Slashdot Mirror
Google To Gain a Rival?
markpapadakis writes "Seems like Google got itself a new rival, which seem to have the potential to actually challenge successfully our beloved'G'. hTeoma Technologia launched a beta version of its search engine which enhances the link analysis idea, borrowing some ideas from Google and extending it to recognise 'communities' of subjects."
Now, if someone would add code to Slashcode that automatically CLOSES THE DAMN ITALICS TAGS! :)
yea, patents suck unless they're on our side.
YEA!!!.
whatever. I tend to read slashdot on a daily basis to see 9/10ths of the population do 180degree turns.
teoma google vivisimo
Helllllooo people. This isn't a fully fledged search engine. Did you people read the page? It's still in beta to show off the technology. They aren't expecting people, at this point, to suddenly start using them instead of Google.
"Oh, I've started work on this new OS. It has the potential to be better than Windows and Linux, with quite a bit of work. But um, start using it right now." Sure, people.
Also, when the nanotechnology revolution arrives, would you still be in favor of patents even they make no real economic sense?...in a world where everyone can have virtually anything they want, and tech is advanced by hobbyists and academic competition.
It's also a given that most new ideas in the future will be invented by insanely fast & complicated "thinking" computers. And, we should look upon these inventions as gifts, not limited monopolies for the corporation that owns the slavemachine.
"GIF at 11"
You mean Flash Intro Movie at 11.
Emailed them about this and got no response, so no renaming directories for me, I'm just shitcanning 63.236.92/24 for a while.
Thank God for that post-posting editing function, eh Hemos? ;)
Within 10 minutes, the link to searchenginewatch.com changed 4 times: teoma%20.html, toema.html, toema. html..
Oh well.
I searched for my name, got a whole lot of page in French (naturally) but this searhc engine doesn't seems to know french.
So it groups result under silly "Topics" like "Le" or "De" ( = "the" or "of")
Too bad...
If they want to have this be actually useful they will need more up-to-date scans of the Web than once every 8 or 10 months (!).
> per person in l998 while the United States expended $4,270 per person
> insuring only 84 percent of our citizens."
Which is why we see large number of americans going across the border for canadian healht care.
oh, wait a minute . . .
:)
>not only that, its cruel
> and disgusting to hold people's health ransom for money...
Far better to make it illegal to own, say, a private CAT scan machine, and hold health ransom to time, while allowing vetrinarians to have the same machines to use on pets (which stand idle while people die waiting their turn for the human ones).
hawk
It's not a matter of security. A lot of stuff you don't want indexed because it's temporary or maybe just too variable (dynamically generated). robots.txt is mostly for the search engines' own good, and if they're ignoring that, they'll eventually be full of junk.
Readers of this thread might be interested to see this page at Don Lancaster's web site to read about how patents fail to benefit the little guy.
OpenSourcerers
You might have a small jump-start, but if you're a big company (say the kind of comapny who could spend $300mil) you have to train your workers somehow, and there goes your startup time. Your higher price probably would turn off potential buyers, because today, copies sell better than originals in many cases because of their cheaper price. You wouldn't stop researching because your patent WILL expire, letting other people copy your ideas and use them then. You need to stay aheasd of the curve.
Your AIDS cure argument doesn't make any sense. There's a PTO for a reason. If a cure was simple and cheap to make, it would probably be too simple to be patented.
I'm against software patents, mostly because they don't make sense. I'm not against patents in many other fields, because the research in those fields that wouldn't have been done without them.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
Some fields require massive amounts of funding (medicine comes to mind) in order to do any useful reasearch. Saying that research will go back to the 'public domain' of universities means that all that funding will need to come from somewhere. Since the companies who are selling these products aren't funding them anymore because they can't afford to invest into a product that won't give them good returns, where do you expect the money to come from?
Note that after a specified time period, patented material DOES go into public domain. That's half the point of a patent, to share innovation.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
This page sums up pretty much what I feel about software patents.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
If you spent $300 million researching that new way to build a house (granted, I don't know how much Google spent researching indexing topics) , and then you started charging to build houses for people lets say, 300% faster and with 200% more strength at the end, would you want some other company coming in and stealing your process that you spent $300 million developing? How would you plan to recoup the research costs? Would you even spend the money reseatching in the first place if you KNEW that it would just get ripped off and you wouldn't be able to get any of that research money back because of competition? Funny, patents actually are good for innovation.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
I did think about 'mpeg at 11' but I'd posted before I thought of it. Oh, well...
--
And in other news, Netiquette has passed away after a prolonged fight against idiocy on the net. GIF at 11.
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Imagine someone who created a cure to AIDS and patented it, that person could charge ridiculous amounts of money for this cure even if it was something simple and cheap to make. People who couldn't afford this cure would die simply because John Doe patented his cure.
Interesting you should use this analogy. I've just recently been asked to participate in a genetic study of diabetes (I've been a diabetic since I was 4). All I have to do for now is provide a blood sample. In the information I was given, they specifically say that you have to give up any rights to products that may be derived from research. Specifically, they want to be able to patent the products that they produce from this research so that pharmaceutical companies can license the rights to manufacture them.
So, do I have a problem with this. Nope, none whatsoever. Because, if the big pharmaceutical companies can't protect their product then they won't manufacture it. And if they don't, who will? Who else can afford the R&D? It may be that by giving up my rights to this research I will help to provide a cure or prevention for diabetes. I'm happy with that.
