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Why Google Rocks And An IPO
Soothsayer wrote to us about the recent BusinessWeek article that profiles Google, its rise to the top, despite no marketing dollars, and tries to explain...well...why Google rocks. Oh, and some small mention of an IPO. CT I also want to note that images.google.com is my favorite place in the universe to idly explore the wierdness of the net.
Help! I keep searching for Babes on image.google.com - but Babe Ruth keeps showing up. Yech!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Wasn't it Google that got an insane amount of funding with no business plan?
NO, not another IPO!
Aaahhh!
Sheesh, you get a good firm and you just want to ruin it by making it go all bonkers with greed and quarterly returns.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's a shame that other sites don't accomodate those of us that speak sweedish chef.
That's why google is on top.
(This post -barely- passed the lameness filter)
I did a search on AltaVista which returned 10,000,000 results. I'll let you know when I find it.
-... ---
One of the first things you learn about in marketing and advertisment is that word of mouth is invaluble. I've used Google for a long time (it's my homepage), and I always find what I'm looking for.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Shouldn't we consider Google a public service? How to maintain it, though?
Or better yet - a congregation: 'Church of Google'. Sounds good to me...
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
It trys to be a search engine rather than a search engine/chat room/news source/email/job search "portal". It does one thing, and it does it really well.
blah. Consumption Junction is the only place for serious weirdness in images on the net.
:)
The reason that Google.com is so heavy on traffic is b/c it is the only decent search engine on the net (and the fact that they power Yahoo, etc).
I love Google but it definitly isn't the place for weird images
ewwwww, Taco!!! Not in front of impressionable young geeks!
If you spend your idle time on images.google.com you might want to try spending some time on http://www.searchshots.com/ -- shows images of actual websites instead of just the images on them.
The article praised google's use of text advertisements that appear at the top of the search list because they confuse web surfers who think they are search results. So why are we all feel-goody about google?
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
About a week or two ago, there was a TV news item in Canada about an investigator locating a man who was wanted for hijacking a flight from Canada to Cuba in 1970 or 1971. The investigator was going through cold case files, and put the name of the wanted man into Google. He got a hit, and found a quote by a man with the same name, living in the Northeastern US. The investigator checked into this person, and it was the man they were looking for.
Google located the missing hijacker in seconds.
Now that rocks!
1.You always find what you want
2.They don't try to shove ads in your face
3.It is quick
4.Everyone found out about it through word of mouth
5.It's Google! need i say anymore, the name is cool
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
I installed the Google toolbar on IE on my Windows machine, and it's great.. one of the most convienent things I've ever installed. Google deserves every bit of praise it gets.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
you mean like this?
g sa fe=off&q=weirdness&spell=1
http://images.google.com/images?num=20&hl=en&im
Google has that nice little AdWords program. Its like a penny per impression I think. We use it and have gotten a bit of extra traffic from it. It's much better than shelling out thousands of dollars to setup a campaign on Yahoo. I think you can start as low as $15.00 on an account. That's a good deal, and that's going to make them some money. Even if they don't work, our attitude is "what the hell, it's only a few bucks".
It's simple, yet so very effective. They also do a funky thing with their logo on various national holidays.
When people want to search the web, they want to search.. not be thrust into a seemingly senseless display of how much can be crammed onto one page.
All hail Google! Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!
Is Eric Schmidt the guy to lead Google into new markets, expand their business, and take them thru an IPO? Personally, I'm a bit worried about him as their CEO. Granted Novell was already on the way down when he took the helm, but to have negative market growth for the 4 years you were in charge? I'll admit I never followed Novell, nor do I know much about him, but his past performance bothers me. Was Novell too far gone for Schmidt to make a difference (although he had 4 years to do something)? Is Google too golden to be affected by him (ie could any bum off the street take Google thru an IPO)?
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
I also want to note that images.google.com is my favorite place in the universe to idly explore the wierdness of the net.
.. is THAT what they call pr0n in your neck of the woods now?
oooh... ummm.. "wierdness"
I think they succeed because they stay simple. I was glad to see the note to victims and survivors of the hit in New York, but saddened for the possibility that Google will take upon itself a role of news, commentary, or anything like that.
We don't need another portal. We need a fast, simple, comprehensive Google. They do continue to make improvements within those parameters, though, which is exciting. Hadn't seen images.google. I'll go look at it now. I usually use the AltaVista image searcher...
