Google Programming Contest

AccordionGuy writes: "Google has just announced its first annual programming contest! The objective is to write a program that will do something "interesting" with the about 900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides. In addition to writing the program, contestants also have to convince the judges why their program is interesting (or useful) and why it will scale (that is, handle a constantly increasing load of data that grows as the Web grows). The prize is US$10,000 in cash, a V.I.P. tour of the Google facility in Mountain View, California and possibly a chance to run their program on Google's complete billion-Web-page store."

Comments

A program that deletes pages.

[suso]

I think I'll write a program that will delete pages as it finds them. This should scale pretty nicely and make the web faster in the process.

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[Anonymous Coward]

I normally dont say it, or think it,

but that was a funny comment. Kudos!

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[froseph]

But please, don't delete the pr0n!

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[Sloppy]

Heh, reminds me of a sorting assignment in high school. People were talking about selection sort, insertion sort, etc. Then someone writes a sort that runs in O(1) time, and amazingly, a test routine run on the data confirms that it really worked -- the data is sorted. And lo, the algorithm was dubbed "deletion sort" because all it did was nuke the array.

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[Rufus211]

haha...someone's been reading a few to many Bastard Operator from Hell stories =)

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[flegged]

I already have a program for that. It's GPLd, comes with full source and can work on billions of files at a time.

It's called 'rm'. You might have heard of it.

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about merging the whole internet to one index.html using heapsort.

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[davcorp]

Ahhh... you have the true makings of a BOFH ..

Re:A program that deletes pages.

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a great idea

Very good

[m4g02]

A nice way to get ideas for free... maybe the idea of the winner will be used on the future.... but i still would like the money better than the idea. =D

Re:Very good

[Malc]

Not just ideas, but a working prototype too. $10K seems like a really small amount - think how much it would cost them to do it in house.

Re:Very good

[ichimunki]

$10,000. 8 weeks til deadline. 40 hours per week.

That's 10000/(8*40) = $31.25 per hour.

Annualized that would be a salary of $65,000.

Even in IT, that's nothing to sneeze at. But I'd say the benefits of winning a contest like this go beyond the money.

Re:Very good

[thetman]

it's something to sneeze at if your odds of winning the prize are incredibly small.

Re:Very good

[beme]

It's only nothing to sneeze at if you're a W2 employee with bene's. This would be more like 1099 work, and 31.25/hour is pretty low, once you start to throw in things like social security taxes, insurance, PTO, etc.
The big benefit would be to use it as a foot in the door for full-time employment with Google. Even if you don't win, it might be a good way to get an interview.

Re:Very good

[ichimunki]

How many people do you think are actually going to enter this contest? I'd say they're lucky if they get 25 good entries. And I'm not suggesting that anyone quit their day job, I'm just saying: even if you worked at this full time the wage ain't that bad-- especially if you're a college kid or out of work.

Re:Very good

[ichimunki]

If you really spend 320 hours on a contest submission from which you expect no other material benefits and have only a *chance* to win, I have to question your sanity. :)

OTOH, I think it is likely that no one would spend 320 hours on this project. I do think it's a lot more likely the average entry would get maybe 40-80 hours of work (assuming it was started from scratch, couple nights a week, a couple weekend binges). That makes the hourly rate closer to $200. Of course, there is still a possibility that you will make $0/hr if you don't win.

Re:Very good

[ChicagoPete]

Who in IT only works 40 hrs/week ??

Re:Very good

[Malc]

Me. You just have to start at a new job on the right foot. Leave at the same (preferably early) time everyday, and you'll be okay.

I know what someone should make!

[Cruciform]

How about adding the option to have google understand what I *mean* to search for, not what I tell it to search for.

Oh, and the ability to find one non-fake Britney porn pic.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[delphin42]

> Oh, and the ability to find one non-fake Britney porn pic

why only one?

Re:I know what someone should make!

[foobar104]

How about adding the option to have google understand what I *mean* to search for, not what I tell it to search for.

You might have been kidding, but you've got a really good idea there.

How about semantic searching: equip Google with a database that organizes words in a relational hierarchy from the general to the specific. For example, "orange" is a more specific form of "fruit," and also a more specific form of "color."

When you search for "orange," Google might also have the ability to search for "fruit" and "color," depending on how broad you want your search to be.

Just a thought.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[andy@petdance.com]

Oh, and the ability to find one non-fake Britney porn pic.

That's easy enough.

printf( "Your query found %d results.", 0 );

Re:I know what someone should make!

[negativekarmanow tm]

In general, you don't want more results, you want less results, and you want them to be more specific.
So a search for oranges that returns all kinds of fruits and colors, is not very useful.

What could be useful, is if it detects whether you mean the fruit or the color from context : so a search for orange vitamins would only return hits related to the fruit, not the color.

(A quick check shows that searching for orange vitamins only returns pages about the fruit anyway, but there are probably some better examples.)

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous DWord]

Hey, I may have slept through umpteen calculus and matrix algebra classes, but since when does 0 equal 1?

Re:I know what someone should make!

[good-n-nappy]

You might be able to do something like this using WordNet.

So now when I search for "Ornage" it asks me "Did you mean orange." I guess Google could extend this if it was hooked up to WordNet - "Did you mean orange the fruit, orange the color, orange the tree, or orange the river"

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Sancho]

I'd just like the ability to use regular expressions in my search...and maybe also have a localization function where I could require that certain search terms be within so many words of each other.

Erik

Re:I know what someone should make!

[shogun]

Did you mean orange the fruit, orange the color, orange the tree, or orange the river"
Great idea but how is the search engine going to tell which meaning of the word its looking for in context? Now that would be a very useful step if you can find a nice way to do it.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[big_hairy_mama]

As great as that would be, the first person to write a regular expression engine that can process a petabyte of indexed web-pages in 0.25 seconds should get more than $10,000!

The problem is that search engines use pre-indexed tables of words, probably one table for every word used by any page anywhere. Regular Expressions have to process the raw data, which wouldn't scale worth a dime.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[damiam]

int O = 1;
printf("O is %d", O);

Re:I know what someone should make!

[foobar104]

So now when I search for "Ornage" it asks me "Did you mean orange." I guess Google could extend this if it was hooked up to WordNet - "Did you mean orange the fruit, orange the color, orange the tree, or orange the river"

EXACTLY! Like that scene in 2010:

CHANDRA
I would like to open a new file. Here is the name for it. [types "phoenix"] Do you know what that means?

SAL
There are twenty five references in the current encyclopedia.

CHANDRA
Which one do you think is relevant?

SAL
The tutor of Achilles?

CHANDRA
That's very interesting, I didn't know that one. Try again.

SAL
A fabulous bird, re-born from the ashes of its earlier life.

CHANDRA
That is correct.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Chundra]

Yeah, wordnet is pretty damn cool, and it's a neat idea but...

Last I heard, using nlp techniques on a general purpose search engine doesn't yield better searches than string matching. So by using wordnet you would throw in a lot more overhead for minimal to non-existent gains.

It would probably be pretty annoying to have google ask you things like that too...especially for a more complex search.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[sl0ppy]

do you mean like google aready does?

not exactly sure when i started seeing it on google, but they appear to already have a "what i mean" system.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[fwankypoo]

In general, you don't want more results, you want less results, and you want them to be more specific.

Should be "you want fewer results"...

Sorry.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[nickjennings]

When you search for "orange," Google might also have the ability to search for "fruit" and "color," depending on how broad you want your search to be.

This idea is severly flawed. It is not often that a webpage will "clarify" what it meant by orange outside of the context of the sentence.

The cat was the color orange.
The cat was orange.

Which do you think is more likely to exist? I think it's apparent that adding the word "color" to the search will only end up trashing otherwise good results.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[good-n-nappy]

Last I heard, using nlp techniques on a general purpose search engine doesn't yield better searches than string matching.

Was that a human factors study? Seems like a pretty broad statement to rule out anything that uses nlp technology. Anyway, I'm not sure I like the idea myself, I was just trying to make the post I replied to more concrete.

I also agree that it would be annoying to have Google ask you something on every search. But it could be selective like it is with the spell checker (i.e. Did you mean orange). So maybe for searches that return millions of pages, it could offer narrower alternative searches based on wordnet data - using synonyms or specific definitions, etc.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Nightpaw]

Well, once it pulls out the pages with all the search terms, than it can send them over some dedicated processors to check nearness. I'm sure people would be willing to wait 5 minutes for it, especially if it gave you a window the straight-up regular-style results in the meantime.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[jesser]

How about adding the option to have google understand what I *mean* to search for, not what I tell it to search for.

Google tried exactly that a few April Fool's Days ago. In fact, you didn't even have to tell it what to search for; it just figured out what you wanted to searched for and gave you the most relevant results.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[abigor]

Actually, it's pretty easy -- you present a list of dictionary definitions for the words, which the user chooses from, and then you add (silently) synonyms and other key words for the word from that dictionary definition. For example, if I type in "Java" as my search term, and then choose "An island in the South Pacific" as my dictionary definition, then the word "island" might be added to the search, giving "Java island". This will turn up the relevant results.

I know all this because I implemented this exact thing once, using Google as the back end (my program accepted some terms, did the dictionary thing then submitted it to Google to get results (it was a special dictionary that I preprocessed with a Perl script)). It worked really well, but I never did anything with it.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[foobar104]

You're being too simplistic, probably because of my hurried and incomplete example. Semantic searching is most useful in the "general to more specific" instances. While searching for "orange" shouldn't necessarily search for "fruit," as you point out, it's very likely that a search for "fruit" should key off of "orange."

This is really much more applicable to concept searching than it is to simple text indexing. (Mmm... SimpleText...)

For example, if a catalogger is describing a painting, she might use the word "orange" to describe the subject of a still life. In that instance, the painting's metadata structures would reflect the fact that "orange" in the subject field must be the concrete noun "orange," which is a specific instance of the concrete noun "fruit." The idea being that a user could search for "fruit" and get a hit on a painting that has been described as "still life with oranges."

So maybe my idea isn't all that applicable to Google after all. Hell, I'm not even sure I'm on topic any more. ;-)

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this is the direction that Altavista took. Look at the crap they return now.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous Coward]

www.answerfriend.com does this.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like Oingo.com? It's somewhat based on Word.net with extensive additions.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Alan]

Yup, re-implementing the 'electricmonk', a search engine that I used almost as much as google when it was still alive.

For those who don't remember it or have never heard of it, it was a natural language parser search engine that would handle searches like "how do I make tomato soup" or "what were the greatest inventions of alexander graham bell". Much easier to type in what you *mean* instead of things like "'alexander graham bell' + greatest !+inventions" or such like.

The problem with electricmonk.com was that it didn't have the huge resource to search from that google did. A combination of the two could be incrediably kick ass, especially if it was just an option to type in on the main search bar! ("why does my kernel break with a foo.o error?")

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous Coward]

Much easier to type in what you *mean* instead of things like "'alexander graham bell' + greatest !+inventions" or such like.

Ummm... if you say so. I personally disagree.

eg: "'alexander graham bell' + greatest !+inventions"
should be "alexander bell greatest inventions"
eg2: ("why does my kernel break with a foo.o error?")
should get good hits with "linux kernal break foo error"

I have found that as I add more terms to my search the less relevant the results become. The exception being when you are looking for a list, and already know a few list elements. In that case you would add as many terms as you can think of(just make sure you are not too generous with terms, or you will exclude the result you are looking for.).

Re:I know what someone should make!

[zeno_2]

What if I wanted to do a search on vitamins that were of an orange color.

Not the best example, but having google *decide* what context my word is, I don't think I would like it.

Google already has a pretty strong search engine, typing this in the google search box should pull up what you were looking for, "orange vitamins -color". You could probably even add a few more to the end of it to further refine the search, but its better then having them decide automatically.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[h2odragon]

Example: "imminent domain" .

I'm working on it... Google surely isn't buying it from me for a chance at $10k though.

Britney pr0n i cant help with. text only. sorry.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already work being done in this area. It's called the Semantic Web. Check out http://www.semanticweb.org. Pretty cool stuff...

Re:I know what someone should make!

[frozenray]

The wisenut search engine tries to do a categorization which is quite helpful with some ambiguous queries.

Raymond

Re:I know what someone should make!

[mbennis]

or something like this

Re:I know what someone should make!

[Alan]

Ok, I might have chosen a bad example. The point was, there are searches that are a lot easier to ask if you can ask in natural language. EM did this, and did it very well. Even if it was just translating "who was einstein" to "eninstein +person" or whatever, it made things easier on the user.

Re:I know what someone should make!

[spudnic]

Maybe so, but would Google be willing to give you the 5 minutes of processing time this exhaustive search takes? Get 20 or 30 thousand people doing it at once and that would require some heavy duty hardware upgrades.

The average color of the WWW

[I am the blob]

Much like the recent discovery of the average color of the universe, this would be a pointless, but fun, use of the data. Of course, I'm not sure exactly what to average. Do you take into account browser real-estate a particular color occupies? Do you simply average each color= and stylesheet instance?

Ideas?

Re:The average color of the WWW

[Anonymous Coward]

The average colour of the web is a very light grey .

Re:The average color of the WWW

[uncledrax]

That depends on if thier Raw formatted data retains HTML Markup like color definations.. then you also have to worry not only color'ed font tags, but opening up .css data that may not be stored in RAW data..

To get an Accurate color would be pretty hard.. you could just throw out all the .css stylesheets, but since it's the recommended standard these days, you could skew the results away from the brighter colors most cutting-edge site designs use..

Re:The average color of the WWW

[negativekarmanow tm]

I think it's more in the skincolor/pink region.

Re:The average color of the WWW

[rjamestaylor]

is Flesh tone.

Re:The average color of the WWW

[krs-one]

What about all of the new, artsy sites out there on the Internet that are composed primarily of images? I would think you would have to get some pretty complex code (i.e., using jpeg, gif, png, bmp, etc., standards) to "parse" the images and then find out the most and least common colors in them, along with the colors inbetween.

-Vic

Re:The average color of the WWW

[Snard]

The WWW is the the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Re:The average color of the WWW

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't see your post when I made my "flesh tone" post because I gave up reading below +1 a long time ago (except when moderating). Your's is funny and first, if not quite pithy.

Re:The average color of the WWW

[AtrN]

Well, for starters. 95% of it is brown and sticky.

Re:The average color of the WWW

[wildsurf]

Good idea!..

And once you find the average color, you can make an Anti-Web page, that you can let your browser sit on a few hours a day, to reverse your monitor burn-in....

Re:The average color of the WWW

[Perdo]

World Opinion "color": Parse the web for specific text strings to determine public opinion. I couuld do a search for "Dogs are great" -vs- "Cats are great" And compare results bar chart style. Some of the neatest information I ever see on google is the Zeitgeist. Now, imagine being able to pick the topics. Used properly it could help predict trends in business, politics and (world) public opinion.

Well this is strange

[The Bungi]

10K is nice along with the recognition and all, but... I'm sure that's a lot cheaper than paying a few Google staff coders to come up with the same thing in a few months.

Jus' being paranoid.

Re:Well this is strange

[Night Goat]

I think that's the point. It is cheaper, hence useful to Google. You're not paranoid. If I could program something useful, I'd enter the contest. Of course, I wouldn't enter something that I'd want to patent myself. But it would be quite cool to take a tour of their facilities.

Re:Well this is strange

[plalonde2]

More to the point though is that it gives Google a great pool of potential employees. That should be of greater benefit to Google than the ideas.

Always think of the potential of hiring people with good ideas, rather then buying the ideas outright.

Geese and golden eggs, and all that.

Re:Well this is strange

[The Bungi]

Yeah, I just thought of that as well. Heh.

One thing for sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the winning program will be written in C - not Java.

Mod me down, but you know it is true.

Re:One thing for sure...

[DrSkwid]

the winning program will be written in C - not Java.

no no no

in Haskell targetted to GNU/.Net

Re:One thing for sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how Haskell always seems to win that ICFPP (or whatever the acronym is) contest - even when the other entrants complete the task in ONE TENTH the time and produce THE SAME results!

Re:One thing for sure...

[PotPieMan]

We provide source code in C++. You may alternatively choose to write your code in Java, in which case you are responsible for implementing any necessary interface code. Your submission must include a Makefile and README, and must compile on Linux 2.2 or 2.4 using g++ (for C++ code) or standard Sun tools (for Java code).
--Contest Rules

The winning entry will most defintely NOT be written in C. It will probably be written in C++, though.

(Or is that what you call a joke?)

Re:One thing for sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

C/C++ - basically the same thing - GCC supports it.

Re:One thing for sure...

[sketerpot]

The acronym is ICFP, and it is a functional programming contest, the link is here, and it looks like Haskell isn't always the winner--the top two teams were both using O'caml this time.

Just giving some more information...

Re:One thing for sure...

[RMSIsAnIdiot]

Are you kidding me? It will so be Fortran.

This is brilliant

[jkujawa]

Evil, but brilliant.

Get hundreds of people to crank out code for you, pay a paltry sum to one of them, keep all the code. Pay $10K for millions of dollars in potential technology.

That's about the slickest thing I've ever seen. You have to admire them for their evil. Microsoft could learn a thing or ten from them.

Re:This is brilliant

[dotderf]

It's not evil, it's just business. Other companies have been doing it for years. Back in the day, car companies used to sponsor "car design" contest for little kids. The winner would get $50 and his car would be whisked away to the labs. Why pay a team of designers and engineers to do what a trained^H^H^H^H^H^H^H normal person would do for cheap? Maybe we'll get a spiffy new feature on google! Hurrah!

Re:This is brilliant

[JordanH]

• You have to admire them for their evil. Microsoft could learn a thing or ten from them.

What's evil about it? Smart maybe, but evil?

Anybody who would enter such a contest is primarily motivated by the challenge, I would think. Getting the $10K gives you bragging rights is all.

Sure, Google gets some value, but a lot of highly motivated programmers get a challenging problem.

If all good programmers were primarily motivated by money, there'd be no Linux, BSD, Apache, Emacs, Vim...

I reserve evil for things that actually hurt someone. This seems like a win-win to me.

Re:This is brilliant

[saint10]

Better yet, post a story to slashdot about a contest with a prize of 10k, read all the responses moded at 4 and above, spend a weekending coding a few of em up, and cash in!

Now that's evil!

Re:This is brilliant

[slam smith]

The key word here is potential. I think that you would almost waste more money in evaluating a lot of the trash that comes in. The most valuable thing they probably will get from it are the ideas that people come up with. Notice how they made it as open ended as they could.

Re:This is brilliant

[m4g02]

I agree with the rest of the guys who replyed, this is not evil, just a good strategy. They are not puting a Goolge search box in the windows taskbar with default installation like some tool i know. *Cough* Internet Explorer *Cough*

Re:This is brilliant

[epsalon]

If you read the rules, you will see that you don't even have to assign copyrights to Google. You only have to give them a license. This means you can GPL your code or even BSD it. Sounds fair to me.

Re:This is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL, I have one of the Books GM used to send out in the early 50's for Just What you are talking about. Youre right it was 50 bucks and you should read the legaleese, makes MS liscences look like kitten chow.

Re:This is brilliant

[TheAwfulTruth]

You just described open source exactly. Except the part about paying ANYTHING at all. Pretty slick!

Re:This is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

If all good programmers were primarily motivated by money, there'd be no Linux, BSD, Apache, Emacs, Vim...

If that's going to be the result, I think the world needs more bad, greedy programmers.

Re:This is brilliant

[ameoba]

Well at least it's not like the guys at Software Carpentry who got a governement contract and held a 'coding contest' to see who could write their toolset for them.

Re:This is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

All I have to say is privately copyright it before you turn it over to google.

Re:This is brilliant

[JordoCrouse]

Yeah, but you grant a non-exclusive licence to Google - There is nothing stopping you from making millions of dollars from your own technology, they would just use it for the 10K they paid you.