And when is this likely to happen? Never. So we're stuck with having patents and big companies making and selling the products to save peoples lives, or no products and a lot of dead people. Make your choice.
Their database is old and doesn't seem to be all that big. They don't seem to honor boolean terms. They'll throw back dozens or hundreds of related pages from the same part of the same site without grouping them or squelching them. No apparent support for fuzzy spelling variations.
And when Apache and Debian show up at the top of a query on "Linux", it throws the sophistication of Google's relevance calculations into relief. Apache and Debian are linked from a ton of web pages, but the overwhelming majority of those pages are message board postings and message board TOCs or things like "This site runs on..." page footers. What this says to me is that Teoma isn't doing a good job of weighting the relevance and prominence of inbound links. It's as though it's going purely on the raw number of times the search term appears in a page linking to Site x regardless of how many are clearly identical and thus probably links from menus and TOCs, and not from the pages' unique content, where a link should count far more.
Hmm. I use Google because it finds what I want faster, more efficiently and more accurately than any other search engine I've used.
I love the clean simple fast interface. I love the lack of flashing banner ads. I love the relevance of the text based ads, and the differentiation between those and my search results. I love the categories, and that half the time it'll show me a category listing exactly what I'm after, as well as the normal list of sites. I love the fact that I can have Google in Dutch, despite not speaking that language. I love the site: tag and the difference it makes when looking for UK sites or for something on a specific website. I love the cache and how it insures me against the aging web. I love the sheer breadth of material available. I love the approach and insight of the company, how it focusses on searching, making searching easier, and on being good at searching, and doesn't get distracted by obscure business models. I love the way that occasionally they switch out the normal logo for one that celebrates a given day, and then links that logo to a search result that is relevant.
Oddly enough, the fact that they're running on x thousand PCs running a free operating system doesn't really impact on me at all. I have immense respect for the engineering involved, and for the responsiveness of the site, but I also wonder if a hardcore IBM mainframe might have been cheaper overall.
If MS bought Google, I would still use it. If they started showing banner ads, popups, forcing you to hold a Passport account, prevent non-IE browsers viewing the site, then no, I wouldn't use it.
Right now there is no search engine that comes close to the beauty of Google. I recognise that beauty from a technological perspective, irregardless of the back-end OS being used.
~Cederic
Some links are scripts. The whole idea behind robots.txt is that some links may never end or won't give fixed results. It's good advice for you to follow as it will keep your spider from spending all day following links and it will keep your search engine from indexing content that will be different the next time it is visited.
> ANYONE CAN READ IT
Actually, if I found your spider ignoring my robots.txt, I'd block you and you'd never see my site again.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I posted this already, but what the hell..
Google got popular among Linux fans because they went out of their way to index Linux-oriented content during their beta period. The PR that they ran on Linux was bandied about slashdot, but wasn't what seduced this crowd.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
most of us who use Google were fans waay back when their database was a fraction of the size..
During Google's Beta period, they focused on indexing tech-related sites, specifically Unix/Linux/Perl/etc related stuff.
I think that's why the fanbase on Slashdot grew so quickly - they were exactly the target market. And the expectation that they would spread the word to their technical and non-technical friends has been successful. I know several non-tech users of Google who must have found them by word-of-mouth (seeing how they don't advertise).
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I just decided to go take a poke around, and as a test, I decided to perform a search on linux mips. (I've been browsing around recently and doing a bit of hacking on it lately, and I know which sites I found the most relevant for it.)
The results, currently, are pretty similar. The first link on the page pointed directly to the Linux/MIPS HOWTO, which I've been referring to quite often recently. Everything else is quite similar down the rest of the first 10 results as well.
Google still has it's advantages over Teoma at the moment though:
It's one of those things that quite frequently are useful when you're searching for something: instead of landing on the main page of the site (if that contains your search terms, and is of course linked more often), you can go directly to the part of the site that addresses exactly what you're looking for.
I really hate it when a site that I want to go visit has pulled it's content or moved it around. But if I'm doing a search on Google, or I even know the last known address of a page, I can just head over to the Google cache and often pull up exactly what I'm looking for, even if the content has been moved or deleted on it's original server. Sites, unfortunately, do vanish from time to time. It's always nice to be able to access that content when you need it most.
Anyway, that would just be my whole 2c on it.
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
You forgot the most important of all... :-)
No "I'm feeling Lucky" button!
bp
Here's the real link.
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
I tried several sources and it got close, but no cigar. Try a search for Benchmade 804. It pulls up three links to knife dealers, but none of the three actually have that knife on them. In google, it pulls up the manufacturers website, and lots of dealers selling that specific knife.
I'm glad that google may have a running mate. Google flattened Yahoo and Altavista. I think some good competition will keep Google progressing into new/better/faster methods (ie. Intel - AMD).
But, for the mean time, google is my search engine of choice and the Google toolbar will be on every browser I use.
-- PSiONiC
Looking forward to a lighter head.
AZ
I spent a good bit on an adword compaign that picked theKompany and other KDE keywords following theKompany's claim that such competitive advertising was illegal. Needless to say the KDE camp went all out, hit spamming my ads, I went though around 10,000x the number of impressions/hour I was supposed to. Google staff was prompt, courteous, fixed the problem, tracked the spammers back to germany (?) and refunded my money.
As for credibility, they'd be one company that I'd be willing to give my email address to, knowing that they get it and won't be sending me "Important Updates" every month.
