Search engines, blogs and worms

A difficult week as I decided there wasn't much I could do to combat the infection my computer seemed to have. So it's in the shop being cleaned up. Luckily the laptop is no worse and got a clean scan when I replaced the antivirus software.

I did discover, after searching and getting advice, that you don't have to buy expensive antivirus...there are other alternatives that some say work even better. Panda Software has one, that can scan your computer online using an ActivX process. Computer Associate (CA.com)'s antivirus is the one I went with since the shop had a copy for sale...that will install on three computers, just what I needed.

So, moving along....yesterday Blogger was reacting as though I never got the New Blogger working, so I couldn't sign in. But that lasted only a short while. Back to normal, I hope.

I'm really enjoying Danny Sullivan's new Search engine land site, lots of interesting news and helpful hints. A couple things I noticed today: A mention of a new beta metasearch, Zuula. Once you search it gives you tabs to see results in Google, Yahoo Search, MSN, Ask, Exalead, and Gigablast. Pretty handy, I'd say. It's useful to compare, too: I'm a bit surprised when I put in the name of a character I've been looking up lately and really the only engine that finds a number of hits is Google. It doesn't have Clusty, which I think is the only other engine that found a lot.

And here's another search engine with a twist: Cranky.com is billed as a search engine for the over-50 crowd. (Seems like an awfully large population to be labelled 'cranky'). It's from a senior centered-website called eons.com. Don't know about this search engine, since it seems to be searching a small universe. People my age don't want a smaller universe, we want bigger! The 'top search' for today seems to be 'brain builders' but most of the top results go to eons.com's sites. Wonder what Ronni Bennett's Cranky Old Lady thinks of this one?