zarjay.net

Why doesn’t Google correctly index my website? You’d think that if you did a Google search for “zarjay.net,” my main page would be the first result—instead, the first result is either my photo gallery’s RSS feed, which doesn’t make sense, or my Wikipedia profile, which isn’t even on my site at all! I don’t claim to understand Google’s methods for indexing websites, but you’d think from common sense that a search engine should correctly find a URL if you search for it. A9, Ask.com, Yahoo! Search, and even Windows Live Search all correctly find my site; they even find it when you search for “Zarjay,” my favorite web alias. I don’t expect this website to be the top of every search result, but it’d be nice if Google indexed my site correctly.

Welcome to the world of buggy software. I say that because Google’s search engine isn’t the only piece of computer software that’s been acting quirky. Has anyone upgraded to Firefox 2.0 yet? The promise of “powerful new features that make your online experience even better” is lost when the browser crashes every few hours. I’m not the only one with complaints, which was made apparent by yesterday’s Slashdot article. Talk of memory leaks, frequent crashing, and security holes doesn’t spell good news for Firefox’s latest version.

Perhaps the Mozilla team rushed to release the newest FF in an attempt to compete with Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft finally gets in the game alongside Opera and Firefox by adding tabbed browsing and advanced RSS support. IE still has a long way to go before it gains any kind of approval from the technological community. I certainly won’t support it until Microsoft gets their heads around web standards. Isn’t it funny that Microsoft is a member of the W3C, yet Microsoft continues to ignore and undermine W3C’s standards and specifications? I’ll stop complaining about Microsoft when IE hacks no longer exist (or when pigs fly, whichever is sooner).

My online experience isn’t the only thing affected by buggy software. I’ve been using iTunes 7 for a while now, and not only are the old bugs still there, but I get the “fun” and “enjoyment” of finding even more. Playing MIDIs in iTunes has always been a problem: you’ll occasionally hear a burst of static before the MIDI starts playing. I don’t know if anyone else has experienced that problem, but I’ve suffered through it since iTunes 6. The most frustrating new bug I see in Apple’s latest iTunes installment is the sudden stopping of my playlist whenever I’m listening to songs. iTunes will suddenly stop at the last second of a song and refuse to go to the next song until you tell it to.

SQA, anyone?