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Hey whiterabbit, can you do a spam report with your nickname and I'll check out an example of what you're talking about?

Not sure if it's complete, but it's got a purty flag for each country and you could scrape the outlinks from this page: http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

It's got google.ru on it, which just re-launched last week, so hopefully that list is pretty up-to-date--possibly even auto-generated..

I'm not aware of anything new over the weekend that would have affected things, other than possibly swings due to holiday traffic.

"In the end for everyone, having 3 major players in the SE world will be awesome for everyone."

I agree. More competition = everybody works harder = better quality results for users. That's the best way forward in the future to me.

"Google has been far-n-away the toughest nut to crack of any of the engines."

That makes me feel better, Brett. :) Seems like a good time to remind folks that there's other search engines out there and diversification plus keeping eggs in many baskets means that folks should go try to crack other search engines' nuts as well. I was reading a book that had a chapter about Infoseek, and all the utterly insane things that spammers did to show up all over Infoseek for all kinds of off-topic words. It was just wild to read about.

And I know that at least a few WebmasterWorld readers will now smile nostalgically as they recall the adventures they had with Infoseek.. :)

"I am getting fed up with so many junk, purpose built, sites appearing in the results. I should know, because I own some of them."

I have to say I got a smile out of that one, Bobby_Davro.

I can believe Easter or taxes. I know that every time I sit down to do my taxes, I'm not in the mood to spend any money for a week or so after that. :)

Dang, I gotta do my taxes this weekend..

BallochBD, I see your point, but who gets to define what's an extremist organization or who's wrong? If you were to take 100 people and ask them to list all the extremist groups, I guarantee you'd hear everything from Greenpeace to the current U.S. administration and everything in between.
There's a group in San Francisco called Critical Mass. Once a month they ride around the city in large groups to rally for better biking infrastructure. Sometimes it causes traffic jams and angry car drivers. Is Critical Mass an advocate group or an extremist group? You can see where it would get problematic if people had to make value judgments like that.

Messages 2-7 make a lot of sense to me--you can't help who links to you.

Glad it sounds like it went okay, soapystar!

Yah, I think that's been around forever..

Scarecrow, is that you? You really remind me of this fellow Everyman that used to post around here. Then Everyman stopped posting and this new fellow Kackle started posting. I haven't seen Kackle around for a while lately, but you remind me of him. :)

Anyway, I posted a bit about Gmail in message #204 of this thread: /forum86/236-7-30.htm

ThomasB, looks like someone had a birthday. :)

"That's great.. I was hoping to find the other great Google April Fool's Day posts. I found Mentalplex, Pigeon Rank and now we have Lunar Job. Does anyone know some of the others?"

There's a long tradition of jokes inside Google. Today for exampe, the milk in the fridge was green. At least, I hope it was milk. And don't even get me started on what we did to the VP of Engineering's office a few years back. I don't know if he ever got all the sand out of that office. Come to think of it, it was April Fool's Day when someone replaced Eric Schmidt's photo in our intranet directory. Hmm. I think maybe I should stop talking now.

"Applying a Patel extrapolation to Rosing linear projections"

I can't believe that they put that information up already! I was pretty sure that proprietary project wasn't due to be mentioned until late 2006 at the earliest. I only hope that other search engines don't uncover the secret of the Patel extrapolation..