Competition is great, but let's not forget the good that Google has done. We need a well funded company to fight off things like the Altavista patent lawsuits on searching.
I don't understand why some folks are so virrulantly anti-google. The flack they took for putting up the deja archives who totally unreasonable seeing as they had barely got the archives out from under deja.com's decaying body. And their new image search is damn cool.
Markus
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- some results are totally unrelated to the word(s) I inserted
- results with Umlauts are shown in a wrong character-set, resulting in garbage
- the number of the results is only 1/5 ~ 1/10 of the results Google or Altavista give for the same searchterm, so I suppose Theoma has indexed only a 10th of the pages other searchengines have
- Oh, they use Helvetica... it looks really ugly on my Win89Box, with some adiacent characters overlapping
- and well, I love Google Groups, the Google Cache, the changing Google Logo, the ability to try the search on other engines...
Theoma has a loooong way to go, but then: also Google took 2 years to beat Altavista, so for Theoma there may lay another 2 years ahead... Since Altavista revamped their search-algorithm, and speeded up their interface, when Google arrived; the same will happen again: Google AND Altavista will make their search better again.just my 2 c
ms
maybe they will italicize everyone to death.
BilldaCat
I know, because all my sites come up in the top ten in searches for my topics. Obviously, this is a search engine of excrutiatingly good taste and refinement, and one which everyone should use.
Of course, the Google results seem to be more relevant (Teoma's search brought up an obscure page on my site as an "Expert link"), and Teoma has been known to blatantly ignore the robot exclusion standard (I remember tons of accesses from it on sites I had tried to exclude from spidering). Despite the wonderful increases in traffic that Teoma may give me, I think I'll stick with Google for now.
How can a company expect to make money (and stay in business) by carrying ads? Maybe you haven't been following the fallout of the dot-conomy.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
the number of the results is only 1/5 ~ 1/10 of the results Google or Altavista give for the same searchterm, so I suppose Theoma has indexed only a 10th of the pages other searchengines have
That's what the article on searchenginewatch says:
Teoma is a crawler-based service and has a collection of about 100 million
URLs. Of course, to be a serious contender in the search engine space, Teoma will
need to grow, and it is planning to do so.
It's nice, but the problem is that those search engine with bought rankings also "poison" meta search engines. For one request, I got download.cnet.com as #1 site because it was ranked very high on various sites used by vivisimo. It had *nothing* to do with the request :-(
I would also appreciate it if all high rankings of a site are displayed. It helps you to find out where you must still submit your own site.
I've already discovered Vivisimo, which is a nice step up from the meta-search-engine garbage of yesteryear. (Disclaimer: I go to CMU, which developed much of the technology behind Vivisimo, but I personally didn't work with it.) Not only does it sort links by relevance, it also categorizes results. I found it very useful when doing a research project last year -- searching for "Japanese Women" on even the most finely tuned search engine turns up pages of results that can be diplomatically called "non-academic."
I doubt it's a replacement for Google, but I recommend it the next time you're searching for a topic that might have several different meanings.
For more information, click here.
Yeah - I think google would still get the raves. Google's not just a bit better than all the search engines that cames before, it's so much better that using anything else is ridiculous.
Interesting thing is that it categorizes the search results .. very nice. Especially the option to search patents.
If someone found a cure for AIDS, shouldn't they be able to get paid for that? Shouldn't people who do the most good for the world receive the largest rewards?
And so what if it's expensive? Say you had AIDS and the cure cost $10,000. Are you going to go buy a sports car instead?
You sound like one of those "I'll take what I want and rationalize it later" type of people. Here's a tip: If you don't bother rationalizing, you can take things faster.
The person who can cure AIDS can already "say millions of people who can't afford the cure must die" by just not bothering to cure it. Maybe he thinks the rewards aren't worth the effort.
If you were in charge, maybe they wouldn't be.
Fortunately, I live in a free society where transactions are voluntary. No one is forced to produce, and no one is forced to buy, but we do it anyway because it's in our individual best interest.
Each transaction makes both the buyer and the seller better off. That's why we both say "Thank You" after the transaction. This is why transactions happen, and this is why more transactions are better than fewer.
Your efforts to reduce the incentive for the producer will result in less producer effort and fewer transactions. This makes both the buyers and the seller worse off.
In the case of an AIDS cure, worse off for the buyer means DEAD.
I checked it, and although it does rank relevant matches well, it is lacking on the indexing, as well as on the caching. These are two of google's strongest points.
With Google, I was searching for information which turned out to be on a defunct website. I was able to get what I wanted by searching within the google caches for the individual url's linked to. With this new one, that's right out.
Google also got the newsgroups that deja had. They are still not quite up to snuff (threading still sucks), but Tehoma lacks even that.
On the other hand Tehoma IS still in beta, and will probably get better. They will continually be indexing the web, and if they are smart will be refining their search process to give more revelant links.
Even if they do rise to a par with Google, I'd still use Google just because the caching of pages is so useful.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
- wonderland child porn
- skinhead porn
- seattle post-intelligencer january 12, 2001 crossword puzzle
- why parents exploit children for pornography
- any telephone number of anyone in Ohio<U>S>A>
WTF?--
The near word is implicitely in every search-- pages rank higher when the search terms are found near each other.
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Slashdot's robots.txt doesn't include /articles where discussions can be found.
Google sells a kind of ad: Sponsored Links, which come up before the first result, are commercial sites that pay google to put their result at the top of searches with certain keywords. This is not payola, Google makes it clear that the advertised result is separate from the other results.
