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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."
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.
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.
Sounds to me that google is getting lots of programs for only $10k and a tour.
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.
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
I know it can't be the source to everything at GOOGLE, but still, does this reek of a security nightmare in the making.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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!
Notice that they don't say exclusive license. You should be able to release it as GPL yourself.
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..."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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.
But I'll have my dated post on slashdot as evidence :).
From the Contest Rules web page
- sa mple.tar - (!!)57M(!!)
...
... 57 Mb /5 CD is 11.4Mb per CD.
The code and data may be downloaded from our web site:
http://research.google.com/contest/prog-contest
... 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
Heck, how small are those cd!?
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...
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.
$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.
I do not have a signature
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.)
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
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
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...
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.
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
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!
Use Zope!
Good idea but sort of self-defeating. The shortest connection between two sites that can be analized by that means is, of course, Google.
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.
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)
ummmmm
If we validate pages by W3C standards conformance, less than 1% would pass!
Even Slashdot would fail!
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.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning