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Re:I agree! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-07-20 05:42 · Score: 1 · on Google, Which Owns Duck.com, Confuses Users Searching For Its Rival DuckDuckGo and Redirects Them Back To Google (twitter.com)

Ikr? Same with HotBot, and InfoSpace and Lycos and Metacrawler and WebCrawler and Dogpile and Looksmart and so on...

I get these confused ALL THE TIME with Google!

Re:Switch by jbplou · 2006-02-11 09:11 · Score: 1 · on One In Two PCs Won't Run Vista's Interface

I can't imagine anyone editing a feature film on Windows XP Professional.

I can't imagine many feature length films are being done on macs either.

Heres weta they use SGI Linux stations for the Lord of The Rings Trilogy.

http://newssearch.looksmart.com/p/articles/mi_go23 95/is_200202/ai_n6749523

Also Quark runs on Windows, you can believe it or not but it Windows is used for graphics editing. Now I'll be the first to admit that Macs are good for image editing but thats all they are good for so they are a fringe OS. By the way the top computer users run FreeBSD.

Re:Prove it by Lost+Race · 2004-12-17 13:04 · Score: 1 · on Astronaut: 'Single-Planet Species Don't Last'

food doesn't just run out, its a highly renewable resource.

Tell it to the fish.

As far as "more than enough food ... doing nothing but rotting" goes, there will always be logistical inefficiences. Even with massive overproduction there will always be localized shortages. (I.e. people will starve, FSVO "starve".) That doesn't change the fact that there are too many individuals for the good of the species, and that there's going to be some kind of major crisis in the foreseeable future. The problem isn't that people are dying now, the problem is that the current unhappy system is unsustainable and doomed to collapse into something even less happy, with much higher death rates. Even if we could somehow do away with greed and selfishness, and fairly distribute all the world's resources, we will not be able to keep up current levels of production for very long. Human population _must_ decline soon. Forced reductions in human population are _always_ ... how shall I say ... unpleasant.

Under Distributed Movies List by Baldrson · 2004-10-05 09:00 · Score: 2, Informative · on The Long Tail

I've been using my own under distributed movies list to decide what movies to see.

Basically I just look at the weekly box office for each movie divided by the number of screens squared and that tells me how much acceleration the market is placing on the distribution channels for the movies.

It works pretty well. Playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange with this metric does a pretty good job of detecting bargains.

Re:Steve is now a Type-1 Diabetic :-( by Guy+Harris · 2004-08-02 16:07 · Score: 1 · on Steve Jobs Undergoes Cancer Surgery

There are only a couple of manufacturers who would be in a position to manufacture the drugs (such as Glaxo-Wellcome or Smith-Klein) - the same people who make the insulin.

Does GlaxoSmithKline make insulin? There's no mention of it on their prescription medicines page, although a search for "insulin" on their Web site found a press release about an alliance to develop an oral insulin.

The LookSmart page about major pharmaceutical companies lists 3 companies that I know produce insulin (Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Lilly), and don't list another one (Novo Nordisk). They also list several companies that, as far as I know, don't, although Pfizer has an inhalable insulin (Exubera) under development (with Aventis and Nektar Theraputics).

Re:Hate them both by Tree131 · 2004-05-21 10:00 · Score: 1 · on Accused Spammer to Debate SpamCop Founder

you might get an accidental click then

They get more accidental clicks by flooding your mailbox than by being more selective. They do whatever it takes to stay profitable.

Someone else posted a while ago on /. that their morning routine is to go to a pay-per-clickthrough inclusion services like overture or looksmart or pick your own and do a search for "Mass Marketing" or "Mass email marketing" and click on the top 5 or 10 links and browse the sites a bit. Those SPAMmers are paying dearly to be placed at the top of the search results. The more people click, the more they'll pay, until they find that it's unprofitable to operate and shut down.

Re:P2P? by cgenman · 2004-04-17 17:47 · Score: 4, Interesting · on How to Build a Search Engine

The closest thing to what you're talking about is Grub, which is run by Looksmart as a dead-link checker and also feeds to WiseNut. While it doesn't allow you to crawl sites that you don't have control over, it does allow you to crawl your own site.

Personally, I've wanted a Google toolbar that indexes the sites that you surf, and adds additional positive weight to the sites that you linger on. It may not know what you liked there, but it knows that you liked it.

Completely offtopic, but does anyone know of a screensaver on Windows that displays random (or spidered) web pages? I've been looking for an equivalent to the XWindows version for years.

