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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!
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.
Christ, give it a break. I know there's an anti-anti-Microsoft backlash here, but for fuck's sake all he did was mention the previous employer with absolutely NO bias or connotations. If the guy had been employed at XYZ University, I'm sure it would have still shown up.
Gates didn't write DOS.
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.
Being a former M$ employee tells me he learned quite a bit.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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.
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.
Actually he was employed by XYZFind Corp. Literally. And it didn't show up.
the part about him being a former MS employee was directly quoted from the submitter, not inserted there by michael. I know it's slashdot reader policy to not read the story, but at least read the fucking summary on the front page before flaming away...
do not read this line twice.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Former MS employee, submits his project to Google, the ultimate linux site.
Come on...
Sigh...
In submitted articles, italics designate the submitted article, while normal text indicates Michael's or CmdrTaco's, etc., additions.
Note that this one was all italics, meaning the 'former Microsoft bit' was included by the person submitting the article.
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 agree. Listing his previous employer probably wasn't intended as an attack on MS. I don't see why anyone would think it was.
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.
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.
Here here! I've been doing that for years.
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.
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.
Yeah, right. That one dancing PaperclipDude was the "epitome of quality software".
Me: (starts writing a letter in Word)
PaperclipDude: "Hi there! It looks like you're writing a letter!"
No shit, Shirlock. What gave it away? The "Dear Sirs" opening line? Shees.
GMD
watch this
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
Well if no one cares, why did you bother even commenting on it?? Of course people here care!! It will drive half of /. readers half out of their mind with rage!!!
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!
And Linux is mostly just a reimplementation of Unix. That doesn't seem to bother anyone....opens source people don't have to innovate, they can just use other people's ideas. Closed source on the other hand....
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
FYI, Michael Abrash once worked at Microsoft, then went to id Software, and then left id and went back to MS.
So I think there are some programmers at Microsoft that you could learn from (not by seeing their mistakes).
-jfedor
...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
The reason I included Microsoft Corp. as a former employer and not XYZFind Corp. is becasue I wanted to point out that despite what most of you like to think, intelligent people do work at Microsoft.
Yes really, it's not a large room full of monkeys!
Also related is this A Journal Discussion which I omitted in my original response.
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
Just because you get annoyed by the paperclip doesn't mean it is not a good application. The fact is, many people have poor grammer and spelling (just watch this site, you'll see), or don't know the proper layouts for business and personal letters, or that there is even a difference in the first place.
That little paperclip that you hate helps a lot of people from making the stupid little mistakes that those of us who choose not to use it make everyday.
I, for one, congratulate Microsoft for the paperclip, as now even a child can use a word processor without having to learn keyboard shortcuts or how to use a menu. You would be surprised at how many people (adults included) 5 years ago didn't know that word processors even had spell checkers included. Now with the advanced user interface it does it while you type, with very few errors (unless you're writing highly in-depth documents).
Think about how far the computer UI has come since Microsoft started playing the game before you start to flame.
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.
I found that site by typing in "answers" into AOL Search (back when Google had a press-release on the front page about their partnership with them.)
I wanted to try AOL Search out. Of course, Google was genius because I was instantly redirected back to a Google site....
Cover your eyes and click this link!
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
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.