An interesting somewhat-inside look at Google’s search technology. I found this interesting: “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds.” No matter how hard CNN or Digg or Twitter works to harness their audience to break news, hooking up Google search queries to Google News in a useful manner would likely scoop them all every time.
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kottke.org posts about search
Google is the crossword puzzler’s best friend. Several of the top 100 searches on a given day are for crossword clues. This was more apparent a few days ago but it looks like they’ve started to filter the crossword terms out. More here. (thx, peggy & jonah)
kottke.org banned from Technorati top 100?
Since swearing off Technorati a couple of years ago, I’ve been checking back every few months to see if the situation has improved. The site is definitely more responsive but their data problems seemingly remain, at least with regard to kottke.org; Google Blog Search gives consistently better results and easy access to RSS feeds of searches.
Technorati recently introduced something called the Technorati Authority number, which is a fancy name for the number of blogs linking to a site in the last six months. Curious as to where kottke.org fell on the authority scale, I checked out the top 100 blogs list. Not there, so I proceeded to the “Everything in the known universe about kottke.org” page where a portion of that huge cache of kottke.org knowledge was the authority number: 5,094. Looking at the top 100 list, that should put the site at #47, nestled between The Superficial and fishki.net, but it’s not there. Technorati also currently states that kottke.org hasn’t been updated in the last day, despite several updates since then and my copy of MT pinging Technorati after each update.
Maybe kottke.org has been intentionally excluded because I’ve been so hard on them in the past. Or maybe it’s just a glitch (or two) in their system. Or maybe it’s an indication of larger problems with their service. Either way, as the company is attempting to offer an authentic picture of the blogosphere, this doesn’t seem like the type of rigor and accuracy that should send reputable media sources like the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal scurrying to their door looking for reliable data about blogs.
Update: As of 3:45pm EST, the top 100 list has been updated to include kottke.org. The site also picked up this post right away, but failed to note a subsequent post published a few minutes later..
Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion. My assertion more than four years ago that Google is not a search engine isn’t looking too shabby.
Google Apps
On Thursday, Google, the Internet search giant, will unveil a package of communications and productivity software aimed at businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft products for those functions.
The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One included programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, included programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise.
Google isn’t worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft’s search efforts…although the media’s focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world’s fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don’t need big, bloated OSes…they’ll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. Using Gnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS for desktop computers that’s modified to use the GooOS and sell it right alongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available free online of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with all your data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomever it needs to be (SubEthaEdit-style collaboration on Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only the beginning). Email, shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing, etc.; all the stuff that people use their computers for, it’s all there.
When you swing a hammer in the vicinity of so many nails, you’re bound to hit one on the head every once in awhile. Well, I got it in the general area of the nail, anyway.
FindSounds is a search engine for sounds. Here’s a collection of bee sounds. Bzzzz….
Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal writer, has penned a piece about Google’s book scanning efforts and the legal challenges it faces. Interestingly, both Google and the publishers who are suing them say that the lawsuit is basically a business negotiation tactic. However, according to Larry Lessig, settling the lawsuit might not be the best thing for anyone outside the lawsuit: “Google wants to be able to get this done, and get permission to resume scanning copyrighted material at all the libraries. For the publishers, if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for everyone else.”
How to disable the stupid Snap Preview things that are popping up on everyone’s site these days. (via df)
Google is now including YouTube videos in Google Video search results. I love the smell of synergy in the morning.
No nofollow
All links on Wikipedia now automatically use the “nofollow” attribute, which means that when Google crawls the site, none of the links it comes across get any PageRank from appearing on Wikipedia. SEO contest concerns aside, this also has the effect of consolidating Wikipedia’s power. Now it gets all the Google juice and doesn’t pass any of it along to the sources from which it gets information. Links are currency on the web and Wikipedia just stopped paying it forward, so to speak.
It’s also unclear how effective nofollow is in curbing spam. It’s too hard for spammers to filter out which sites use nofollow and which do not and much easier & cheaper just to spam everyone and everywhere. Plus there’s a not-insignificant echo effect of links in Wikipedia articles getting posted elsewhere so the effort is still worth it for spammers.
Dick Cheney’s Google searches. “lynne cheney MySpace”
Search, always dead
Via Tim O’Reilly comes this comment from Bill Burnham:
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isn’t a great place to be or because they can’t create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
For Norvig to say what he did seems a little crazy, given the company he works for. The first time that search died was back in 1998. Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and other sites had the search game all sewn up. They were all about the same in terms of quality and people found what they were looking for much of the time. No one needed another search engine, and starting a search company in such a mature market seemed like folly. Around that time, Google became a company and eventually the world figured out it really did need another search engine.
Not sure if this is the actual code or not, but the source code for MS-DOS 6.0 appears to be available on Google Code Search (by way of a search for “microsoft confidential”). More Google Code Search goodies here. (thx, aj)
O students! Pray teachers! Behold: a Shakespeare search engine.
Simply Google, a one-pager for navigating and searching all of Google’s offerings.
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