3 ms·
In case the spirit of my post isn't clear, let me be the first to acknowledge that I wouldn't have run into this problem at all if I had been less careless. Th
by Encosia 15y ago
In case the spirit of my post isn't clear, let me be the first to acknowledge that I wouldn't have run into this problem at all if I had been less careless. The purpose of posting this was to raise awareness and hopefully help others avoid making the same blunder (and to point some links at the correct site with good anchor text).
- masklinn 15y agoInterestingly, I did the exact same thing today: tried downloading jquery 1.6.2, was not careful enough, got a syntax error when I used it. Just checked, I'd gotten it from jquery.it...
- mrcharles 15y agoSadly, I foresee a future where you have to whitelist everything in order to be truly safe. You got screwed over by two characters.
- kragen 15y agoThat's where we were pre-Google; we called the whitelist our "bookmarks".
- jshen 15y agobut it can be more automated than bookmarks. One idea, imagine if your searches searched pages across all your friends bookmarks and your own. Bookmarks isn't the right term, imagine if it were really easy to say "this I validate", then everyone that trusts you will be able to search that as well.
- kragen 15y agoThat's a really good idea. I wonder why Delicious never did that. They had your "friends" list and all your friends' bookmarks. I'll implement it in yamemex for sure!
- jshen 15y agoI've wanted to build something like my idea for years, but it's not something you can do on the cheap. I've thought about focusing on some vertical to make it cheaper, but meh.
- rokekr 15y agoblekko.com looks to be doing something similar to what you described
- jshen 15y agowhat are they doing?
- msbarnett 15y agoBasically they're letting people create "slashtags" that restrict a search to a customized list of sites. Eg) I have one for /objc that searches a half-dozen high-quality, good signal-to-noise, non-spammy objective-c related sites, so that if I search for "timers /objc" I get only quality content and no farmed spam. There's a lot more to it but they've essentially farmed out the job of whitelisting the non-spammy parts of the internet to their users. Edit: and more to the point of what you were desribing, you can easily use other people's public slashtags, and it will detect and suggest relevant ones as you use it. It's totally worth playing around with.
- jshen 15y agoThat's very close, if they let me search my friends slash tags all at once it would be perfect.
- brown9-2 15y agoHonestly it seems like the majority of the article's attention is spent criticizing Google for allowing you to download a file from a site you didn't intend to, rather than warning others.
- yaakov34 15y agoI completely agree with the tone of your post. A spam site outranking the official site of a popular tech download is a big deal. Yes, as a web designer, you should know better, but if they can outrank jquery, they can outrank anything. Including sites meant for non-technical users. How's a non-technical user supposed to know he is making a dangerous download, if there is a nice green lock on his screen and the name of the program is familiar? How do we explain this to them?