Google also licenses the technology to other companies, as mentioned before. But most importantly, if you read here you can read all about their business model, including how they make money, and how they are owned by a large parent company which probably doesn't have to fear bankruptcy any time soon.
well.. if you're doing the minimalistic thing with 1 graphic for your company name, a single textbox and 1 submit button, you're bound to look like google..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Um, no it won't - the search suggestion given does exactly what you requested. If your you search for john doe it will return pages that contain the words john and doe in them. If you search for "john doe" it will return pages that contain that phase in itself. Google has search tips pages explaining how to structure your searches. The one on refining your search covers the above.
HTH
Well I did read this (yes, I actually READ the referenced article before posting):
"Currently in beta, the site is primarily intended to demonstrate Teoma's technology to potential partners or buyers."
Also, Google lack the ability to do things like:
True, many poeple cannot understand how to formulate a Boolean query correctly, and that may be why Google doesn't feel it's important. However, just like a CLI is better for some tasks than a GUI, a Boolean search it better for some tasks than what Google has now.
www.eFax.com are spammers
and be able to filter out the crap.
If google would allow a post-processing phase to apply this sort of logic AV would disappear from my list of search engines.
www.eFax.com are spammers
There's probably a problem trying to keep track of how many sites link to the site in question, and every time a page changes, you have to recalculate the weights of sites linked from that page.
Then you have to consider stuff like 404 pages that redirect to a page that links to the main site.
After that there are banner ads etc which you may or may not want to exclude from the weighting.
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Loyal people like you, right?
Personally I don't care if they ripped off every one of Googles concepts, if their engine works better I'll use it.
Like another poster said, without patents, I.P. ventures aren't worth it.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
The money they will get out of this has little to do with the single user search engine, and everything to do with the data mining. Companines like Google can mine their databases to do marketing queries on a HUGE scale. The search engine is great for the rest of us and a great advertising tool for them, but it is not where the money is.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Try searching for "speling lessons".
No, because the PageRank algorithm was published before any patent was awarded.
How long do you think, assuming that this new technique is valid, will it take for Google to catch up and provide similar results?
They already have 5 of the 6 requirements ( as I see em):
1. Existing, proven, scalable infrastructure
2. Gob-loads of search engine experience && the programmers/net admins to back it up
3. A better name (Marketing, sadly, does count)
4. ~1.3 billion pages already 'spidered' and waiting to be re-munched using any technique they deem appropriate
5. A lot of high-paying corporate customers (Yahoo!, RedHat etc) which helps pay for everything... and lets face it... money talks.
ALl they really need is an algorithm.... whish shouldn't be a problem from the guys that revolutionized searching in the first place.
My $0.02
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
I don't trust search engines that don't let me get lucky... um... feel lucky...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
I searched for "vim" on Teoma and noticed while the normal results did rank the original site above any mirrors, the "Expert Links" placed mirrors above the originals. But the expert sites that it did return were certainly good sites that I wish I would've found long ago.
Not only does it ignore robots.txt but it even ignores . Combine this "feature" with a failure to group similar results from the same domain under a single link and you've got a huge mess if you've ever relocated a site to a new domain and set up redirection pages on the old one.
Ditto (or at least top 5, depending on what search phrase you use, but any obvious ones seem to work). Like I said, not the most scientific method and I guess it's all down to how effective their spiders are. Having said that, I'm still going to take it personally : (
Oh, and it doesn't seem to have indexed as much of the web as Google yet (admittedly, tested using the not-very-scientific method of searching for myself and my site), but I guess that'll come with time.
...is it just me or does that look strikingly similar to the google main page.
how lame
metatr0n.net - the digital divine
So security by obscurity isn't working well for you?
It was just a joke. I didn't mean to offend you. So, I take it you like Brent Spiner a lot?
Not to start bashing it already, but it found my web page. Not a good sign if it thinks this could be a relevant answer to any search query.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Yes ;-)
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ogre+battle%22+% 22fan+art%22
That is a search for
"ogre battle" "fan art"
and you can see quite clearly that it treats fan and art to be two separate words to search for, not a phrase. And their emails tell me that this is by design. Roight.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Does anyone have information on Google's patents? Last thing I knew was they only were "patent pending", and I just checked Google's site and it doesn't even mention it. Maybe their patent was denied???
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
most of us who use Google were fans waay back when their database was a fraction of the size that Teoma's is now, and we still swore by it. It's interesting that some of the same people I have talked to who were militant in their support of Google (is, it's "our" search engine!) now are disdaining Teoma.
And I am sure that Google will respond to the challenge with honor - I can't imagine that Google would try a patent challenge. It seems so out of character. But then again, I may be guilty of putting Google on a pedestal just because it was started by other geeks. Though one could make the argument that in today's downturn economy, patent litigation is just good business sense. There are no morals or honor in pure capitalism.
I'll add Teoma to my bookmarks - if they give me better results than Google, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Even if they run M$ IIS !
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
right, obviously, since the article clearly says the site is just a demo to attract interest from investors. Teoma has not yet decided whether or not to run as a standalone search engine.
PLEASE read the article before posting
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
It basically involves two weighted listing of sites. Sites in the second list pointed to by sites in the first list earn weight points based on the weighted value of sites in the first list. Sites in the first list earn weighted value based on the site that they point to in the second list.
You iterate this a few times and you end up with the first list being a listing of "Link Pages" which have a lot of useful links on the subject. The second list becomes an ordered listing of "authortive sites", sites that are pointed to by many other sites.
What's really neat about this is this method has the ability to find seperate communities. For instances, search for the word jaguar and this method will give you authoritive sites and link pages for the car, the animal, and the atari games system quite easily....becuase each meaning of the word jaguar would have a distinct grouping of authortive sties and link pages.
What's more is this type of problem can be formulated as a eigenvector calculation for the matrix of link pages, and authoritive sites.
-jef
I'm a developer of ASPSeek - GPLed search engine that implements Google's page rank. So far Google is ignorant about ASPSeek, although some people (from JabberSearch.org) call ASPSeek "google-in-a-box".
WBR, Kir.
Funky javascript causes Opera 4 under Winblows to crash.
--
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
Anyway, none of the ideas used by Google and now Teoma are really new -- academics have been doing this stuff for a while now.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
How would you plan to recoup the research costs? ----> What research costs? The article states that it was "federally funded research". Ye olde taxpayer footed that bill.
I'm still wondering how a private company can purport to license out "federally funded research".
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I don't see how this can infringe on any patents, unless google patented the method of ranking pages by external linkages (can they patent that?).
Would you really be all that surprised if they could patent that? In this day and age I could probably patent the cold and then charge people money every time they catch it. But this is rather OT and the patent sitution in the US has been discussed on /. at great length.
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
That 'Google is our favorite search engine' is a tribute to Google's marketing team. This even happened before the newsgroups and before the cached pages. I wonder how much money they shoved down the throats of web sites like slashdot in order to get them heavily promoted with nerds.
Altavista's raging.com also gives add-free searches, althought they lost something when they were merged with the look and feel of altavista.com. I use google for what used to be called deja.com services. Google is not my favorite search engine, I don't have one. I could care less if it stayed or dissapeared, there are plenty out there that do the same thing. Altavista may not have cached pages, but does google have translation?
This whole article is a big "kiss google's butt" add. Slashdot should be obligated to note on their postings if an article is a payed advertisement. Makes me sick.
Well, then nobody on Slashdot would care about google, and you would be a "Troll" for professing your love of it.
You see, intellectual property in general and patents in particular are evil and against the orthodoxy of the slashbots.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This idea is fine, until you look at the idea that any super intelligent AI like that might censor the links for your own good. You might not find anti microsoft links unless you specified hate and microsoft, for example. Or it might be too much stress in your life to know about the impending comet strike, and so that is left out of the search results, even if you choose to vacation at ground zero.
After all, it is smarter than humans, and hopefully is more moral? The question on what to do with "the questions of morals", and whose "morals to program it with" becomes very disturbing when applied to super intelligent search engines.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
On a slightly related note, Google's director of operations and head sys-admin gave a great technical presenation of why google runs so damn fast last week at the Bay LISA meeting. Two of the more interesting things were that Google's colors on their search page were chosen for rendering efficiency and the fact that they have a team of people who actually count the bytes on their pages to make sure that you are getting all the necessary info with the least possible bytes. Considering it was a free talk, it was very interesting for us linux enthusiasts.
Hopefully this newcomer will go to the same lengths to make their search engine competitive...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Just because you don't especially like it, doesn't mean that Google is so damn successful, by bribing GeekZines.
You are either extremely paranoid or rather arrogant, my friend.
Personally, I'd never shove it down anybodies throat, but what I really like about Google (besides the sleek interface and the cache), is the fact that the first 30 results on a query, like "gcc usages nuclear physics linux", aren't something like:
Atomic chicks to blow away your gcc-perverted brain by playing with their Linux PDAs or some such shit.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
since I normally use Google, unfortunatley not...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
As long as search results are the products of advertisers, won't all search engines suck?
Funny, patents actually are good for innovation.
No, your wrong. Research will go back to the 'public domain' or 'common knowledge' area and be done at University - supported by all.
When a 'new better' method is founded, the 'good parts' of capitalism will empower anyone who cares to, to try and make that thing better, faster and cheaper. If you allow hole realms of knowledge (like ranking pages based upon their a href's) you will enable a company to operate *contrary* to what a 'free market' would provide. You cannot have both numerous and broad monopolies and free markets. This is ridiculous and counter productive.
Note: I myself favour a controlled and planned economy, capitalism enables terrible choices which do not align with healthy sustainable futures (like pollution, consumerism, exploitation of labour and whatnot) - *B*U*T* if the Plutocrats who run the G8 are going to run this capitalism game, they at least have to do it right by not enshrining businesses as all-powerfull-gods-of-knowledge... but I digress.
to invest into a product that won't give them good returns
See again, your stuck in a rut... why are we only researching medicing that provieds a 'good return'? WTF is our motivation again? oh yeaah, its HEALHTY PEOPLE, when we have an idea on how to make PEOPLE HEALTHY we should INVESTIGATE. BigPharm only investigates what makes profit..
Do you understand the clear and distinct different motives here?
do I have a problem with this. Nope, none whatsoever. Because, if the big pharmaceutical companies can't protect their product then they won't manufacture it. And if they don't, who will? Who else can afford the R&D? It may be that by giving up my rights to this research I will help to provide a cure or prevention for diabetes. I'm happy with that.
