Okay, I’m not making this up, folks: Ask.com’s RSS Search isn’t outputting RSS properly. Actually, it is and was – according to the RSS 2.0 spec, the link element is completely optional – though I must admit this was the first time we had encountered an RSS 2.0 feed that lacked the link element altogether. I completely stand corrected As with any Web service that outputs RSS for search queries, I immediately integrated it into Gada.be results. You’ll certainly find Ask.com listed on Gada.be today, but the links to results aren’t working properly (a discovery pointed out by a few of our regular users). I looked at the source, and it seemed normal to me. When Shayne went to troubleshoot it this morning, he came up with an amazingly ironic discovery: “This may sound stupid, but when I tried to filter Ask.com to work using my methods… I came to find out, they’re not putting a <link> node in their RSS!!!” Okay, now that’s just too funny. ROTFLMAO funny. No, what’s funny is that I didn’t realize the link element was optional – because to me, it would seem to be obligatory, and I can’t help but wonder if other news aggregators had issues with Ask.com RSS feeds. I’ll be sending a note to my friends at Ask.com immediately, as I can’t imagine this being a difficult fix. Wasn’t really a fix, but they did update it to include the link element rather quickly – speaking to the dedication and understanding that’s happening behind the scenes over there. There ya go – Gada.be makes for an excellent troubleshooting tool sometimes (as it also discovered feed discrepancies in MSN’s feeds a few months ago). Boo-ya! Here’s a screen shot for posterity. Just to show I’m not completely nuts – only partially. If it’s possible to be right and wrong at the same time, I did it.

Ask.com RSS Search – NOT!

I don’t know how or why this is happening, but there must be some way to turn it off or stop it. Since moving to a new machine, I’ve discovered that all my searches through Google produce results that have crap surrounding the direct hyperlinks. For example, a search for the word “Chris” spits back familiar results – but each result link is prefixed with “http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=” and suffixed with “&e=9797″ – which totally kills my ability to easily copy / paste the link elsewhere without first removing the surrounding text. Link crap! I tried clearing my cookies to no avail – I just can’t get Google to give me straight up hyperlinks in IE (though it works fine in Firefox). Anybody know how to take this pain away?

Google Search Results Link Crap