I had heard people talk about how fast Google’s blog spider was, but I didn’t take it that seriously … until I saw my own post in a search result within an hour of posting.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Powerset and other search mechanisms
Well, I was hoping to be able to say
The nice guys over at powerset.com have let me sneak a peek at their new search engine.
… but I’m waiting 
like everyone else. For now, you have to be satisfied with their remarks from TechCrunch.
In the meantime, Entrepreneur.com has an interesting article about other search utilities.
Conference call dull? Why not do some shopping!
In a recent Ipsos survey, 12 million Americans fessed up to shopping online while listening to coworkers and clients drone away on a conference call. Lifehacker has posted a list of techniques to help people avoid zoning out during a call – but I’m more interested in encouraging and exploiting this trend. What if shopping cart vendors were to automatically discount purchases made between 9 and 5 local time, or create coupons which were only valid during business hours – would it work?
Payment Gateway Overview
The paper Online Payment Gateways Used to Facilitate E-Commerce Transactions and Improve Risk Management provides an good introduction to payment processing.
PayPal Documentation
Grumble grumble … for some reason, the links to documentation on the PayPal site are broken. Here is the correct link to the PayPal API Documentation. Thanks to Tad at PayPal for providing the new URI.
Aside: It’s a big aggravating that legitimate email from PayPal’s Merchant Technical Support group gets caught up by the GMail spam filter. Is this a misfeature designed to increase the take rate on Google Checkout? 
