Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Programming Contest

Posted by michael on from the do-you-feel-lucky-punk dept.

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."

4 of 629 comments (clear)

  1. Googlewhacking by waldoj · · Score: 4, Informative

    An automated Googlewhacking system.

    Ingenius!

    -Waldo Jaquith

  2. Re:So basically... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:This is brilliant by epsalon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --

    Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org

  4. Re:Well, here's an idea.. by YoJ · · Score: 4, Informative
    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!