Audible.com Web Site is Lousy (To Be Polite)

My wife was surprised this week when I told her Audible.com has been charging her $14.95 every month for almost a year. She checked into it and realized she had signed up for a monthly subscription without even know it. That's a problem right there. Before closing the account, she wanted to redeem six book credits her account had accumulated. We decided to divide them evenly.

When it was my turn to select books, I was expecting an experience similar to Amazon.com. First of all, the Audible.com web site is very slow. Not snappy like Amazon.com, or any other website I use by choice for that matter. Seconds lagged each time I clicked a link.

Secondly, the category navigation is not very intuitive.

Thirdly, it looks like the site is quite different depending on if you are signed in or not. The site is more appealing when they are trying to lure you into registration, and frankly it's faster too. Tolerably fast. Audible.com offers fewer categories, perhaps to remove clutter and reduce load times.

Once you log in, its the slow site. Clicking on "Science Fiction & Fantasy" now and you can feel the delay before the page loads. You get to a page that displays, among other sub-categories for fantasy etc:

# Sci-Fi: Classic (217)
# Sci-Fi: Contemporary (555)

That is not a great number of titles. It gets more frustrating after clicking around twenty pages or so, the amount it took me to figure out "Contemporary" means anything since 1980. There is no way to browse with multiple filters, for example all "contemporary" sci-fi that was also on the New York Times best sellers list. The closest thing Audible.com offers is all 555 titles, sorted by how often they are sold on Audible.com.

I clicked on that link, got frustrated at how long the page was taking to load and was able to type "I'm composing this" before the page loaded.

Suffice it to say, Audible.com: now that Amazon.com has entered the audio book market place, you web site needs a huge overhaul to be competitive:

1) Speed. The competition is a click away.
2) Breadth of content: I understand sci-fi may be your weak area, but if you don't have what I want for all my audio book needs, I'll go elsewhere.
3) Navigation. Browsing a book store is easy and pleasurable. You're website needs to be even easier. Let me go to sci-fi, and then narrow down to New York Times best sellers. Then let me sort by newest first. By letting me narrow in, and showing me what path I am on, you would let me feel like I am getting closer to the perfect purchase. Otherwise I'm lost in the woods, and leave.

Ask.com Top 10 Search Terms for 2008

Ask.com announced their top 10 search terms for 2008, and Tech crunch covered it succinctly.

Its not surprising to anyone who has examined user behavior that it is common to use search navigationally. That is, they type in Google the search box of Yahoo and,apparently, Ask.com, to get to google. Ask.com top term "dictionary" should be seen as a navigational search; Ask.com owns dictionary.com.

TechCrunch lauds Ask for being more honest than the other search engines who scrub their lists so much the results are meaningless.

In my opinion, Ask.com and others should cite their methodology. Do they remove terms that are navigational to their competitors? Do they remove porn terms? Its fine and expected that they do, but they should say that.

Raw data is one outcome I hope to see in the future, and why I laud projects like solr that help make open search a reality.

My sister got hosed by MS Antivirus

[Wow, I haven't blogged for awhile. Been enjoying retirement, I guess. This pic is now way out of date. My hair got much longer and is now way shorter than my blogger headshot :P.]

First, kind reader, be fully confident: Microsoft does *not* make an antivirus product. There is a malware program going around that calls itself MS Antivirus. I know, because I just installed it for my sister.

Her laptop was hosed, she told me. I thought she meant that the hard drive was shot, but then she continued and described all the problems her computer was having, and it was obviously infected with spyware.

So I took her laptop home, did a low level reformat, and installed Windows XP. Got all the patches loaded on, and of course gave her Firefox.

She sent me info on some antivirus software she had just purchased, including the activation code, and wanted me to make sure I loaded that on since it was bought and paid for. I'm a good brother, so I did.

D'Oh!

Spybot Search and Destroy cleaned the resulting mess up, except for MS Antivirus itself. To kill that, I Ctrl+Alt+Deleted and killed the program, then deleted the install directory.

So, a couple tips:
- Whenever I want to fix someones computer, I always download the utilities I need from download.com. Don't do a Google Search for the stuff you need, since any ads may be compromised. I don't know who the hell makes Spybot Search and Destroy but for years I've gone to download.com to get it; it's always one of the most popular downloads.
- An the new corollary I will pass on to my sister: If you suspect your computer is infected with spyware, don't click on any of the pop-ups said spyware produces looking for a cure.

Props to PC Mag for info on MS Antivirus.

And finally, here are the emails my sister got, in an effort to let any other victims know that they've been had.

From: eSafeBill Transaction 
Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:29 PM
Subject: Your MS Antivirus License purchase
To: my sister


Thank you for making a purchase with eSafeBill!

Transaction information:
Amount: 77.9 USD Including SCHD Bundle chosen
Activation Code: 873465112334272
Transaction ID: 
Order Number: 
Item: MS Antivirus License + System Cleaner and Hardware Doctor Bundle
You have chosen to purchase your software along with System Cleaner and Hardware Doctor bundle offer. Please download the installer for the additional software: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?tks=1
Quantity: 1
Date: 08/27/2008 12:21:40
Download source: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=msantivirusxp&c=c

This purchase will appear in your credit card statement as "Spyware-shop4..com".
Total amount of 77.9 USD will be charged to your credit card.
If you are not completely satisfied with this purchase, please do not hesitate
to contact us using SUPPORT REQUEST APPLICATION at http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=secure.esafebill&c=c
Please do not dispute this charge as doing so may affect your credit rating.