So, if you are really smart and you do make technology that people want, not only do you have software you can licence yourself, you also got paid to do it.

Where is the evil in that?

Re:This is brilliant

[digitalunity]

Yes you could GPL it yourself. However, the BSD license would be excluded. On the page itself, it says that the only submissions that will be accepted are GPL'd.

Re:This is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

no, it says "open source or GPL".

Re:This is brilliant

[epsalon]

The page refers to what software submitions are allowed to USE.
Google has no problem with you leaving the source closed and granting the license only to them.

Re:This is brilliant

[Sarcazmo]

Google is messing up:

Odds of winning depend on the number and quality of entries received.

As always, IANAL, but... :)

When you state "odds" of winning, that implies a certain randomness to the game, which in some states makes this a sweepstake, instead of a contest of skill, which is VERY bad. That means it is most likely void in many states in the Union. (or subject to rediculous restrictions) Beware, and lets hope Google retains better lawyers soon.

Re:This is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly...I liked the average color of the WWW, but, that's actually easy to guess at. What color is porn?

Re:This is brilliant

[Moosifer]

MOD THIS UP! You have hit the evil nail on its evil head.

Re:This is brilliant

[Tom7]

Unfortunately, all the comments at 4 and above are complaining about how Google intends to rip people's ideas off.

Re:This is brilliant

[SmittyTheBold]

Well, then...help Google rip people off! Genius!

make a Java applet that pops up a dialog..."Hello from the accounting department of [ISP Name]. We need to re-verify your account information. ..."

It could even use the Google index to take the reverse-lookup of the person's IP, then locate the ISP's real name.

Usefulness?

[Hi-Tech Redneck]

I'm honestly curious as to what kind of useful programs could be run on that collection of pages and still be interesting? Statistical Analysis? Boring! Or maybe market analysis? Again, BORING! Some of the more trivial interesting things, like how much of phrase or word x appears on the internet couldn't really be termed useful... Hopefully, somebody will prove me wrong. Good luck to all you developers...

Re:Usefulness?

[TwP]

Replace the qotd server running on port 17 with the new and improved Google wpotd server running on port 17.

wpotd == "web page of the day"

Re:Usefulness?

[gfxguy]

Speaking of words and phrases - how about scanning keywords, and then scanning content - ignore keywords that don't actually fit the content. In other words, strike back at the porno sites and advertisers that abuse the keywords meta tag.

Re:Usefulness?

[WhiteKnight07]

Something like this perhaps?

What a coincedence!

[ctkrohn]

I was just talking to someone on IRC, and we were playing a game with Google. You had to find a two correctly spelled words which would obtain a page or less of results. He mentioned that a distributed client which searches for the longest string of words returning less than a page would be a cool idea.

Just a thought...

Re:What a coincedence!

[VikingBerserker]

I've heard that called Googlebashing, among other terms.

One change, though: more words you're searching for, the fewer responses you'll find with all the words. That's why you search for two words; the odds are much harder for you to find no matches.

Two words for you: pipefitter tollbooth. No matches! I win!

Re:What a coincedence!

[Anonymous Coward]

pneumonoconiosis gangrene

Two words, seven matches. Both are spelled correctly.

What do I win?

Re:What a coincedence!

[damiam]

Just wait until Google indexes this page.

Re:What a coincedence!

[rgmoore]

The only problem is that now that you've mentioned your zero match querry on Slashdot, there will be an entry in Google soon. After all, the thread will be archived and then added to Google's list of pages. Pretty soon there will be a page that includes pipefitter and tollboth.

Re:What a coincedence!

[ratguy]

callipygous balderdash is one example that I found. Currently there's 1 result found, that is until Google updates it's Slashdot cache.

Re:What a coincedence!

[jpeach]

My friend implemented this game recently. It's call The Odd Couplet. Lots of fun for those days when you don't feel like working :)

Re:What a coincedence!

[Anonymous Coward]

sporange, and duckling

Both correctly spelled. No matches.

Re:What a coincedence!

[Anonymous Coward]

trangam hydro - 0 matches.

Re:What a coincedence!

[wildsurf]

Of course, once you win the contest and the result is posted everywhere, the search won't be valid anymore...

Re:What a coincedence!

[duren686]

Did you mean: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis gangrene?

Re:What a coincedence!

[magnified_plaid]

The point of googlewhacking (this bashing you speak of I don't know) is to find a two word combo that yields one and only one result like 'tmesis heisenberg' further if you want to play by the real rules both of them need to be underlined in the blue bar (meaning they exist in the dictionary.com)

Re:What a coincedence!

[Alsee]

Pretty easy. Got it on my second try.

It kinda helps to happen to know that the very last word in the scrabble player's dictionary is zyzzyva (requiring the only Z, both Y's, both BLANK's, and half of the V's. 75 points with the seven tile bonus LOL). I even remember that zyzzyva is a tropical weevil, hehe.

My immediate reaction for a second word was aardvark, but bad choice. Several occurrences of "from aardvark to zyzzyva".

For my second try I went with meteorology which returned 2 matches (plus 1 redundant match not displayed). The first match was this evil page. (WARNING - 9.1 MEG TEXT DATAFILE)

Then I found zyzzyva herpetology which returns no matches. Herpetology: study of reptiles and amphibians.

P.S.
People just can't resist challenging you when you put a word vertically simultaneously creating 4 or 5 two letter words horizontally, and announce that "oe" is a whirlwind off the Faeroe islands :)

Y,IAAG. (Yes, I am a geek) I created a list of all (96) legal 2 letter words. I haven't memorized them all though. Perhaps because no one seems to want to play scrabble with me :)

-

Re:What a coincedence!

[sheilagh]

Vibrapeen tools!

Hmmm...

[Kjella]

10000$/x hours of work we could get done for us...

Make sure we get a slashdot posting so a bunch of geeks with programming skills will enter.

The only thing I'd want is for google to stay just the way it is though, don't bloat. Great service, maybe I'm just pessimistic but sites rarely do everything well.

Kjella

Re:Hmmm...

[bentini]

Post on slashdot so a bunch of geeks *with programming skills* will enter?
Chyeah, right.
They might get some good programming coming from here....

Re:Hmmm...

[Cuthalion]

The only thing I'd want is for google to stay just the way it is though, don't bloat.

Google is constantly adding new services. But they don't force them down your throat, so it doesn't matter.

The term bloat doesn't really apply here. The fact that they made catalogs.google.com doesn't in any way affect people who don't go out of their way to use that service.

To summarize: I don't care if they offer a lot of extra services, so long as they keep the front-end clean. Which they have a history of doing.

Re:Hmmm...

[Cowculator]

And here's the next /. poll so CmdrTaco knows what to write for the contest:

Google program?

1) A spider that finds and caches sites right before they get slashdotted
2) Run StegDetect to find hidden "M$ is evil" messages
3) Find real Britney Spears porn
4) Anything running on a Beowulf cluster
5) system("grep -r \"CowboyNeal\" *");

I doubt they'll get their $10,000 worth of code that easily...

wow

[flynt]

The objective is to write a program that will do something "interesting" with the about 900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides.

To quote pulp fiction, "English motherfucker, do you speak it?"

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice punctuation, flynt. Choke on that bone.

What you really meant to say was:

"English, motherfucker—do you speak it?"

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he was talking about an English motherfucker. Sort of an Oedipal fantasy thing.

Or something.

Submission

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q= porn

Where's my money?

Free Programming(or nearly free)...

[yonnage]

Sounds to me that google is getting lots of programs for only $10k and a tour.

Re:Free Programming(or nearly free)...

[Herr_Nightingale]

[Hope I'm reading the tone of your post correctly .. ]
Sounds to ME like millions and Billions of people are getting useage of the fantastic Google search engine for free too... this is a cool opportunity to showcase one's skillz for a larger audience than you'll ever reach in a single lifetime otherwise.. Kinda like getting a free spot in the Superbowl, if your program gets chosen.
Dammit I'm gonna give it a shot even though there are thousands of more proficient programmers out there, because it's definitely worth my time. Hope y'all out there don't feel the same, cuz I need that green ;O)

Some Inspiration

[Eloquence]

A lot of implicit rating data can be gathered from the links pointing to a page. Google is already doing this when sorting the search results (frequently linked-to pages rank higher). It would be interesting to see how this could be used to detect very popular new sites. I sent this mail to Google a while ago:

Hi,

it occurred to me, since you are evaluating the number of links pointing to a page anyway, that it would be a very nice thing to have a sort of "Top 40 Links of the Day" page, regularly updated to include only new and unique stuff. You could use an algorithm similar to the one used by

http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

or

http://www.daypop.com/

Both of these sites have become immensely popular through this feature (in the case of Daypop, I find http://www.daypop.com/top.htm very valuable), and I think it would also be a great addition to Google. I don't think inappropriate content would be much of a problem since it would hardly show up high on the list, and besides, a top 40 list can be looked through by a human.

What do you think?

Of course this could be spammed, but as I said, a human could filter the results every day; besides, it would be hard to create a very large number of unique links from different servers pointing to a page. I'm sure Google is already doing some of this to prevent spamming their search-order algorithm anyway.

Re:Some Inspiration

[jimbo3123]

it occurred to me, since you are evaluating the number of links pointing to a page anyway, that it would be a very nice thing to
have a sort of "Top 40 Links of the Day" page, regularly updated to include only new and unique stuff. You could use an
algorithm similar to the one used by

It's Called Google Zeitgeist.

It is at:
Zeitgeist[Google.com]

Re:Some Inspiration

[costas]

I hate to link a beta-level site from /., but that's exactly what I am trying out...

Re:Some Inspiration

[Eloquence]

No. Please read again.

Re:Some Inspiration

[zurab]

No need for that, here's the top 40:

1. Britney Spears Unleashed
2. How to date Britney in 21 days
3. Britney for dummies
... etc.

On the other hand it will be interesting to have Slashdot top 40 links every week. But then again, that's predictable too.

Re:Some Inspiration

[zerohalo2]

What Eloquence is suggesting is different than Zeitgeist. Rather than a list of the top queries or searches, it would be a list of the top links accessed that day, or month. Thus WEB sites rather than search terms are highlighted. Popular queries can help detect general interest in a subject by the majority of surfers, but popular sites actually linked to gives a different and equally interesting picture.

Re:Some Inspiration

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off.

(It has nothing to do with the particular post. I just always wanted to tell you that because you're an ass).

Re:Some Inspiration

[g00z]

Dude, that's silly. Thehun.net would win by a landslide everyday.

Cool, but.....

[IamTheRealMike]

This sounds really great doens't it? 10,000 USD cash prize, visiting their facilities (who wouldn't be curious to see the worlds biggest Beowulf cluster) and more.

Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.

What then? You have no claim to a part of their profits. I guess that's just a part of competing to give your ideas to a company.

-mike

Re:Cool, but.....

[Chmarr]

Especially considering that Google gets to 'own' all the entries, and not just the winning one.

Hey... it worked for Microsoft (Their 'Compression' contest)

Re:Cool, but.....

[anthony_dipierro]

Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.

If you're that good, they'll probably hire you to at least consult for them to maintain the code you wrote.

Re:Cool, but.....

[schowley]

Ok, granted it does seem to be a cheap way for the folks at Google to get some really interesting stuff. But think of the mileage you get from being THE winner, that alone would open a lot of doors for you.

Re:Cool, but.....

[dbucher]

Are you sure ?

The licence being NON-exclusive, you can then
sell the solution for $15'000 !

So this is not a problem ;-)

Re:Cool, but.....

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when you write a piece of open source software for free and they use it to make a million dollars off of it? You get nothing that's what. Isn't O.S. great?!?!?

Re:Cool, but.....

[Herr_Nightingale]

I'll tell you what happens if you come up with that magical algorithm ... millions of potential employers/financiers will be exposed to your mind-blowing talent, you'll get slashdotted with opportunities, AND you'll get a tour of the Holy Land! What more can a computer dude want?? Oh yeah ... the 10K would be nice, but it's really just icing. Heck, GPL the program and the benefits will multiply even further..
Alternatively, you could think up that big beautiful idea, decline to send it in, try to market it independently (hey, it might happen) and ultimately you'd likely have squandered the coolest opportunity of a lifetime.
Think big or think small: free choice is a beautiful thing, n'est-ce pas?

Googlewhacking

[waldoj]

An automated Googlewhacking system.

Ingenius!

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

also here on

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

dar......
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020204/tc/tech _g ooglewhack_dc_2.html

Re:Googlewhacking

[ZuG]

ethology + pringles = 1 result baby =)

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Hippopotamus armalite

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

tollbooth primality, sociopathic gerund, and jingoist flagellum (and jingoism flagellum). A hat trick =)

Re:Googlewhacking

[Ubergrendle]

antidisestablishmentarianism thundercats Does thundercats count? It's a proper name. PS I'm scared where my train of thought takes me sometimes...

Re:Googlewhacking

[arb]

Unfortunately not a valid Googlewhack. Both words must appear in the dictionary used by Google. ie, both words whould be underlined in the blue bar where it says "Searched the web for ..."

Now "ocelot louvres" is a valid Googlewhack, which returns just one result.

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

rimjobs goatsex

1 result!

Re:Googlewhacking

[angst_ridden_hipster]

Here's a valid one:

limaceous cretin

(until this page gets indexed... get it while it's fresh!)

Re:Googlewhacking

[Compuser]

gipsy + colonoscopy

That took 1 minute of trying. Guess not that
hard of a pursuit.

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

this is sooooo easy. where's the archive of whacks so we can make a game?

perspicaciousness+motherfucker

Re:Googlewhacking

[WhiteKnight07]

Holy crap! That actually works.... I'm amazed...

Re:Googlewhacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah... two words is easy... Try one ...

As in, Folliculitises (Google.com).

In case you don't believe, check this out (Webster.com).

Cheers!

Re:Googlewhacking

[Cow4263]

Dammit, if only i hadn't posted in this discussion already, I woulda have used my last mod point on this wonderful parent. Anybody who can ruin someones game and fun within a single minute is worth a +1, Insightful to me.

Re:Googlewhacking

[Alsee]

Folliculitises Jeezus christ! A word that only appears on the internet once, and even then only in a list of all words.

I propose that any word that does not exist on the internet (lists of words excluded) be declared no longer a real word.

-

Security Risk

[Embedded Geek]

The code and data may be downloaded from our web site...

I know it can't be the source to everything at GOOGLE, but still, does this reek of a security nightmare in the making.

Re:Security Risk

[Anonymous Coward]

> I know it can't be the source to everything at GOOGLE, but still, does this reek of a security nightmare in the making.

That's like saying letting people download SourceForge projects is a security nightmare. They _want_ other people to be able to get this code and play with it.

Re:Security Risk

[anthony_dipierro]

Security through obscurity is no security at all.

Re:Security Risk

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the page, it sounds like this is only the code to extract the data from their format. It's from the backend, indexing part - not the publicly visible front end.

Re:Security Risk

[Embedded Geek]

Touche'!

Re:Security Risk

[grytpype]

Slashtard bingo!

The Contest is Interesting Though Heinous

[Anonymous Coward]

but they get virtually free labor to upgrade Google. ;)

how owns the code?

[doubtless]

Google will own the piece of code you write for a mere $10,000, that's much cheaper than hiring 2 programmers to come up with anything in 2 months.

I think I can start a software company base on this method. ;)

Re:how owns the code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's how? Is that him standing on my software company base?

Ev'rybody luvs Pr0n

[NaCh0]

I'll write a program to see how many links on average you have to visit before getting to a porn site.

I'll then repeat the same program looking for how many clicks to an X-10 ad. :-)

Brian

Re:Ev'rybody luvs Pr0n

[ncc74656]

I'll write a program to see how many links on average you have to visit before getting to a porn site.

If the numbers come up right, maybe you could call it "Six Degrees of Pr0n"...

Re:Ev'rybody luvs Pr0n

[anotherone]

There was an article on /. a year or two ago that stated that any two random websites were (on average) 11 links apart.

So basically...

[Dutchmaan]

They're going to (hopefully) get tons of interesting ideas and almost as much useful code for the price of $10,000. Sure beats hiring programmers.

That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.

Perhaps this is the evolution of a new buisness model... Either way, I don't really care as long as Google remains free, fast, and useful!

Re:So basically...

[anthony_dipierro]

That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.

With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry

So basically, google doesn't own your code, only the right to use it. GPLing your code would satisfy the worldwide, perptual non-exclusive license grant.

Re:So basically...

[Wakkow]

That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.

From the contest page:
With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.

So yup.

Re:So basically...

[geekoid]

they do, but many companies have done this in the past.

Re:So basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Course with Open Source, they *could* just wait around a bit and get what they want without paying a dime! It's Open Source Great!?!?!?

Re:So basically...

[PurpleBob]

I'm sure the world will be eternally grateful when you release your GPLed code which only works when it's hooked up to Google's database.

Re:So basically...

[anthony_dipierro]

Have you seen "Google's database"? It's pretty much just raw html files.

Re:So basically...

[brondsem]

And could easily be a lot of logic that is not related to Google's db format. For example, checking how many dead links are on a page... this could be useful in a non-google application. Or, more likely, something more exciting than dead link checking.

Re:This is brilliant - But not evil

[owlmeat]

It would be evil if they held a gun to your head and told you to do it. Mod the parent down for trollbait.

Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th..)

[Christianfreak]

From the agreement:

With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.

Hey Google! Why not make the agreement state that all entries go under the GPL?

i can finally make money off my spambot!

[edrugtrader]

how about go through the pages looking for mailto: tags, and then (the tricky part), devise a product that could be sold, and spam all the people.

brilliant.

Re:i can finally make money off my spambot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's finally figured out the missing Step Two!!!

Step 1 -- Collect all the underwear.

Step 2 -- Previously unknown -- Now: Use the email lists to spam people, offering to sell them used underwear - since you have all the underwear, they'll _have_ to buy some! (Unless they're going commando style, but let's not think about that.)

Step 3 -- Profit!

I wonder...

[Kopretinka]

I wonder if they would accept as something interesting taking the data and posting it as troll page-lenghtening posts on Slashdot.8-)

The biggest Dictionary

[p-n-wise]

I'd go for a dictionary of every word ever used on the web. Complete with common usage examples.

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[rgmoore]

Great. Now you only have to devise a program that can figure out which words that you're looking at are spelled and used correctly and you'll be in business. Good luck, dude.

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Complete with common usage examples.

Not to mention common misspelling examples :o)

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[Craig Davison]

Did you mean: beginning

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious, too bad you will be modded down but idiot moderators that don't get it.

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[greenrd]

And you're at Cambridge University?? Are you half-asleep, or just trolling?

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, that deserves to be modded up. Took me a while to get it though :).

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[dillon_rinker]

There is no such thing as correct spelling. There is only consensus. Those big brown things with green bits all over them...do you think that 2,000 years ago the correct spelling was "TREE"?

This is actually one of the most interesting ideas I've seen...develop a database that dictionary writers can use.

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[rgmoore]

There is no such thing as correct spelling. There is only consensus.

This assumes that the only function of a dictionary is descriptive. A good dictionary also serves a normative function, describing what the accepted (i.e. consensus) spelling and meaning of words is. You can't just accept any old spelling and usage of words on the net, or you wind up in Humpty Dumpty world where anyone is allowed to use and spell words however they choose. Down that path lies madness and, if taken to the extreme, the death of the purpose of a dictionary. After all, if anyone is allowed to define a new meaning and/or spelling for a word at will there is no point in collecting those spellings and meanings anymore as they are subject to arbitrary change. IOW, you need some kind of filtering out of misuse and misspelling (at least according to consensus) so that the dictionary can function at all. Unless that filtering is done automatically- which is obviously a terribly difficult problem and quite possibly Turing complete- all you've done is build such an enormous database that it will be difficult to use.

