The best place to buy a used car in Tenerife

My cousin moved to Tenerife a while back. He needed to get himself a new car while he was out there – it was much easier to sell one over here and then buy another out there rather than export – and so he was looking around for a good deal.

He found just the used car he was looking for at Motorworld Tenerife. He’s pretty chuffed with his snazzy BMW and is even happier with the service he got from the Motorworld guys.

All I ask of you is one thing

All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

—Conan O’Brien on his final show.

How much search engine traffic is just bookmarking?

I was thinking the other day about the types of searches I do in search-engines. Even though I have a lot of bookmarks saved in Firefox I still use Google to go to a lot of sites even when I know the URL.

If I want to go to Amazon.co.uk or Play.com, I won’t type the URL in I’ll just type “Amazon” or “Play” into Google and then click on the top result, which I know is the one I want without even looking because I’ve done this search hundreds of times before.

Now, I guess you’d say I was a Firefox power-user – I know how to install plugins and extensions, I use Ubiquity, I use Greasemonkey and I use shortcuts. And still I don’t use it properly and I abuse Google because I’m too lazy to type full URLs.

So what about non-techy users? I’ve watched my Wife browsing and she does this too. Even though I’ve put toolbar bookmarks for Facebook and HSBC on for her, she’ll still Google them. She’ll even click on an Adwords advert to get to a site, that’s not only a waste of search-engine’s time, it’s also costing someone some money. The amount of search-engine traffic that is just bookmarking must be huge.

How could browsers stop this from happening? Google Chrome has the New Tab page that show screenshots of the eight most used sites, but that page isn’t the default home page and how many people will change their home? How many people even know what a home page is? Firefox has a plugin that is similar, but again, how many non web-savvy users are gonna install it?

Maybe browsers could intercept search-engine requests for domain names and just GET the domain instead? Interestingly, if you type “Amazon” into the Firefox URL bar it takes you straight to the site, whereas doing that in Chrome does a search in Google. Maybe the default start page for Firefox should not be Google, but should be a smart input like the URL bar.

Perhaps the bookmarking traffic just doesn’t matter to Google et al. All those pointless clicks on Adwords will matter to the publisher though.

Swine Flu and the media effect

For weeks and weeks there was massive coverage of the Swine Flu pandemic in the British media. The story of a young, completely healthy school-girl who died from the flu got a lot of newspaper column space. It scared a lot of people. She was the first person to die who had no underlying illness. Turns out she didn’t die from swine flu at all, but from a completely unrelated problem. Then we had experts claiming that up to 65,000 people could die. It was front-page news for weeks. Last week there was apparently 100,000 new flu cases in one day.

And then the media got bored of the story. There was the Michael Jackson story to cover and the Jordan/Andre split too.

And now, the number of swine flu cases being diagnosed has dropped off massively.

Is this a case of the media reporting the situation or causing it?