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A Pair of Google Bits
Vengeance writes "Check out this excellent BusinessWeek story about Google's business strategy and how it can survive without selling out to banner ads. The best line in the article: Google saves money by using Linux :)" Here's a second story about Google's Toolbar Plugin and privacy concerns that it raises (course in this case, it looks like it blatantly tells you what its doing, so if it bothers you, you at least can't claim ignorance. And it doesn't look like a big deal either). It raises an eyebrow, but not my red flag.
Friend of mine works for (large Texas-based computer manufacturer who uses Ask Jeeve's engine as the basis of their online tech support thing, called Ask Dudley or some equally shitty name). According to him it would give "interesting" results sometimes when it was first brought online and it's vocab hadn't been trained/tuned much.
For example: searching for ATAPI.SYS would bring up as one of the options something like "I'd like to know more about EAT PUSSY." (Somehow ATA PI.SYS (space for empahsis) sounded like that to Ask Jeeve's engine.)
Needless to say, that was changed real quick. :-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
In large engineering projects, such as search engines, the amount of work to be done is something more than linearly related to the size of the project. Back when google was two guys, they had defined the key algorithm and it was really cool. But.... really cool is a long, long way from a business. For example, how do you index over a billion pages and still keep the search fast? How do you distribute the database and the searches over linux machines to reduce cost at little (or no) expense in reliability? How do you keep crafty webmasters from tricking your algorithms?
Do you really think google is the same as it was, just bigger? Give me a break.
Just why do the companies, even the great ones, think that their headcount MUST grow?
They don't. Exar is the world leader in analog interfaces for digital imagers and they've been around since the 1960s. They have around 200 employees.
Some of us think that approaches to a problem that are both non-obvious and extremely powerful (which, IMO at least, is true of Page Rank) are exactly the reason that patents were invented. This is not a patent that is:
Patents exist precisely to protect inventions that don't fall into one or more of the above categories. It's not so much patents that most slashdotters are angry about, it's patent abuses, and Google's patent clearly isn't abusing the system.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
How many of you would be willing to pay to use google on, say, a 1 cent/search basis? 2 cents? 5?
1 cent sounds fair to me. I don't want them going out of business 2 years down the line, just because they don't sell pagerank spots or whatever. I need that search!
My other sig is also a
You can install the Google toolbar without the PageRank features that transmit URL's back to Google. Those sneaky bastards hid this option behind a huge freaking button that clearly states this.
Sean
The patent-pending technology, PageRank, is Google's method of rating the importance of Web pages by counting the number of other Web pages that link to them.
So, will Slashdotters (and, more specifically, the editors) jump all over Google once this patent is granted? Or do Slashdot favorites win a "get out of flamage free" card?