Big Pharm spends *by far* more on advertising than Research. See here. Also, to as a side-note, please see here to understand that free-market capitalism in the health care industry doesnt make sense; to note "Canada insured 100 percent of its citizens for $2,250 per person in l998 while the United States expended $4,270 per person insuring only 84 percent of our citizens.", not only that, its cruel and disgusting to hold people's health ransom for money...
De-Regulating the health care industry is more about stable profit for big-pharm than anything else.. Canada and Britain's citizens would do well to understand what 'American Style' health care really means. Fewer healthy people, higher cost, profiteering at the expense of your health (literally).
What does this have to do with R&D & Patents? Patents are weapons used by the Health Care Industry to kill people for money. The 'R & D' they do is to make money. Neither thing has 'beans' to do with Healthy People. The R&D should be done by doctors with alot less attachment to profit motives, which by nature, make for an *UNHEALTHY* "Health Industry"..
"So how do you motivate people to make others healthy when your only incentive is profit" would be a better question.
Google, Hotbot, AltaVista, hTeoma -- they will all be outclassed by a truly intelligent search engine emerging eventually as the progeny of Mind.SourceForge.Net, the Open Source inevitable AI platform that evolves towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards a superintelligence beyond any human IQ. When the Singularity described at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html gets here, human minds and cyborg brains will co-wander the Web in search of information of interest to both of us symbiontically, and we will nevermore be plagues with thousand of useless, off-the-mark search results.
--
You can use the advanced search, but I usually use the Google toolbar which lets you find backward links, page popularity, similar pages, search news groups, and lots of other stuff.
link:http://www.ichimunki.com/
...without a cool name like Google. I searched on my name, and found nothing of interest. I tried with Google, and I'm third link from the top! Way to go.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Well, if you search for Linux using this thing the first site you get is Debian, not linux.org. (Following that are Freshmeat and Apache, incidentally.)
Google's first hits, on the other hand, are linux.org, linux.com, and RedHat.
Could this be intentional?
Cool. Thanks for the tip. I, of course, have not read the manual at Google. :)
I liked that it was part of the natural flow on Teoma.
I do not have a signature
I don't give a rip whether they rip off every Google concept ever used. I don't care whether the site is identical to Google in almost every way. No patent should ever be allowed to protect the look and feel of a web site, they are designed to protect inventions-- and that would be the backend part on a web site. The look and feel should be a copyright or trademark issue, and frankly, I don't feel like Google has done anything distinctive in any of these categories to merit a patent or any other intellectual "property" protection.
Yes, Google has a rather nifty approach to ranking and search heuristics, but tough noogies on them if someone else can write software that reacts similarly to the information they gather from the world. As it is, Teoma has some features in their beta that differentiate them significantly from Google (in good ways). Already I've managed to see who is linking to me (and not having to rely on referrer logs for that) and that is way cool (and if Google shows that, I am interested in knowing how to see it).
On a less enthusiastic note, a search on "ichimunki" turned up www.ichimunki.com first (woohoo!) and a whole boatload of Slashdot postings (bleah, who needs that indexed).
I do not have a signature
I find it quite nice that this search engine totally ignored my robots.txt and scanned my entire site anyway. How can a search engine, so friggin complex and monstrous, ignore the basics of spider etiquette ?
I guess it's time to rename my directories again.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Google had no ads at the outset either.
Additonally, who's to say that those google-ites haven't improved their technology over the last year or so. I'm sure many of us have turned exlusively to Google's tried and true system... oh so easy... oh so accurate.
Finally I think we love Google's look and those tiny little modifications they make to their logo on the special (but mostly American) dates.
Hey, if someone can better it, we could all use a search with a button "The right link."
yoink
Talking about patents and search engines, I was wondering recently what is to stop someone from settng up a web search form which passes queries to their own script, which then calls (say) Googles CGI, parses the results and presents them as their own, in their own page?
Is that legal?
errr, not if Big Bad Construction Company (BBCC) came up and stole your idea. They would put money behind it and drive you out of business, quickly... Patents protect little people from getting eaten up by the big dogs as well(in their ideal sense).
I would obviously be the most effective at using it(at least in theory)
rarely is the person that invents something the most effective at executing that process. The most effective person at executing anything is the person that finds the right mix between workers with natural talent for doing what they do, and having enough money to throw at the project.
If I could simply patent my method, I would stop researching new ideas simply because no one could compete with me anyway so why waste the money?
Not when BBCC2 came along with a BETTER method of building a house. then where would you be? Probably right back inventing new ways to do things! ah, innovation!
Imagine someone who created a cure to AIDS and patented it
That is why you can't say "I patent cures to aids". Patents are supposed to be specifically how you do something. In the case of Medicinal Patents, they would go through the steps it took to create the drug, and the chemicals that went into it. Someone else could come along and find a better way to cure aids, or still yet, they could license the rights to make your cure to aids and give your royalties.
patents, when used properly, can be a huge boost to a civilization; protecting its inventors frr theft, and big bad companies with lots of money. The problem with our patent system is not its Intent, it's the Method in which it's executed..
OTOH: Even if it is cheap to manufacture, It certainly wasn't cheap to research and develop. So the cost of the product will have to include that cost as well. You keep forgetting that aspect of 'cost'. How are we to reward the person that comes up with ideas such as this? Joe Blow in his garage is never going to develop the cure for AIDS. It takes a lot of effort and money to do that. If companies weren't allowed to profit from those inovations, they would never happen in the first place!
