norlight.htm: Fravia's web-searching lore (¯`·.¸(¯`·.¸ Your Web Pages For Sale ¸.·´¯)¸.·´¯)

~ For SALE: Your Work ~

Version September 2002

FREEing up a Search Engine
by jeff
(with some older contributions by fravia+, slightly edited by jeff)

Jeff's intro

Can the free Internet, Survive, and, remain Free?
Everywhere you look on the net everything goes From Free to Fee
It begins to take on the appearance of a bank.
You deposit, and we will charge you tiny fees to hold in trust for you that which is yours.
When you want to make a withdrawal please feel free to do so understanding of course our TOS agreements.
For this priveledge of banking with us we give you several options to choose from... please read the fine print...
a Free account: a 5 mg web page -- no zip mpegs exe's permitted...nor images over .5 kb allowed.
We also require you to put an advertizzing sticker on each of your pages ---or (suffer)the Pop Up ads will be generated on the fly for your convience
If you would like to triple the size of your account please sign up for our silver plan which contains no advertizing!!
and for 10 dollars more you can be a part of our elite gold plan with unlimited ---...

There was a time when it was believed that Web Site traffic would turn into barrels of gold, and with a few Midus touches it did so for a time. Remember the days when we would complain about those damned pop advertizments? Remember all of the clever ideas and ways we came up with to shut them down or shut them off? I remember i even came up with a way using layering on my FREE pages that loaded MY OWN gif to exactly load cover Up the advertizements that they loaded onto my pages. For every Pro there is a con and for every con we find a way to reverse the pro and they in turn find a way to bypass our con :) Growth and change by inteli-osmos-gence- is :)

FREE FREE FREEEE ! Was the CRY and the bait to lure those to the call of the wild wild web.

We are constantly bombarded by FREE
But, What was/is/ this cost of free(dom)?

Why advertizing of course! We will display ads on your page and in turn you can have This and That for Free! If however you don't want web-free- advertizing on your page then a mere $29.95 can give you and your (irrittated by pop-ups) visitors freedom from our primary free offer of semi-free-free ...
the gambit is to always get your consumers coming and going you see.

You offer them what they don't, or won't, want, and then give them choices of what you Really want to give them, but either choice the customer makes, you still have a profit up your sleeve.

Those days may become the past because Web Traffic visitor numbers was a fallacy built upon the idea of where people gather, money will follow... harvesting visitors to what end? Why the profits of course! Click thrus without purchasing? Big Time profit loses... With everything comes an evolution of change, and with this change the web becomes ensconced in big named, big monied big brothered, corporate profiteers. How many Free places have we known that recognize us as their base for 'start out' audiences that hook us with 'free' offers and then gaff us with fees when they say.... oh sooooo sorry, we are changing ownership now; the new management will no longer be providing this service for free to you as our customer base seems to be of the eilite ilk who would RATHER PAY for the ooportunity to use our service in a more 'private' and 'personal' enviornment that we can provide for a small fee of... Curious too i bet is that if you dig down you find that the change in ownership wasn't a cash deal at all just swapping of stock which means the fisherman is still holding the pole while pacifying you with... geee, we are so sorry for the change in policy, its just not our fault, free just wasn't working out and we were forced to sell... hook line and stinker

I don't know about You, but I go to the Refer for a beer when the advertizing commercials come on, and I have yet in my 48 years too see an advertizement and say whooooooooooa, and switch off the Tube and jump in my truck to run out and buy anything. I think advertizing on the web is proving to be the same kind of whoooooooooa! It's sublimal impact for me while it is loading and poping all over my pages is to Kill it, or go get a beer and wait for it to die a minimized death with its emperors fig leaf floopping in my cookies jar. You know i have 2587 of those dam cookies taking up space on my hardrive? And as aware that i am of the snooping that must be going on in the background of my hard drive i continue to wonder weird things to myself, like, when I recieve 3 spam emails from Mortgage Companies, hours after I have clicked onto a mortgage site to use a mortagage rate calculator... Wow HOW did they do that? These guys are mind readers!!!!

Lets not forget now, that you have some dang search engines who will BAN you and your site for life if you even think about putting a disallow/* in a robots.txt file... and yet not only are they going to continue crawling your site with "what's yours is OURS" ego-disdane-nomics-- but they then are going to provide the information within your site to only those who will pay for it! Neat eh?

Now what is the cost of, Web-free, free freedom? No access; access denied; send $129.95 for your password.
Tresspassers will be violated on site, and killed with denails of service.

Hold the presses! Another one bites the bytes and hides the web parchments and scrolls of knowledge from us.
As of jan 200*-eternity+1, Northern Light will no longer provide free access

note:The CIA partners with Northern Light

(does collaborating email mean that they scan, share, and read it?)
whoa! big brothers watching

You pay, you read
You read, you Pay!
STOP, you can't come in
Go back and collect 200 dollars and forward it immediately

So what's the story here?
welp; geeeeesh; now these people are reaching their tenacles into your banked "knowledge-account", and not only withdrawing your interest,
but are now going to charge people to be able to find and view your knowledge; your creativity; and your work.
just another reason we need (those that are so fortunately capable)to make our own tools.

Who OWNS your web pages?
but that's another topic in itself...

...and yet in another part of the world in a sleepy little town... ... a cheshire cat is yawning nonchalantly in a window,and with seemingly half closed eyes while watching this pendulum swing...he suddenly takes a swipe

northernlight yes, northernlight no (08/03/02 00:46:39)

posted by fravia+ (slightly html edited by jeff :-) eheh I always wanted to say that :)

we all know about the demise of the 'normal' northernlight services in order to push the 'special collection' commercial searches.
Yet it seems to work nevertheless at times (on the simple mask, not on the advanced one).

So it works, at times it does not work
is northernlight dead or not?

1 item ("divine" northernlight ?)

1 item (power search)

582 items: "good searchlores search"

(note: last year this was 582 returns???; this year it is only 246 items in 62 sources)

no docs whatsoever: "bad searchlores search"

so... simplyfing

good mashpotatoes

good fravia

worth deepening into?

fravia+

******************************
BAM!!! Well hells bells you ole magician--
looks to me like you pretty much re-opened their commericialy closed door

your string of light [ http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?&qr= ] still shines thru :-)

:( mostly written in 2001 --- rewriten 2002; sorry for the delay.

a note to those who may suffer some strange variances in clicking on what appears to work:
sometimes i will click on the 'g' in the 'good fravia' link and I get One return; other times i will click on a diffeent area of the 'good' link and get 552 sources;
something is still very flighty and strange in the consistancy of the returns...

extra:
for anyone wanting to play a little riddle game you can find a gate to a prefab NL search query page here.

jeff
Post Scriptum (by fravia+, September 2002)

So Jeff did it, after all. He collected our observations and ints and integrated them -- quite cleverly -- in an 'experimental' essay. As you will have noticed, there are neither 'conclusions' nor 'certainities' here. It's a work in progress. The reader (you, duh) should work further, following these lines and angles (and, believe me, such endeavours will be rewarded by sheer mighty knowledge). Let's hope the reader (it's always (you, duh) will send his findings over here, so that they can be added here. A wisdom 'rosario': A 'necklace of knowledge', every pearl gently bringing your seekers' fingers to the next one...