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Google Programming Contest Winner

Posted by michael on from the check-out-the-big-brain-on-brad dept.

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."

3 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. I see one being implemented soon by Masem · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the hon. mentions:
    Laird Breyer, for his project, Markovian Page Ranking Distributions: Some Theory and Simulations. This project examined various properties of the Markovian process behind Google's PageRank algorithm, and suggested some modifications to take into account the "age" of each link to reduce Pagerank's tendency to bias against newly-created pages.

    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:
  2. 404 Page Not Found ? by bigmouth_strikes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Daniel Egnor's "Iocaine Powder" by po8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!