Re:Why I don't like this - IANASB and idea by liteyear · 2004-01-05 14:33 · Score: 1 · on Google Chooses An Underwriter For Upcoming IPO

Well, IAAP, and heard about this guy a while back:

"Grub is a distributed web crawler."

"Last week, LookSmart released a screensaver that harnesses the spare computing power of volunteers whose machines are indexing the Web.
Like SETI@Home, LookSmart's Grub screensaver runs in the background or when the computer is idle. But instead of searching for signs of intelligent aliens, Grub crawls the Net to build an index for Web searches."

Interesting idea indeed.

MSN's search is not a user service... by qtp · 2003-08-24 11:39 · Score: 4, Informative · on How Objective Is Microsoft's Search?

Although MSN would have you believe that thier search feature is a service offered to users, it is clearly a marketing tool from end to end.

In order to be listed at MSN, you must deal with Looksmart, a company that touts itself as "the global leader in paid inclusions". In other words, Microsoft's MSN Search is not in the business of helping you find what you are looking for, but the business of making sure you go where thier customers want you to go.

Google, on the other hand is a search company, that specialized in search technologies, for your corporate intranet or for your web page before they added advertising, first, to thier search page and later to your own page.

While there is no doubt that Google Advertising is a large part of thier revenue, the success of Google Adverts is due to thier apropriateness to the viewer of the page. This appropriateness is only possible if there is an attempt to keep the pagerank formula somewhat objective.

IMHO, Google's business model is the stronger, because they are not attempting the impossible task of keeping the viewer while simultaneously attempting to manipulate him (like MSN is), and the advertising model that Google has created is the only advertising that I would allow on a page of my own.

MSN's search is not a user service... by qtp · 2003-08-24 11:39 · Score: 4, Informative · on How Objective Is Microsoft's Search?

Although MSN would have you believe that thier search feature is a service offered to users, it is clearly a marketing tool from end to end.

In order to be listed at MSN, you must deal with Looksmart, a company that touts itself as "the global leader in paid inclusions". In other words, Microsoft's MSN Search is not in the business of helping you find what you are looking for, but the business of making sure you go where thier customers want you to go.

Google, on the other hand is a search company, that specialized in search technologies, for your corporate intranet or for your web page before they added advertising, first, to thier search page and later to your own page.

While there is no doubt that Google Advertising is a large part of thier revenue, the success of Google Adverts is due to thier apropriateness to the viewer of the page. This appropriateness is only possible if there is an attempt to keep the pagerank formula somewhat objective.

IMHO, Google's business model is the stronger, because they are not attempting the impossible task of keeping the viewer while simultaneously attempting to manipulate him (like MSN is), and the advertising model that Google has created is the only advertising that I would allow on a page of my own.

Pot, Kettle, black... by qtp · 2003-07-22 11:31 · Score: 1 · on Digging Holes in Google

So, MSNs getting a little self ritghtous about search engines in anticipation of the launch of the Microsoft search engine. Lets see how they stand up to thier own criticism. Just to be fair, well just count the first ten results on the page, as that is what we'll see on Google

Criticism 1: All Shopping, all the time:

flowers(MSN) Result: 7 sites selling flowers, 2 informative sites (one of which is part of MSN, and 1 site for searching yellow pages (also MSN). 80% comercial, 20% informative (and 20% self promoting).

flowers(Google) Result: 7 sites selling flowers, 2 informative sites, 1 selling flower themed e-cards. 80% comercial, 20% informative

Criticism 2: Skewed Synonyms:

apple(MSN) Result: 9 sites about Apple computers, 1 site about apple recipes (on MSN) 90% "skewed synonym", 10% traditional meaning (80% comercial, 20% informational and 10% self promoting)

apple(Google) 10 sites about Apple computers. 100% "skewed synonym" (80% comercial/promotional 20% tech support)

Criticism 3: Book Learning

This one's a little difficult to test, because what Mr. Johnson pretends to be concerned about is more due to the economics of publishing and the web than to anything that Google has control over. It seems that the concern is over Google's indexing of PDF files, but not indexing these files would leave out important archives of information that are published online in that format, such as most of the documents in George Washington University's National Security Archives. I don't think that there's a legitimate argument for not indexing PDFs, and I find it a little disturbing that some search engines do not. Google's ability to search for specific file formats has enabled me to weed out the nutcase sites, and returned a higher percentage of useful results when looking for Government documents for my research.

All in all, I find little difference between the two search engines when doing simple, one-word searches. MSN's web search is is just as guilty of Mr. Johnson's first two criticisms as Google. MSN's web search is intended as a marketing tool, not a user service. Looksmart accepts payment for better rankings and "expidited review". I doubt the new search engine Microsoft will unveil will be much different.

At least on Google, no one has to pay to get listed.

You just have to get linked.

Re:Yahoo -- Overture by dmehus · 2003-07-14 07:54 · Score: 1 · on Yahoo Buys Overture for $1.63 Billion

Yahoo! secured an interest free loan of $750 million several months ago that doesn't have to paid until 2005. Plus, they have been increasingly profitable for the past year and a half (5 quarters), generating more than $200 million in free cash flow from their profits (since they have no capital expenditures). That takes us to $950 million. Plus, it's a cash and stock deal. So the acquisition was relatively easily for Yahoo! to do. They didn't even have to spend all of that $950 million cash pile, which leads to speculation further, smaller acquisitions are in the works. I'm not an analyst, but they may try and snap up LookSmart just to prevent rival Microsoft from buying it.

Telefonica, a Spanish ISP, is looking to purchase the remaining shares of Terra Networks, owner of Terra Lycos, it does not already own. It expects to close the acquisition probably by the end of this month. And, it has publicly said it wants to dump the Lycos unit and its assets. Focus Interactive, formerly iWon, which owns Excite is reportedly interested in all or part of the Lycos unit. If they buy part of it, Yahoo! may buy some parts as well, such as Tripod to complement its Yahoo! GeoCities or Web Hosting businesses.

Best,
Doug

Customized Pagerank by K-Man · 2003-05-14 12:17 · Score: 4, Informative · on Compute Google's PageRank 5 Times Faster

Sounds a lot like Kleinberg's HITS algorithm, circa 1997. Try Teoma for a real-world implementation.

For example, searching a sports-specific Google site for "Giants" would give more importance to pages about the New York or San Francisco Giants and less importance to pages about Jack and the Beanstalk.

Coincidence time: I used the same example in a presentation a couple of years ago to illustrate how subgroupings can be found for a single search term. Try it on Teoma, and see the various subtopics under "Refine". IIRC each of those is a principal eigenvector of the link matrix.

Topologically speaking, each principal eigenvector corresponds to a more or less isolated subgraph, eg the subgraph for "San Francisco Giants" is not much connected to the nest of links for "They Might Be Giants", and we get a nice list of subtopics.

(I once tried to explain this algorithm to my bosses at my former employer, which is why I have so much free time to type this right now.)

Submitting Sites to MSN/Google by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-02 14:38 · Score: 0 · on Microsoft Wants to Take on Google

Google you can freely submit a site to the search engine. Google Submit a Site MSN Submit a Site Submission for inclusion in MSN Search Directory Submit your Web site to appear on MSN, plus over 100 additional Web portals, search engines and ISPs with LookSmart Small Business Listings. Your site will appear in the "Web Directory Sites" section of results on MSN search, as well as within the main body of search results on many other popular search sites, including About.com, Netscape, InfoSpace and LookSmart.com. Best of all, you pay only $0.15 per click.

Is this the real deal? by mrkurt · 2003-02-13 04:34 · Score: 2, Insightful · on U.S. National Do-Not-Call Registry On the Way?

I wonder if this bill will be the real deal. Skimming over it on Thomas, the bill is merely what they call an 'implementation' act. Both the FCC and FTC are to submit suggested reglations for the do-not-call list. Apparently the FCC is given precedence, and AFAIK they haven't come out with any proposed rules yet. They may not be as tough as those already proposed by the FTC.

What I do know is that a few weeks ago, Rep. Billy Tauzin was all-fired against the FTC regulations. Yet, in the article I read on a service supplied by AP, he was very supportive of this bill passing. Perhaps, because the devil is in the details. Sen. Fritz Hollings, proponent of that wonderful "Fritz chip" we've heard so much about, also was mentioned as lauding the passage of this bill.

I sense that if consumer advocates don't keep their eyes on the ball, do-not-call advocates will get rolled by Tauzin and Hollings, who have a reputation for standing up for big business interests in Hollywood and among the telcos. I am sure they will be ready to assist the telemarketers, if the price is right.

Re:they ruined it. by roxbox · 2002-09-14 15:04 · Score: 1 · on Keanu Reeves as Superman

Anonymous Coward wrote:

>

Speaking of the consummate Superman, here's some good news about Christopher Reeve.