Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

DarklordJonnyDigital writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Google founder Larry Page has admitted that the Google project wasn't originally intended to be a search engine at all. "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations." ' Of course, happy accidents have often been the cause for advancement, technologically or otherwise.

Comments

Lego

[Duds]

Well given they were building PCs out of lego we didn't expect them to come up with something normal deliberately did we?

Re:Lego

[Squareball]

lol I miss my legos! Welp this is just another thing my self and google have in common.. we were both accidents of our creators! ;)

like bob ross

[the idoru]

there are no accidents, just happy little trees.

Re:like bob ross

[Anonymous Coward]

here's a happy lil tree. ;oD

Re:like bob ross

[mbadolato]

For the bonus question: Prussion Blue and Titanium white for the Happy Little Clouds, but what colors made up the happy little trees??

Re:like bob ross

[bailout911]

Actually, I think Bob always said "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents," but I could be wrong.

Re:like bob ross

[241comp]

I believe it was dark sienna and titanium white applied with a knife and pulled across the tree with a slight downward sweep to create the rounded effect on trees close enough to the viewer to warrant it.

Re:like bob ross

[Anonymous Coward]

Yellow ocre, van dyke brown

Re:like bob ross

[Anonymous Coward]

error 404: sense of humour not found

Re:like bob ross

[agallagh42]

What, no burnt umber? You can't make a tree without burnt umber!!

Re:like bob ross

[Anonymous Coward]

VanDike Brown!

Some Accident

[DarenN]

Remind me never to give up when a project isn't going exactly as planned :)

Mind you, looking at what it was originally planned to be, you can see where google came from. You keep going, you Crazy Kids!

Re:Some Accident

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, this is a great story. I had to double take on the calendar though; they should have saved this for April 1.

Damn bastards

[tmark]

I wish I was lucky enough to have such accidents. The only accidents I have usually involve me looking for a mop and bucket, or writing a big check.

Re:Damn bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

The only accidents I have are now the biggest financial burden of my life, and they still aren't even five ;-)

Re:Damn bastards

[Duds]

Shame it's wrong if you're not American ;)

Google to me ;)

Re:Damn bastards

[zelphi]

yeah, alimony's a real bitch, aint it?

Before google

[GuyMannDude]

The fact that these guys accidently created a search engine that blows all the other ones away kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?

GMD

Re:Before google

[Duds]

And there was me thinking all search engines were written by people who couldn't find porn without it...

Re:Before google

[Anonvmous Coward]

"The fact that these guys accidently created a search engine that blows all the other ones away kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?"

You gotta admit, creating a search engine that doesn't spawn pop-ups is pretty innovative .

Re:Before google

[terbo]

*cough* the laughable state of technology.
*cough* the laughable state of human existence.

we were just an accident, you know?

Re:Before google

[gmuslera]

Not really, previous search engines did well what they were intended to do. They searched the web focusing in each site as isolated in the web.

But used the wrong point of view, they didn't see the web so interlinked that searching based in how much linked a site is could be a measure of how much desirable could be find that site.

Sometimes the better solutions are just viewing a hard problem from another point of view.

Re:Before google

[GGardner]

What's laughable (now) is that the previous search engines all where trying to optimize the wrong problems. Altavista bragged about how DEC Alpha CPUs, with their 64 bit CPUs returned results faster. Others bragged about covering more of the web. Others hyped the fact that they returned the most results.

Google reminded them all that the most important thing in a search engine isn't how fast it runs (though that's important), but that it returns the most relevant results first.

I think that this lesson holds for many projects and companies today.

Re:Before google

[josh crawley]

Then I can assume that you dont remember the time you HAD to punch altavista.DIGITAL.com , do you?

Re:Before google

[Beltza]

Altavista bragged about how DEC Alpha CPUs, with their 64 bit CPUs returned results faster.

This was exactly what AltaVista was designed for! AltaVista was created to promote DEC equipment; to show what powerful applications could run on their machines. And it did this job really good.

Re:Before google

[GGardner]

This was exactly what AltaVista was designed for!

I know that AltaVista was created by DEC, but instead of focusing on how fast their search was, they should have spent more effort on how effective the search was. That way, their message could have been "our alphas are so fast, we can do more than search, we can also sort well". After google, the message everyone understood was that, "Alphas may be fast, but they get beaten by better software running on commodity hardware".

BTW, every vi hacker should know that using :x saves keystrokes over :wq

Re:Before google

[cyb97]

and still after being the no1 searchengine doesn't spawn pop-ups...

even more amazing

Re:Before google

[oPless]

PS. Shift ZZ

Re:Before google

[hughk]

Altavista used a somewhat brute-force approach. With Tru-64, they could effectively run large parts of their database in memory.