-wp
information is immaterial
314-15-9265
Why would any company that is growing in the aftermath of the .boom want a parasite on the business in the form of investers wanting ever-growing returns? What do they need the extra capitol for?
science is a religion
I also want to note that images.google.com is my favorite place in the universe to idly explore the wierdness of the net.
I think you you're really exploring the weirdness of your sex fetishes.
Honestly, have you seen what my prior favorite, metacrawler (now goto.net) has become? One of these horribly busy, what's what, 10-minutes-to-load, feature glut, sensory overload type pages.
It's noce that success hasn't put a bunch of crap on google's front page like it did for ICQ, Netscape, or Yahoo.
It's also good to know that the #1 result spot was not there because it was purchased. They're good about making that clear.
Add to this the fact that it GETS RESULTS and RUNS LINUX... you've got a perfect engine. Of course, I'd like to know what they're doing with those cookies and click-through data, but that's just the privacy freak in me talking.
+++ ATH0 +++
And it's all about relevant results.
Google is great for many of the same reasons that Yahoo was great (and still, more or less, is great). Early search engines all used the same ranking scheme (if they ranked sites at all). The more often a term appeared in a page's META tags or body, the more relevant the page must be. This was quickly taken advantage of by web page creators.
Yahoo might not have been the first to deviate from the traditional search engine, but they were the first raging success at it. Web surfers quickly learned that searching Yahoo's directory yielded more relevant results because the sights were screened beforehand to make sure the sites contained what the site creators said the sites contained. But soon the directory became bloated, many sites simply went away causing broken links, site creators all began their site titles with "A" just to push up to the top of the alphabetical listing and corporations trumped them all by paying for top billing.
Enter Google. The ranking algorithm works something like this: A site is crawled and it's contents indexed. A check is made in Google's existing directory to see if any other sites point to the currently crawled site. If there are many sites pointing to the current site, then obviously the current site has some importance and deserves and higher ranking. If one of the "big sites" (i.e. AOL, MSN, etc) link to a site, it must be really important. I believe there are other factors involved but I can't remember them at the moment.
Google's ranking system provides the most relevant search results of all the current search engines. As a bonus, it doesn't try and clutter the interface with unneccessary "portal" features or too much blatant advertising. Fast, powerful and smart. That's why it rocks.
My sigs always suck.
Google's search seems to be a little more focused on the content of the surrounding page, while Altavista's search seems to be a little more focused on the content of the image itself.
Altavista's "Similar" indexing is a really interesting way to browse randomly, or to find better-quality copies of the same image. It goes by some color-to-area fingerprinting index scheme, so a pumpkin on a black background may be seen as "similar" to a basketball on a dark brown background.
Google's database of images is not mature yet, and needs more tie-in with the stock-photo services, but it is in more ways predictable: reasonable searches often find reasonable images.
In both, and in website searching too, I'd like for it to automatically try synonyms to words I provide, perhaps at a lower weighting.
More semantic work could be done on Google, to avoid the dreaded "'how' is a very common word and ignored" phenomenon. Of course, a database table with references to all the pages that include the word 'how' would be enormous. However, if groups of words on pages and in searches were recognized and considered as new meta-English symbols, the tables of how to verb for each verb would be manageable and useful. "How to tie", "how to format", "how to derive". (Linux docs have adopted 'howto' as a word to avoid the situation, but [shock] not everything you want to find is about Linux.)
Other word groupings that commonly surround the too-common words are good candidates for this symbol-analysis too.[
The article talks about Google selling its search engine to companies, thus getting (in future, i'm sure, most of) its income from selling the software. I'm positive it will eventually get competion from an open source engine that will use Google's patented ideas. Will they enforce their IP against OSS undercutters and if so, how will their 'cool' public image survive?
I think one could sum it right here...
So, why does it rock you ask? Cause it follows the KISS method. No BS. No stupid ads. No pop-ups. Its just a simple search engine that gives RESULTS.
We are blind to the Worlds within us
waiting to be born...
I remember when images.google.com was first announced, somebody noticed that if you searched for "CmdrTaco" you got a hilarious page with "Mr.T vs. Slashdot Geeks."
Doesn't return that one anymore, though.
Go search for "linux".
Enjoy reading an advertisement for Solaris.
for the d00dz out there:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
I only noticed this one today
The current issue of Wired Magazine is also featuring Google in an article about it's marketing and advertising sales strategies.. good read, but not available on the net yet..
