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.

Comments

Languages

[Eric Seppanen]

From the article:

With the addition of Arabic and Hebrew, Google now spits out results in 66 languages.

I wonder if that count includes swedish chef?

google images vs alta vista images

[Speare]

I like the features of both Google and Altavista's different image searchers.

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.