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Google Programming Contest Winner
asqui writes "The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it."
they wanted such boring submissions.
The winning idea was cool, but the rest looks
like free development for google rather
than something novel.
Here's one i wrote earlier.
Dosn't do the document lookup thing, but we were using it for finding the neariest piza on a now defunct e-commerce website.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This may help to defeat the current practice of overloading the PageRank results of a given key word as to point to a given page by having people link to that page with a link containing that keyword, aka "Googlebombing". I do think that the winner is a very interesting and useful project, this latter one will probably be implemented ASAP.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
But I guess they thought there was no need for -thedanceman- on the google site.
If only more pizza restaurants in my area had web sites. Soon enough, I won't even have to pick up the phone to make my food come to me! I wonder if the delivery guy will bring the pizza up to me at my computer. Hmm...
Search => Osama Bin Laden ...
...
Latitude/Longitude => 37/180, Pak
Capture
If this would have come out before we could have saved a country
- MP3's
- Warez
- Pr0n
- Explosives making instructions
And worst of all....- DeCSS
We've got to stop all of the terrorists in the categories mentioned above!Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Was that necessary Michael ?
I mean, no one here cares whether he worked for MS. And we certainly dont believe he got better at coding while he worked at MS.
And I am not buying the theory that Daniel Egnor is actually the alter ego of Mr. William Gates. His coding skills died with DOS!
Rapid Nirvana
yeah, putting it into linux would be nice, but you need something like several terabytes of space to hold the index, not to mention the continous processing power needed to do the indexing would be a huge strain on the box.
It really seems to me like the "Google Sets" feature recently made available at Google Labs is an implementation of Zhenlei Cai's submission(although the details are extremely sketchy in the Google announcement). If this is true, I wonder why they couldn't implement the winning idea too?
-raph
This is impressive bit of database manipulation. Somehow I didn't think that all of the datatypes, etc would be so easily parsed.
Although I do recall telephone directories that used to give you results for a specified radius for certain types of businesses
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm surprised that there are so many 404 Page Not Found errors in Google's search results, even on the top hits.
Shouldn't Google automatically check results that a user follows and flag those that cannot be displayed ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
How is google open source?
No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
All kidding aside, sounds pretty neat.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I don't think the Pizza delivery analogy will pan out. They can pin it down to a country (usually), and maybe even a region of a country(rarely), but beyond that, it won't be possible to get very close. For example, in the country I work for, the whole class B address shows up as being in the UK, but it is broken up accross each european country, so even if you are in spain or france, it looks like a UK address. I'm sure many companies do the same. Also, the IP addresses from the cable ISP will cover a wide area of several cities or sometimes a whole country.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Credit to the guy for thinking of it. It could save a person the hassle of looking up all the address in mapquest. I've never had the need to do such a search on google, since it's easier to just do a yellowpage search. Most yellow page sites like superpages and switchboard already provide that kind of functionality. Google's directory search doesn't have search by distance yet, but I'm guessing it will be added in the future. They kinda have to considering the other directory sites have those features.
Last time I used Lasoo was on Mother's Day, to find the closet florist to my mom's house.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
It would be tempting to put some sarcastic rebuttal in here.
Get a book on basic qauntum mechanics and it will tell you that your observations are always out-of-date.
What's wrong with Afganistan anyhow, they seemed a nice bunch of people, with a strong religious following before the US regieme ousted there lovley government.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
What would be cool, would be the option to right click on the hyperlink and have the option "Find alternative location".
Or even cooler, have IE (or your favourite browser) on putting up the 404 message have a hyperlink which does the same. Hell, easy enough to do with apache.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
pronoblem
I was thinking about doing exactly the same thing, a common thought?
:-)
But the idea of using it just to find business within a certain radius is very limited thinking.