Get serious here folks? Mom and pop money for ads isn't going to attract investors. If anyone has any real ideas about how this company is going to make money, I'd like to hear it. If goes something like they can charge $15 a subscription or $.01 per click, then goe sell it to your great aunt.
Has anyone come across any really interest results for searches on images.google? One of the oddest ones ive come across these days has been searches for "bruise"
Hello,
This is my first note on Slashdot so it may be in the wrong place or whatever...so I apologoize in advance if I offend anybody.
I'm a freelance technology writer (info is at http://www.jmbcommunications.com) doing a story...if you have input please mail it to me at Jeff1620@aol.com. (It's not my "real" email address, I just use it for special occasions like this...)
Now seriously:
I am working on a story concerning "pushy" programs -- pesky pop-up windows proliferating on browsers, certain search engines and web
sites, html e-newsletters that automatically connect to websites, websites that don't let you leave, and programs that change settings and install themselves...
I want examples of such annoying programs / technologies coupled to information about any technology / programs / ideas that counter these
programs and technologies. I do *NOT* want to interview anyone; please send info, including links and PDFs, and I will work on them. I'll respond by email.
NOTE: AUDIENCE / PRODUCT FOCUS IS U.S. Any products you reference *MUST* be
available now (or shortly) in the US.
PLEASE RESPOND TO jeff1620@aol.com. THANKS!
Jeff
Google "growing up" and becoming a real business. Why does a real business have to have an IPO?
Right. My wife works for Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the largest rental car company in the US. However, it is also privately held, which allows the principals strong flexibility in their decision making, because it is theirs and theirs alone. Incidentally, it's also a great company to work for, because all of the perks and bennies don't have to be approved by a mass of shareholders--if Mr. Enterprise wills it, it becomes.
--
$tar -xvf
I know I can get to some of my pages through Google, and I never paid 'em a dime. They don't charge me to search for things, and they don't show me a lot of ads. Where does the money come from?
The article mentions that someone does pay Google to spider their site, and that they sell their "technology". It must be an aweful amount of money if this is how Google covers their expenses. It's a little hard to believe.
Google looks like one of those things that is Too Good To Be True. Are we gonna find out that they are Osama's piggy bank or something? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Sellign technolgoy to do a job with fixed needs is not a sustainable business model.
You can make some large hunks of cash but wher eis the ongoing revenue? I don't see an ydiscussion of whether the amrket for their technology can or will expand.
Some plain business sense still seems a good idea when picking companies. Burn is sustained so income must be sustainable.
because it doesn't second guess my logical operators, and doesn't replace the searches that I want with ads that were paid for. If I put a string in quotes, goddamit, I want that string, and *not* just some of the words of the string, and not variations of the string. If I put something in parantheses, I want the operator performed on just the strings in the parantheses, and not anything else.
Google rocks because it believes me when I tell it I know what I want. The others don't do that, and so I use Google always.
--
$tar -xvf
The main benefit of issuing an IPO is the massive amount of cash that is immediately infused into the company. The company usually has some sort of business plan that includes the spending of this money through acquisitions, research, and general company growth. The company will be able to do things that it could only dream of without that money. A company going IPO without a reasonable plan as to how the money will be spent is not a company that you want to be invested in.
Of course, with this newfound money comes new responsibility. The company heads become beholden to the shareholders and the never-ceasing demands of the market. If the principals make one bad decision, a barrage of lawsuits are bound to rain down. An unlucky company may soon find itself making decisions that bolster the short term stock price instead of making decisions that strengthen the company for the long term. The lucky company, though, may make it past its first few years and into steady cash flow well enough that it can take gambles that other companies both public and private could only imagine (Microsoft, anyone?).
Dancin Santa
Or if you use Opera 5 the toolbar is already built in!
But it is not perfect. What about exact pharse searches? Try this search on google. "to be or not to be, that is the question" Google first hit is something about horticulture, huh?!? "To spray or not to spray?" And the rest of the hits have nothing to do with Shakespeare. Now try the same exact search on Altavista you actually get Shakespeare related sites. Google is great for topic search especially multiple topics. With Altavista it is +linux +filtering +security but Google is automatically ANDed. It is just to bad that Google's advanced search to turn on exact phase matching doesn't actually work. I tried the Google advanced search page but I got the same results as the standard page. Lycos has an advanced search with exact match and it did give the good results, so what is the deal with Google? I realize this may be redundant and others on Slashdot have mentioned this problem with Google. The question is: Is there a way around this or a fix in the works? Has anyone else experienced this?
