Problematic Changes
As I designer I’m all for changing websites; maybe the design got a bit stuffy, maybe there’s a new layout you’d like to try, maybe you’ve got a better idea than before, or even your focus has changed.
Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients’ websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.
I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there’s ultimately less playing of “catchup” and you’ve already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.
Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.
Crawler.com hijacked my browser
After installing an app last weekend I’ve had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn’t tell Crawler.com to do that so I’m pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.
The hijack doesn’t appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn’t the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.
So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?
Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:
In the address bar enter about:config
Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:
browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1
My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk
Bugger! That didn’t work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:
keyword.URL
THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.
That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.