Doug Ross @ Journal

More Google Hacking

From ResearchBuzz comes this interesting Google syntax for date-based searching:

The syntax is daterange:xx-xx , where each xx is a date. Here's the kicker, though; the dates must be in Julian format. I hear you yelling, "What the heck is Julian format?" Julian dates are a continuous count of days since noon UTC on January 1, 4713 BC. April 21, 2002, at about 5am UTC is 2452385.70608 in Julian date format (hereafter referred to as JD.) Skip the decimals; Google doesn't like 'em...

dogs daterange:2452384-2452384

You'd get about 400 results, vs about 6,770,000 for a full Google search of the word dogs. Now, can you mix this with other syntaxes? Yes, to a certain extent. It works fine with intitle:

intitle:dog daterange:2452384-2452384

It also works okay with inurl, even when you mix the syntaxes together.

intitle:dog inurl:dog daterange:2452384-2452384


NBOR Review

The pre-release marketing hype has faded and left NBOR with the reality of developing a usable software product. The first reviews are in and are decidedly, well, you make the call.

"My opinion is that NBOR's Blackspace could be a great university/phD project or a research project. But not a product. It is currently very limited (few basic functions to derive from) to be used in real offices (for $299 retail price no less), it does not interoperate with existing office documents, its interface is terrible and can even be time consuming creating some of the tools from scratch for functions that they are just a click away on existing Office or graphics applications...

...Maybe when they have a complete SDK to give away, they refine their interface, clean up the crashing bugs of the player, be more compatible with office ... then maybe NBOR would have a chance. But if that take them 10 more years to complete I don't want to even imagine their investor's mood by then."

Advice to NBOR and other would-be software designers working on leading-edge user interfaces: hire the best (e.g., Gerry at MindStorm) and let them work their magic. I have a suspicion that the guys at NBOR have never shipped a mainstream product before and, if that's the case, their investors did everyone a disservice by not insisting upon a seasoned team to assist.