Philip Nicosia

Just curious as to why Google search results are different to Google Toolbar search results.

If I enter www.philipnicosia.com into the Google Toolbar it takes me directly to this site. If I enter the same search term on Google.co.uk it lists search results instead.

The funny thing is I’m not number 1 for that search term. Google doesn’t think that www.philipnicosia.com is the most relevant result for www.philipnicosia.com.

I just received an email telling me I was going to be charged on the the 5th October for a broadband connection I don’t even have!

I left Plusnet on the 19th September so why do they still want to charge me? The email says “If you have any queries about this or any other matter, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly Support Team on 0845 1400200 . We are available to take your calls 24 hours, 7 days a week.” That’s great but their friendly automated service centre doesn’t have an option for billing.

So I decided to use their online help centre. Filled in the form to remind them I don’t have broadband with them anymore and receive a notification telling me my question will be forwarded to the support team and I should get a reply in about 19 hours!

Is that good customer service? It seems it is pretty much the norm for UK companies now and we’re told it is the consumers fault because we expect to pay less for our services and basically they can’t afford to employ more staff and still make a profit.

With 3 races left and only 2 points between them who is going to be F1 World Champion this year?

Fernando Alonso or Michael Schumacher?

When you log into your Sky broadband Netgear router you will see that there are no fields for username and password. These are hidden I guess so you can’t change them and use the router on another suppliers broadband.

It also means that without your username and password you can’t use your own router instead of the Sky Netgear router to connect to their service.

Well someone over at Skyuser.co.uk, a forum setup for Sky broadband routers independently of sky has figured out a way to get your username and password from your Sky Netgear router.

Your username is the mac code of your box @skydsl and your password is a hex code. For instructions on how to do this go here.

It has been confirmed on the forum that users have managed to connect to Sky with their own routers using the username and password obtained from the Sky Netgear router and users have also used their Sky router to connect to another provider.

It is worth remembering though that strictly speaking if you use a router other than the Sky provided Netgear router then you are breaking their Terms & Conditions.

Logging into my Google Sitemaps account I notice the following:

http://www.philipnicosia.com/gallery/index.php URL restricted by robots.txt Sep 8, 2006

But looking at a site command Google has indexed and cached this page despite being restricted by robots.txt.

This is Google’s cache of http://www.philipnicosia.com/gallery/index.php as retrieved on 18 Sep 2006 06:18:24 GMT.
Google’s cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.

So I check with their robots.txt checker to see if there is a problem and it indeed says the page is allowed despite the robots.txt saying:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gallery/

By adding the following to my robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /gallery/

Google now recognizes that the directory is blocked.

So somewhere between the 8th September and the 18th September Google has decided that it is not like any other search engines and any page you have on your site is fair game unless you specifically tell Googlebot not to go there.