Mobile phones will soon be broadcasting their position. You want interactive guided tours of a city? How about playing full size monopoly? Driving directions? Any sign you currently see could be removed and replaced with a virtual sign? Any number of VR worlds played out in meat space? etc etc
I think that the ability to automatically tell someone where you are will prove to be a boon.
Kudos to the developer for carrying through, rather than my lazy ass postulating
sounds a lot like Google sets
Robust Hyperlinks has to be my favourite.
hmmmm sounds like to me Street and Trips with more URLS
Funny you should mention the phone books. I work for an telephone directory publisher. Our online product used to do just that - targeted search results within the radius you specify, or a default radius for a given classification. USED TO. The online yellow pages industry is making a big move towards sites that emulate the look and feel of a printed directory. Sales reps know how to sell it, they say. But what happens is that when you go to use it, you end up "flipping through pages" until you find what you're looking for. It completely negates the advantages of having the info online. Just venting.
There's a public database called NetGeo which will convert IP addresses to latitude and longitude locations. I created a script called IP-Atlas to get a visual location of the lat and lon coords.
He's not offtopic, he's getting his google on!
Bitchslapped. Neat.
WOW! Someone finally someone had a break through and invented geocoding and buffers! AMAZING! I guess those of us in the GIS profession have been imagining the address matching and buffer zones all this time!
His approach may have some novelty (in the technique for estimating location) but location dependent queries have been studied for some time now. Location dependent queries assume that you know where the machine posing the query and the results of the query are geographically located.
Something really useful, like regexp searches?
Good job I have all those web pages saying that Bush is Osama Bin Laden, could make a nice killing on this one
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
We could undermine all the original ideas in the world.
Who the hell was judging that thing anyhow, there's geo searches all over the place, and i've done plenty of address parsing code in my time!!!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
..a certain Slashdot editor is trolling, what with the 'former Microsoft employee' bit, but I've discovered his secret plot.
You see, we've long known that Microsoft, while shitting on the entire industry, treats their programmers well. Though their operating systems may be riddled with bugs and security flaws of all sorts, look at their applications. They tend to be the epitome of quality software.
Could they be ignoring their operating systems because they've already got an iron grip on the desktop market? That they wish to achieve dominance over applications of all kinds as well? Whatever the cause may be, it matters little.
We need volunteers. Programmers who would dare to make the ultimate sacrifice - to be delegated into the ranks of the damned, into the status of.. manager.
These programmers turned managers shall be hired by Microsoft. Once there, they shall become.. Pointy Haired Bosses.
Microsoft won't have a single programmer left within a month!
doesn't this site do it already? pick a particular geographic location and a radius, and find yellowpage/website data within that radius. the searching interface is clunky but that seems like the same thing that this guy is doing. some of their returns are clunky also - i.e. you type in "california pizza kitchen" on their los angeles site and you get some company that makes vegeterian food - but sure enough, they have an address listed within the radius, and they also supply food to CPK.
it seems to me that the problem is not being able to cross-reference addresses pulled from sites with the user's geographic location, but in the quality of data retrieved from the website to be displayed. if you search for "pizza" x kilometers from your location, parsing any address pulled from sites, you don't really know whether it happens to be a local pizza company, or some kid writing about how tasty his pizza was in his weblog.
Ahem... I think you mean "NeoGeo".
./ post that stated that the NeoGeo is still alive and kicking.
This is a "36-bit" video game system that came out in the early 90's. It was basically SNK's arcade engine put into a small box with controllers. It was pretty cool, except that was extremely expensive and the games cost anywhere from $80 to $300. Funny, though, I recently saw a
Its interesting that SNK has spent time developing a public database for the system. I didn't even know you could get internet functionality with it! Does anyone have this system, who could maybe provide a review?
Does this mean that when the time comes to leave this planet and move to Mars that we can still visit our favorite places via Google's Cache?