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[pmc]

Of course not - the correct spelling is "HILL"

Re:The biggest Dictionary

[dillon_rinker]

A good dictionary also serves a normative function

Have you ever studied how to write a dictionary?

You can't just accept any old spelling and usage of words on the net, or you wind up in Humpty Dumpty world where anyone is allowed to use and spell words however they choose
No, but if you find that 99% of the population is spelling "enough" as "enuff", then maybe your dictionary is out of date.

After all, if anyone is allowed to define a new meaning and/or spelling for a word at will there is no point in collecting those spellings and meanings anymore as they are subject to arbitrary change
NEWS FLASH! What you seem so afraid of is how language works.
- I am the baddest dude on the block
- That new car is the bomb
- Shutup! (synonyms: "Get out!" "You're kidding me!" "That is too good to be believed")

Granted, these are currently slang (ie used when speaking informally, and usually not written except as dialog) but that is how words start...

BTW, if people can't arbitrarily change the meaning of a word, then tell me how "computer" came to have its current definition as an electronic device. 75 years ago a computer was a person who performed computations.

Waiting for Google Groups contest...

[bopo]

so I can delete all my posts from the rec.arts.comics.* hierarchy. So much time wasted. : (

I can, however, write for pages and pages on why the Hulk could kick Thor's girly ass.

I know!

[AntiFreeze]

Someone could do a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) on all the pages in the cache, that way, one could tell when the Internet's been updated...

Even Stupider: Not only easy, but it could allow google to create static result pages for common searches: it would just update the result page when the cache CRC changes.

map of the internet, using the internet...

[edrugtrader]

how about have google parse every page, and save the homepage as an image. then take the map of the internet, and make it using tiny thumbnails of the most heavily linked (popular) sites.

this would be just like those mosaic photos, only much nerdier. thinkgeek execs are drooling already....

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

a program that figures how many "degrees of seperation" between websites?

Use that idea if you want, I'll only ask for 65% consultation fee. You can keep the tour.

Make the check out to "CASH"

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Central Amazonian Spiritual Healers? What a good cause...

Re:How about...

[Atilla]

naw....

that would make it too much like a search engine.

How about a FPS game?

[t0qer]

A few years back there was a game, I think it was called Virus or something like that. It would scan your directory structure and make a map for the FPS world based on that.

Looking at the web, I allways though it would be cool to make a game based on the same concept, but use web pages instead of your hard drive directory.

I'm just throwing out ideas.

Re:How about a FPS game?

[Nightpaw]

That game sounded cool, but boy did it ever suck when I tried it out.

Re:How about a FPS game?

[BlueGecko]

A few years back there was a game, I think it was called Virus or something like that. It would scan your directory structure and make a map for the FPS world based on that.

So if you were standing in the C: room and unleashed a flury of rockets, was that equivalent to rm -rf /?

Re:How about a FPS game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just throwing out ideas.

Well, you can throw that one out. It's retarded.

Re:How about a FPS game?

[mlk]

Doom as a tool for system administration Ohhh yeah baby! ;-)

Re:How about a FPS game?

[good-n-nappy]

I went to talk on this at CHI 2001 (Here is the paper). The guy mentioned that there was a serious problem because the monsters/processes would attack and kill each other. So the system had a tendency towards anarchy and crashing :)

Re:How about a FPS game?

[tswinzig]

A few years back there was a game, I think it was called Virus or something like that. It would scan your directory structure and make a map for the FPS world based on that.

Looking at the web, I allways though it would be cool to make a game based on the same concept, but use web pages instead of your hard drive directory.

I always thought it would be cool if Quake became a user interface for an operating system. Just imagine, instead of encrypting your files, you would just put them in a room guarded by bad-ass monsters and surrounded by a moat of molten lava.

You could organize your files by rooms in your house. No wait -- you could have a filing cabinet in one of these rooms, filled with folders. In each folder you could have documents that you've 'created'. If you want to get rid of a document, just drop it in the 'waste basket.'

I think I'm on to something here.

Re:How about a FPS game?

[mlk]

Noticed ;-)

It only adds to the fun of it ;-)

mlk

Re:How about a FPS game?

[evand]

Two words: Microsoft BobQuake.

Re:How about a FPS game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the system described in "
True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (The lava and monsters part anyway)

Re:How about a FPS game?

[PurpleFloyd]

When I read that, this line literally had me on the floor:

For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.

I humbly submit this scene, common in the computer rooms of the future:

Shit! All the Apache child processes are ganging up on init! Go for the level exit!

Re:How about a FPS game?

[i22y]

You could organize your files by rooms in your house. No wait -- you could have a filing cabinet in one of these rooms, filled with folders. In each folder you could have documents that you've 'created'. If you want to get rid of a document, just drop it in the 'waste basket.'


Yeah, it's called Microsoft Bob(TM). That went real far...

Google = Fred Durst

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/lantana/92.html

Sounds familiar, Google are just being nicer about it.

Google Press Release

[wizarddc]

Google Contest Winner Offers Better Porn Searches

Winner of the First annual Google Programming Contest creates greatest porn spider ever.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - December 11, 2001 - Google Inc., developer of the award-winning Google search engine, today announced it's first winner of the Annual Google Programming Contest. Winner I. C. Porno has created a program to help catalog and organize google cache of the Internet, also refered to as the World Wide Web of Porn.

"This announcement is an important step in Google's ongoing effort to provide search services that are fast, easy to use, and that help people find the information they need," said Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of Products. "To search our collection of 3 billion documents for porn by hand, it would take 5,707 years, searching twenty-four hours per day, at one minute per document. With I. C.'s new program, it takes less than a second."

World's Largest Collection of Porn
Google users now have the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of porn right at their fingertips and can immediately primal urges using the following services:

Google Web Porn Search: The company's newest search service now offers more than 2 billion documents - 25 percent of which are non-English language web pages. Google Web Search also offers users the ability to search for numerous non-HTML files such as PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel documents. Google's powerful and scalable technology searches this comprehensive set of information and delivers a list of relevant porno in less than half-a-second.

Google Porn Groups: This 20-year archive of Usenet porn conversations is the largest of its kind and can serve as a powerful reference tool, while offering more porno than the Internet. Google Groups was released from beta today with 700 million postings in more than 35,000 topical porno categories.

Google Image Search: Comprising more than 330 million nude images, Google Image Search enables users to quickly and easily find porn images relevant to a wide variety of topics, including pictures of celebrities and popular travel destinations. Advanced features include search by image size, format (JPEG and/or GIF), coloration, and the ability to restrict searches to specific genre's of porn.

About Google Inc.
With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. Google's technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards; two WIRED magazine Readers Raves Awards; Best Internet Innovation and Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech from TIME magazine; and Editor's Pick from CNET. A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, AOL/Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. More information about Google can be found on the Google site at http://www.google.com.

Re:Google Press Release

[tmarzolf]

Google Web Porn Search: The company's newest search service now offers more than 2 billion documents - 25 percent of which are non-English language web pages. Google Web Search also offers users the ability to search for numerous non-HTML files such as PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel documents.

For all that Corel formatted porn out there...

Re:Google Press Release

[danonb]

I wonder what would happen if I were to cut and paste this email rumour. Could cause some interesting results :)

Re:Google Press Release

[ParisTG]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - December 11, 2001 - Google Inc., developer of the award-winning...

Wow... they work fast! So fast that they managed to finish it before they started!

Re:Google Press Release

[Cyn]

Brings new meaning to googles "I'm Feeling Lucky" search option.

Re:Google Press Release

[armb]

> Google Contest Winner Offers Better Porn Searches

Actually I think the existing page ranking mechanism could be adapted for identifying porn sites. You can identify a few existing sites as porn, and/or full of porn links. From there we use the fact that most links to and from porn related sites are from or to other porn related sites (we can use keywords as well of course) to give rankings.
Add in measurements of "how many pictures and movies can we reach on this site without being asked for a credit card number", and maybe some analysis of the javascript to penalize pop-ups and onclose methods, use the existing indexing, classification, and image search stuff, and there you are.

bible code truth detector

[Anonymous Coward]

make a program that plays with putting it in various matrixes and see if the internet can predict the future through crossword like connections between the letters....

$10k? Cheap development

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing. Google is gaureanteed to get at least a few interesting product ideas out of this, all for the low low product development cost of $10k.

Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th

[benwb]

Notice that they don't say exclusive license. You should be able to release it as GPL yourself.

one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[option8]

i actually bugged the google guys a while ago about adding a spellchecking function to google. throw a URL or a set of pages at it, and it spits out a list of misspelled or questionable words - highlighted in the way they already do search terms in the cache...

anyway, someone there emailed me back basically saying it was an interesting idea, but not something on their agenda.

maybe someone out there can work up a scalable google spellchecker that i can run my big-ass database-driven website through (which is a major pain to spellcheck, considering the client simply refuses to do when they provide the content)

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[Anonymous Coward]

lynx -dump | ispell....

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[PurpleBob]

So why do you need a database of billions of web pages to do that? You only need to hook a spellcheck program up to a word list, not the entirety of the Internet.

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[Anonymous Coward]

...adding a spellchecking function to google. throw a URL or a set of pages at it, and it spits out a list of misspelled or questionable words...

Let's just hope that if something like this ever does happen, nobody makes the mistake of putting the URL for a Slashdot comments page in there.

Ever seen a Beowulf cluster burst into flames?

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[srvivn21]

Something like www.spellonline.com?

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[moore234]

You mean something like this:
search for turtle familiy

See the "Did you mean: family turtle" text?

Re:one word (or maybe two): spellcheck

[option8]

no. something like a query string like so:

spellcheck:http://slashdot.org

and the resulting page(s) would hilight all the misspelled or questionable words on the page.

ideally, it could also do this as it spidered a site, and, if the robots.txt or some other means of subscribing were in place, could email the webmaster that X words on page Y are misspelled, and here is the list, with suggested spellings. click here (link to aforementioned query string) to see the misspelled words highlighted.

that is what i mean.

Create a gene sequencer

[gosand]

Count all of the letters A, T, C, and G from all the web pages in the search results and sequence that into a DNA strand to produce the perfect human. Myuhahahahahaha.

Nope, not worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

$10,000 and the publicity are valuable, but not enough for a technology Google would find 'interesting'. Especially since (as I read it) they claim ownership on all entries, even if they don't win.

With regard to the software and repository that you obtain for the Contest, you agree to the license terms as stated in files you download or receive. With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.

Of course you could always include an EULA with more generous licensing terms.

Re:Nope, not worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Read it again.

"non-exclusive license" != exclusive ownership

Restoring meta-tags

[Charles Dodgeson]

I've been kicking around an idea for a scheme to end meta-tag (keyword, description) abuse so that they can actually become useful again. But it would require the cooperation and effort of google (and others) do do this.

The idea is roughly to refuse to index sites which engage in keyword/description abuse.

1. index keywords and description data
2. Allow users to search with keywords on or off
3. If users search with keywords on, provide a mechanism for users to nominate a site as engaging in keyword abuse.
4. semi-automatically, and then manusually review nominations.
5. Refuse to index sites which have engaged in keyword abuse.

This isn't so much a system that meets the specs of the contest. And there is a scaling issue, but it is on my wish-list for google (and others) to do.

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[Anonymous Coward]

Already happens. Google ignores meta tags for ranking results.

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[Charles Dodgeson]

You've missed the point. I know it ignores meta tags. It ignores them on all pages because some pages abuse them. I am suggesting that google ignore all and only those pages which abuse meta-tags.

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[truesaer]

Maybe this is already possible, or being done. I would imagine that the sites that link to you are likely to have similar meta tags. Not all, but in general. Now, google could potentially come up with an algorithm that scores how related your meta tags are, and then based on that score weights the keywords in meta tags when you do a search.

In other words, if I sell fish tanks and I have meta tags for porn, britney spears, etc. etc. to attract mistaken visitors, and everyone who links to me has fish related meta tags, then you could give the meta tag on this site a bad score, and penalize it accordingly when serching on porn terms.

I'm sorry for that terribly long sentence. Anyway, this might be "interesting"

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[Beltza]

I dont think that google should implement such a function. The unique selling point of Google is its simplicity. Just fill in your keywords and go! Everybody is able to understand it. The only preferences you can set are the language and the number of results. Everybody is able to understand that too.

But does everybody now what the description data and the keywords of a page are???
I think it will make things too complex for a lot of people; Google will not benefit from it.

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[Anonymous Coward]

Image what happens when the sites linking to you also have meta tags for porn and britney spears...

Re:Restoring meta-tags

[Charles Dodgeson]

I agree that google needs to maintain its interface simplicity. But I think that something like my scheme should be doable wiithout making the user presentation untidy. Just has after each listing, there is a link to the cached instance (and maybe to a text format), there could be another link for "nominate as having bad
meta tags". The option to search with meta tags enabled
is something you would set once with preferences and rely on cookies to maintain. It would be off by default, so
most users would never see or know about the change.

What about a program to get rid of frontpage?

[Ieshan]

How about a program that searches for the meta generator tags and looks for "Microsoft Frontpage X.X", deletes the page from the database, and commenses a DOS attack from the rest of the slashdot community?

Go Google! Get rid of the fake HTML goons!

Re:What about a program to get rid of frontpage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did the generator tags become more important than the information on the site. Many people out there don't have the time to learn html when there's a simple tool that let's you get your information/ideas out there on the web. Just a thought anyway. Wait, damn...I'm posting from Internet Explorer, maybe my post will be modded down since it's not as important!

Easy enough..

[Junta]

Very small program actually, but one that will drastically improve google's popularity:

Mature content *only* in image search.

To further enhance this with a lot of space, cache high quality versions of the images.

Re:Easy enough..

[Jarrod Pol]

Counterpoint....NO mature content in image search...any of the searches. Sometimes, I'm looking for a screw...the kind that holds a bookcase together.

The entire internet on a floppy

[KenSentMe]

Something to think about... you know that cool cacheing feature that google has? That basically means they have the entire internet saved on their disk array. Seriously though, I've been doing a lot of work and research in the area of neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, etc. etc. I wouldn't mind feeding 900,000 webpages into a neural net, and seeing how well it learns, or *what* it learns.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[hyperstation]

quit it, i'm getting goosebumps thinking about that

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[yasth]

Probably:
SEX my dog Fido, skinned DDR RAM.

Because there would be no common thread binding the data, and if you make the net follow data linearly, then what is the point of using, a massive database, when you can just request the pages yourself?

I suppose you could use it for starts though.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[singularity]

I have had thoughts in this matter, especially since Google now has a fairly complete archive of Usenet postings. These are discussions between two or more individuals, for the most part.

Imagine what a neural net, geared towards looking at online communication between people, could do with that amount of discussion.

It would also help that Usenet postings tend to be better sorted and, up until just a few years ago, had a relatively high signal/noise ratio.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[rgmoore]

I'm not sure if using USENET is such a great idea. While there are some areas where it has a great signal to noise ratio and intelligent commentary, there are a ton of places where it's simply awful. It's loaded with misinformation, flameage, and proof of the correctness of Godwin's Law. I doubt that I'd be very excited about chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the USENET archives.

OTOH, you might be able to do some very clever work on using the page cache as a knowledge store for a chatbot. You'd just take the incoming message, try to find some keywords in it (probably using previous parts of the conversation to help) and use them to search Google for relevant information. Then you'd reformat the information you found into something like a conversational reply and send it.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[PurpleBob]

Watch out. Just by bringing that up, you're likely to get an inane response by Mentifex about how you should feed the webpages into his "mind" written in Visual Basic^W^W JavaScript, which of course is the most important AI development of the year 2001^W 2002, the Year When AI Is Reborn, despite the fact that it is nothing but a lookup table.

Though, hopefully, this post will prevent it.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[Sarcazmo]

I doubt that I'd be very excited about chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the USENET archives.


I'm not sure what you mean by learned to communicate by reading the USENET archive.

We were talking about you, not me.

How does it make you feel when you chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the UDENET archives?

How does it make you feel when you RTFM in your Nazi garb?

(I know, this post is too subtle, the 13 year old moderators won't get the joke, and I will be modded down.)

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[singularity]

The nice thing about Usenet is how it is divided up in different groups.

To start small, you could just use *.moderated groups. This will help assure that you are going to get really good signal/noise ratio.

From there you could do some relatively easy research to see what groups tend to keep better signal/noise ratio. The group I keep the FAQ for, for example, comp.mail.eudora.mac, has a really good ratio.

From well researched groups, you could move on to the the entire comp.* and sci.* groups.

Of course you would almost have to save alt.* for last.

The other thing you could do is divide it by time. For example, stuff posted before 1992 or so is going to have a better ratio stuff posted after 1998 or so.

Hopefully your system would be good enough to be able to throw out some of the trash.

it would not be easy, but I think that it would be a great use of that stored information.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his real mind is going. Before, Arthur "Mentifex" Murray at least strained to stay on topic when pushing his Javascript crap. Now he doesn't really try hard any more. I think the constant rejection is really starting to get to him.

Still, his crap is good for a laugh every now and then.

Re:The entire internet on a floppy

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even have 15% of the internet... most of it is hidden for us.

Why not

[dmouritsendk]

Make a image-2-asciiart converter, so you could have a txt-only option on the google cache.

Can _you_ count?

[mikeage]

900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides... Google's complete billion-Web-page store.

Hmmm. Either this guy can't count... or google gained 100K web pages in the time it took to write that paragraph ;)

Re:Can _you_ count?

[anno1602]

If you read the announcement, you would see that the data provided by google for developing your app (because you need s/th to test it on, right?) is those 900.000 pages, while, if you win, you might have your app run on the entire repository (the billion-page-thingy).

Re:Can _you_ count?

[RetardHumper]

Uh...you didnt read the article did you?
the 900K pages are provided from googles cache of about 100 .edu sites, this is just for the programmers to play with a fairly large set of data before scaling it to 2 billion.

Also 900,000 +100K != 1 billion just FYI...

Re:Can _you_ count?

[MavEtJu]

You can't count either, 100k + 900k != a billion ;-)

This is what it reads:

Google is providing a selection of about 900,000 web pages in pre-parsed and raw format

That is what you get for the 57Mb or five cd's.

The billion-Web-page store is what your program might be ran on if it wins.

Re:Can _you_ count?

[edrugtrader]

actually 999,100,000 but who is _really_ counting

Re:Can _you_ count?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't count either, 100k + 900k != a billion ;-)

According to Arthur Anderson, it is.

Don't post them or they'll be Googlewhackwhacked

[clary]

The Googlewhacking site lists reader-submitted Googlewhacks...which of course causes Google to pick up a second site for the search. And so the Googlewhack is whacked!

The other company

[pardonne]

Didn't the other company (Israel company?) which was trying to bait^H^H^H^H challange individuals to write code for them for cheap go bankrupt?
But I am sure this novel strategy will thrive this time around.

pardonne

Re:The other company

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

Umm... yeah, actually, it's been thriving for quite a while now. It's this silly little thing called "open source". You may have heard of it, it has allowed many companies around the world to make enormous profits by baiting individuals to write useful code for free. You know what they say, a sucker is born every minute.

Re:The other company

[jason_hutchens]

I worked for Ai (the Israel company) as its Chief Scientist, and I still take great interest in its activites and progess. Ai didn't go bankrupt. It has frozen its operations by choice, simply because today's climate isn't conducive to the kind of work we were doing.

I personally proposed the "Machine Learning Challenge" when I first joined Ai, in mid-2000. Our intentions in running the contest were noble. We really were interested in finding out how well competing machine learning techniques fared in head-to-head battles.

Unlike Google, our entry criteria was "by entering the challenge you transfer to us no rights apart from the right to evaluate your program by running the round-robin tournament". We offered a prize of $2,000 and a round trip for the creators of the top three entries to our research facilities for a research workshop. We also offered an additional prize of $25,000 to any entrant whom we entered into an agreement with (e.g. by buying their technology).

