The war for your search bar

(Welcome reddit users)
If you are anything like me, you probably have Google toolbar installed in your primary browser. It does many things, but foremost, it allows you to search Google without going to google.com.
But there is a search bar built right within your browser. It sits right next to the address bar.


Now you might think that no one would care about such a puny, tiny- winy search bar. And sir, can you be more wrong?

It all started when I wanted to install picasa, this is what I get in the last step of installation.

Now picasa is an image management software. Why should it try to reset my search preferences? Oh and by the way, the default option is to switch the default search engine, not to
retain your preferences.












Bad, bad Google. Stealing my search bar! Yahoo would not do anything like that. Let's install Yahoo search bar.














Aw! Not so fast yahoo baby. Cap'n Google won't let you change the default option.








Well then lets try MSN toolbar.















So does opening Gmail change search preferences too? Look like it does not. Thank god for small mercies.




Lets see what happpens if I manually change the search settings.















Do they do this with firefox too?


















Looks like they do.














When you install a toolbar aren't you already reserving a part of your screen real estate to that search engine. And then shouldn't the toolbar offer to leave your search bar, instead of trying to capture it?

ACAPTCHA - Almost Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

(Welcome reddit users)

Captcha generally (but not always)solve the problem of comment and other spam. But this comes at a price. Users with low visibility and other disablities find solving captcha hard. And blind users cant solve it unless you provide an alternative audio captcha. Why, even Seth hates it!
Negative captcha - where you hide form fields via CSS so user can't see it and hence not fill it, while bots will, is an interesting possibility. But let me itroduce ACAPTCHA - "Almost Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" to you. This is waht you do.

1. There are some questions which are very easy for humans to answer but very difficult for bots to understand. Take "What color is a blue towel?" or "Is a green towel red?". Any (well most) humans can answer that qwestion in a snap, but probably not bot can.
2. Create a centralized AND rapidly changing repository of such questions. May be allow users to submit new questions and answers there. May be peer review questions before accepting them, whatever you do get a large and fast changing repositary.
3. Create a plugin/architecture where you get a random question for the repositary (ala Akismet which is a distributed anti spam engine) and ask users to solve it.
There are already some sites which try to do something similar. They ask question where they ask something like "What is 2 + 2". The problem is, it is probably very easy to break this. As soon as this becomes mainstream, you can be sure that the bots will break trough and abuse. To beat completely automated systems, you need to bring in human intelligence.

Updates -
Foo asked: ". The repo would have to include the *answers* and be as easily downloadable, right? Right. So Mr. Spammer wins again."
And I say: Well no the idea is that the central repository has say a million questions and answers. And whenever any site wants to check using a ACaptcha, they ask for a question-answer pair(Using an API). Now no one excepting the repository has all the questions and each time the spammers get a new question. This is why you need the repository to get new questions quickly, so that spammers can not build up a bank of questions over time and know there answers.