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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."
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?
All sweeping generalizations suck.
The idea is roughly to refuse to index sites which engage in keyword/description abuse.
- index keywords and description data
- Allow users to search with keywords on or off
- If users search with keywords on, provide a mechanism for users to nominate a site as engaging in
keyword abuse.
- semi-automatically, and then manusually review nominations.
- 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.Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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.
- MbM
Connect any two pages on the web to each other with the minimum number of hyperlinks.
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.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
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.
Say hello to zMac.
Webcollage -- slowly builds a random collage of images from the net.
DadaDodo -- generates random sentences based on word probabilities in pages on the net.
-- The Hoss Man
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
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
Me
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.
..." 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.
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
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.
Unfortunately, all the comments at 4 and above are complaining about how Google intends to rip people's ideas off.
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.
--It's all fun and games, 'till someone loses an eye. Then it's one-eyed fun!--
So that pages that can properly be read by any browser comes first.
Then, maybe webmasters will stop doing IE-only pages.
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