Bing use-case! AKA One Weird Trick Time And Date Sites Hate
In my prior post¹ I noted that I use 'b' as a Search Shortcut for #Bing. Here is why:
* quickly view a Gregorian calendar month display, with readable days, days of the week, and weekends & holidays highlighted.
E.g. I type this into my Firefox address bar:
b dec 2024
then press return and immediately see:
Only Microsoft Bing search supports this.
On other search engines (Duckduckgo, Google, Yahoo) all you get are links to random date time sites littered with ads, or blurry images of calendar months where the day numbers and holidays are too small to read.
This is something I have informally complained about to friends for years, that if you use Google Search for unit conversions, simple arithmetic, and even names of holidays, you get a nice large font “featured snippet” display of exactly your answer. But not something as simple as a month and year or even month with the implication that you want to see the current or next instance of that month.
How hard can that be to build? 12 names of months. 12 more 3-letter abbreviations. Multiplied by however number of languages supported. An intern could code that in under an hour. Someone has likely already written a regular expression for detecting this. (Aside: I tried year first, e.g. 2024 Dec, and hilariously enough that did not work to show the nice month display. So I suspect there is a minimal regular expression under the covers of this Bing feature.)
From having tried search engines for years, I was pretty convinced no one supported this.
Then on a whim I tried this in Bing recently (maybe I hadn’t before?) and to my pleasant surprise it worked.
There you have it, a use-case for Bing that only works in Bing, and reason enough to add a 'b' Search Shortcut in Firefox for Bing.
#search #webSearch #SearchShortcut #Microsoft #BingTip #searchTip #calendar #month
¹ https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox
You should setup Search Shortcuts in #Firefox, they have sped up my web browsing experience considerably.
James (@jamesg.blog) wrote up a great summary of how to do so and his experience:
* https://jamesg.blog/2024/10/13/search-engine-shortcuts-firefox/
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, so here are the Search Shortcuts I have setup when I want to explicitly search/lookup something elsewhere, roughly ordered by my perceived frequency of use:
i - IndieWeb - https://indieweb.org/
w - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
g - Google - https://google.com/
d - MDN Web Docs - https://developer.mozilla.org/
m - Google Maps - https://maps.google.com/
b - Bing - https://bing.com/
a - Amazon - https://amazon.com/
x - Twitter - https://twitter.com/search
If you don’t see one of these search engines in your Firefox Settings: Search Shortcuts, you can visit its URL above and then follow the instructions in James’s blog post to add it to your browser’s list of search engines. Once added there, it will show up in the Search Shortcuts table and you can double-click it and add a one-letter (or more) shortcut as you wish!
What Search Shortcuts have you setup in your browser?
#search #OpenSearch #webSearch #SearchShortcuts #browserTip #FirefoxTip #searchTip
No I did not block you on the #fediverse / #Mastodon / #Misskey etc.
If you were following me @tantek.com on your client/server/instance of choice but noticed you were no longer doing so, that was due to a recent software bug in my fediverse provider which accidentally caused everyone’s #ActivityPub servers to unfollow me (bug details below).
No it’s absolutely not your fault, you did nothing wrong.
We need a variant of Hanlon’s Razor¹ like:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a software bug.”
Take another look at my posts if you want (directly on @tantek.com or try searching for that on your instance) and if you like what you see or find them otherwise informative and useful, feel free to refollow. If not, no worries!
Also no worries if you ever unfollow/refollow for any reason. I mean that.
I always assume people know best how to manage their online reader/reading experiences, everyone’s priorities and likes/dislikes change over time, and encourage everyone to make choices that are best for their mental health and overall joy online.
Bug details:
This was due to a #BridgyFed bug² that deleted my profile (“ActivityPub actor”) from (nearly?) all instances, making everyone’s accounts automatically unfollow me, as well as remove any of my posts from your likes and reposts (boosts) collections. It also removed my posts from any of your replies to my posts, leaving your replies dangling without reply-contexts. Apologies!
The bug was introduced accidentally as part of another fix about a month ago³, and was triggered within the following week⁴.
Anyone following me before ~2024-09-22 was no longer following me. A few folks have noticed and refollowed. Any likes or reposts of my posts before that date were also undone (removed).
Ryan (@snarfed.org) has been really good about giving folks a heads-up, and apologizing, and quickly doing what he can to fix things.
Bugs happen, yes even in production code, so please do not post/send any hate.
I’d rather be one of the folks helping with improving BridgyFed, and temporary setbacks like this are part of being an early / eager #IndieWeb adopter.
This bug has also revealed some potential weaknesses in other ActivityPub implementations. E.g. deleting an “actor” should be undoable, and undoing a delete should reconnect everything, from follows to likes & reposts collections, to reply-contexts. Perhaps the ActivityPub specification could be updated with such guidance (if it hasn’t been already, I need to double-check).
To be clear, I’m still a big supporter of #BridgyFed, #ActivityPub, #Webmention, and everyone who chooses to implement these and other #IndieWeb related and adjacent protocols as best fits their products and services.
All of these are a part of our broader open #socialWeb, and making all these #openStandards work well together (including handling edge-cases and mistakes!) is essential for providing #socialMedia alternatives that put users first.
References:
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
² https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/1379
³ https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/commit/4df76d0db7b87cabbd714039546c05b3221169be
⁴ https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2024-09-22#t1727028174623700
This is post 26 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/285/t1/io-domain-suggested-steps
→ https://tantek.com/2024/306/t1/simple-embeds