Learning is an Art

I am to used to searching everything from Firefox search providers box on the left hand side; I was getting fed up when I type some issue id for my local jira and not getting any results so I decided to develop a search provider for jira quick search and to my surprise it was easier than I expected; hence I put ins some effort in working it out and I want to save effort of people who might be interested in doing same.
We will create an xml file based on following page creating open search plugin for Firefox

Edit the fields in bold according to your setup and save the file in your <Firefox installation directory>\searchplugins\jira.xml

Restart your browser and check the list of search providers; you will see a new search provider with name you specified in tag short name.

The above concept can be extended for searching any other intranet side through Firefox.

Enjoy searching Jira issues; post me back if you have some issue getting it working.

In this article I am going to share my observation on a search engine scour.com; which claims to be a social search engine.

I would like to randomly point out few of my observations

• They are try to give a new face to search introducing socialization in searching; instead of reading full clicking on link and reading whole thing I can read comment from fellow users; provided some body has already commented on th result, but again this can easily be spammed with useless and misleading comments I really don’t know how they are going to handle that.
• The search is cumulative of results from scour, msn, yahoo, google that possibly could give you good results but what I got was not always useful; but still it is a good feature to see in place. But I would like to know what they are doing with all these results before displaying it and how they are claiming that result is optimum.
• If you type a string which does not give any result on any of the search engines it goes into unknown state and even does not tell you whats wrong; it keeps on displaying searching; I have reported this to them but no response.
• Time taken for search is higher than any other search engine but that should be expected as it searching three search engines and giving you the results but magnitude is higher than what is expectable; the search which took Google 0.06 seconds scour took around 2.13 seconds and as we say time is money a lot of money is getting lost out there.
• Worst part for me is that while browsing a result you can not find out what page of the site you are as you get a constant link like this http://scour.com/view/result/?URL=http://www.python.org/ this will remain like this what ever page you navigate; this has a reason behind it to enable you to vote and comment on the result but from usability point of view its not good.
• They are trying to buy publicity and attention; they have some point system for different actions like searching, commenting on search results, voting on search results and if you are able to reach 6500 points you get $25 visa gift card; I even read some one complaining of being banned when he was about to reach the mark; this raises some fingers on credibility of the company but I will leave it on company to answer that.

I would like to conclude with a thumbs up to them for the idea but idea can only become great if it can be implemented properly. You can not get success and publicity just by throwing some dollars here and there.