The Machine Learning Challenge went ahead, thanks to Dror Kessler volunteering his time to run it. The winners were recently announced, and the workshop is scheduled to happen soon. See Ai's home page for more information.

Re:The other company

[pardonne]

Thanks for the reply. We were also planning on "playing" but scrapped plans because we heard of the operations stoppage and we are lazy. In any case I hope you don't blame me too much for having been skeptical about an AI company having various Internet denizens write AI code for them. I hope it goes well for Ai.

jargon watcher

[MbM]

Write an application to track keyword usage over time, when a keyword goes from only 10 hits to several thousand then flag it for jargon. The jargon can then be presented as a webpage of the top whatever with various statistics over popularity and suspected origin urls.

Re:jargon watcher

[jjon]

> Write an application to track keyword usage over time

You mean like this?

Re:jargon watcher

[MbM]

not quite, that tracks what people search for and not the jargon that appears in the webpages themselves

(we're talking a few orders of magnitude more complex)

How ironic...

[Seemlar]

900,000 + 100,000 != 1,000,000,000

Regular Expressions!

[Oink.NET]

If someone can come up with a regular expression search engine that scales to billions of pages, that would be the killer app for Google. It would probably have to be a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) regex engine, not the more powerful Nondeterministic Finite Automaton (NFA) engines like you have in Perl, Python, Emacs, and Tcl, but still, that would rock!

Re:Regular Expressions!

[jeffy124]

DFAs are equivalent to NFAs, and DFA happen to run much faster because they are much smaller than NFAs. In addition, there's only one result from a DFA, NFAs produce an unknown number of results.

Re:Regular Expressions!

[Anonymous Coward]

***ALERT***
Karma whore!

Spam page deleter

[www.sorehands.com]

How about a program that checks for SPAM, then the program will delete the entries in the database that SPAMMERs have used to publicize. Then if there are more than 3 SPAMs, then notify the ISP and delete every page in the data base from that ISP.

Re:Spam page deleter

[Sarcazmo]

SPAM is spiced meat in a can.

Spam is unsolicited, widely distributed, usually automated, advertisements.

Please get it right. Hormel has been cool about all this, at least respect their wishes about the use of their trademark.

six degrees of google-ation

[anthony_dipierro]

Connect any two pages on the web to each other with the minimum number of hyperlinks.

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[suss]

Connect any two pages on the web to each other with the minimum number of hyperlinks.

You'll probably just end up on www.kevinbacon.com...

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[neafevoc]

I'd probably spend my day's on google instead of imdb.com doing this :)

When I was "working", I was so bored out of my mind, I'd hang out at imdb and see how many movies can I jump through between two possible actors/crewmembers.

Yeah, I sure was productive :)

That's a good idea though, I'd like to see someone do that.

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[Dante'sPrayer]

Good idea but sort of self-defeating. The shortest connection between two sites that can be analized by that means is, of course, Google.

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[alech]

That would have been useful for me several years ago.

I was using the internet terminal at a local newspaper, which was basically nice as it had free webbrowsing (which at that time was quite still expensive here), but it did not have a keyboard (d'oh), so you had to figure out how to get from the newspaper site to something more useful :-)

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[br0ck]

The Oracle of Bacon uses the IMDb data to link any two stars that show up in the IMDb database. However, the freely available ImDb databases that it uses are only ~150 Mb, so this concept may not scale very well.

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[karlm]

Good idea but sort of self-defeating. The shortest connection between two sites that can be analized by that means is, of course, Google. You forget that hyperlinks are unidirectional, so this would be the case if the sites both had links back to google.

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[Sanga]

Well, if Google knows about the two pages: they will never be more than two degrees away, no?

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, but if you could get from the newspaper site to google, then you'd already be fine...

Re:six degrees of google-ation

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you couldn't use the "copy and paste individual letters" technique into the location bar?

Forget Google

[SirWhoopass]

I'll pay $15,000 for the script that finds one non-fake Britney porn pic!

Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[Embedded Geek]

Many posters have commented on how Google will essentially get free labor out of this (by having thousands of man hours expended for that $10K prize). The only thing that surprises me is that people think this is innovative/new/evil/dastardly or otherwise unique. Fact is, it's old hat.

I mean, how many contests have you seen on the back of a cereal box to "create a new slogan!" or "write an essay"? Just a cheap way to create some buzz and get your customers to write your advertising copy for you. Heck, the most blatant scams in memory are HBO's Project Greenlight (trolling for scripts - you don't even want to know what the Writers' Guild thought of this) and the Lego Film Contest (trolling for complete commercials).

Hardly new stuff. Remember Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer? There's a bit where he holds a "contest" to see which kid can whitewash the fence he's supposed to paint fastest. I'm sure that even as Twain wrote that bit, even he thought "I better be sure to give the fence painting thing a unique spin so it works. After all, it's an awfully old idea..."

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[dmitri]

It was not a contest. It just looked to the other kids like he was really enjoying himself, and so they naturally wanted to paint the fence, too.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, how many contests have you seen on the back of a cereal box to "create a new slogan!" or "write an essay"? Just a cheap way to create some buzz and get your customers to write your advertising copy for you.

Yeah, but at least in the case of the "create a new slogan" contest, you only get to use one example. Google can use 500 different ideas, and only has to pay for 1 (not even necessarily one they use).

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[whovian]

There are also firms that air commercials advertising how they can help you patent your brilliant idea.

It seemed to me those firms could steal your ideas as their own -- maybe they make you sign over your rights as part of the paperwork. If so, then you have to find the time, money and interest to fight them based on your own prior art. Or at least hire a lawyer. I dunno, but it sounds kind of shady to me.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[bannerman]

kids these days... I remember Tom Sawyer. As the story goes, he does not hold a contest. He makes them think that he's having the time of his life and in fact talks them into paying him to be allowed to paint the fence. It was a great idea. And the idea of holding a contest for a cool program for Google is a pretty good idea too.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

kids these days... I remember Tom Sawyer. As the story goes, he does not hold a contest. He makes them think that he's having the time of his life...

Yes, but that was the old, boring Tom Sawyer. In the new one, the fence-painting scene takes place in a weird chamber where Tom and his friends are tortured while two scantily-clad hostesses wrestle. It's on right before Temptation Island, I think.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[Sarcazmo]

I believe they pay the fees to patent your stuff (a few thousand at most), and then take a cut of any future profits you might get from said patent.

I'm sure they only accept the better ideas for this anyway, so it's like venture capital from a loan shark sort of.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[pen]

Well, he also said that the kids probably couldn't paint the fence right anyway, causing them to try to prove their worth by painting it. So it was a contest -- just not competition.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[waveman]

Actually when companies have competitions to think up a new slogan promoting the company their aim is not to find a new slogan. They want you to think that but it is not true.

The real purpose is to get people saying - and therefore thinking - good things about the product or service. It has been shown that if people write something down they are likely to end up believing what they wrote down.

These techniques were perfected by the Chinese brainwwashing teams during the Korean war.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

You know, the biggest suckers of them all write whole operating systems for free.

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[tsangc]

the Lego Film Contest [lego.com] (trolling for complete commercials).

Oh, you mean the complete commercials at 320x240x15 fps shot on a grainy CMOS imager camera called the Lego Studios package?

Sure. I'll put that on national network TV.

Calum

Re:Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect

[bannerman]

hmm, it sounds like I should read this new Tom Sawyer for uh.. yeah, education. It's a classic, right? Have to read all the classics. It's important. I loved the 90s. It's a crazy world where 21 feels old and outdated.

I Feel Loved!

[tiltowait]

Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:

2002-02-06 17:17:50 Google Programming Contest (articles,quickies) (rejected)

Re:I Feel Loved!

[aoeuid]

In the future, why don't you take your rejected stories to the User Created Discussions.

Bah to their definition of 'interesting'.

[Xzzy]

I think their example ideas pretty much suck, dunno, maybe they did it on purpose so no one would try that stuff or maybe they just don't wanna see much creativity.

I personally think it'd be coolest to turn it into an art project.. imagine you had a repository of the consciousness of an entire race and could run a script on it. Things like the map of the internet. Or the web collage. Or use it to power some kind of AI chatterbot.

I dunno. Their webpage on it didn't seem to do much to promote being creative; they just want to pay someone 10k to develop a new way to make more relevent search results.

Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably could give it to them under the GPL:

The GPL is 'worldwide.'
It doesn't expire.
It explicitly lets you 'make' stuff.
Google can sell it -- as long as they give the source code out when selling!
Sure, they can use it.

Maybe it's playing fast and loose with the rules, but I don't see why you couldn't let 'em them have it under the GPL.

Strikes me as odd...

[krs-one]

...that they don't allow you to use Perl. Why C++/Java, especially since Perl was made to do text manipulation and stuff like this? Perl, on many occasions is faster than Java, and C++? Assuming that you would be using the STL, it would still be incredibly easy to make a very inefficient text manipulation program.

However, it would be pretty hard to make an efficient text manipulation program in C++. I would assume that any person doing this in C++ would use OOP (Java, obviously, since its 100% OOP).

I guess that since I am a Perl zealot, not a fan of Java, or not 18, I am bitter that I can't enter the contest. Oh well. :)

-Vic

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not eighteen either, which rather ticks me off ;). I agree with you completely in that Perl would be extremeley effective (not to mention efficient!) for the task at hand since there is no doubt most of the projects will infact be modifying text!

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[perky]

Perl, on many occasions is faster than Java, and C++?

?! show me some evidence.

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[Thomas A. Anderson]

This is a troll, right? Perl runs faster than java almost *all* the time (common knowledge), and development in in perl is *much* faster then c and c++ (also common knowledge).

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[SpaceLifeForm]

...that they don't allow you to use Perl.

Perl is open source right? You can use it most likely. In fact, the question already came up regarding Berkeley DB using the open source sleepy cat license. That was deemed acceptable. The key is for it to be open source.

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[perky]

It wasn't meant to be a troll.

I assumed that C/C++ would be significantly faster in execution than an interpreted language like perl. Since the Google challenge successful entries are likely to be pretty hardware intensive I would have thought that execution speed is of paramount importance. I certainly agree that perl development is a hell of a lot faster than C/C++ development, especially for the text processing type operations that perl was designed for.

I was also under the impression that the only area in which Java was slow when compared to perl is in GUI (ie. vs perlTk). In a threaded application I would have thought Java would be much faster.

Re:Strikes me as odd...

[jfonseca]

Offtopic, moderators please ignore.

This is the 100MB Google file repos.00.

I will use cat as the C sample.

time cat repos.00 > /dev/null

real 0m0.415s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.390s

time java cat.class repos.00 > /dev/null

real 0m0.822s
user 0m0.030s
sys 0m0.800s

time perl -n -e 'print;' repos.00 > /dev/null

real 0m1.514s
user 0m1.190s
sys 0m0.350s

So perl takes much longer to compile but runs over twice as fast as Java just to read and spit out the contents of a 100MB file.

Completely offtopic I know...you asked for evidence...

Any doubts mail me at Perl Mongers Brasilia - brasilia.pm.org

Riiight...

[jonr]

When did you last donate to Google? How many times have you used Google on your job, saving your self and your company money? Where is the friggin' "Do it for the love of coding" thinking now? I would be happy to enter (I just need the right idea ;)) and if Google gets better because of my code, so be it!
J.

Re:Riiight...

[MisterBlister]

When did you last donate to Google?

I don't think google is evil (though I think the previous poster does have a point -- $10,000 is quite a small prize considering the possibility that they may get some great technology from this). However, why should anyone 'donate' to Google? Google is a business.

Re:Riiight...

[Coulson]

Absolutely! Google is an incredible tool (the google toolbar is the first thing I install on any new computer :>), and this is an interesting challenge. What better way to show respect for their efforts than to participate? Imitation and flattery and all that.

Re:Riiight...

[wholesomegrits]

Don't fool yourself. Google is a business. Not a fucking charity. They're not out helping clothe the clotheless, feed the foodless, house the houseless, etc. The SELL stuff, and TAKE money. They are a Business. Not someone who will help your aged grandmother change her socks and wash her face.

They have done well in trying to look like a geek charity, and fooled many apparently.

Fuck helping THEM. If they cared about YOU (the royal you), they'd be paying $100,000+ and giving you a job. Not a fucking tour of their server room and some chump change barely able to cover the balance of a student loan.

I like Google, and I see what you are saying. I help Google by using Google. That's my end of the deal. With out Me the Customer, they need not exist. The more I use Google, the more advertising I see, and the more advertisers are tickled pink.

Useful or interesting?

[Mr. Sketch]

It seems like it would be very easy to come up with something interesting, and only a small fraction of those interesting things are actually useful.

Examples of a few interesting non-useful things I can come up with just off the top of my head:
Google Poet: Generate rhyming poetry from randomly rhyming sentances on the webpages in the database.
Googlesaic: Input a picture and scavenge the webpages for pictures from which to create a large mosaic of the input picture.
Google Map: Create a picture/graph of all the website connections (links) in the webpage list, perhaps add 3d/naviations. Perhaps perform graph opererations and maybe find the longest path one can travel through the links and still stay within the Google search results/database.

These are just a few, I'm sure plenty of other people can find much more exciting/interesting things to do, but they won't always be useful to the google company.

Re:Useful or interesting?

[JordoCrouse]

I like the Googlesaic idea - You could index each picture in the database by the average of its color and brightness, and use that to construct your mosaic - the resulting picture would be huge, though

Re:Useful or interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The poetry idea is good, but it should be combined with a search, so Google would create poetry based on sentences, phrases or words in the pages that rhyme and best match your search terms.

To get a poem about sheep, search for sheep, wool, ram, ewe, and so on... On the results page for every search there could be a little link labeled "Compose Poetry".

Even more fun, compose poetry about what other people are searching for... Imagine all the phrases that rhyme with "Hot young chicks".

Re:Useful or interesting?

[Suppafly]

that is such a great idea.. I often wondered how hard it would be to make such a program ever since I first started seeing those photo mosaics at the store where I work a few years ago. it should actually be pretty easy to do to.. You would just have to make sure you have images of the same size or if you didnt youd have to puzzle fit them all together some how..

Re:Useful or interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent post, Mr. Sketch. But was your post useful, or merely interesting?

Well, as it says (Score: 5, Interesting) near the top, I'd assume the latter!

Re:Useful or interesting?

[leviramsey]

that is such a great idea.. I often wondered how hard it would be to make such a program ever since I first started seeing those photo mosaics at the store where I work a few years ago. it should actually be pretty easy to do to.. You would just have to make sure you have images of the same size or if you didnt youd have to puzzle fit them all together some how..

There was a really neat article in Dr. Dobbs Journal a few (October? November?) months ago about making photomosaics. As long as you can scale the photos to the same size, it works fine (granted with possible stretching...)

Re:Useful or interesting?

[Suppafly]

thanks for the info.. ill have to see if i can drag up a copy of it..

Re:Useful or interesting?

[Fjord]

I believe the company that puts the mosaic photos out has a patent on the process, however.

Give me my 10K but ..patent pending

[Anonymous Coward]

On the idea of creating programming competitions with prize money to lure or gain access to brilliant algos.

What are the rules? Do they take ownership of the idea if one wins?
10K doesn't sound like fair compensation.

Re:Give me my 10K but ..patent pending

[Cuthalion]

10K doesn't sound like fair compensation.

Depending on how crappy the entries are, 10K could be quite generous.

Search Engine Wars

[Van Halen]

I already made a game last year I called Search Engine Wars. I wonder if it would qualify?

It's a party game. The basic idea is that a bunch of people are in the game, and it goes around in turns. On your turn, you type in a few words to search for. The game goes and queries google for the first hit on that search, and sends everyone's browser to that page. Then the other players get 100 seconds to guess which words you searched for. The first player to guess correctly gets points for the amount of time remaining.

It's written using BYOND, which you'll have to download if you want to play.

Re:Search Engine Wars

[MediaBoy77]

Interesting game. Only fun if you play it with people who don't spend every round searching for anime.

And the scoring system needs re-vamping. It seems quite random. Some items will score very few points for a guess off the top, and some will score lots of points for an answer when almost the entire phrase has been filled in.

But a thumbs-up on the concept!

Yeah, But for 10K, Google owns it

[mattvd]

"With regard to the software and repository that you obtain for the Contest, you agree to the license terms as stated in files you download or receive. With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.

If you are selected as a contest winner, you agree that Google may publicize your name, likeness, and the description of work you did to win the contest. Apart from the prizes associated with being selected as a winner, Google shall not be obligated to compensate you in any way for such publicity."

So in other words, google buys the next great thing for $10K. The only upside of the above is that it's a non-exclusive license which means you could go and sell it to a competing search engine too...

Of course, good luck finding a competing search engine :-)

Why are you posting you ideas?

[Capt_Troy]

Why are all you dorks posting your ideas? Go do it, or don't complain when someone implements your idea and wins a bunch of money!!!

Re:Why are you posting you ideas?

[anthony_dipierro]

Why are all you dorks posting your ideas?

I'd much rather have a shot at having my idea implemented for 30 seconds of work than have a shot at $10,000 for 100 hours of work.

Re:Why are you posting you ideas?

[Capt_Troy]

Sure, I understand. But you will also complain about it later if it does get implemented and nobody will believe you!

Re:Why are you posting you ideas?

[anthony_dipierro]

But I'll have my dated post on slashdot as evidence :).

Re:Why are you posting you ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, the only idea I actually posted, "six degrees of google-ation" wouldn't win, but it would be pretty neat to see google implement it.

Re:Why are you posting you ideas?

[rholland356]

For $10k, you might as well give it away!

C'mon, Google, make the cash interesting!

Non-exclusive license

[mgkimsal2]

The contest rules state that you grant google a "non-exclusive license" to your entry, so theoretically you could use your work in other areas too. Doesn't sound TOO bad, though I'd prefer to see the $10k up to $50k. :)

Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th

[Cato the Elder]

Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors? Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to GPL it. However, you can certainly release the source under some open liscense. What Google is doing is perfectly reasonable--if you create something based off their code, they are asking for the right to use it. It's similar to many liscenses already out there.

One thing I do wish was part of the rules was that if they used your code/algorithms, etc. that they notify you. After all, you may think your idea is great, but it would be a big endorsement if Google used it, even if you didn't win. If anyone in charge of this contest reads this, I'd urge doing that anyway--it would be a good cheap way to reward more talented programmers.

Just curious but...

[cdrj]

ow would testing be employed for something like this? No one has the large scale servers to use it with and I really don't think that anyone has 900,000 web pages saved locally either. Also, it would most likely have to be compatible with Google's current software (it could run separately, but the data collected would do no good if the Google machines can't interpret it.) Any thoughts on this?

Re:Just curious but...

[Hi-Tech Redneck]

That's why Google is providing the 900,000 page cache and some C++ source that (I'm assuming) includes the method for interfacing the database. I'm not going to re-write the terms as it's been done several times above... Just scroll up and read from the previous comments.

nethack

[Double A]

random nethack maps based on random data from the web, and monsters/items/etc from queries from the past 24 hours.

but i'm not a nethack dude, so it's not for me.

Mee Too! Mee Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to say that I think this is a really good way for Google to get a bunch of programs, some of which could be profitable for them, for only 10K!
That was all I had to say! I'm so shocked that no one has thought of this yet!

The LICENSE

[anthony_dipierro]

If you'd like to see the license before actually downloading the actual (huge, and possibly slashdotted) .tar:

This repository of web page information is being provided to you by Google Inc. solely for academic and research purposes related to the Google programming contest. You may not modify, distribute, or make any commercial use of the repository.

This source code is copyrighted 2002 by Google Inc. All rights reserved. You are given a limited license to use this source code for purposes of participating in the Google programming contest. If you choose to use or distribute the source code for any other purpose, you must either (1) first obtain written approval from Google, or (2) prominently display the foregoing copyright notice and the following warranty and liability disclaimer on each copy used or distributed.

