As a teacher at an alternative school, I'm more than aware of the need at Christmas time for such projects. You'd be amazed at the lists these kids make, such as gas cards so their parents can go to work and put food on the table, toys for younger brothers and sisters, etc...Should such a write off occur--I would dredge up as many golf reviews as my fingers could type.

Yeah--it'd be a drag to see all those golf reviews go up for a good cause, and no one able to read them...but then again..I digress

I can share my feelings, but they're pretty much irrelevant to anyone but me.

I know the mantra for *years* has been that no one should write at Epinions expecting money. The mining of your own data as a proxy for the site's data violates so many rules of analytic rigor that my head hurts.

As for the search engine (shrug), I've never written the specifications for a search engine covering millions of permutations so I wouldn't know where to begin. Is "the" a stop word? I guess. (shrug again) I'm certainly not about to tell people who do this for a living how to code and what they've done wrong in their code.

If I come across an error, I'll file a bug. And when the bugs are all resolved, I'll evaluate where we are and have an opinion. But I swear I'm going to maintain perspective on this latest Epinions drama. Improvements were made to the site. There are going to be changes and missed IS and hats in the wrong spot and whatever.

When Jeff Bezos writes me and thanks me for the couple of thousand dollars I spend every year at Amazon and includes a checklist of what his engineering and development teams are working on then I'll expect Epinions to do the same. Heck, I read no less than 50 articles from well-placed sources in the last month swearing that a Google phone (a Gphone) was being released this month.

Oops.

Perspective. It's a beautiful thing.