The problem with senility...

The biggest problem that I see with dementia, is that you never know when that perfectly rational, sane person you are talking to has turned that unseen corner and gone off into their own absurd, unreal world...

It can happen at any time, and it gets worse as they get older. But, there is no light on their forehead to give you any warning at all. One minute, they are making perfect sense, but the next...

The really scary part is that there is no warning when you, yourself, can start slipping into that imaginary world, as I am afraid that we all do if we live long enough. I guess that there really is a reason why, "Only the good die young" because if we lived long enough, somebody would be complaining about us.

Search by country?

Not that I'm uninterested in the results from China, but I sometimes wish there was a way to search for sites that are only in the US. I know that you can set the advanced search to return only English results pages, but that does not prevent other countries from creeping into the SERP just by creating an English version of their site...

You can call me a US snob if you want, but if I'm doing a shopping search I really do not want to place an order with a foreign country (and have to wait for it to clear customs, etc.). I just want to see the SERP with companies inside the US...

And yes, I know that both Yahoo and MSN provide this capability in their "advanced search" but what about Google?

And forget about ask.com - that search engine is only looking for an audience and does not care where they get it - try searching for "ice eaters" on ask.com and the #1 natural SERP is a site that sells, "smoke eaters" which has nothing at all to do with ice...

On Server Header Codes...

It is important to understand that a server header code is completely transparent to the end user (viewer) of the site. Every page in a website can put out a 404 (page not found) server header code, but the entire site can still be visible to a viewer of the site.

This presents itself as a problem when the "custom 404" page puts out a 200 server header code (page found) when it actually should be putting out the standard 404 server header code so the page is not indexed by a search engine.

So, here are the most important server header codes for a webmaster to use:

200 (page found). This is the normal code that most pages put out.
404 (page not found). Use this when you do not want a page to be indexed.
301 (page permanently moved). Use this whenever a page (or site) has been moved.

A 302 (temporary move) is very dangerous because there is no way for a search engine to know if the page will come back, so in some cases, the page will remain for many years in the search engine index. Yahoo is the worst at this, and will keep some pages for many, many years when the server header code is a 302, instead of a 301...