The source code and repository (the "Software") is provided "AS IS", with no warranty, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular use. In no event shall Google Inc. be liable for any damages, direct or indirect, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

But wait...

[The Bungi]

Many of the responses are about Google short-changing the person who comes up with this. I thought as much myself.

But after going outside and having a smoke, I think this is not such a bad idea. Sure, maybe I can come up with a great algorithm that does whatever, but from there to market... long road.

Better, if you're into this type of thing I'd say go at it. I mean, it's not as Google won't offer a job to the winner immediately. Heck, they'll probably employ all the runners-up as well.

Not as sexy of course, but still. Think about working for one of the few pure, stable Internet gigs out there.

And no, I don't work for them =)

Damn, this is hard!

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, google needs to cache this webpage so the world won't be deprived of latest news on that darn persnickety americium. If brand names are allowed, you can hit the jackpot with a bag of Stolichnaya ovum

Something useful

[kilroy_hau]

Google can find web pages, images and usenet posts, I would like to see the following:

-Find videos (type "star wars", get all fanfiction mpegs)
-Find programs to download (type "strategy" and find shareware or freeware downloads)

JWZ Has the winner, and the runner up...

[thehossman]

JWZ allready wrote the coolest apps I've ever seen that harvest the power of Internet search engines...

Webcollage -- slowly builds a random collage of images from the net.

DadaDodo -- generates random sentences based on word probabilities in pages on the net.

Re:JWZ Has the winner, and the runner up...

[Anonymous Coward]

from dadadodo-

Arnold Schwarzenegger's butt. Sometimes in: extra transistors present evidence of whack.

57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[quake74]

From the Contest Rules web page

The code and data may be downloaded from our web site:

http://research.google.com/contest/prog-contest- sa mple.tar - (!!)57M(!!)

... yada yada yada ...

If you prefer, we will mail you the code and data on a set of (!!)five(!!) CDs. E-mail your request for CDs, including a postal address, to programming-contest@google.com.

Let's see ... 57 Mb /5 CD is 11.4Mb per CD.
Heck, how small are those cd!?

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[metsfan]

The 57MB download only includes the code, not the 900,000 web pages. Instructions for downloading those are included with the initial download. This is what takes up most of the space on the CDs.

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[David E. Smith]

Inside the tar file is another tar file (with code) and a .bz2 file (with Web pages). I haven't uncompressed the latter yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was two or three gigs after being unwrapped. (This is 900,000 Web pages we're talking about here...)

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[rainwater]

If you learn to read, you will notice that they are referring to the full database of 900,000 web pages not the sample db you can download.

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[stienman]

The download file (If you actually read the entire page) contains instructions on how to download the larger sampling of 900,000 web pages - the 57MB download is NOT the 900,000 sample file, only a subset of the 900,000 subset of GOOGLE.

-Adam

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[bigjocker]

I believe as small as your IQ ...

It reads explicitly that the README contains a link to download the 900.000 pages. In the tar there are only 16.000 pages.

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[Electrum]

The 57Mb is only a small test set of the entire data set. As it notes on the page, the tarball includes links to where to download the entire set, which will fill the five CD's.

Re:57Mb = 5 CD ?!?

[quake74]

Thanks Adam. No, I did not bother to read the whole page since I'll never enter the contest. The original post was a just a joke. I actually thought that the 5 CD were the uncompressed pages. That should make sense since it shouldn't be too hard to get a 50:1 compression rate on text files like to web pages.

Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Google owns nothing. They're only accepting code under an Open Source license, or did you conveniently skip that part?

Re:Troll

[mattvd]

If this is what you're referring too:

"Sorry, we cannot accept entries that require commercial software or other software that is not provided as open source or under GPL."

This only means that google will not accept entries that rely on commercial or closed source code (such as an API).

Perl and Google

[blibbleblobble]

You *can* program in Perl -- it says that if you use any C modules, you have to specify which, and if you can compile perl from c and use that to run your perl program, then you can argue that your program is written in c with one very large additional module.

Seriously though, why would anyone want to do text processing/internet/database stuff in C now that perl is available?

Well, here's an idea..

[shayne321]

Here's a free idea to anyone who has the time/initiative to code it (i.e. Not Me): a program that scans a page and rates it with an annoyance rating (x out of 100?) based on annoying things you'll find on the page if you open it: webbugs, cookies sent back to doubleclick, pop-unders, banner ads, java applets, BLINK tags, poorly formed HTML/CSS, broken images, sql/asp/php errors, etc. The higher the number the more annoying the page, and therefore the more likely the user is to click a different search result. Google could also tie it in to their ranking system to rank annoying pages lower in the results. Seems to me like it'd make the web a better place.

Shayne

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[gfxguy]

I really like that...

combine it with my idea (next in the thread after yours) to verify keywords - maybe penalize sites that have a million keywords, and you might just have a winner there...

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[The G]

This is f*cking brilliant. I love it. I imagine a little variable-color smiley-frowny-pissed-off face next to each link...
--G

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[YoJ]

I like this idea. But I would limit the definition of "annoyance" to something easily quantifiable. Broken links might be the easiest, but even for that you have the problem of internet addresses being sporadically available, or just slow some days.

Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor. I'm sure there are many tools out there that can do this rather quickly. If this were actually implemented by Google, so sites with bad HTML were ranked below all other sites, imagine how much cleaner the web would get!

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Winged Cat]

Perhaps the W3C's HTML Validator or something similar? Rate the page based on conformance to the HTML specs (say, number of errors divided by length of HTML), in the hopes that this has some correlation to how generally useful the page is (i.e., if they can't be bothered to follow the technical rules, they probably don't have enough of a clue to put out content of genuine use to their users instead of just brochureware or scams or the like)? This wouldn't be perfect, of course, and utility is very much a subjective measure...

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[shayne321]

Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor.

That's not really what I had in mind... HTML errors are nowhere NEAR as annoying as pr0n sites that pop open ads all over the place, resize your browser, bookmark themselves, etc, etc. That's what I mean by annoyance, the kind of site that makes Joe Sixpack (as well as me) get upset when he gets stuck in a loop that for every window he closes two pop open. I'm more worried about discouraging sites from using bad behavior than I am encouraging them to use proper html. Of course, malformed html should ADD to the annoyance factor, but not be the only thing counted. That's my opinion anyway.

Shayne

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Broccolist]

Nice, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google did this already. I don't seem to get many pages with billions of porn popups as results for my searches.

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Cow4263]

Good idea. But like many great ideas before you, it is actually disproven in pratice.

The site I am going to use is one that most of us would consider to be a great source of infomation, google itself.

You can view the results here and as you can see they aren't too pleasing. First of all, it doesn't have a doc type (which is a fatal error, and shows another underling problem with the plan -- doc type guessing). So after giving it a doc type of HTML 4.01 Transitional (btw, lower doc types didn't fare any better) it came out with about 28 errors (its quite possible I miscounted, shoot me).

28 / 13 = 2 errors per line

(rounded down out of niceness)

There are numberous reasons that you could argue in favor of google (ie. the insanely long line 13 that could be broken down to at least 5-10 more lines).

In the long run, I think that such an implantation would benefit web developers making them realize they should shape up their html or lose hits as a result. And, this could also help burden the transition to xhtml (which isn't nearly as tolerant as html was\is). However, the users would ulitimately suffer in the mean time, which violates one of google's main policies: always do things that helps the user.

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea! I like it a lot.

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Tha_Zanthrax]

Feature not mentioned before:

Do a Google search for 'Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5'.
It's just plain stupid to see how many people use icky WYSIWYG-editors andc have NO clue what's really happening.

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

_This_ was funny.

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

"when he gets stuck in a loop that for every window he closes two pop open"

Hmm...my modem is slow enough I can usually close them before they load their pop-up code...

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML errors are nowhere NEAR as annoying as pr0n sites that pop open ads all over the place, resize your browser, bookmark themselves

Agreed, I just hate those pages that have missing table entries and stuff...Why can`t all sites just keep opening fresh porn in new windows neatly sized to my desktop while automaticly bookmarking themselfs? Even beter, set themself as home-page so all I have to do for more p0rn is fire up my browser.

Google should give a -50 penalty for sites that do not have javascript!

Or like the new princes of the netherlands said when asked about the conclusions of extensive historical research into the involvment of her father in the history of argentina "well, that to, is an opinion"....

Re:Well, here's an idea..

[YoJ]

The problem with that is that you are analyzing code. So you have to look at JavaScript code and determine what it does, and if it does something annoying. In general, analyzing code to see what it does is no easier than just running the code and seeing what happens. In this case it might be possible to look for specific phrases like OnClose (or whatever), or whatever command starts a popup.

My program

[Anonymous Coward]

s/www\.microsoft\.com/www\.goatse\.cx/g

Re:My program

[Anonymous Coward]

s/www\.microsoft\.com/www\.goatse\.cx/g

Dude,

You don't need to \ a . in the replacement part of the expression:

s/www\.microsoft\.com/www.goatse.cx/g

Winner might get $10,000...

[Anonymous Coward]

but who knows how many diffrent programs google will get for free

google whacked?

[Anonymous Coward]

longest string of worlds returning LESS THAN A PAGE?

Security through obscurity?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't use passwords?

Re:Security through obscurity?

[anthony_dipierro]

of course not

Re:Security through obscurity?

[Anonymous Coward]

shut up infamy di perror you stupid asshole go suck yo mamas ass motherfucker

mod this up i wanna get seen

muuuuuuuuahhahahahahahahahahahhaha

Obvious feature everyone would use

[belphegore]

Six degrees of Google Bacon. How many links (and what's the path) to get from any page on the web to Kevin Bacon's personal homepage. Or more interesting from any page to any other page.

Re:Obvious feature everyone would use

[bluebomber]

This has been done and was news maybe two years ago. The web is about 18 links deep (at least two years ago it was). I want to say it was some guy at CMU, but I really don't remember the details.

A neat trick.

[Walob]

it be nice if google could connect to every peer to peer "service", and be able to replace those crappy clients now available. Instant headlines for 10k.

Not exactly Free...

[Tom7]

Well, don't forget that they actually have to look through all this crap and find the good ideas (if they exist). So it is a gamble, but it's probably a good one. Anyway, I'm sure many people will be happy to do this, so don't spoil their fun. ;)

57mb Download

[RageMachine]

I have to say the download is quite smooth. 160k a second is nice. I wonder how much bandwidth google actually has? Probably a gigabit or more?
This many people with Cable/DSL downloading that file, and its not even slashdotted.

I havn't untared the file yet. But I wonder just how many people it takes to run google. How many are on staff? And how many work on the actual code that powers such a huge site?

Re:57mb Download

[godless]

"just under 300", acording to this

Regards,
G

Here's my entry

[Lord Hugh Toppingham]

#!/bin/sh
# google useful competition entry
rm -rf /home/google-data
echo 'now how will you find your porn ?'
exit 0

porn-get - http://www.linuks.mine.nu/porn-get/

[tarzeau]

i'll make a new list! WITH THEIR 9000000 or so website links! anyone can help?

Just Do It!

[Zibu]

Well, it seems like a lot of /.ers think they are the greatests coders on earth and that Evil Google will pay their talent for only 10K? Go ahead, just do it! Find the best idea on earth (that hasnt been done before), code it, and sell it for a googol $ to the world. Then come back to this thread and you'll be granted eternal respect.

Or why dont we create a company, start a contest "Come with your idea and your code", so we can rip naive coders from their immense talent?

So easy to talk, so hard to code...

I could come with a good idea, code it, but for $10K, it's not worth my ego. I better stay in this thread and compare Google to M$.

Get a life.

Only US...

[mgblst]

I looked, but couldn't find anything indicating if this is only for US citizens. Surely not!

Anybody, anybody?

Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors? Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to GPL it.

You own the copyright, so you can GPL it even if you grant a different license to others. See "mozilla" for an example of this.

you dumbass

[crayz]

of course he uses passwords, the point is that it's more secure if he tells everyone else what they are...

Quit saying this!

[Tom7]

I am tired of hearing this shit adage. Just because something is obscure doesn't mean that it's not secure. Furthermore, things that are obscure and secure intrinsically are typically more secure extrinsically, since there are more unknowns and they are harder to attack.

It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.

Re:Quit saying this!

[Grax]

I agree. Obscurity is one tool in a security admin's toolbox. Anyone who does not agree, please post /etc/password for our review.

Re:Quit saying this!

[anthony_dipierro]

Just because something is obscure doesn't mean that it's not secure.

I agree, of course.

Furthermore, things that are obscure and secure intrinsically are typically more secure extrinsically, since there are more unknowns and they are harder to attack.

I disagree with this. I think that most people are not criminal. I think having your security flaws out in the open is more likely to cause someone to point it out to you than it is to aid a hacker.

It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.

Semantics. I take the phrase to mean that obscurity does not increase security.

Re:Quit saying this!

[notsoanonymouscoward]

sure thing f00...

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
bin:x:1:1:bin:/bin:
daemon:x:2:2:daemon:/sbin:
adm:x:3:4:adm:/var/adm:
lp:x:4:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:
sync:x:5:0:sync:/sbin:/bin/sync
shutdown:x:6:0:shutdown:/sbin:/sbin/shutdown
halt:x:7:0:halt:/sbin:/sbin/halt
mail:x:8:12:mail:/var/spool/mail:
news:x:9:13:news:/var/spool/news:
uucp:x:10:14:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:
operator:x:11:0:operator:/root:
games:x:12:100:games:/usr/games:
gopher:x:13:30:gopher:/usr/lib/gopher-data:
ftp:x:14:50:FTP User:/var/ftp:
nobody:x:99:99:Nobody:/:
apache:x:48:48:Apache:/var/www:/bin/false
mysql:x:27:27:MySQL Server:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/bash
super:x:15:0:Super User Account:/home/super:/bin/bash
manager:x:16:0:Super User Account:/home/manager:/bin/bash
named:x:25:25:Named:/var/named:/bin/false
qmaild:x:100:506::/var/qmail:/bin/true
qmaill:x:101:506::/var/qmail:/bin/true
qmailp:x:102:506::/var/qmail:/bin/true
alias:x:103:506::/var/qmail/alias:/bin/true
qmailq:x:104:505::/var/qmail:/bin/true
qmailr:x:105:505::/var/qmail:/bin/true
qmails:x:106:505::/var/qmail:/bin/true
dtlog:x:107:107::/home/dtlog:/bin/bash

there you go ignorant boy... I await your s|rip7 /i|)Di3 hack attack.

oh... you meant the unshadowed passwd file? I could even give you that... and my box would STILL be safe... but of course... only because WHICH box has the associated passwd file is obscure to you =)

Re:Quit saying this!

[Anonymous Coward]

$ cat /etc/passwd
root:0:0:*:/sh
$

Re:Quit saying this!

[stripes]

It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.

Sure, it is a bit safer and the typical phrase is an overstatement, but most common phrases are. Security through obscurity tends to make things feel more secure then they are, so shocking people out of that is useful.

Definitely XORing your valuable data with 0xdeadbeaf makes it a lot harder for most people to read. Sure if you come up against most programmers it may be one of the things they try in the first hour, but it will take a bit. Sure against a cryptographer *any* XORing with any short string will buy you about 15 seconds of safety, but that's 15 seconds better then nothing against a trained opponent, maybe hours against a talented but untrained one, and a very very very long time against an unskilled opponent.

However a whole lot of people who apply security through obscurity think it buys them a lot more then an hour. People who use the phrase forget that it buys you at least the hour, and that is way better then zip. (or of corse they use it as shorthand)

Re:Quit saying this!

[SpaceLifeForm]

Definitely XORing your valuable data with 0xdeadbeaf makes it a lot harder for most people to read.

No wonder it didn't work. I was using 0xdeadbeef.

Re:Quit saying this!

[stripes]

No wonder it didn't work. I was using 0xdeadbeef.

That's my (exactly) one bit of obscurity...

Re:Quit saying this!

[Grax]

So you do agree that it probably isn't a good idea for incoming attackers to have a list of all the user accounts on your machine?

As far as my attack, don't count on it. I don't have time to break into someone else's machines. It is much more challenging to secure a machine as someone breaking in needs only one little opening but someone securing a machine needs to block all entry points.

Re:Quit saying this!

[notsoanonymouscoward]

yeah I know... I've been fighting a DDOS for a friend since saturday. they've been port scanning and throwing random garbage (or seemingly random I should say) at the box, etc... f00king kiddies. but I must say, its been fun =)

www.daypop.com

[Nathdot]

oh sure this off-topic but anyway,

I tried typing "axis of evil" into the daypop search enginge.

This resultant effect?:

My computer suffered a melt-down

:)

Free ideas and free code development for Google

[letxa2000]

This is a way for Google to get free ideas and, better than that, free expert-level code development for them to make money off.

I wouldn't go for $10k. Perhaps $100k, or perhaps $20k plus some percentage of future revenue attributable to my invention.

Got to hand it to them, though, it's an innovative way to receive hundreds of ideas and get a working prototype. Only one person wins but they probably retain the rights to develop their own code that accomplishes the ideas submitted by everyone else.

Basically, they want a cool idea for something innovative but their brainstorming sessions haven't come up with anything new...

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[CmdrPinkTaco]

While I am all for Free Software, I have to agree with the poster of this comment, at least in principal. 10k is a small price to pay for tons of ideas. While Im sure the majority of the ideas will not be worth the time spent reviewing them, there will always be that precious gem buried somewhere.

For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.

It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them. At the risk of sounding like a "me too" post - I still think that this would be something fun to be involved in if I had the creativity or the passion to persue something of this sort.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[notsoanonymouscoward]

would binary only even matter? its the IDEA they need... they have tons of coders easily available to implement whatever ideas they can glean from this. its not always about source control.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

no they don't. they're all way overworked there for low pay. they're hiring like mad but can't find anyone that's acceptable. this is really just a recruiting effort to try and find someone worthy of being on their payroll who won't balk at being paid less than $100k/year.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[kill -9 $$]

For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission.

Ahh, but if you read the submission requirements, you have to submit your source, a Makefile, and use only GPL or other open source libraries, so they've covered their butt there.

I hope anybody who does decide to participate in this contest realizes the implications of it. $10K is nothing for Google to pay to get ideas, source code, etc. Also note, in the submission requirements, any entry made to Google becomes their sole property. Christ, I can afford $10K, a tour of my house, allow somebody to run their prize winning code on the data on my computers if somebody's going to give me this kind of intellectual property. I really think that its a pretty raw deal for the developer.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[WNight]

The problem is that ideas aren't worth a lot without a way to use them. I've had a lot of neat thoughts about mapping connectivity and so on, but without something like Google to run it on I'd have to spider the whole web myself on my cable.

They might get a good idea, but if you don't win the contest they don't really have much of a legal leg to take your idea, so you're pretty safe unless you're the winner, in which case you get $10k for hacking together a script that you never could have afforded to run anyways. (It's only concept they want, not the polished results of a 2-month dev process.)

It honestly sounds like a good deal to me. I hack for a night or two on a project that I find interesting. If I lose, no big deal. If I win I get 10k USD (3 months wages for me, I get paid in Canadian $s) and I'd be famous in exactly the circles who are looking to hire a coder with good ideas...

People go on about the value of ideas all the time, but really, without proper backing ideas are a dime a dozen. I've said many time "Hey, how about a ..." and seen it advertised a few years later. That doesn't mean I lost out on it, because I didn't have the cash to develop it let alone market it.

This is why patents on wide ideas are so damaging. Any idiot can have a good idea every now and then, but it takes more work (and funding unfortunately) to make them fly. If you let someone with an undeveloped idea block off a whole field it does a great disservice to the people with the ability to follow through, who likely had the idea independently.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

>you're the winner, in which case you get $10k for
>hacking together a script that you never could have
>afforded to run anyways.

