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

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: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.

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.

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..."

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: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.

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

[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: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.