
Oktober 2011
1 Eintrag
Links to Wikipedia are now protocol relative
MetaScroll now supports Wikipedias protocol relative URLs. So when you are using an SSL encrypted connection to MetaScroll an go to a Wikipedia article from there, it will be SSL encrypted as well.
No chance for any possible listeners along your internet connection (educational facilities, employers, café owners) to see what you were searching or what Wikipedia articles you were reading.
August 2011
1 Eintrag
Google Admits Handing over European User Data to... →
April 2011
1 Eintrag
Yahoo! now stores their log files for 18 instead... →
März 2011
1 Eintrag
btw: The quick preview feature has a keyboard...
I totally forgot to mention: the shortcut for the web preview is Ctrl+Enter. Have fun!
Februar 2011
1 Eintrag
2 Tags
Anonymous peak into search result pages
Starting now, you find an new icon in the upper right corner of every search result on MetaScroll:
By clicking this icon, you can get a quick preview of the page behind the link, without ever visiting it:
This helps you find the right site for your search, without revealing your IP to different websites and multiple ad/tracking providers along the way. Try it out!
Technical details
This...
Dezember 2010
1 Eintrag
Wallstreet Journal: Rivals Say Google Plays... →
Good for those, who don’t rely on Google alone.
November 2010
1 Eintrag
Viglink integration
I just integrated the Viglink-service as an intend to cover the expenses necessary to support MetaScroll.
What Viglink does is, it tries to find an affiliate program for a given URL. All clicks on a search result on MetaScroll are now redirected via Viglink as a default. You an prevent this by unchecking the “Allow affiliate programs”-checkbx in the settings. Viglink takes the given...
Oktober 2010
2 Einträge
Google reveals user search histories 9k times... →
Switch to Google Closure
MetaScroll went through a major rewrite of the search client during the last weeks. I switched from using jQuery as the core JavaScript library to Google’s Closure Library.
The reason I chose Closure is the hope for a better overall performance due to less encapsulation, as well as a smaller footprint of the JavaScript Code.
The Google Closure Library allows one to pick the required...
September 2010
1 Eintrag
MetaScroll is "Mashup of the Day" on...
ProgrammableWeb chose MetaScroll as their “Mashup of the Day” for August 30th 2010! This is the first coverage of MetaScroll on international websites.
Thank you very much, guys! Great to see that others love MetaScroll as much as I do!
August 2010
1 Eintrag
Keyboard support!
Your mouse or trackpads are great ways to skim through your search results on MetaScroll! Anyhow, some folks prefer to not travel with their hands between keyboard and mouse/trackpad when searching. They’d ike to leave them on the keyboard.
For those keyboard afficiandos MetaScroll just got a lot better! You now aren’t dependend on your mouse anymore! Instead, you can move between...
März 2010
2 Einträge
New: Now with MIME-type hinting
I am proud to annonce that by now a new feature just got released! MetaScroll now hints various non-HTML MIME-types to you by displaying an according icon (taken from the great KDE Oxygen set).
You can try it yourself by doing a search for e.g. some PDFs. Hinted MIME-types include, but are not limited to:
PDF
MP3, WAV, AAC
WMV, AVI, MOV
DOC, XLS, CSV, RTF
TTF, Torrent, Diff
If you have...
Webserver configuration
At first, I used the classic allrounder, the Apache2-webserver. But since its memory footprint isn’t the smallest, especially with all the modules I use (like mod_deflate, mod_jk, mod_proxy, mod_php, mod_rewrite, mod_ssl, etc), a service like MetaScroll generates quite a load on the machine, even with very few users. This is because of many requests being proxied over the service, so that...
Februar 2010
2 Einträge
The technology behind MetaScroll
In the cause of this blog, I will try to give you an impression of the technology behind MetaScroll and the ropes that I’ve jumped through, to give you a top performance for your we search. Hopefully you can learn a thing or two, to help you with YOUR projects.
The topics that I’ll try to cover are …
Caching
Document size reduction
Webserver configuration
Backend...
What is MetaScroll?
MetaScroll is the attempt to build a modern version of the classic meta-search engines. These engines, though quite popular in the late 90s, early 2000s, lost their market share to Google, like all the other of the popular search engines at that time.
Although Google delivers great results and a good searching experiences, there still are issues with their web search:
Ease of use. At the end of...