Finally someone with a brain capable of separating logical ideas from paranoia.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[MouseR]

I wouldn't go for $10k. Perhaps $100k, or perhaps $20k plus some percentage of future revenue attributable to my invention.

Pardon me for asking but... what are you doing developing, maintaining or otherwise promoting a system for not even free beer?

If a chance to provide usefull code for a worthy cause (google being still the best search engine out there and that still doesn't plaster your screen with pop-up adds), spend a couple of weeks on it and get paid 10K doesn't sound attractive, what would?

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google totally rules. Jesus christ, they're trying to run a fun contest and shit. I agree with this MouseR guy. Helping google is almost a priveledge (it's free, it's non-annoying, and it's great. It's better than 99.9% of OSS shit out there). 10k? Jesus christ, I'd think about working on it for nothing. If you think of something that's worth more than 10k, don't submit it!

(ps - when they clutter their front-page with more than essentials, it's that awesome thing about getting rid of spyware. If google was a religion, I'd sign up. I'd drink the damn kool-aid.)

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Ragin'Cajun]

For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.

It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them.

Well, they *have* been running the best search engine on the web FOR FREE for the past 3 years. They don't clutter their main page with flashing X10 ads, or the the irritating news+sports+weather+financialnews+email combo that everybody seems to think people want. This might not be a bad way to give something back to the company that's saved us so much time and effort finding information.

And to the guys out there who wouldn't bother with this contest for less than $100K: if your idea is so good, go develop it yourself! Get a lawyer, and work out a deal with Google that suits you better.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[CmdrPinkTaco]

I guess that I did come off as a little snotty in my original post, but to me (and this is purely my opinion); for them to ask for ideas as opposed to having an open channel where the users can constantly contribute ideas seems suspect to me.

I have no problem contibuting ideas so long as it doesn't involve an "act now for this limited time offer" clause attached to it.

Free Software has never had marketing before and hasn't needed it. I just don't want to see things cheapened and see Free / Open Software get turned into an infomercial. Unless this is Google sticking their feet in the water...if they are going to be a Free company, then they should go ahead and do it and not be half hearted about it.

sorry for the ramble - it's late, Im tired and have a serious case of "code head."

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[lostguy]

You're getting old.

Do you still remember the days when you were in college, and $10k would pay your tuition and room-and-board for a year at a state school, AND keep you full of beer? :-)

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[onepoint]

Oh this has to be the funniest set of post on slashdot in a long time.

What happend to the free sharing of ideas and code. They want it GPL, so post your code when it's done on sourceforge.

gee when it's for your own benifit it has to be free, but when somebody desires something it has to cost alot.

Thank you all for the laugh

ONEPOINT

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[QuaZar666]

Ah but you forget you can not use commercial software and in order to keep your ideas without them able to use it you must not use any GPL. If you do then your software is then under the GPL license and they can use it however they want.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[armb]

> > For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission.
> Ahh, but if you read the submission requirements, you have to submit your source, a Makefile, and use only GPL or other open source libraries, so they've covered their butt there.

Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents. Given some of the rubbish that gets patented, patenting a really innovative idea shouldn't be that hard :-)

It's not as if you're forced to enter the contest - if you decide halfway through that your idea could be worth a lot of money, don't submit it. On the other hand, if you were going to GPL it anyway, this could be a nice bonus.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Software has never had marketing before and hasn't needed it.

Have you checked Redhat's stock price lately?

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, just take the contest for what it is. $10 000 is a lot of money, even for a company, so they have to have a reason for spending it. If that reason is ideas, fine.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[armb]

> Patent the neat idea your code is based on, then make them licence the patents.

Ok, they thought of that one too. "you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[u01iz]

"Basically, they want a cool idea for something innovative but their brainstorming sessions haven't come up with anything new..."

Dont forget, this is the result of their brainstorming.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Mike McTernan]

I think it is likely that if someone does something really good Google might well make a job offer... the $10k is just the bait.

Mike

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[u01iz]

How about, if the contestants adjust their "scale" of effort to the proportionaly low price money?

Then they shall convince the judges that this idea
is actually worths $10K and not a dime more.
Simular to the 8K assembly demos (not more than 8KB)

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I have sent ideas to google with the hope the they
would use them. I think google is run by people
who care as well as who are trying to make money.
Since they provide a very important service for
free (and that I use), I don't have a problem
with giving them ideas for free.
Suggestions I have made to them in the past:
Archive usenet (before they announced any intent
to do that)
Provide ssl access (to prevent eavesdropping of
queries without a warrant)
Provide a link checking service (since they already
scan the whole web, why should each web site
test their links seperately - this just wastes
bandwidth and costs everyone)

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[ConceptJunkie]

Ummm... correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am), but if the winning submission use GPL libraries, and Google it, aren't they then subject to the GPL with respect to the submission?

Don't they then need to make their new tool Open Source as well?

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Calvin Deck]

Funny isnt it, complaining about that we give google cheap ideas for only $10K.

They can get free and very good ideas just by looking here at slashdot :-)

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[axlrosen]

Also note, in the submission requirements, any entry made to Google becomes their sole property.

No, it says that you grant Google a non-exclusive right to do anything it wants with the code. You still own it and can still do whatever you want with it, including sell it to someone else or start your own company with it, I assume.

Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that innovative: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:30D8FG8l2EoC: www.corefactory.com/contest/

Ummm...

[Tom7]

DFA and NFA are equivalently powerful. (It is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.)

It's true that Emacs et al. support a richer language than what's offered by traditional regular expressions (as can be implemented on DFA or NFA) but that's because the languages are *not regular*. It has nothing to do with the distinction between DFA and NFA.

Re:Ummm...

[Oink.NET]

DFA and NFA are equivalently powerful.

Not entirely accurate. Here's a quote from chapter 4 of O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions: "The way a DFA engine works completely precludes the concept of backreferences and capturing parentheses. It just can't happen."

is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.

Between some of them. If you expression contains backreferences or counted subexpressions, then you can't go from NFA to DFA.

Re:Ummm...

[sholden]

Between some of them. If you expression contains backreferences or counted subexpressions, then you can't go from NFA to DFA.

If your expression contains backreferences it is not regular. And hence is not a regular expression.

Which the poster mentioned but you ignored.

Re:Ummm...

[Tom7]

In general, it's not wise to learn about computer science from O'Reilly books!

The languages that can be expressed with NFA, DFA, and Regular are the same. I promise I know what I'm talking about; I've taught this material to undergraduates in fact. It might be the case that O'Reilly has a word for something in Perl or Python, and they call it "Nondeterministic Finite Automaton", but whatever that is, it isn't a real NFA. NFA also cannot capture back-references or counted sub-expressions; they are subject to the same shortcomings as DFA. But, it might be an abuse of the terminology "NFA", just as everyone calls the (non) regular expressions that perl uses "regular expressions". Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused... no big deal.

Re:Ummm...

[Oink.NET]

Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused...

Yep, I can see now that's what happened to the definition of NFA. Thanks for making the case for it and causing me to go digging for a better understanding of it. O'Reilly's book acknowledges the misuse of the term, and then goes ahead and misuses it anyway!

Re:Ummm...

[Mignon]

In general, it's not wise to learn about computer science from O'Reilly books!

Or Slashdot, for that matter...

Re:Ummm...

[reynaert]

Of course, the O'Reilly book talks about "a DFA engine". What they're saying is that a NFA engine is easier to hack ;)

first annual... yes yes

[MavEtJu]

Google has just announced its first annual programming contest!

Always good to see that these announcements are buzzword and cliche compliant.

Re:first annual... yes yes

[prnz]

Google has just announced its first annual programming contest!

Always good to see that these announcements are buzzword and cliche compliant.

That just means they're going to have another contest next year.

Now, if they'd annouched a First Annual Google Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, *that* would be not only buzzword and cliché but also pop-culture reference compliant. :-)

Paul

Re:first annual... yes yes

[Atrahasis]

Webster's Dictionary defines programming as....

Re:Now I have a use for my Goatse search program

[Kasmiur]

How did I get stuck as a troll? Heck it would probably even be a submission I could give to google as a joke. :-( oh well

Why do these contests never provide royalties?

[VortexVertigo]

In the fine print of the code contest, Google wants non-exclusive rights to use and sell your code. Use your code I can understand, after all they are basically paying you a $10,000 contracting fee (assuming you're the first place winner). But if they sell your entry for a profit then why not include a royalty rate in that fine print of theirs. Say "Google agrees to provide 5% of any profit realized from sale of your entry". In a perfect coding world they would even offer royalties on the internal savings or enhanced earnings they receive from utilizing your entry.

*sigh*

Feeling Unlucky ?

[Quazion]

It will take you to the site your the least lucky to find what your looking for, now if its true that you always find the stuff your looking for in the last place you look for you should find it there not ?

Now its just only to code the code that will find that site..

Quazion.

WARNING! Read the Fine Print

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't enter this contest if you are employed. Read the rule about how you will defend Google if your employer (or anyone you might happen to infringe upon) sues you as a result of your work. If you're a student, check your school's IP policy. This is a complete scam.

1 line of shell code

[ilovecheese]

Here's my entry:

dd if=/dev/eth0 of=/dev/st0 bs=32k

Download the internet!

doxographically

[cliveholloway]

doxographically

That was damn hard - I thought I'd be there with duniwassal, but that had 61 pages!

cLive ;-)

Re:doxographically

[WhiteKnight07]

Sorry dude but that returns 3 results. None of which are shashdot.

Why don't you try using your brain?

[autopr0n]

What are you going to do, sue yourself?

Yes, the creator of a GPL'd program can do whatever he or she wants with the code they wrote.(although they can't retoactively remove the GPL, or do things with contributions people make under the GPL)

El Stupido

[Anonymous Coward]

You made a fool of yourself!

Mod this dude up!! Funny!

How about...

[jjeffries]

...something that looks through that data and finds the interesting bits based on a set of terms that the user provides?

Or has someone done that already?

another one - botargoes

[cliveholloway]

botargoes

cLive ;-)

Add- free cache ?

[Guignol]

Maybe an add-free cache could be interesting..

Something cool also would be to translate mp3 links into a "lalala pattern database" :)
This way, you could make a search for a song you don't know the title, or not even who sings it (or plays it if it's just music.)
You just sing how it's like to the microphone, and it looks for similar "lalala patterns" :)
I already made somthing like that : you sing what you want and you get this answer:
6 matches:
- R.E.M: losing my religion
- Rammstein: Wollt Ihr das bett in flammen sehen
- Tatiana: yukaidi yukaida
- Alphaville: Forever Young
- Farinelli: Alto Giove
- Fight Club: theme
There is a link for useful feedback where users generaly complain they didn't find what they were looking for, but they get what they deserve:
"You are a loser and should learn to sing before complaining. what you sang 'ladadiladadada' (emailed to all in the lab) *did* match those 6 titles"

Take your pals on holiday...courtesy of Google!

[ChunKing]

They say "One $10,000 cash prize will be awarded to the winning entry" - okay, that's simple enough.

Next, Google say "If the winning entry is submitted by more than one individual, the $10,000 cash prize will be divided equally among the participants who submit the winning entry". Fair do's, no problem with that.

But then they say "In addition, Google shall provide each member of the winning team a round trip ticket for a commercial carrier flight to the San Francisco Bay Area, and will reimburse each member of the winning team for up to 3 nights stay at a hotel to be designated by Google, Inc".

So what's to stop some geek nailing that top prize on his own but then inviting all his nerdy buddies along for the ride to Google Mountain?

The winner could even sell tickets for the trip and top up those measly 10,000 smackeroonies....now there's a thought.

Re:Take your pals on holiday...courtesy of Google!

[Oswald]

Well, maybe they figure if you're that hard up for the price of a few plane seats they'll spot you some freebies.

Re:Take your pals on holiday...courtesy of Google!

[Atrahasis]

The price of a few plane seats? Maybe inside the continental US the price of getting to Googles HQ by plane is low, but what about those lucky enough not to live in America?

Re:Take your pals on holiday...courtesy of Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

"but what about those lucky enough not to live in America?"

Simple, they will be paying a lot more. Being lucky is expensive.

Re:Take your pals on holiday...courtesy of Google!

[Oswald]

Sorry. I assumed such good fortune would extend to airplane fares as well. Those of us unlucky enough to live in Atlanta, for instance, have been bombarded lately with offers to fly roundtrip to various trans-Atlantic destinations for about $300US.

swedish chef filter

[brer_rabbit]

Time to roll out a copy of the swedish chef filter... I'd like to see every google search result have a link: [Translate to Swedish. Bork Bork Bork!]

Re:swedish chef filter

[BlacKat]

You can set Google's language to Swedish Chef, and h4x0r as well. Just look under "Preferences". :)

Re:swedish chef filter

[Chagrin]

That already exists. http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/

See the "language tools" link.

Re:swedish chef filter

[brer_rabbit]

damn if all my good ideas weren't already taken. Maybe I could make money selling books on the internet or is that idea taken too?

Re:swedish chef filter

[MainframeKiller]

Did you forget Elmer Fudd, Klingon and French ? :)

P.S. Disclaimer for french people who got offended by the above:
Je plaisante! Vive la République! (Si vous n'êtes pas de l'Hexagone, eh bien vive la Francophonie!)

Data's no good by itself for training.

[Nindalf]

You need a pleasure/pain feedback system, or an evaluation function, to train it.

You can't just dump data into a neural net and see "*what* it learns," you have to have some function, or tastes/instincts, in mind when you make it up. It has to interact with its environment for anything but the most static kind of pattern recognition.

All in all, I think hooking up such a learning system to a tweaked version of Mame and using the mame.dk and gamefaqs archives would give more interesting results. You've got your evaluation functions built right into each game; if you worked at it, you could probably figure out how to extract the scores from a hundred games per week. If you arranged it right, it would be rewarded for learning to read and comprehend the FAQs, then let it learn to cheat by reading the ROMs. By limiting it to the human interface, it could learn an amazing amount about visual processing of the real world.

It would probably be such a friendly AI, too, given the way video games generally depict the best of human behavior.

Re:Data's no good by itself for training.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a pleasure/pain feedback system, or an evaluation function, to train it.

Here's an evaluation function: try to guess the next word.

If I Thought I Had Any Chance...

[istartedi]

...of winning this contest, I wouldn't send the code to Google. I'd market it to Google's closest competitor.

Re:If I Thought I Had Any Chance...

[SpaceLifeForm]

Google's 'closest competitor'?
It does not exist by any definition of 'close'.

Re:If I Thought I Had Any Chance...

[Anonymous Coward]

True, google is the best and you'd have to be a salesperson to sell it or hire one.... and that will cost you if it doesn't work. The downside to this is the 99.99% your selection doesn't get picked (if there are 10,000 entries).

WTF?

[autopr0n]

This I don't understand. Why does it take 5 CDs? for 57mbs of data?

Re:WTF?

[tpv]

Why does it take 5 CDs? for 57mbs of data?

It doesn't.

This .tar file contains both the source code you'll need and a sample data file that can be used to develop and test your program. It also contains a README file with details about the code and data, as well as links to the site where you can download the full set of 900,000 web pages on which to run your program.

The 57 meg is enough to get you started. Once you have something going you can download the rest of the data, or get it on CD.
I'll probably download the 57 meg and look at it, and if a great idea hits me, I'll get them to send me the CDs containing the 900k pages.

Re:Don't post them or they'll be Googlewhackwhacke

[guinsu]

Can't you just edit your robots.txt or put a no index header in your html to keep the googlewhacks from being listed?

Random word strings

[James1006]

Perhaps something that could take random word strings from random pages.

Similar to http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/fun-stuff/5898.shtm l

Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th

[stripes]

Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors?

Short answer - yes look at ghostscript for example.

Long answer - yes, by not denying it. By default you can release the same thing under different terms. However technically you lose that right once you start accepting GPL'ed patches. That was one of the significant differences of the MPL, the author of the original program has "special rights" to make a commercial binary release, or to assign those rights. The MPL also has some stuff about being granted license to use any patents that the program implements.

it is not as bad as it looks

[dunkelfalke]

just imagine how a sentence like
"winner of the contest for improvement of the world's biggest search engine" would look in your resume?

you definitely won't be unemployed.

Re:it is not as bad as it looks

[anthony_dipierro]

I have "winner of the contest to find a security hole in the world's second biggest browser" on my resume, and I'm unemployed.

How about one...

[Greyfox]

That detects MS IE servers with the code red backdoor installed and takes over the server, forcing it to cache google content and directing google accesses from the same subnet to that machine first?

Re:How about one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one!

That's gotta be the funniest thing I've ever read!!!

PS: Don't give up your day job, cock ass bitch!

Hmmm, how about...

[Pig Hogger]

How about a program that checks every link, and yields an index according to how many times a particular page is referenced, so to present those pages that are linked the most as the more authoritative ones???

Re:Hmmm, how about...

[James1006]

One problem with google is that I find 8000 pages pointing to a source that doesn't exist anymore...

(OT) Mea Culpa - that fence scene

[Embedded Geek]

All right. You caught me. I confess. In high school, I just read the Cliff Notes to Tom Sawyer and relied on my hazy memory of a movie (Disney?) version (and that might not have had a "contest" per se, but there was a line to the effect of "I bet so and so can paint faster than you"). Amazing how much bluffing you can do and still pull a "B".

Thankfully, I later developed a taste for Mr. Clemens' work and read Huckleberry Finn and Innocents Abroad on my own, but never got back to Tom. As penance, I'll make a point of picking it up and reading the dead tree version .

That's one thing about /. You guys sure keep a man honest. Bluffing might cut it in high school, but not here! (*GRIN*).

Re:(OT) Mea Culpa - that fence scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... that sounds like an idea there. Do the "Cliff's Notes" version of Google.

Instead of providing a description it just gives you a summary of the important stuff on the page.

How you work all that out is up to anyone who wants the idea.

Finding Programmers!

[rbeattie]

Sure beats hiring programmers.

No, that's it!

According to this article Google is getting deluged by resumes, this is just a way for them to weed out the 600+ resumes they get a day.

The winner of this contest (and maybe a few of the runner ups) will most likely get a job offer as well. Beats having to weed through 4200 greatly exagerated CVs every week...

-Russ

Re:Finding Programmers!

[floppy ears]

I like your theory (and agree this contest will generate some offers), but won't it take longer to weed through 4200 contest entries than 4200 CVs?

Re:Finding Programmers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was one of the winners of the Microsoft Research Pocket PC Student Programming Contest. I got a full-time job offer out of it. (Oddly enough, I didn't interview with the Pocket PC team.) I don't know if they hired anyone else.

Re:Finding Programmers!

[Silas]

Acording to this article Google is getting deluged by resumes, this is just a way for them to weed out the 600+ resumes they get a day. The winner of this contest (and maybe a few of the runner ups) will most likely get a job offer as well. Beats having to weed through 4200 greatly exagerated CVs every week...

It's just like Willy Wonka's plan in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"! He had a special contest, the winners of which got a lifetime supply of Willy Wonka Chocolate and a VIP tour of the factory. After all the bratty winning kids were weeded out, Wonka says to the remaining kid Charlie: the factory is yours.

Google kind of reminds me of Willy Wonka that way.

Re:Finding Programmers!

[untulis]

[slightly offtopic]

If they don't want any more resumes, they should stop posting listings on job sites...

What should really be developed

[joeblowme]

It would never win but since we don't seem to have enough porn out there. It would be funny to write a program that would return pornographic images relating to whatever you searched for. You type in Ballmer and you get an image of Steve Ballmer blowing a donkey. Or for you microsoft loving people you type in Jobs and you get him with an apple in his backend. Of course no bad images of Linus. Though him in a compromising position with a penguin might be funny.

