Inbox

By DON McALLISTER

Welcome to InBox, where we attempt to answer your internet questions.

* Can search engines return results by date? asks Danielle. She is trying to find more on a two-year-old story about a Bahraini Princess, but the links she is after are buried within old stories.

Some search engines have an Advanced Search option, Danielle. Try Google's advanced search. Enter Bahraini Princess as the key words and select the option to search for results within the past year. Hit Google Search, and it will produce the links that are hiding from you.

* After reading last Tuesday's Hotlinks column, Aline was interested in the Queen Mother obituary link but it refused to load.

Worldwide interest was so high that the page was failing under the extra strain, Aline. It refused to work at times, especially for us poor souls at the bottom of the world. I checked it during the day and it loaded correctly, so the trick is to pick a quiet time. I find 6.30am to 7.30am is an ideal time to reach popular web destinations.

* It's all doom and gloom for John, who received a warning about emails titled "A card for you". It stated: "Classified by Microsoft as the worst virus ever, worse still - McAfee has no solution to it".

It's another hoax, John. Always check the Symantec hoax page before reacting to any warning. Many computer operating systems have been damaged and time wasted because the information or claim wasn't verified first.

* Sheila wants to remove those advertising pop-up windows that trouble her internet experience. She remembers us mentioning the solution in this column before.

Those darn pop-up ads, again - a question that pops up in Inbox often. There are two main solutions we recommend - Adaware from Lavasoft, which kills ad and spy software infections and Popupkiller, which kills the pop-up ads while you are surfing.

Links

Advanced Google search

Queen Mother obituary link

Symantec

Lavasoft

Web Attack


* If there's anything you want to know about the exciting world of the web, just email inbox@nzherald.co.nz.