I agree the results are the most relevant, but there's one factor I've been unable to specify in a query: TIME. Oftentimes, I'd get 40-50 results of which many were posted years ago, and it's a pain to skim through all those to find the ones that pertain to a recent development and/or announcement!
Some Ideas:
Workaround: I've tried to do something like including "2001" in a query, but it's not very selective or effective. :(
Google may 'rock' now but it won't after an IPO. I will get flamed for this but things you can expect to see are some of the following,
banner ads, pop-ups
intrusive user tracking
links for 'product placement'
smart people leaving the company disillusioned
Tell me "it can't happen"... it has every time before and it will here
In 12-24 months google will suck badly, mark my words. You will be ashamed to have promoted it.
By the way, my understanding is that they are profitable and don't need an IPO -- but no doubt the private investors want their 10x return on their original capital. After all, do you think that multimillionaires invest in these things out of good-will?
The only way to have a search engine that does want you want in the long term is for it to be owned by the users.
Because they can't profit from anything without destroying the site. Banner ads dont bring in any revenue, and you cant charge for the service. This wont get off the ground because there isn't anywhere it can go but down. The only thing that they can do is start running auctions, selling products through buy.com and its affiliates and hope they make enough to pay the 5,000 employees they hire in anticipation of "getting big" only having to fire them 3 months later.
Business Week likes it, in part, because they think it's deceptive!
Google has seen online ad sales rise in recent quarters. The reason? The ads on Google's site are delivered as a text listing above the search results--making them appear more a part of the page's content. "It works so well since users seem to be under the impression that all ads are graphical in nature and written-word ad placements are still editorial," says ad buyer Jonathan Adams, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive.
I'm torn! Do I tell that looser what drives people to visit the place and give him a clue, or do I keep my mouth shut and let him keep buying ads?
Nah, I'll keep my mouth shut. One day after the IPO, some greedhead is going to screw my favorite search engine. It will be replaced in about five days by an honest site. Why can't those fools just enjoy their profits and leave excellent alone?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thing is, Google at this point is just a search box which covers 20% of the screen? IPO could mean having better instructions, a little bit of advertizing, and a more fancy logo. I don't think that the Google people will be dumb enough to change things enough that their current users don't like it anymore. That said, Google is my favorite search engine, and I could be a tad biased :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
"It works so well since users seem to be under the impression that all ads are graphical in nature and written-word ad placements are still editorial," says ad buyer Jonathan Adams, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive.
Why do these marketing people always treat people like braindead sheep? He's implying that their adversting works because the apparent deception works. I personally, *intentionally* check out Google's sponsors because I assume that if this company has spent some money to advertise their product/service, it might be worth looking at; a better signal-to-noise ratio. Of course this isn't always the case, and even if not, I'm still helping to support one of my favorite sites.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I hope the google servers can survive being slashdotted.
Google is great, there's no doubt about it. They've also branched out into a lot of interesting searches (picking up the Usenet groups, PDF, images, etc.) However, one new feature annoys me a little: the Google PhoneBook. If you type someone's first name, last name, and the city they live in into the main search window, it'll pull up their address and phone number. Is that really necessary? I know that's nothing new and plenty of other sites have this functionality, but still...it bugs me. They don't mention the name of the 3rd party that gives them the information, either. They do make it relatively easy to remove your own info, though, so I guess it could be worse. It's just a little creepy when you're not expecting it.
From the article:
I really disagree with this statement. Google's ads are clearly marked with a colored background, the words "Sponsored Link," and are presented in a totally different format, most notably wording. There is no mistaking these ads for search results.
He's right though, that the ads work. Unlike the blinking crap that pollutes so many web pages, the ads on Google are relevant and often interesting. I've clicked them fairly often, when I usually ignore banner ads.
"oh google fantastic it got me the results I needed"- researcher
"oh the libraries fantastic they showed me the indexes and then I went and got the best book"- researcher
this is the old way of doing things not anything new
its called Impact Factor this is how often a paper is cited by other papers in their bibliography (an equivalent in a home page would be links section). This then determines how good the paper is and so a journal with a high impact factor is seen as better than one with a low one because people use articles from it a lot. In turn journals then demand more money from the library to buy it or advertiser if they run adverts.
But get this some high brow journals cost $10,000 for a years subs that every library in the land has to stock because they have such high impact factor.
