Don Zeigler dot Info

If you've never heard of Orly Taitz, she's the queen of the "Birther" movement, which contends Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen and therefore not eligible to serve as President of the United States.

Taitz has been laughed out of courtroom after courtroom as she doggedly pursues her so-called "case" against Obama. She's prime joke fodder, but a recent post on her blog indicates she might be a tad dangerous, too:

"What is the real intention of this Kenyan, Indonesian communist usurper? Is it to provide security for us or to destroy our security? Judge for yourself.

"Seeing targeted destruction of our economy, our security, dissipation of American jobs, massive corruption in the Government, Congress Department of Justice and Judiciary, it might be time to start rallies and protests using our second amendment right to bare arms and organise in militias."

Sounds like a call to arms to me…. and possibly to many others, in which Taitz's already bad year may just be an inkling of what's to come for her. Here's a rundown of her low points in 2009:

• August 3: MSNBC's David Shuster calls out Taitz on live TV after she lashes out at "Obama's brownshirts" in the media. Said Shuster: "You're making a reference to Nazi Germany, and to a lot of us who lost relatives in the Holocaust, this is deeply, deeply offensive."
• August 6: In a sign of an intra-Birther power struggle, fellow conspiracy theorist Andy Martin publicly declares it's time to "shut down the Orly Taitz circus."
• Sept. 16: Federal Judge Clay Land, who is presiding over a Georgia Birther case, belittles Taitz in a widely circulated order that accuses Taitz of failing to understand legal principles grasped by "any middle school civics student." Land adds: "Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so."
• Sept. 17: A fellow member of the California bar files a complaint in response to Taitz's call — during an interview with TPMmuckraker — for Judge Land to be tried for treason.
• Sept. 21: Army Captain Connie Rhodes, Taitz's own client in the Georgia Birther case, sends a letter to the judge renouncing Taitz as her counsel. Rhodes, who sent the letter while deploying to Iraq, tells the judge that Taitz submitted an emergency filing without Rhodes' permission or blessing.
• October 13: A frustrated Land fines Taitz $20,000 for repeated frivolous filings. "When a lawyer files complaints and motions without a reasonable basis for believing that they are supported by existing law or a modification or extension of existing law, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law," he writes. "When a lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law, that lawyer ceases to advance her cause or the ends of justice."
• October 14: Appearing on Joy Behar's show, Taitz is forced to explain why she described the judge as "delusional":
• November 12: An affidavit from a prospective witness in a California Birther case alleges that Taitz asked witnesses to perjure themselves — and much worse.

Anyone who supports this woman or her cause should be ashamed of themselves.

Effective January 1, 2010, I will no longer charge an hourly rate for graphic or website design unless you specifically request it. Clients desiring work to be done in these two areas will, after initial consultation(s) with me, be quoted a flat fee for which I will deliver a finished product. This does not affect anything I'm currently working on that was undertaken at an hourly rate.

By my quoting you a flat rate on these type of projects, which are often very complex and can stretch over days or weeks, you will know up front what the final cost to you will be and can plan your budget accordingly. It also frees me from the pressure of trying to conform to a fixed number of hours to complete a project, and allows me to focus on delivering an outstanding product to you.

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General Web Search Engines

If all you know are Google, Yahoo and Bing you might be surprised to learn there are many, many more search engines on the Web. Check out the list!

Altavista was the first well known search engine for the Web and that's about the only thing it's known for. Today it's mentioned mainly for it's role in history. The search results are from Yahoo so don't expect anything original here, still it can bring a nice dose of nostalgia to those of us who remember the time when Yahoo was just a free directory and Google didn't exist. Altavista

Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is one of the small but big search engines with a 3.9% market shart as of November 2009. Ask was one of the first search engines to mix it's search results with other sources like encyclopedias, images and maps. A simple query test indicates that Ask has billions of pages, or 1/8th of those in Google, at least for Enlish language results. Ask.com

Bing is Microsoft's latest facelift on the search engine that was first named MSN Search, then Live Search and now Bing. Bing is considered by most to take the third spot after Google and Yahoo in terms of search quality. It's also third in search as far as market share is concerned. Bing

Blekko is a brand new Google killer as they like to call themselves. It's run by Rich Skrenta, previously on Topix and Netscape's Open Directory. It's not live yet but is supposed to launch in the end of 2009, let's see if it does… Blekko

Clusty calls itself a clustering search engine. This basically means that in addition to the traditional list of search results it gives you a list of alternative topics that your search phrase could be related to. I don't like the quality of search results, though, there's a fair bit of low relevancy results returned. Clusty

Cuil is a new search engine that markets itself as the world's biggest search engine with three times the pages indexed as Google. It made a big bang when it launched in 2008 by crashing on launch day (LOL), but gives fairly good results and presents them in a new, somewhat strange, way. Cuil

Dogpile is a meta search engine that combines the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask to let you search from all the big search engines in one place. Despite a minimal market share Dogpile has still managed to get several J.D. Power & Associates awards for best customer satisfaction, this according to Businessweek. Dogpile