===
ACTIVATION

Please download the software from the following link if you
do not have it already installed.
Download source: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=msantivirusxp&c=c

Please activate the program by entering the following
code when prompted.

Make sure you enter your activation code correctly.
Just copy it and paste into the activation code box with no changes.
The code consists of 15 characters.
Your code is: 873465112334272

The product is activated now.
In case of any difficulties,
please do not hesitate to contact us.

===
REFUND POLICY

If you are not completely satisfied with this purchase, please do not hesitate


to contact us using SUPPORT REQUEST APPLICATION at http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=secure.esafebill&c=c
Please do not dispute this charge as doing so may affect your credit rating.

===
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE. PLEASE DO NOT REPLY.

Ok, lets note that dead giveaway too: if it says "Don't contact your credit card company to dispute the charge, it will affect your credit rating" then please call Visa or Mastercard right now and do just that. Their operators are standing by. :)

Google AdPlanner

Why buy a search term and link it to a page that is unreachable? No prob, if you a) have more money than Yaweh and b) you are the guy from whom we buy search terms.

A search for AdPlanner, Google's new publisher tool, does just that. Organic results include links to Toyota affiliate terms of use etc, which means this blog just might be a linkbait success.

I'll dig more into AdPlanner once I find a link to official public info, but Valleyway is already blogging about what it means to Comscore and Nielsen -- ok, they say its no threat. But maybe they were just being ironic. Oh, I can hope.

Google Street View for Real-estate Investors

A real-estate agent who I trust a lot happens to be in North Carolina a lot this year, and is on the look out for investment properties for me. She found a great single family home in Hillsborough that came on the market that morning, and it sounded like it was priced right. I went to Google maps, hoping the satellite view would give me some sense of the neighborhood, since I'd be making an offer site unseen. Not only did I find the satellite view, but also a Google Street View of the front on the house. This is a very residential area, so I was quite surprised. Within a few clicks I had checked out a dozen houses on the street and felt very comfortable with what I saw. We made an offer and it was accepted.

Google Street View will certainly become such a useful tool for us we will take it for granted. Until then, it'll be amazing to see how it changes the way we live and do business.

Wikia Search dead?

search.wikia.com was released January 7, 2008 as an open source search engine enhanced by user submitted content. But looking at http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia, the wiki about the project, there has been no news in over a month. And the forums look dead too. This could be a really interesting project, but seems like the open source community hasn't embraced it yet. Maybe we're tired of Jimmy? Maybe he's tainted?

If anyone is interested in working on the concept of open search, I recommend Lucene which is the engine Wikia Search is based on, or solr which is an enhacement of lucene. I've done a solr proof of concept in the past several months, and I love what solr can do. I think I'll be spending time their. Google can't be the final solution to search.

Google for Error Messages

I'm a total geek -- if you are, you may, like me, find this page completely hillarious: http://extension.usu.edu/?q=error

I stumbled upon that while exploring the problem of displaying error messages. To often people forget to turn of debug output in their production environments, revealing *way* too much to the public about their innards.

So, take the default error message for the code of your choice, and Google it. Find a lot of sites at their worst, if Googlebot happened to be spidering them then.

Google hearts Cupid

In the past I've blogged about Cupid.com running afoul of Google's mystical algorithm. That's a thing of the past, now it's the first search result for the term "cupid."

Our business model of advertising on local radio means we don't have to play the PPC game or get crazy worried about our Google search results, as long as we do well for branded search. For example, if you search for "online dating", the competition to get on that page is fierce/expensive, and we just haven't engaged in that pursuit.

Today I noticed, however, if you search for "online dating" or even "dating," Google's new "Searches related to" section includes "cupid.com" or "cupid." Very cool. Nice to be finally getting our props, just in time for Valentine's day.

Google, Cupid.com hearts you too.

VoilaBot, behave!

My websites are in the local advertising space: employment, online dating, business listings. My audience is in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Because of that, I have no chance of making revenue from traffic from Europe, China, or Nigeria.

So when I see a spider called voilabot, for Voila.fr, pounding my server farm, that's a spider I'd like to disallow. No problem, just add them to robots.txt. Only thing needed is how the bot identifies itself when scanning that file.

Typically, a spider will identify it's useragent and, parenthetically, give a link to info regarding the bot. Voilabot does not, it just points to their homepage:


2008-01-09 05:00:12 GET /robots.txt - - 193.252.149.16 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+fr;+rv:1.8.1)+
VoilaBot+BETA+1.2+(http://www.voila.com/) - - 200 1100 358 546


which redirects to http://www.voila.fr/, which sucks for me since I don't know French. I am able to find a page on their site about robots.txt, and how to block *all* spiders from visiting my site -- no thanks! I heart Google -- but nothing that mentions what user-agent top specify to block Voilabot.

The Google index, interestingly, includes the robots.txt files they scan. Examining these, some people specify Voila and just as many specify Voilabot. Other Google results include rant like mine -- apparently this bot has been in Beta since 2001.

So Voila.fr Webmaster: please tell us how to block your bot. Thanks!

Update: 1/15/08
No response from Voiala.fr so I'm now denying them at the firewall. If you don't want this bot, I encourage you to do the same.

We've seen it from

81.52.143.15
81.52.143.16

193.252.149.15
193.252.149.16