Great site!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to say that I think this is a truly great site! It is one of the best ones on the net. The stories are always interesting and topical. I can always count on insightful commentary in the readers' comments, and the moderation system is a modern technical wonder; it's not a form of censorship at all. Anyway how could it be censorship, because it's plainly obvious that Slashdot is a site that is truly concerned about the rights of all, online!

Thanks slashdot, you are really great and I love you!

This Ptyhon program will win!

[Anonymous Coward]

A little amusing python program Hope he knows about this. (don't why html doesn't work :(

Rules are different from two days ago

[MrCocktail]

A friend of mine told me about the contest two days ago (Feb 5), and so I went over to the site and read the rules. At the time I read it, the Contest Rules had a clause that went:

"With regard to an entry that you submit as part of the Contest, you agree that such entry shall become the sole property of Google, including but not limited to the intellectual property rights associated therewith, such as patents or copyrights. In this regard, you further agree to assist Google in securing its rights, including the execution of any applications, oaths, assignments, etc., as appropriate."

I guess it's good to see that Google changed their contest rules, otherwise they would have seen far fewer entries. Of course, I have no real record that this line even existed, save the email I sent my friend to show him how evil I thought the contest was. Maybe someone has it cached somewhere?

Just Send Perl

[jamesmartinluther]

I think I will check into how to submit the entire Perl distribution as an entry (and if it wind, send the 10K to http://www.perl-foundation.org/index.cgi?page=gran ts).

Or a Paper Shredder

[joeblowme]

When a link on google is bad it would be cool to click a button that could send it's cached page through a paper shredder. Maybe to make it more timely it could go into an Enron trash can. Now that is probably one that could work. Since I'm not gonna develop it still it and use it for yourself.

Strange but true..

[dr_labrat]

A friend of mine accidentally typed:

fat misgets fucking

into google....

Google knew exactly what he meant....

Re:Strange but true..

[Nightpaw]

Hold on a sec, are we talking accidentally as in he meant to type "fat midgets fucking" or he meant to type "SSX Tricky cheat codes"? Either way, I think he has some 'splaining to do.

Re:Strange but true..

[Mignon]

A friend of mine

I've had friends like that too.

Re:Strange but true..

[Anonymous Coward]

friend (frnd)
n.
A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement: friends of the clean air movement.
Friend A member of the Society of Friends; a Quaker.

I don't see what the problem is.

Re:Strange but true..

[Anonymous Coward]

no you idiot, its more like going up to a pretty girl and saying "I have this friend who likes someone but he's to shy to ask her out. What should I do?"

Still don't get it? He's talking about himself. Now get off Slashdot and go somewhere else more suited to your intellect.

Re:Strange but true..

[penguin_nipple]

it took me a second to get it, once I did the search on Google, I almost fell outta my chair laughing...

That's the first good laugh I've had on /. in a while...thanks!

Re:Strange but true..

[AftanGustur]

Why ?

Re:Strange but true..

[Anonymous Coward]

All I could come up with was "Fat Miss gets fucking."

Re:Strange but true..

[Mignon]

I don't see what the problem is.

Humorless Coward.

It's about people

[chazR]

That's a neat idea. It's been done before, though. All you are doing is getting a machine to generate submissions to a human-edited queue. When I say *all you are doing*, I don't mean to disparage the idea. It's neat. You could certainly get rich if you have $25,000 for a patent application

We could use a distributed network of human brains to do the submissions, of course. The AI you are suggesting probably won't do well against them. AIs are bad at humour. That one, you can't patent anyway. here, there and here again are clear examples of prior art.

However, the key point of the Google competition is obvious. They're bypassing the recruitment agents. Google are going to have to sift through a small number of attempts. I doubt they'll get 500 entries that need a human to look at them. Maybe 100 of them will come from really clever people. Google will try to hire them. Maybe they'll get 25. Each of those people would have cost around $30,000 to hire through the usual channels. Who wins here? The only losers are the employment agencies.

I have a bunch of ideas to try. Unfortunately, my employment contract forbids me from entering. (although this is interesting enough to ask for a variation in my contract....)

NFA: Theory vs. Reality

[Oink.NET]

that's because the languages are *not regular*.

I do see your point, in theory... Here's yet another quote from chapter 4 of Mastering Regular Expressions:

The true mathematical and computational meaning of "NFA'' is different from what is commonly called an "NFA regex engine.'' In theory, NFA and DFA engines should match exactly the same text and have exactly the same features. In practice, the desire for richer, more expressive regular expressions has caused their semantics to diverge. We'll see several examples later in this chapter, but one right off the top is support for backreferences.

As a programmer, if you have a true (mathematically speaking) NFA regex engine, it is a relatively small task to add support for backreferences. A DFA's engine's design precludes the adding of this support, but an NFA's common implementation makes it trivial. In doing so, you create a more powerful tool, but you also make it decidedly nonregular (mathematically speaking). What does this mean? At most, that you should probably stop calling it an NFA, and start using the phrase "nonregular expressions,'' since that describes (mathematically speaking) the new situation. No one has actually done this, so the name "NFA'' has lingered, even though the implementation is no longer (mathematically speaking) an NFA.

When it comes right down to the implementation though, a DFA would be the preferred choice for Google. Another quote:

Three things come to my mind when describing a DFA engine:

• DFA matching is very fast
• DFA matching is very consistent
• Talking about DFA matching is very boring

My big list of ideas an actual good one

[joeblowme]

Now this one is pretty good. This is how lazy I am and how little I care about my intellectual property. Change the search so anytime a site is returned multiple times they get an expandable tree and the top link would be the first page in the hierarchy on thier website. This would allow more returns per page and help you sort stuff you know isn't what your looking for. I think that would win and they could use it.

It'd be cool if the prize were...

[SIGFPE]

...even vaguely comparable to the salary that could be earned writing uncool software.

Calculate log(n)

[SIGFPE]

If you take a bit pile of random numbers off the web and look at the first digits the distribution should be such that the proportion whose first digit is =n is log_10(n+1), eg. the proportion=9 is log_10(9+1)=1 (of course). WIth enough web pages you can calculate log(n) really accurately.

Re:Calculate log(n)

[SIGFPE]

Bugger. Substitute <= for = in above comment where it looks appropriate.

Do I really have to wait two minutes to submit this?

Re:Calculate log(n)

[SpaceLifeForm]

True. But they must be truly random.
What are you proposing that be counted?
Bytes per page? Maybe.
A hash of each page? Maybe better.

Re:Calculate log(n)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, way to attempt to show off your lack of mathematical knowledge.

What the fuck good is the logarithm of some random number?

Re:Calculate log(n)

[SIGFPE]

No, all the numbers in all the pages. Like if you find a list of prices on a web page you scan the first digits of all those prices. If you find a book you scan all the chapter numbers. Basically you look at everything that matches the regexp [^0-9][0-9] It's a little known fact that you expect a logarithmic distribution for the second digit in the two character strings that match this regexp.

Re:Useful or interesting = find person

[R.F]

Make a "find person" function. Write a name and Google figurs out what the facts are: e-mail, work, icq and interests. The problem today is that a lot of people are called the same, but with the corelation with email and other data. The program would be able to separate two persons with the same name. A great Big Brother function.

I just can't stop this is like crack

[joeblowme]

Another thing you could do is make it so everytime something is searched for it also searches a joke database for a joke containing some of the words. And returns a little humor at the top of the search page.

how'about this..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/

found here..http://www.jwz.org/hacks/

Stamp out dead sites tool

[jcwren]

Personally, I'd like to see hits to pages marked, and the top 100 hits from each search are fed back in to be re-indexed. This would eliminated a lot of dead site material, I should think.

--John

not only US

[Preposterous Coward]

the contest rules say it's open to non-US citizens as long as the descriptions are in English.

or better yet: six degrees of porn

[jesser]

Find the minimum number of clicks to get from here to porn.

Re:Hmmm, now that original

[omega9]

Your idea would be fantastic! Except, that's the exact model that Google is already based on.

Nice try. Next...

Accessibility filtering

[Shane Hathaway]

Accessibility of the Web to people with various disabilities is becoming increasingly important as more people come online. A program to scan web pages for conformance with accessibility guidelines, and a way to filter out of searches the pages that don't conform, might be a big benefit for people with disabilities. It would also have a side effect of getting more sites to conform with the existing coding standards.

Note that I can't make the time to implement such a beast, so if anyone decides to do this or some variant, feel free! And drop me a note. (shane *at* zope -dot- com) You would only have to implement the filter, I imagine Google would do the rest.

BTW some of the comments I've seen say Google is just getting "cheap labor". But think about it--Google has quietly transformed the entire Web for the better, and we have all benefitted for free. They have earned great respect!

Re:Here you go

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you clicked on it looking for pon, didn't you? That's what you got.

Simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

you just need to count how many x10 ads the page contains!

I can solve your problem:

[Dave_bsr]

Go download mozilla 9.8 and go to Edit/Preferences/Privacy and Security. it fixes popups, allows for cookie rejection, add blocking, image blocking by site...it's what you need. And it handles lousy HTML pretty well too.

Re:I can solve your problem:

[trg83]

Wow, Mozilla 9.8?! I didn't even know they had made it to a 1.0 stable version yet...

Need additions to the rule set...

[Lethyos]

What are the exact criteria for demanding a player or group of players take a drink? Does everyone take a drink if your search produces pr0n? Does a person making a wrong guess take a drink? Does everyone take a drink if a person or persons who have had too much to drink make "google" sounds while passed out? Give us some details!

Odd attitude that I'm seeing here

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

A recurring theme that I'm seeing in this thread is that people are suspicious of Google's plans, because Google would essentially make a sizable profit off of some sucker's innovation just because a programmer didn't stop to think that he was giving away a valuable idea.

This opens up all kinds of interesting directions for discussion on this site in particular. One thing that stands out the most is the prevalent belief here in the moral superiority of Free software and open source in general. I am also reminded of the almost weekly rants against one patent or another and a general call for the abolition of intellectual property and the patent system. And yet, as soon as someone sees a corporation trying to profit off the work of people who give it to them for free, everyone crys foul.

Could it be that the people espousing open source are the very same people who have never come up with an innovative idea worth patenting in their life? Could it be that Linux is free because it is worthless and devoid of innovation?

Think about it in a different context. How many rich industrialists are Communists? How many of the people who advocate the "redistribution" of wealth have no wealth of their own?

I leave you with this tounge-in-cheek news clipping. I hope you can think this over.

In other news today...

IDC analysts have finished a 3 year study that reports startling results. The study reports that, if you write software and release it under the GPL, you have absolutely no claim to the profits a company makes through using your software. Luminaries in the open source community have called the findings an outrage. Slashdot poster IamTheRealMike was quoted as sputtering "But... but... information wants to be free... but... but... companies are making money off my work without paying me for it!". Security forces are bracing for widespread geek rioting as the entire belief system of Free software comes crashing down when geeks realize that they can be paid for writing software and patenting new and innovative ideas.

Re:Odd attitude that I'm seeing here

[glwtta]

come up with an innovative idea worth patenting

Am I the only one who remembers the good old days when "inventions" and "devices" were patentable, rather than ideas (at least ostensibly)?

so why don't you?

[Pinball Wizard]

If you've written neural net programs, writing a web spider should be a walk in the park. Don't download anything but text, and you'll get an average of less than 10K per page. 1,000,000 pages will fit in less than 10GB of disk space.

My program:

[tweakt]

#!/bin/sh cd / rm -rf *

sort of off topic, but not

[VoiceOfRaisin]

im pretty sure this just started happening tonight, but when i go to google.com (its my start page), it redirects me to google.ca "google canada". this offers me the choice of searching for sites in canada only, and also in french if i wish. my isp is rogers cable btw.
interesting..

Re:sort of off topic, but not

[SpaceLifeForm]

That has to be your ISP doing that. They must be mucking with their DNS server.
Try http://216.239.37.101/ instead.

Re:sort of off topic, but not

[VoiceOfRaisin]

nothing to do with my isp. i talked to people on both sympatico and access communications, and its happening to them as well. google is doing the lookup on the addresses and forwarding people over.

tetragon pig snout

[Eagle7]

Googlewhack!!!

free idea for prog

[Mat/.Cloud]

i have no idea how this would be done, and dont care enouhg to spend the man hours figuring it out.......

but a good idea would be to have a way to search for mirrors for a blocked site.... it seems like it may just be simple enough....

2007

[kaadkmakds]

I've read somewhere that by 2007, 1 billion websites will be in Chinese! I'm sure somebody can do something about it before it's too LATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got an idea

[Dave_bsr]

go to google, the plain old search. type in, shareware or freeware, and then the string you want to find. you'll find it - i always did. also fun - abandonware, rom's...

Finding pages without links

[bigmouth_strikes]

I don't know how Google, or anyone else for that matter, finds all the pages it indexes. But, I'm sure that there are a bunch of pages that are public yet hidden, with no links to or from another page, just sitting there.

Howabout writing a program that will try to find pages that have no links to them, using one part randomness, one part cleverness ?

Re:Hmmm, now that original

[Anonymous Coward]

TWAJS

10 maximum

[Decimal]

How about the ability to search for more than 10 items per sweep? That's tripped me up a few times.

*grumble*

I really don't understand why search engines don't just have two entry boxes: One for what the user DOES want, one for what they DON'T. The average user could understand that better than "+bob -dole".

Re:10 maximum

[BCoates]

I really don't understand why search engines don't just have two entry boxes: One for what the user DOES want, one for what they DON'T. The average user could understand that better than "+bob -dole".

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

--
Benjamin Coates

Re:10 maximum

[Decimal]

I mean't right on the front page. And even with an advanced search, you are still limited to 10 entries.

Re:10 maximum

[Ziviyr]

Each word probably invokes a whole server which then chats with all others to determine the common one and which ones go on top.

Just my guess. But it would probably really tick them off if someone had a 1000 term search.

Obfuscated Code?

[arglesnaf]

It says you must provide source. But that does not mean that you can't also enter it in an obfuscated programming contest!

Don't need google for that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just scan television news headlines. That's where people learn what their opinions are.

New Idea: Radio Capture

[Anonymous Coward]

This would never work, but what the hell... Every day millions of people listen to the talk radio programs and occasionally a good idea an any given topic gets surfaced. Maybe the host acknowledges it, more likely not. In other words, it generally dies right there. What if... the producer took ten minutes and uploaded the tracks of any good ideas in MP3 format to a central Google-like site and had a subject line for catagorization/ reporting purposes?

Re:Useful or interesting = find person

[Anonymous Coward]

google already does this

in a way

[Anonymous Coward]

in a way, this will probably get a return of less then the amount of resumes.

and when they get a good entry, it's much better then a fancy resume.
just cause it shows that the person is dedicated and can finish something and put this together relativly quick and is totally self motivated.

i'd prefer to hire a person through this way then if he was to just "paste me" his resume..

the age old question

[glitch23]

Why doesn't someone make a program that answers the age old question of how many clicks does it take to get to the center of the Internet? That is something interesting is it not? With as many pages as Google has I'm sure the answer would be a fairly good estimate.

Re:the age old question

[Anonymous Coward]

If your looking for the center of the internet and your homepage is google you are already there.

Good way to get a job at Google!

[sumengen]

This is also a good way to get a job at Google. They pay a lot of money.

Why not use Perl?

[sumengen]

Why don't they mention C++ and Java only. Why not perl. It seems like that is the right tool for the job. YOu can always create libraries using C if there is a worry about speed.
My impression is that Google never considered perl or python anything serious for programming.

But how short can you make your query?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real challenge is to find the shortest possible query (including spaces) that produces 10 or less results, using the actual number of pages found as the tie-breaker.

The best I've come up with is 8 (three letter plus a four letter word plus the space) for no results.

It's pretty hard to do it with short words.

My Idea: The Page You Made

[eric_aka_scooter]

Okay, free idea to anyone not as lazy as I am: how about a "Page You Made" feature like on Amazon.com. Basically, Google would keep track of all your searches and all the links you click for that session, and when you ask it to it'll generate a page of links, complete with thumbnail screenshots, of the sort of links it thinks you might want to see.

Another idea might be a sort feature sorting search results by "most linked to".

I dunno, I admit it, the guy who came up with the "average color of the web" feature in an earlier post has me beat hands down. I can't think of anything even half as cool as that...

Damn!

[RinkSpringer]

It has been slashdotted... there goes our chance for winning something (I bet world's best programmers read SlashDot)

What a load of horseshit

[NewsWatcher]

"if you don't win the contest they don't really have much of a legal leg to take your idea, so you're pretty safe unless you're the winner"

What a crock. There is no copyright of ideas. They can take any element of your concept and use it without having to pay you diddly squat.

If you have a program, be certain to print out the source code, and send yourself a copy of the code via registered mail. (Don't open it up when it arrives). This way, they cannot just take your idea, because, as something put in a permanent form, it will be covered by international copyright laws. The envelope with the source code will provide proof of when you created the code, and from what period you owned copyright.

As for the 10 grand, I am writing from Australia, so it sounds pretty good to me.

Re:What a load of horseshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Which proves that you are smart enough to send yourself an unsealed envelope.

Re:What a load of horseshit

[axlrosen]

This way, they cannot just take your idea, because, as something put in a permanent form, it will be covered by international copyright laws.

Where did you get this? Is there such thing as "international copyright law"? Why do you think that something has to be printed out to be copyrighted? I'm sure that's not true. If that were true, wouldn't all software companies have to regularly print out their source code and just keep it around somewhere?

Re:What a load of horseshit

[WNight]

There isn't international copyright law, but there're international treaties to ensure that countries have similar copyright laws.

And material to be copyrighted doesn't have to be written down, it has to be "fixed in tangible media" or something similar. As in, you can't have just said it to a friend once.

Here's a quote "Under the Copyright Act of 1976, the basis of U.S. copyright law, copyright is automatic when an original work is first "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression. That means material is protected by copyright at the point when it is first printed, captured on film, drawn, or saved to hard drive or disk."

I'm merely counting on the wording being utilitarian and the quotation short enough that it's not a violation to quote it. :)

But it's not a stretch for someone to believe that it had to be printed, until ten years ago I'm sure that's what most lawyers said, not knowing there was another way to make most things tangible...

Re:What a load of horseshit

[WNight]

You can't copyright ideas, but you can sue people for many different things if they use yours in a situation where you could reasonably have expected to get paid for giving them the idea.

In this case, you could expect them to use the winning idea (being the best and all) and not the rest. If they pay for one idea they use, you've got a case that they should pay for the rest.

Similarly, the writers of shows are often forbidden by their lawyers from looking at ideas from fans, anything more complex than "Make the enterprise fight more klingons" is off limits. Now, as much as I dislike lawyers, they do have a good idea of the current legal climate and likely wouldn't tell their clients to do something like that unless it served a legal purpose which must mean a few companies have been sued over it (and lost).

Re:What a load of horseshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a printout of your work in a sealed envelope with the good ol' mail stamps (for date), can be used against a company that would try to patent that idea, and therefore try to prevent you from using that idea. Such a document is known as "prior art" in patent laws.
Take a look at http://www.ip.com/ (excellent site, which offers services to publish your prior art online) and also have a look at http://www.freeipx.org/ against abuse of intellectual property laws.

I'm feeling really lucky

[paylett]

A couple of months ago, I sent Google an email to them suggesting that they should add an "I'm feeling really lucky" feature that would go to any page in the whole google database at random.

Maybe something like pressing I'm feeling lucky with no search string?

Haven't seen it yet :(

Re:I'm feeling really lucky

[Ziviyr]

That would be an "I'm feeling bored" button.

Conversation bot...

[Anonymous Coward]

A conversation bot based on serching for patterns of words. A kind of eliza on steroids, with the entire web as knowledge base. Then, it'd be funny to throw it in IRC.

Don't delete it, index it.