On top of this if you want to publish where do you publish? In a high impact factor journal because your work is going to be seen and often you grant is linked to impact factor. So researchers are so desperate to get their money they give copyright of their work to journals .
And of course this self perpetuates with the best work going to high brow journals the winners are the Publishers not the people doing the work or the libraries that hold the research.
What is needed is to break the cycle is for researchers to publish online to a respected website and to keep copyright of their work and for funding companies / governments to acknowledge these as having an impact factor (may be based on unique viewing of page I suppose ) and the libraries to stop paying them!
Please encourage you local libraries and governments to do this !
Regards
John Jones
Hello All-
Seems like Google has quite the DB backend... anyone know what they are running?
I am constantly surprised by Google... it almost always finds what I am looking for...
-Affe
Do they mean that they're selling guaranteed high ranking search results to companies?
Like, if you look up "Ice Cream", does it mean that "Baskin & Robins" will come up first because they paid off the Google cops and not because their site ranks based on the normal criteria?
Hm.
I don't know how I feel about that. I know it costs money to run these things, but I always get nervous when the quality of information becomes subservient to corporate agendas.
Fear the IPO.
-Fantastic Lad.
Having Business Week do a cover story on a company is the kiss of death to that industry. You can make a great deal of money DOING THE OPPOSITE of what Business Week says. Sell when it hits the newsstands. Past Business Week favorites of mine: Enron (ENE), Ariba (ARBA), Sun Micro (SUNW). Take a look at the downward trajectory right after the business week recommendation. It is uncanny how *perfectly* wrong they are!
their hAx0r interface language. It's friggin' hilarious.
-raph
i read an article in wired (i think) a while ago talking about new generation search engines... the one that really stands out is wisenut, which puts things in nice little catergories - i did a search for 'the matrix' and in addition to a list of links, i got all these catergories and the option to search them: Medical Matrix(2), Matrix Net(4), Astrology Software(3), Matrix Reloaded(3), Matrix Group(3), Dot Matrix(3), Class Matrix(3), Internet Matrix(4), Others(179). google returned basically the same thing, but just as a jumbled mess. i like being able to quickly scan and find the general topic before diving in much better! and it has almost as many pages as google (it only had like a third when i read the article!) - wisenut: 1,495,332,308 / google: 1,610,476,000
while i havn't had much need to search since i'm not in school right now, it has seemed much more helpful doing comparison searches for the hell of it...
chesh
I hope they don't IPO too. Right how they're making a respectable amount of money and delivering a TOP quality service. Want proof? Google is my browser home page! I have NEVER made any external site my home page before; always kept them local to my own box. I do this because I use google a lot and because it's quick to load.
If they IPO, they'll ruin it. They will come under increasing pressure by profit chasing share holders to take all opportunities to raise revenue, and that will ultimately lead to ad bloated pages.
Google needs to resist the IPO trap and carry on doing what it does best - putting its customers first!
Macka
I agree. This is not just good design, this is ethical dealing. But it's ironic -- according to the article, many people don't see these ads as ads, even though they're clearly marked. Apparently people have been conditioned to equate ads with graphic banners. So Google is benefiting from the excesses of its predecessors.
Add to this the fact that it GETS RESULTS and RUNS LINUX... you've got a perfect engine..
That doesn't make any sense. If it doesn't get results, it's not imperfect, it's useless. And preferring a search engine (or any other public web site) for the OS its maintainers choose is just plain silly.
I agree with pretty much every other nerd out there that Google is the best search engine on the net, but there's something that keeps bothering me: it seems like every time I search for something, the top of the list is dominated by sites located at Geocities.com, which is of course owned by Yahoo!. Since Yahoo! is more than likely Google's best customer, you reckon its possible that Google is tuning there search to fit Yahoo!'s needs?
I really don't think so myself, but it's something interesting to chew on.
w|f
They *are* already making money, or they would not get or go (err) IPO, (fortunately) the time is over that company's that aren't profitable can do that.
Aparently google has found a way to make money without annoying ads or a too-busy looking website.
(-% TwistedMind %-)
From the article:
"It works so well since users seem to be under the impression that all ads are graphical in nature and written-word ad placements are still editorial," says ad buyer Jonathan Adams, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive.
As seen through the all-knowing cynic's eye:
"Google makes money because users can't tell the difference between text ads and search results. I can't pay those little ingrates to click on my JavaFlashScript banner ads, but post up a boring text ad, and they come running. How can I maintain a herd of sycophants, if I have to lay off my production and graphics departments? Damn communists."
