Even the colors are right. I bet you could fit a kantookler[1] on this thing.

Thanks to The Goat for the pointer.

[1] Kantooklers only appear in the animated version of *How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”, so I don’t have an authoritative spelling for this toy. They sure look like fun, though.

At least the paper version of the yellow pages is dead. I opened the new phonebook to find an Indian restaurant for take-out, and the listings were skimpy enough that the the by-cuisine section is gone. Restaurants that I know exist were not listed. My guess is that restaurants are dropping their yellow pages ads in favor of web sites. In the latest phone book for Palo Alto, that section in the directory just dropped below the useful level. I won’t bother with it again.

Unfortunately, local web search still isn’t doing the job. Yahoo! Local is the best, but browsing multiple pages for different kinds of restaurants is really clumsy compared to the good ol’ paper yellow pages. Try it: a Yahoo! search for indian restaurants, palo alto links to this Yahoo! Local result. Not bad, but it doesn’t seem very complete or up to date. Why list the Whole Foods six miles away in downtown Palo Alto but not the new one a mile away in Los Altos?

If I have more time to plan, I scan the Metroactive restaurant section which has pretty good coverage, but with some mysterious navigational division between full reviews and the one sentence descriptions.

In our case, we skipped restaurant take-out entirely, and grabbed some Indian from the deli/take-out section at Piazza’s, our local grocery. So switching from paper to web didn’t really pay off for the local restaurants.

Silicon Valley is a few years ahead of the rest of the country in web adoption, so let’s hope that local search can get it together before my parents in Texas are stranded with a skinny, useless yellow section in their phonebook.

Yesterday, our local CNN Headline News radio station (KLIV 1590) ran a puff piece on the CEO of Harper-Collins. I think it was the CEO. She sounded like a sharp person, but I can’t manage to even verify her name on the badly-designed H-C website. In it, they claimed that H-C is the first publisher to make excerpts of their books available on-line. They rolled out that “innovative” idea this year. Bzzzt. Wrong.

OK, accepting the qualifier “publisher” does rule out relative unknowns like Amazon (search inside this book) and Google’s book search. Google and Amazon aren’t publishers. And “excerpt” accidentally rules out the Baen Free Library which publishes entire books. But it is still wrong.

Every heard of the publisher O’Reilly? The reporter would have, if they’d ever even walked into the cube of anyone who keeps cnn.com running. O’Reilly has published book chapters for many years. Five years, seven, who knows? Heck, they’ve been doing it long enough to move past that stuff to a customizable on-line textbook publishing system for universities.

And I can’t even link to the CNN HN story so I can diss it specifically, because it doesn’t seem to exist on their website. Bleah.

I titled this “more bad reporting” because the worst science reporting I’ve ever heard was on CNN Headline News. I’ll write that up later.

I’m finally entering the public blogosphere after running an internal corporate blog for a couple of years. I work on search and spidering, mostly on the Ultraseek search engine. I’ve been on the web for over ten years and on the Internet for over twenty (my first ARPA e-mail address was before domains!).

Why “most casual observer”? My freshman physics professor at Rice was fond of the phrase “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” My friends and I thought that one of those would be a really handy thing to have available in the laboratory, because you could just ask them, get the obvious answer, and skip the experiments.

I don’t expect my observations to eliminate all your experiments, but I hope they will
save you some time. As Frank Westheimer at Harvard said, “a few months in the laboratory saves a few hours in the library.”