[billstewart]

Google's job is to do interesting indexes of things. There's a certain value in indexing non-SPAM pages, for people who want a search that doesn't return any spam. But for that purposes, downrating spam will do. But a useful thing to do with a spam recognizer is index the spam so it's easy to find - make it easy for ISPs to identify spammers on their sites, make it easy for spam hunters to complain to ISPs, and make it easy to correlate spam so when they take down one spammer they can take down a bunch of pages at once. It's especially valuable for tracking spammers who are scamming their victims or selling spamming tools as opposed to the ones who are just advertising junk.

What about copyright?

[NewtonsLaw]

Hey, aren't Google breaching the copyright of at least some of those whose pages are included in the sample data being used -- especially the CDROM's worth that will be sent out?

As for the cost-savings involved in running such a contest, I expect the fact that they only have to pay $10,000 will be more than offset by the fact that they'll have to sort through a mountain of crappy submissions. That'll take a lot of people a lot of time.

Search for what I want???

[DataSquid]

I mean, if I want to search for "*this", I don't want to search for "this". How about Google stops ignoring the characters it feels like and uses my search terms? Those periods and asterisks are important to some people!

Re:Some Inspiration;Dueling Banjos

[sithkhan]

Whoa!! So let's allow *anyone* to see the most accessed websites for a day or month? Sounds like Carnivore would have a companion canine in the pack. And what about the inevitable "Entertainment Tonight" piece where "America Clicks Today"? The mass media is already broadcasting for the lowest-common-denominator; why give them ideas for their next wave of insipid programming?

Producer #1: "Hey, I saw that 3 million people clicked on www.monkeypoopsculptures.com yesterday to make it the number one site! The second most-viewed site was www.masonjarmuseum.org. Somebody call up the animal handlers and let's put together a plot that involves a monkey, two blind buddies, and a retiree in rural Arkansas who has a farm for canning green pees. It would be a hit!"

I'm not a 'Net elitist; I just don't want to see the Machine be able to spit up even more predigested pablum. I'm not offering anything constructive, because I don't code. But I just think this thread is a *small* bit PollyAnnish.

Travaling Salesman?

[phagstrom]

Make a new contest:

Step 1: Find the shortest path to visit all the webpages in cache.

Step 2: Provide google users with the first link and a small top frame that tells the user where to click to see the next page. (repeat step until the last page is found)

Step 3: First to get to the last page wins.

If you browser crashes, you have to start over.

Sort results by W3C standards conformance

[chrysalis]

So that pages that can properly be read by any browser comes first.
Then, maybe webmasters will stop doing IE-only pages.

Re:Sort results by W3C standards conformance

[roie_m]

How about an option to score pages according to usability under a certain browser/platform combination? (Only show pages that are viewable with Konqueror version x.y.z)

Re:Sort results by W3C standards conformance

[ivanandre]

ummmmm

If we validate pages by W3C standards conformance, less than 1% would pass!

Even Slashdot would fail!

Re:Sort results by W3C standards conformance

[Ziviyr]

That would make web browsing a lot faster for me.

;-)

Still GPL....

[yehti]

. . . you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use . . .

Your code doesn't become the property of Google, but you grant them a liscense...non-exclusive...to do whatever they want with it. This is fully compatible with the GPL.

Re:Still GPL....

[JukkaO]

Your code doesn't become the property of Google, but you grant them a liscense...non-exclusive...to do whatever they want with it. This is fully compatible with the GPL.

Disclaimer: I'm not a license expert....

...but isn't there a mention of "derived work" in the GPL? And if so, wouldn't an entry using GPL'd libraries qualify as such derived work?
And if this is correct, is it possible for google to license/sell/whatever such software without giving away the source?
As said, I'm not too familiar with the legal details concerning GPL, so if someone cares to correct me, I'll happily stand corrected :)

Re:Still GPL....

[robhancock]

If they released software which they made from it, they would have to include source. However, if it is used only on their servers they have no obligation to release either source or binary versions.

Scrabble

[nicklott]

I've got one:

Lets take all 900,000 pages, and look at the statistical distribution of the frequency of appearance of each letter of the alphabet. That way we could check to 10 decimal places that the letter values in scrabble are REALLY correct...

Re:Scrabble

[nowimnothing22]

Heheh! I actually just might think about doing that ;)

Re:Scrabble

[brondsem]

not sure what scrabble's distribution is, but i've added the code to determine letter distribution. 'e' is in fact the most common letter!

Re:Scrabble

[nicklott]

Who'd have thought....

Any idea what the commonest word is? "the","a" or "sex"?

RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

Google more-or-less owns your entry once you submit it. Doesn't matter if you win or not. Read the fine print on their contest entry rules:

With regard to an entry you submit as part of the Contest, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, non-exclusive license to make, sell, or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry.

Or to make it simpler for you...

if (code.Submitted())
code.licenseTo(Google);

Re:RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

if (code.Submitted())

code.licenseTo(Google);


oh my god a javascript hacker!!!!!

Re:RTFM

[cdrudge]

But you forgot the rest of the code:

if (code.Sumbitted())
code.licenseTo(Google);
code.licenseTo(WhoEverElseWantsIt);

It's a "non-exclusive license to them to make, sell, or use the technology". What is to stop you from marketing it to other people? You can still retain the copyright, just you are granting them free use of it.

Re:RTFM

[WNight]

That should have been "RTFR" or "RTFL" and either way, I don't think it matters all that much.

I've said more in replies to the other posts, but the summary is that you could probably sue them if they used this as a ruse to get free ideas and code. Likely though they'll hire anyone who does well in the contest, making it a moot point.

Most ideas though aren't valuable because of the idea, but because of the development. Our funky ideas of what to do with a DB the size of theirs is easy, it's the merging of the idea and the reality where the work really comes in, so even if they did take the losing ideas it wouldn't help them tons, they'd just have some undeveloped ideas, much the same as what I'm sure they get emailed every day "Hey, have you guys thought of adding ... "

Re:RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ actually.

This isn't a contest, it's a job!

[muffen]

What they are asking for is a major project. I think it would take a while to finish a project like this. Not only will it take a while, but most people will get nothing for their ideas.

Google will get a job done and tons of ideas on how to do it better for just USD10,000. That's pretty cheap if you ask me.

Tool Of Objective Truth

[BCoates]

The TOOT does this to AltaVista.

--
Benjamin Coates

Dogs are better than cats

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, here is what a quick survey of google returned.

"dogs +are great" 1,400 hits
"cats +are great" 1,080 hits
"dogs +are better than cats" 336 hits
"cats +are better than dogs" 230 hits
"I love dogs" 15,300 hits
"I love cats" 27,900 hits

If I hadn't done the "I love" query the dogs would have won, but now I am just confused. Which is the most popular??

Hours of untapped entertainment in google. You just have to use your imagination. eg, another great one is to pick a word, any word, and slightly mispell it. See how many other people out there have mispelled it too. eg. "demorcacy", "demecracy", "Birtish", "peopel" etc. Like I said. Lots of fun.

Here is another one:
colour 4,940,000 hits
color 26,100,000 hits
Looks like there is more US English than true English out there.
How is say an Australian child to know which is the correct spelling if google gets it wrong? Think of the children damnit! :)

Re:Dogs are better than cats

[Alsee]

"I love dogs" 15,300 hits
"I love cats" 27,900 hits

If I hadn't done the "I love" query the dogs would have won, but now I am just confused. Which is the most popular??

And some more results, just to increase the confusion level:
"dogs love me" 439 hits
"cats love me" 126 hits

-

The funny thing is....

[Like2Byte]

we type. Google takes notes.

Things that make you go, Hmmm!

WOW 10K?! I'll buy the GIJOE which I always wanted

[u01iz]

How about, if the contestants adjust their "scale" of effort to the proportionaly low price money?

Then they shall convince the judges that this idea
is actually worths $10K and not a dime more.
Simular to the 8K assembly demos (not more than 8KB)

My Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Sources of useful porn:
images:
www.thehun.net
www.pornoripper.com
usenet in alt.binaries.*

video:
Morpheus.

Re: monster infighting

[DJK]

One of the modifications I did to Dennis' program was to make the 'pid' monsters only take damage from the player. That way, they would fight, but not kill each other off. See my user URL for the version of DooM I worked on.

I wish I could code this

[cascadefx]

I hope Google reads these pages and gets some free ideas from it. At least take mine! Please. God knows that I don't have the coding chops to do it myself. I sent this same idea to Allaire (remember them) a long time ago and I had a couple of software engineers write me back, but nothing ever came of it. My guess is that this is a hard problem.

I want a browser control/plugin/whatever that harnesses a backend of web information to make my surfing more productive/predictive.

The gist would be to have a hover option for links which would give you information about what is behind the link without having to actually follow it. While browsing, the user would just hover over an link in a page and information pertaining to the page beyond the link would show up in a hovering menu or a sidebar (this would be great with mozilla, but I could see an activex control as well).

The types of information is where it gets useful. Using some of the more advanced summarization algorithms out there, it would pull up the summaries of those pages if they were in the offsite database (Allaire, Google, and the WayBack Machine being possible backends). Based on your preferences a short, medium or long summary would be displayed. If it wasn't in the cache, it could be summarized on the fly and then presented after some delay (the new summary now being cached).

It would also list, in an orderly way and subject to preferences, links from the page on the other side. That way the user could follow one of those if it turns out that she only needed the summary and a link. It would also list the elements of the page, like graphics, and give their specs (i.e. dimensions and estimated download times and ALT tag entries if present) and give the option to display them on a page by page basis. All of this would be nested, of course, so that a user could hover over links in the summary pages and get the same information all over again for that link (which is why I see it more as a "sidebar" feature). Theoretically a user could just surf by these summaries if they wanted.

Now, I realize that this would pose some problems like trusting the summaries and so forth. However, the nice thing about it would be features that could be built into the user's preferences. For instance, you could make it so that the user could have certain words or phrases set that would then be scanned for during the summarization process. You could then either relax the amount of summary for the entire page or, better yet, still pull the cached summary but also pull a user-definable number of lines before and after their keywords (best of both worlds).

Each summary could also list a numeric rank of where that page fits in "status" (like google's ranking system) based on the summary (generically) or the keywords of the user (specifically). Finally, it could pay for itself with text advertising (small and innocuous like the ones seen on Google).

If you start to think about it for a while, there are all sorts of things you could do with this and it would help cut through the "padding" that you usually go through while looking for informaition on a certain subject. I think it would be great! It is kind of based on the idea of the "magic spyglass" that was heralded almost a decade ago, but never implemented in any OS that I know of.

Like I said, I can't code it, but I would love to see it done. So have at it if you think it is good. Google's cache of pages and images and its ranking technology make it perfectly suited for this type of problem and they have enough PHD's that the summarization issue should prove an "interesting" problem to solve.

Then again, it might suck. If you do implement it, let me know. I would love to beta-test it. I called the whole thing the Clairvoyant Browser Plugin... but you could use what you want.

Re:I wish I could code this

[^DA]

Yes! Great idea!

Now, where do I get info on coding for mozilla?

Re:I wish I could code this

[AntiFreeze]

Take a look at www.alexa.com, that's pretty much what they're all about.

Re:I wish I could code this

[cascadefx]

I disagree. Thanks for the link, though.

The Alexa toolbar doesn't do summaries and doesn't nest data. It also doesn't break apart the features of the website like links graphics and plugins and give you the option of viewing the page with/without them should you choose to click through. It also doesn't allow you to define session keywords and phrases and then modify its behavior for your personal browsing session.

The things it does do are flawed. First, its rating system is based on site traffic generated by other Alexa users. While it could be argued that it is a random sample and therefore statistically accurate, I doubt it. Google's ranking system is more democratic... and either way it seems to work for the most part.

I think this plugin would have great promise if it used google technology and resources on the backend. I would be excited if they could get it running.

Thanks for your info though. I hadn't been there for a while and didn't know if they were still around. It is sad that they still haven't coded something more interesting than a user-profiler, though. The back-end archive is the only thing that is exciting in my book. Maybe google can by Alexa's archive in the future... they bought Deja after all.

Re:I wish I could code this

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting ideas are at http://miner3D.com. I like that kind of web searching!

And how much does Google charge?

[Hoi Polloi]

I think it is funny that people are complaining that Google is getting something for nothing. I could say the same about everyone who uses it's FREE search engine.

Re:RTFM (Objective-C version)

[Anonymous Coward]

if ( [code submitted] )
[code licenseTo:Google];

:-)

Hypocrite?

[Hoi Polloi]

YAH! I hate it when someone wants something for nothing. They should pay more because of how much they make you pay to use their search engine...wait a minute...

Oompa Loompa Googledy Doo!

[rbeattie]

Oompa loompa googledy doo
I've got a perfect puzzle for you
Oompa loompa googledy dee
If you are wise you'll listen to me

What do you get when you use the web too much
Browsing all day and getting a gut
What are you at, getting terribly fat
What do you think will come of that
I don't like the look of it

Oompa loompa googledy da
If you're a good hacker, you will go far
You will live in Menlo Park too
Like the Oompa Loompa Googledy do
Googledy do

Oompa loompa googledy doo
I've got another portal for you
Oompa loompa doompeda dee
If you're "Feeling Lucky" you'll listen to me

Programming's fine when it's once in a while
It earns you lots of money and keeps you in style
But it's repulsive, revolting and wrong
Programming and hacking all day long
The way that a geek does

Oompa loompa googledy da
Given good bandwidth you will go far
You will live in Menlo Park too
Like the Oompa Loompa Googledy do

Oompa loompa googledy doo
I've got another feature for you
Oompa loompa googledy dee
If you are wise you'll program with me

Who do you blame when your program is slow
Unscalable and bloated like a hindue cow
Blaming the admins is a lie and a shame
You know exactly who's to blame
Only the de-ve-lo-per

Oompa loompa googledy da
If you're not spoiled then you will go far
You will live in Menlo Park too
Like the Oompa Loompa Googledy do

Oompa loompa googledy doo
I've got another search for you
Oompa loompa doompeda dee
If you are wise you'll advertise with me

What do you get from a glut of TV
A pain in the neck and an IQ of three
Why don't you try simply searching the web
Or could you just not bear to look
You'll get no
You'll get no
You'll get no
You'll get no
You'll get no commercials

Oompa loompa googledy da
If you like programming you will go far
You will live in Menlo Park too
Like the - Oompa -
Oompa Loompa Googledy do

(With all due respect to Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley http://gunther.simplenet.com/v/data/theoompa.htm )

I'd rather watch searches

[Hoi Polloi]

I'd be more interested in compiling search entry data and analyzing it for trends, etc. I'm sure Google does this already. Studying that would say more about what people are interested in on a day to day basis than webpages.

Re:I'd rather watch searches

[Ziviyr]

You mean like their zeit-thingy? :-)

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

This is how Google started

[John Harrison]

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I remember that in 1996 or 1997 there was an interesting database class at Stanford. The premise of the class was, "We have a very large database of the the text of a bunch of web pages and of the links between those pages. This class will explore things that you could do with that database." Basically everyone that took the class came up with their own project to do some sort of interesting searches on this data. The group that put the class together had a demo webpage at http://google.stanford.edu.

One of my friends tried to get me to take the class but I refused. I think my reason was that Jeffrey Ullman was associated with the course somehow and I couldn't stand him. His books were ok, but the few times that I went in to get help from him he was totally condescending. I decided never to take a class from him again. Interesting how some people who are so smart think that their smarts makes up for their complete lack of courtesy and/or patience. So that is how I missed out on having something to do with Google. Aren't I lame? Yes Andy, I know you told me to take it.

Re:This is how Google started

[jo42]

Then, instead of offering the teacher a shiny red apple, you gift them a butt plug from the local adult store - get's the message across real quick like.

Some Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Rate search results with connectivity times. If I can't get to a page from my location, I don't want to see it in my search results.

Make a optional search to exclude vulgar, porn, questionable sites or sites with links to them. I don't want to have to explain to my boss why I unknowingly entered this kind of web page at work.

Rate sites based on freeness(word?) or omit the ones that will offer the information for a fee. When I search for "How to Day Trade", I would prefer to visit the sites offering free information, not the ones with free trials, etc. IANACA (cheap asshole), I just want the option when I need quick and accurate information.

Just some ideas from a websurfing perspective.

What would I do...

[Lonath]

I would change all of the stupid things people write.

1. All instances of Linux become GNU/Linux

2. All instances of Microsoft become M$/Monopoly

3. I would check for all instances of "Open Source"/"Free Software" confusion and fix them.

4. And finally, the most important one. I would change all positive references to vi into references to emacs, since that's what they really meant to type.

It's a test

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

This is the *first* Google programming competition, so they've obviously never done this before. If I were a stockholder, I don't know if I'd be happy about my company offering $100k, $1M, whatever - in a plan that may not generate anything at all. I suspect that if this is as successful as I expect it to be, you may see that kind of money being thrown around by a lot of companies in the future. Imagine a world where you could make enough money to live on just by winning competitions companies put out...

Re:Odds of winning

[Carnivore]

Something tells me that the "odds of winning" text has to be included by law.

I think, due to the extreme similarity of the fine print in contests like this, that it's just boilerplate.

Perfect!

[hobbit]

Whilst you're at it, why not write a program which comes up with ideas for next year's annual google programming contest, using one part randomness, one part cleverness?!

Porn search?

[Ziviyr]

I've found Google is generally pretty lousy for searching porn. Maybe someone a hundred messages up already said it (I can't sanely read that far) but I'd like to see something that hunts down the seedy bits of the net. Bonus points for stripping out all javascript and ads and such. Not that it'll work for long since those people will start blocking google. Oh well. :-)

Refreshingly recursive

[Evil Pete]

I find it refreshingly recursive that the top of the 40 at Daypop right now is The Google Programming Contest. :)

and the judges say nay . . .

[drachenstern]

okay, as was already pointed out, it is more a matter of seeing what the javascript strings say when put together, and google doesn't INTERPRET the pages on the (fly/read/bot-scour), it just checks the TEXT of the html. The doubleclick idea is pretty good, except for then google would be discriminating against doubleclick (and any other banner-ad sites, from which a good portion of the web is financed, or at least the parts of the web where we spend all our time, look at slashdot for instance, see the pretty banners?).

now then, pop-(ups/outs/unders), broken links, and a few others would be easy to scan for, but look at all the sites that have something useful to offer that use the code the way it was meant to be written. maybe what you meant to say was, "pages where pop-up adds are used after the /body tag is present in the document."

something else that you're suggestion leaves out is all the MS office published documents, which do their best to conform to all the standards, but which also are generated on the fly by not too superior coders, and who wouldn't know the difference between html and rtf if they had a map, a reference work, and a guide.

Now, maybe it would be possible for us to get with all the people who have genuinely useful web pages and tell them to put in a tag called just because they deserve to be left out of the google weenie roast. but i won't tell you the real tag, 'cos only the pr0n webmasters are supposed to know it ;].

get my point yet? the only truly useful thing to do would be to find the pages and sites which serve a goodly number of jpgs or gifs and to have the webmasters of those sites which are not pr0n register with google. google then makes a database of "good" picture laden sites, and as it scours a webpage, it loads the database and compares the address to see if it is an accepted graphic-ful page. otherwise, it cuts it to the bottom of the list, under a category of "Pornographic Material is most likely to follow from this point on. Please do not continue unless you really wish to see Pornographic materials."

so now let's examine the results of such an operation. well, google would have to allocate a certain amount of space in memory to list those "good" urls, "bad" urls and "undetermined, undefined, unchecked, or generally unknown" urls. then it has to concantenate all three lists together and present them in standard google form. all this, and we still expect it to run with minimal amounts of memory requirments/cpu cycles on their computers/servers, and in the same 1/4 sec or less times that we are so used to.

so after that little rant, sorry about that, you did have a good idea, it's just a little harder to implement a scanner for things that are perfectly legit methods of using html (except for that non-cleanup after /body)
-=+=-
drach