I wonder if the regulations that result from the SC^10A would make it illegal to not load banner ads.
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
What more could you ask for?
How can computer savvy people use a search engine that does not support regular expressions?
Still google finds what I want 90% of the time.
If you go to AltaVista's text only search page, then you don't get any ads at all... not even graphics. It's quick to load, and quick to search. I've got it bookmarked, and it's the search engine that I always use.
"+to +be +or +not +to +be, +that +is +the +question"
In YOUR query:
The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.[details]
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be that is. [details]
ie. Googlemeister stripped most of your words because they were too common. Be more intelligent with your searches and google WILL prevail
Cute. For those of you who are math challenged, it's a joke.
-- MarkusQ
Look at everyone's old favorite, MetaCrawler. They were innovative, and extremely efficient, then they sold out and now the tool is about as worthless as any of the other individuals it crawled. Few products or services have withstood the buyout, WinAmp and ICQ come to mind. Some that I recall with less enthusiasm are Lotus 123 (which just sort of died, rather than being imroved to death), and Napster. With any luck, if they do sell out, it will be to Yahoo! I mean, look how much better they made GeoCities.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
try searching for the word "dick" on http://images.google.com
--
If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
200002: 1628: 1.70%
200004: 1116: 0.92%
200005: 3583: 3.21%
200006: 3184: 5.05%
200007: 3347: 5.83%
200008: 5085: 6.89%
200009: 6216: 5.29%
200010: 9341: 7.06%
200011: 7786: 6.18%
200012: 7345: 7.44%
200101: 8985: 8.08%
200102: 8422: 7.45%
200103: 9685: 7.60%
200104: 11588: 8.56%
200105: 12983: 9.02%
200106: 11740: 10.85%
200107: 11917: 13.23%
200108: 15378: 14.06%
The percentages need to be multipled by about 2.5 to get fractions of external referers - ie in August 2001 about 35% of my traffic came from www.google.com. (Also, these figures don't include google.yahoo.com or google.co.uk or the other sites using Google.)
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
The worst search engine has gotta be MSN.COM. It takes the longest time to load of any search engine ive been to, does not conform to standards so it doesnt render properly in Opera, and its just so annoying each time you get out of Hotmail and are sent there. Hotmail itself is ever worse. It doesnt let me select messages in Opera and you can't use most of the functions in a non windows environment.
You just made my night. Thanks. :)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
goto images.google.com and type in "funny".. I now have a new found happiness.. it is the little things in life!!! THANK YOU GOOGLE!
Libraries had this a long time ago? Man, have you ever done a research for relevant papers in a library? Even with all their CD-Rom and online catalogs it still sucks, because it's still keyword based, like Altavista.
That changed with citeseer, a search DB that specifically links publications and calculates their relevance based on common citations.
Great for doing research, check it out.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
The danger is that if the whole web starts to rely more and more on one single central search engine, what happens if it fails some day? Are we getting dependent on it as we are on the dns? The dns has the concept of secondary servers, though - Google does not, so far.
There are many possibilities why Google could (partly) fail - technically, by intrest of its (future?!) owners, politically and so on. Again, a decentralized network of many smaller search engines and databases would be better in this regard for the web. It would probably not make as much money as Google.
Google's cached copy of Google is prefaced by: "Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I wish to point out that a smart ranking technique based on hyperlinks, similar to that used by Google, but more complex, has been proposed years ago by the IBM's "Clever" Project.
You can find a description on Hypersearching the Web, Scientific American 6/99.
The article cites also Google, with the differences in respect to Clever.
In particular, while Google limits hyperlink ranking to links pointing _to_ a page, Clever identifies two scores, "authority" and "hub" : "...a respected authority is a page that is referred to by many good hubs; a useful hub is a location that points to many valuable authorities".
Values are calculated in an iterative way, depending also on the query.
It's an interesting field of research, and Google demonstrates that it is also fruitful.
Google's home page normally has no updated content except for changing the picture. You would do better to save the home page to a local file and make that your browser homepage. Loads even faster.
ICQ comes to mind as one of the bigger sell-outs - I don't need 500 features in a messaging program, with ads plastered all over every message I get from my buds.
The only thing about ICQ that makes it halfway decent is that they don't make random changes to the protocol in order to force people to stop using non-sancioned clients.
-Matthead