While it probably wouldn't ever happen that a company could charge 1 billion dollars for a pill that saved someones life (millions (?) of peopls of life at that!), it CERTAINLY wouldn't be allowed by the government in that the price would need to be reduced or the patent would be invalidated
This is not a coincidence. It is as foretold in the Book of the Subgenius! Linus Torvalds is a perceptive man, much more perceptive than your average "pink", but he got it wrong this time. He has sensed the presence of JHVH-1, but he has foolishly decided to fight back. THIS CANNOT BE DONE. The only path to true Slack, to get EXACTLY WHAT YOU DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE YOU WANTED, is to submit to JHVH-1's plans. He might be an evil alien bastard, but let him pull the psychic strings for you! Praise "Bob"!
The site www.teoma.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Solaris 8. This link should give you all that nice info. Makes me wonder if this will turn into a Solaris vs Linux search engine shootout. Either way, Teoma will have to work pretty hard to dethrone Google as my search engine of choice.
[...] enhances the link analysis idea [...]
Some of the better search criterion that lead to my rather benign site:
You know, when I did a search on "teoma search engine technology" on several search engines (including google and teoma of course), the only one that came up with a decent result was Lookle, with this result from about.com: Review of Teoma Search Engine - Tasty New Search Engines Part 2. Now Lookle is somewhat innovative, and copycats google to no end, and were apparently threatened by google (trademark, not patent) last June. As far as I know, nothing came of it because google decided not to pursue.
Now as I see it there's two kinds of companies out there: those that are too busy innovating to sue, and those too busy suing to innovate. Adobe seems to have joined the Dark side; But Google's been making all sorts of cool changes lately, enough to make you think they hired more linux geeks, not more lawyers. So I doubt anything like a patent suit will cross their minds. When it does, I switch search engines. It hasn't for, what, seven years?
And THAT's why google's *my* favorite search engine.
Gremio
Let the machine do the dirty work. --K&R: Elements
Only someone with money to burn would spend hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with a better, cheaper and stronger way to build a house given that such research was carried out extensively throughout the 30s 40s and 50s and resulted in little more than the clarification of the fact that people insist on living in square wooden boxes.
Felix Candela, the famous Mexican ferrocement shell designer, produced buildings so cheaply that he refused to disclose his materials costs because of the damage it would have done to the traditional construction industry if others realized what he was getting away with.
Felix's "trick" was to build walls of only one and a half inches thick with dense woven meshes of relatively thin guage reinforcing steel. This was a very scientific approach to the application of ferrocement in that it emphasized the accurate placement of the steel --which photos depict as very similar to highly intricate interwoven 3D wireframes-- rather than reliance upon the notorious instability of concrete.
The practice was considered such a threat to the construction industry --aws well as being linked to communism-- that the US set a standard of a minimum of three inches thick for all ferrocement shell stuructures. These heavier, thicker walls require much more cement and steel and are therefore much heavier hence requiring larger foundations and limiting design considerations.
So, the innocent notion of the helpful patent system saving us from our own devices mentioned by the above post is poorly served by the analogy to the housing industry. If anything, the history of housing ominously illustrates the reality of government legislation to protect vested interet against innovation.
Are you kidding? Just how many websites do you think there are that are both large enough and high-end enough to need a Google-type search? Maybe 10000 total? Now how many of those few websites are so disatisfied with the search technologies that come for free or that are already built into their servers that they will fork over $1200+/month to liscense Google's tech? I'll be generous and say 5%, which is almost certainly too high. So with a market size of a paltry $7.2 million, and competition from at least 4 or 5 players, that hardly qualifies as a good business model.
Now on the other hand, Google is making a killing on advertising. The online advertising market is at least a $2 Billion dollar industry...probably even higher. My (medium-sized) company alone spends well over $10000/month with Google just for advertising a single niche product. Google's AdWords system charges an average of $11.50 CPM to up to 8 different advertisers on a single page... Or in other words, Google is able to charge $92 CPM (an unheard of figure!) for non-obtrusive advertisements on high-traffic keywords. Whats more, their system really works. I get an average CTR with Google of about 4.3%... which is incredible. In addition to AdWords, Google also offers exclusive premium sponsorships (the horizontal bar) for another $20 - $50 CPM on those same pages.
Yes, Google does have a good business model, but it sure isn't because of them licensing their search technology.
No, that is not true. Google is exactly doing that from the start. Of course they value a link from yahoo more.
Here is the neat idea of Google: Think the web as a graph of connected url's. At the start all url's were the same, but when you start the propagations of connectedness, then the value of some url's increase such as yahoo because many sites link to it and also many sites link to the sites that link to yahoo, etc.
And another simple idea of google that is very useful is this:
When a url links to another url, they don't just consider the url, but also the text that is linked. For example http://ww.bn.com is linked using the text "Barnes & Noble" on thousands of pages. So when you search google for "Barnes & Noble" you will get http://ww.bn.com as the likely candidate.
I know it's still in beta, but so far, after a few test searches, I'd have to say it's a far cry from Google. I don't find the results as useful for a couple of reasons:
1. Searches default to allow embedded matches, so that a search for '2gb bios limit' yields a bunch of crap about 3.2gb limits, etc.
2. Results give about a line and a half of text from the site for you to review, but it's not necessarily text that contains your search criteria, so it's hard to judge relevance for yourself.
I judge it not ready for prime time.