Pot-holes they should search in there, I here the Afghanistanies like to some a bit of pot now and then!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I tried to submit this a couple of times, but it was rejected. Google has in beta a service known as "google answers". Pay google 50c for a listing fee, then post a question you want answered by google users. Min price for a question is $4, and google gets 1$ of that. Max price for a question is $50 IIRC.
Lots of fun looking at all the questions, and answers. eg one of them was asking for pictures of duck bottoms, and another asked for the meaning of life valued at a pathetic $4.
This has already been posted to infoanarchy.org and kuro5hin.org. I thought slashdot would have picked it up, but haven't so far.
Let the IE lusers suffer !
Oh btw france lost vs. senegal. shame.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And on the vastness of the internet, what would those words most likely be?
The URL, of course.
If Bill Clinton had decided back in 1999 to remove the Taliban from power "because it's the right thing to do", would you have supported that? Because the Taliban were worse than Milosovec.
But the Taliban were in bed with Osama bin Laden and his gang, who mass murdered thousands. So now leaving them in power is the same as "saving a country".
You're a dumbfuck.
This is actually a nifty way of getting real good ideas from people. $10000 seems a bit cheap for an idea that can make google helluva lot more than that.
So does this now make it easier for governments to limit their citizens ability to get information than ever before?
/. before???
As well as any other of the many geography based rules, laws, taxes, restrictions, etc that we have seen talked about on
If you can't be good, be good at it!
I suppose the page-widening effect has its promoters and vindicators, but it is an effect only for IE (and only on Windows to boot).
Such page-widening "complaints" are not about the code thrown out by servers, but are complaints about the rendering engines of specific browsers.
Why don't you fix your browser and get over yourself?
blog
It could have saved the US.
US gov has been trying to
capture Bin Laden before 9/11.
At least some changes would
not have occured that fast.
.... It should be :
,if you must, IE)..."
"...Have your favourite browser (or
:)
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I agree totally, I remember seeing the contest a few months ago and thinking "Oh man, that's so cool", but then when I actually read through the contest and saw the boring-ness of it all and said "screw it, that's boring".
Of course, the prize wasn't boring...
I, on the other hand, am sitting here with Mozilla and laughing it up. So there.
What was failed to mention from his resume:
Miscellaneous Projects
1995 - ongoing: Free Software
I wrote and maintain Gale30, an open source instant messaging system. Other free software projects of mine include Airhook, Liboop, and some XML processing tools.
2001 - ongoing: Sweetcode
I am the sole proprietor of Sweetcode, a web site that reports interesting free software. Sweetcode receives thousands of visitors daily; media reports include NTK, memepool, the Linux Weekly News, and others.
2000 - ongoing: SeattleWireless
I maintain the Node Map, a simple XML-based GIS which uses public mapping engines to display the location of community 802.11b wireless nodes in Seattle.
Did they actually send out those copies?
Or is it because I live in Germany?
Regards,
Marc
Actually when I saw that a former Microsoft employee had written something for Google, I had a flashback to that scene in Return of the Jedi where Vader makes up for a lifetime of evil deeds by tossing the Emperor off the platform. It's never too late for someone to turn back from the Dark Side. ;)
My Karma hit 50. Now maybe I can start posting intelligently.
Well, you're back down to 49 now!
GMD
watch this
A Markov process is basically a series of random variables where the value of random variable X^(i+1) only depends on X^i. The idea is that if you want to predict the value of X^(i+1), all of the information you could possibly use is in the value of X^i.
Lots of processes are Markovian- for instance, a random walk. If you're at point x at time t, then you know that there's a fifty-fifty chance you will be at x-1 or x+1 at time t+1. Knowing all of the previous points along the random walk won't help you predict the next point any better than that.
Let me help you out with a clue. Forcing you to flip through many pages to find what you want means more ads on each page you have to view. This translates to more revenue for the company hosting the directory site.
Yes, it sucks and makes no technological sense, but it does make sense to the marketdroids and financial suits.
