Monthly Archive for April, 2006

The Grifters… Sucked!

I watched The Grifters last night before bed. I have to say, while it started off confusing, and began to look very promising, it ended up sucking.

From IMDB:

Lily works for a bookie, placing bets to change the odds at the track. When her son is hospitalized after an unsuccessful con job and resultant beating, she finds that even an absentee parent has feelings for her child. This causes her own job to go wrong as well. Each of them faces the down side of the grift.

When con artist Roy Dillon (Cusack) is visited by his Mother, Lilly (Huston), who is also a con artist, she sends Roy off to the hospital because of a blow to the gut he suffered while working the grift. Roy’s girlfriend, Myra (Bening), the third con artist, comes to visit Roy, and we discover that Lilly and Myra don’t get along. After he is released from the hospital, Roy and Myra go on a little trip, where he is propositioned to be partners in crime with Myra. Everything soon falls apart for the three con artists, which leads to a bloody climax.

That “bloody climax” is Lily (the mother) killing Myra (the girlfriend) and later Roy (the son). The final scene of the movie is Lily hitting Roy with a suitcase full of his money (which she’s show up to steal), causing the glass in his hand to shatter and rip open his neck. She cries over the body, sweeps up some of the wet, bloody money (mixed with shards of broken glass) and driving off through LA.

Worst. Movie. Evar.

TagThru - A True Search Comparison

It’s not often that something brand new hits the internet that provides such an easy basis for comparison. I imagine this likely wasn’t one of the ideas on their minds when they released “SOG” late last week, but Scott and Alex did give me an interesting way to test the search leaders.

Previously, I’ve tested search engines before, but I’ve never been able to test and see exactly how quickly any of them pick up new content on the Internet.

Thanks to the new TagThru feature of FeedLounge, I had a brand new “word” to search for on the big 3. Here are the results:

Google (Link)

TagThru - Google

Yahoo! (Link)

TagThru - Yahoo

MSN (Link)

TagThru - MSN

I was a bit shocked that Google had no results and uselessly offered up “Together” as an alternative search phrase (who the hell searches for ‘Together’?). 3 days after launch, Google still didn’t know about the new FeedLounge feature… Could it really be?

I found it hard to believe, so I did a little more in-depth searching:

Google (Link)

TagThru - Google 2

Yahoo! (Link)

TagThru - Yahoo 2

MSN (Link)

TagThru - MSN 2

Sadly, it looks like Google’s still the only one in the game that’s… well… not. As often as their bot is crawling my little sites, I would expect them to pick up on news about FeedLounge from any of the hundreds of sites talking about it fairly quickly. Looking at the results from Yahoo! and MSN, it looks like this isn’t an unreasonable expectation either.

So what’s holding Google up? Is there that much analysis to be done on search results, that 3 days later they can still have not finished properly indexing a single site mentioning the phrase “TagThru” that they’ve grabbed since Friday’s launch?

If this spells any kind of growing trend, I’d say we’re looking at a transition period here. MSN appears to be showing the most relevent data first, although they’ve got some problems with the URLs they’re choosing to display with it (I’d rather see a link directly to the post on the FeedLounge blog, rather than to my.feedlounge.com). Could they actually be making all the progress that people like Scoble keep saying they are? In this instance, it seems like they are to me, but I’ll let you make your own decisions and we’ll see where time takes us…

As with so many things ‘tech, we sit back and wait once more…

UPDATE: Just to add another aspect of comparison, I decided to snag A9’s results:

TagThru - A9

Looks like Google’s not the only one missing the party…