DuckDuckGo, founded by Gabriel Weinberg, is a search engine with it's own bot and index, but it also uses data from other sources, like Yahoo BOSS. Despite it's funny name, DuckDuckGo provides compelling search results that is a combination of facts, disambiguations and links. DuckDuckGo

Entireweb is a search engine founded in 2000 by the Swedish company WorldLight.com AB. Currently they index several hundred million webpages and serve over 100 million searches per month. Entireweb

Excite was founded in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, all students at Stanford. Over the years it has been through the dot-com bubble, mergers, aquisitions and bankruptcy. Today it's a meta search engine and portal with search results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask through an arrangement with InfoSpace. Excite

Gigablast was founded in 2000 by Matt Wells. It has a large, frequently updated index and gets to play with the big boys though it doesn't have much of a market share in search. The search results in a quick test is not up to the same standard as Google and Yahoo. Gigablast

Google is the world's most popular search engine. Cuil said they have a bigger index but it's going to take years before anyone can knock big G down from the position as market leader. Google

Hakia is a semantic search engine that organizes the results into categories looking at the search term from different angles. It uses a database of sites recommended by librarians to provide credible results, it then adds web results where the credible sources do not have enough info. It blends all this with news, photos and social media feeds to make it a different search experience. Hakia

ImHalal is a search engine mainly for Muslims and includes web, image and Quran search. It returns highly relevant results quickly and looks nice so I included it here with the others. ImHalal

Leapfish combines the results from Google, Wikipedia, Digg, wikiHow, Answers, Amazon and Twitter to make an information page about your search term combining the media from many services. It looks neat enough to include on the search engine list even if they don't have their own index. Leapfish

Lycos, which began as a research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, grew to become the most visited online destination in the world in 1999. After several years of decline the search market share of Lycos was at 0.01% by the end of 2008, but if you visit them you'll see that they still deliver relevant results with thumbnails attached. Lycos

Omgili is a forum search engine that only returns forum threads in the results. I tried a couple of searches and it's really useful. I get to see what people are talking about, which sometimes is just what I want. Omgili

Secret Search Engine Labs was started in 2007 as a hobby project by Simon Byholm and is aiming at providing highly relevant search results with a really small index size.  Secret Search Engine Labs

Spezify is a totally cool new search engine that, instead of the normal search result listings, provides a flash based view that looks like you had pinned newspaper clips and photos to a board. You can see and read a whole paragraph of text from the website which makes it a lot more easy, at least for me, to decide which page I want to visit to learn more. Spezify

WayBackMachine lets you search old versions of webpages, sometimes all the way back to 1996. It's fun to look up old versions of popular websites to see how they've changed through the years. WayBackMachine

Yahoo! Search is the eternal runner up, always trailing big G with good search results and a significantly smaller share of the search market. Yahoo has a lot of portal features in addition to search, which sets it apart from Google in many ways. Yahoo Search

Some Search Engines that traditionally appear in many search engine lists have been left out as I feel they provide little value. Usually this is because they use the data from another engine, the're not Enlish language or they simply return low quality results.

These search engines use the Entireweb datafeed: ExactSeek, WebFerret, ixquick, mamma, slingpage, searchmirror, findtarget, Zoeken, Search66, Findelio, AtomicSeek, aesop, Kart00, eTools, ZUULA, Citosearch, Atnio, unabet, iZito, zapmeta, InfoGrid, VINDEN.NL and FlexFinder

These are the others: All The Web, AOL, Baidu, Comcast, HotBot, Mamma, MetaCrawler, mywebsearch, WebCrawler, WebFetch, Yandex

Blog Search Engines

Blog search engines finds blog posts and usually favor recent posts as blogs are often about news and you want to get the latest news. Blog search engines are also often real-time as the pinging system and RSS feed of a blog makes it a lot easier for the search engine to fetch content as it is created.

Bloglines is a blog search engine and news aggregator that was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist. In addition to searching through millions of blog posts you can also combine news (RSS) feeds to have all your online information collected in one place. Bloglines

Google Blog Search is the blog search engine by Google. It finds a lot of relevant answers to a query and feels comfortable to use. Google Blog Search

Social Search Engines and Other Weird Stuff

Hunch is a decision enging that asks you fun questions to learn what type of person you are. With some questions answered it will use it's knowledge of your interests and social associations to give you answers tailored to your personality. I think it's quite fun, but I'm not sure if it's useful.. Hunch

Mahalo is a questions and answers type portal much like Yahoo Answers, you can type in any question and other users can answer them. You can earn Mahalo dollars if you provide the best answer to a question. Mahalo

Powerset is a natural language search engine that tries to understand the question asked instead of just looking for keywords. Powerset was founded by Barney Pell, a graduate of Stanford with a Ph.D in computer science from Cambridge, aquired by Microsoft in 2008, and it currently searches and organizes articles from the Wikipedia. Powerset

Aardvark is a social engine where users can ask their friends and contacts for advice. The software automatically directs the question to the persons best eqipped to answer based on the personal profile they have entered into the system. Sounds like a good idea and they have an offer from Google to buy them for $30 million. Aardvark