Search Engine

Yeah, yeah, I know: Google is the Second Coming. But it's not perfect.

Things I really, really want:

• Regular expressions. There's no excuse. I don't care how expensive wildcard searches are—I want them. (Update: Yahoo allows "stem:run" do find english words with stem "run". A step in the right direction.)
  
• A way to get those ridiculous dynamically generated "here are the best sites on 'frog cardioechograms'" sites out of my results for "frog cardioechograms".
  
• Search Cheaptickets, Jet Blue, Southwest, Travelocity, Yahoo! Travel, and Orbitz all at the same time...
  
• ...with date and airport bracketing for international flights...
  
• ...and a "just gimme the cheapest flight from A to B, I don't care when" option. And, no, Kayak doesn't quite do that yet. (Update: travelocity now does international flexible dates!)
  

Things I'd like:

• Powerful personal filters: no matches from .geocities.com, or a higher rank for matches from .edu domains, or a lower rank for things that look corporate, or for web fora, or for blogs. Search only sites that report Apache as their server. Search only blogs that run Movable Type. Search only sites not yet indexed in the Google directory.
  
• Click-through enhanced ratings. Is this easily done with cookies? I don't know. Check what the last site is a user checks from a list of results. That is, mark down sites if a user hits back and comes back to the search results and clicks on a new site in the results. Presumably the last one clicked is the one that contained the desired information. (Yes, that's a half-bogus algorithm, but not entirely bogus. So I want it. Gimme.)
  
• Unified Friendster-Orkut-Tribes-&c. search; like the airport thing, but not as pressing.
  

Things that'd be cute in a "wow, it's a miracle this works" sort of way:

• Hum a tune to search for a song.
  
• Upload an image to search for similar ones. (There kinda is something like this now: Riya.)
  

Random search challenges:

• Enter a list of items in your pantry and return only recipes that can be made from those items.
  
• Find all places (cities, villages, tourist attractions, valleys, atols, whatever) which have low humidity and average daytime temperatures between 20 and 30 centigrade in July and August and which are within an hour's travel of an international airport serviced by Northwest Airlines or one of its partners.
  
• Find all cities in the U.S. with more than 10,000 inhabitants which are more than 5 miles from the nearest interstate.
  

DVD UI's

I wasn't going to write about DVD UI's, because they're all so bloody terrible, but then I watched The Incredibles (both the main feature and the special features disc) and, damn, they almost got it right. Go Pixar!

Things they did right:

1. No annoying animations that slow down menus
   
2. Everything has subtitles
   
3. Animators' commentary is fairly interesting
   

Things they messed up:

4. Special features menu is inconsistent in depth and breadth. You can't tell how many levels there are under a specific option. Are you going to another menu or directly to a featurette? Is this an interactive slide show or a movie you're about to watch?
   
5. Brad Bird is an annoying git, and is all over the damn' second disc. I suppose it's hard to not have the director involved somehow.
   

Screwing up #1 is popular, and I would not have bothered to mention it were the rest of the thing not so close to perfection. Apparently the people that design DVD menus do not use computers with GUI shells. Xerox PARC solved this problem ages ago: make files look different from folders, and while you're at it, make different kinds of files (slide show, movie, text) look different from each other. Stick a little (not too little, please) icon next to your menu entry and you're done. You can be more elegant, but this will do.

While I'm ranting, here're the lists for the Scrubs Season 2 DVD's:

Things they did right:

1. Episodes are uncut (unlike The Cosby Show ones).
   

Things they messed up:

1. Menus torture user with animation.
   
2. No subtitles for special features (including commentary)
   
3. Commentary cannot be turned on with audio channel feature of DVD player: you have to go to the special features menu to do so. As a result, there's no easy way to switch back and forth between commentary and original soundtrack. Stupid.
   
4. Not all episodes have commentary—but then again, the commentary that's there is mostly pointless.
   

#1 always makes me wonder whether the people that designed the menu actually watch DVD's.