Hmm... A few very specific searches for pages turn up what I was looking for on Google but not on this new guy.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is interesting - they have no ads on their pages. How do they expect to make money (and stay in business)? Not that I am complaining - I like the clean interface of google and teoma.
Didn't Google get all sorts of patents on the concepts used in their search engine? You have to wonder if a patent fight is on the horizon. I for one encourage competition and it'll take some serious innovation to displace my beloved Google, but I say more power to them as long as they aren't just ripping off Google's concepts.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I have a feeling this is way too offtopic, but ...
Alas, if only someone had done this to Microsoft in the times of MSDOS,
But they did. PCDOS (IBM) was released togheter with MSDOS. Then, we had DR-DOS, Novell-DOS and some others.
The point is not that MSDOS was better, but that Microsoft had a better, yet controvertible, marketing aproch.
---
morcego
The most important result of this, as I see it, will be competition. And that is good. Both will be innovating, spending more on R&D, and giving us better value for no money.
Alas, if only someone had done this to Microsoft in the times of MSDOS, computing would've been different (and maybe even better).
-Shaunak.
google's has my cv, and lots of game dev and cv-related stuff. whereas teoma reveals, er, bugger all. i wont be switching for a while.
I love google's performance, but I don't think they spent $300 million on developing entirely new and unique search methods. (Hell, I don't think they even HAVE $300 mill.)
It seems to be not concentrated in pages but in sites, so being rather a different approach to google.
In any case a link to keep and a technology to watch. There are never too many good search engines. Good luck to them!.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The query Evil Empire puts MS only in the 8th return... *grin*
----------
Sounds trivial, but after you've been looking at search engines all day, Google's little graphic tributes to this and that go a long way.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
a search for "Bob" comes up with the same nuber of websites that a search for Linux does. :P wierd.
1,350,000
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
launched a beta version of its search engine which enhances the link analysis idea
Sorry! The file you requested couldn't be found in Search Engine Watch. Here are some ways to find what you may be looking for:
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
This looks GREAT! I looked around on it a little and got some good results. The links are more unreliable than Google's, but it brings back more topics. Unfortunately they still drop the "common words" even out of phases, and doesn't do too well with them included. Still this looks like a good alterative to Google, though why you would use another search engine than Google, I don't know.
I just happened to be searching for a new discman (my old one seems to have developed the wonderful new feature of shutting off every time it tries to activate the skip protection), so I fired up this Teoma to see how it compared to Google. Using the search string "portable CD player reviews", I got a load of links for DVD and MD players...yet no CD players. (Maybe it's trying to tell me something...) Yet Google gave me this sweet link (http://www.storescanner.com/cat/Portable-CD-Playe rs.asp) on the first page. I suppose I can't bash it much since it's still in beta, but Google will be with me for a while still.
--
"I strongly urge both the faint of heart and the faint of butt to leave the room at this time."
- Strong Bad
They would have to list which sites came from Google within plain view like all other search engines that use other search engines.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
ok, the whole arument of loyal customer base was based arround my assumption that the other companies would use the exact same method I came up with...except possibly cheaper, if I'd already proven myself to do a good job my customers would be willing to pay a little more rather than risk counting on the skills of a new unproved builder. Now if a rival company added a significant improvement to my method then the customers would leave and flock to the other company, leaving me to come up with more improvements or go out of business, thus the buliding process gets better. I wouldn't stop going to Google because a site perfectly imitated them, only if they added significant improvements.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
No, I have no problem with a person who comes up with the cure for AIDS getting payed. If each pill cost 9,500 dollars to make then a $10,000 dollar price tag per pill seems fair, however if a pill costs $5 to make then someone who would think to charge $10,000 for it should be shot. Also, that person doesn't need to charge too much more than cost to make a lot of money, millions of people with AIDS + $5 profit per pill = lot of money. Not to mention with the threat of AIDS gone cases would increase dramatically because it would no longer matter if you got AIDS. Patent law however would allow an unscrupulous man to seriously take advantage of people. I think you should read some of my other posts before you judge me, I outlined in quite a few of them several plans to pay the creator of a cure, I just don't think that person should be able to say millions of people who can't afford the cure must die because I want my money.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
This seems like the first of what might be many google knockoffs... I don't really see anything different, and I actually like the less cluttered look that google gives you on the search results page. Also, when I did a search for "Swing Plugin" (no quotes in the search) on both, google gave me a link to the java.sun.com homepage (which I wanted) and teoma gave me a link to a BBS posting, and I absolutely despise getting a BBS when I search for information, they are only useful about 25% of the time. I think I'll stick with google.
import sig.my.*;
Another things I find _great_ about google that I haven't found on any other search site, is instead of showing you the first sentance of the page found, it shows you sentence where you search words are. Perhaps not always the most helpful method, but more often than not, I think it is.
The search engine this article points to also fails to show the complete URL, I find that rather annoying, someimtes its quite helpful..
-jon
I have to say that so far Google is my favourite, but if there is someone else who can give me even better results I will be grateful. I can't see one reason why this shouldn't be good for me. Now Google has to improve their SE to get even better. So for me this is a win win situation.
If it's wet, Drink it!
If it's wet, Drink it!
I haven't heard the argument that blocking ads is illegal (except with free internet services and I think that's understandable.) I have to agree with you and just hearing about it upsets me. Like the rest of you I love Google, but I still have to stick with Northern Light when I need to do some serious searching. Unfortunately NL keeps becoming more commercialized as well and I really hate that they now try to charge for information which CAN be found elsewhere for free.