With a new version of Internet Explorer 7 come quite a few new nifty shortcuts that can make your web-surfing experience a lot more enjoyable. Some of these tips also apply to previous versions of Internet Explorer, and some to other browsers as well. Items denoted with a ‘%’ work on IE6, and those marked with a ‘*’ may work in other browsers.

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If you were unlucky enough to break your IE7 install (via a repair of Windows or a failed install), you can get it fixed in two easy steps!

1. Download this file and save it as C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe (obviously changing C:\ with the drive letter of your XP Partition…)
2. After overwriting the existing IE7 iexplore.exe with iexplore6.exe from the link above, re-run the Internet Explorer 7 installer.. It should not bother you about having already installed IE7!

Should that fail, you have to use this much longer method; but it is guaranteed to work.

1. Get either WinRAR or PowerArchiver. I recommend the latter.
2. Right-click on the IE7 installer, and extract it to a folder (using WinRAR or PA)
3. Browse to Update\Update.inf
4. Open it in WordPad
5. In update.inf remove the section that says [Prerequisite]
6. Save changes, BUT DO NOT EXIT.
7. Press ctrl+z to undo, BUT DO NOT SAVE
8. Run Update\Update.exe
9. The very nanosecond that Update.exe shows up, save the WordPad document.
10. If everything went fine (as far as you saving at the right times), IE7 will reinstall and fix itself. If not, redo the steps above. Make sure that when you launch IE7 Installer, [Prerequisite] & Co. are erased, and right after launching the installer, they are available.
11. Feel free to uninstall IE7 via the Add/Remove CP or keep it. It will work either way.

No, there is no Internet Explorer 9. As a matter of fact, there is no Internet Explorer 8, or even 7 (officially at any rate…).

But I brought this up to discuss something that I abhor to the highest degree: the SEO game. Back in the 20th Century, when Search-Engine Optimization was something new and unexplored, getting your website listed on MSN or Google or AltaVista was a nice, clean, and frustrating game.

Today, in the year 2005, when search-engine bots can crawl the web as fast as information can travel, cache their find and integrate into their search engine in a matter of minutes, too many people have taken advantage of it, and used dishonest means to further their ends.

Yesterday I was looking for information on MSN Messenger 8 for a project (not NeoSmart related); and I came across a post from the days of MSN Messenger 6. The page title was ‘MSN Messenger 8’ and the author went on to claim the title was a ‘typo.’

Unaware users would type in MSN 8, and end up with a couple of results only on Google, one of which, was this webmasters. Unethical ‘shortcuts’ like this have been around forever, but now the battle has reached an all-time peak. Websites are constantly developing new methods of harvesting links, faster than the search engines can discern between those and the legit links out there. At first it was simply text made the same color as the background, then text too small to see. Hidden Div tags were a failure from the start. Now the current ‘trick’ is to use CSS to hide the links, since search engines do not use CSS files for viewing.

In the end it all ends up to the same thing: Cyberspace has become just as political as the real world. It is now impossible to find what you want on a search-engine.. not without spending way more time than you need. Google introduced back-links, and now they have taken over. Let’s just hope there is a solution on the horizon.