You're right. Man, I miss the US already. If only they'd found that man in time, our republic could have been saved! "O beautiful for spaciou..." ah man, I can't do it, I'm tearing up here!
GWB! WHY!
- dpk, citizen of the former United States
In a weird coincidence, I just spent a half-hour last night lecturing about Daniel Egnor's Iocaine Powder , winner of the First International RoShamBo Programming Competition. Credit this guy with two award-winning pieces of extreme programming cleverness!
I've met Dan Egnor, and this isn't the only cool thing he's done. He's the author of Iocaine powder, the world champion rock-paper-scissors program. He's also the proprieter of sweetcode a web log devoted to innovative open source projects (i.e. projects that don't just clone or tweak existing software.) But his best hack (not described on line, as far as I know) is a version of Pac Man that runs on a PDA and uses a GPS for a user interface -- if you run around an open field carrying the GPS+PDA, the pacman correspondingly runs around the maze chasing Blinky, Stinky and Dinky (or whatever their names are.)
-Tom Duff
...suggested some modifications to take into account the "age" of each link to reduce Pagerank's tendency to bias against newly-created pages.
Shouldn't Google have said bias for (in favour of) rather than bias against if what you are suggesting is correct? I'm just confused by the way they have worded it...
It was at 2 when I replied.
How many hosts implement their coordinates in their info any more?
5%? 10%?
80% omit it because admins are lazy, and 10% omit it for security reasons.
So Google just gave an award to a tool with half the batting average of a bad baseball player.
--Blair
I noticed a lot of the previous comments talking about the inaccuracies of using IPs to get geographical location. Well it should be pointed out that he parses for street addresses in the html document then converts those to geographical coordinates. So it would even work for people who have a business in Washington but are hosted in Utah.
Did you all read the honorable mentions? Google stands to make some good money off of the ideas and implementations these folks have come up with. I'm assuming that all entries now are owned by Google, and man they might have some really cool new features after seeing the projects that were submitted. I only hope that they give at least some royalties to the developers.
~ now you know
Mapbast gives you the lat/lon of any address you give in the corner of the map. It even will make your directions into GPS routes with a little tweaking. Combine with a $90 eTrex for a cheap OnStar system.
Besides, it's line-drive directions are the coolest.
----- I hate sigs.
For more details about how Daniel's entry works, you can view the README, or even just read the source for yourself.
another m$ innovation that aids terrorists
i should have just made somehting that groups pages by cup size
when i lived in austria for a while results for common searches (movies, places to go out) frequently used to include sites with austrian content, which doesn't really happen any more now that i'm back in germany.
i thought it was a common practice, also considering that it's not that hard to implement (you could easily base this filtering logic on the TLD of a site and the IP of the requesting machine).
Yeah, it wouldn't prevent googlebombing. You would have to use it in conjunction with some other algorithm to prevent that.
They have a product called Streets and Trips. You can enter in your address, and find out what is within a 5 mile radius lets say. Sounds pretty much like what this guy did.
Parsing out addresses from web sites is notoriously unreliable. A company can have multiple addresses for multiple locations, franchises will have location finder code accessing databases instead of static HTML pages, locations can be in graphic text rather than parsable text, etc. Doubt that he solved all of those issues.
Worked at a company 3 years ago that sold similar technology to another major search company. It cross-referenced domain name addresses to business listings from InfoUSA. Maybe 60% coverage with 80% accuracy.
10 January 1610
IP-Atlas tells me I'm in Plano, TX. I'm really in Bridgeport, CT, using a SNET dialup.
Am I the only one who thinks this would be useful for speech recognition? If you just detected a "federal" and you have two possibilities for the next word, "law" and "paw" say, the software would know it's more likely to be "law". Federal paw is probably fairly uncommon and yet this is exactly the mistake that current software makes.
Such as Denmark, some people complained about other people being able to look up who you were. So now the whois information has been made much more restricted, and dk hostmaster will supress information if people requestit.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Here is a Wired article on it.