Digitial, in their infinite wisdom din't quite understand what their engineers had done and the message of what they were doing was kargely ignored for marketing to managers. Sure, techies knew what was going on, but the message should have been rephrased for management.

The marketing opportunity was largely lost and Altavista was surpassed.

Re:Before google

[garcia]

at the time Altavista was the best out there. We didn't have another option. Now that we do we find that it has a lot to do w/programming. Imagine if computer programmers would see that today instead of relying on the fucking hardware to pull their shit coding through.

Re:Before google

[Isofarro]

kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?

Google have a top-notch system but the whole indexing thing is still laughable. They are not really taking advantage of structured markup in evaluating keywords - they extract the same information as if it were a plain text file sans markup. Yeah, sometimes top-level headers and link text is used, but that's it really.

Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs amply demonstrate. I like Google sets, which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed.

Considering Google's purchase of Blogger announced this past weekend, I'm looking forward to more semantically based search abilities - since blogs are by their nature very structured (especially those with RSS or XML feeds).

Re:Before google

[timeOday]

Google have a top-notch system but the whole indexing thing is still laughable. They are not really taking advantage of structured markup in evaluating keywords - they extract the same information as if it were a plain text file sans markup. Yeah, sometimes top-level headers and link text is used, but that's it really.

I don't think there's all that much information in structured markup. Certainly no where near as much as in the boring old plain text, so why focus on semantic analysis of the tags rather than the text?

Re:Before google

[jericho4.0]

Google used to look at markup and keywords, but they stopped because of people trying to manipulate rankings through keywords, hidden text, etc. Makes sense to me. As long as it still works.

I am also a big fan of google sets. It's awesome as a brainstorming tool. If you're ever researching anything, it's a great way to find relevant topics to your subject.

Re:Before google

[Trailer Trash]

The fact that these guys accidently created a search engine that blows all the other ones away kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?

I think it says more about the business of search engine technology at the time. All I ever used before Google was AltaVista, and I started using it back when it was a demo for DEC's 64-bit Alpha chip (side-note of irony is that the much better Google search engine uses all 32-bit Intel architecture). AV started out as 5 or 6 Alphas networked running Ultrix, and it simply indexed the web. I still use it for exact phrase matches, simply because it does a better job at that.

But when Google came out, AV had been split out into its own company, tried to become a "portal" (screw that, I just want search results), and was shamelessly selling top-billing in its search results to anybody with money. This was the norm for search engines at the time.

So Google stepped in and simply offered honest search results with no ads. I remember reading the Scientific American article before the site started, but I anxiously awaited it after that. But the thing that brought people to it in legions was the simple, honest results and lack of ads.

After building a reputation, they still needed revenue, so they brought in ads but they didn't give up their honesty for it. The ads are clearly marked as such, and nobody minds. It's probably too late for the other search engines to try to make up the lost business.

Anyway, they make an honest living, it's an interesting way to differentiate yourself in a market (and says something about that market).

MDC

Re:Before google

[pi_rules]

> I don't think there's all that much information in structured markup. Certainly no where near as much as in the boring old plain text, so why focus on semantic analysis of the tags rather than the text?

Because HTML is supposed to mark-up the -content- of a webpage, and not be used as a layout engine. The data is contained within the tags, so you're right there, but the tags should describe what the data actually is.

Things within <table>'s are supposed to represent tabular data, but we all too often use them for getting things in the right spot of the page. The tags <b>, <i> and <u> should be banned entirely from HTML, as they describe the data visually, and not describe their content. You may want your address to be displayed in italics, but that's really a locale setting. You -should- put an address in an <address> tag so that the search engines can properly identify it as an address, and so that any user that visits your site gets the address displayed in the manner that they want addresses displayed. If your search phrase was contained within an <h2> block that likely means there's a whole section of data after it that talks about the subject. However, if your search string shows up in a <p> tag it's quite likely that it's simply a single sentence that happens to match your search criteria. That's why the <font> tag is deprecated IIRC, and should never ever be used. A <span> with a stylesheet setting lets everybody know that the data in there is really no more important than anything else, and you're just wishing to make it look differently.

It's far too late for this trend to be reversed I'm afraid, at least not for 3-4 browser generations and possibly a new HTML/CSS standard comes out. Until that time we'll probably just have to live with indexers flattening out a page and giving nearly every bit of information contained within the same level of importance.

Re:Before google

[amnesty]

I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?

XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.

Re:Before google

[Doomdark]

Whoa, I'm happy you said that, because I would have had to argue same thing. There are way too many "XMLheads" in existence who think that just by starting to use a structured markup system they will automatically be adding information that solves all searching problems.

In fact, if XML (and similar) markup mechanism were being designed to help searching, they certainly could help. But as things are that's not the order -- usually "content specialist" concentrate on classifying things without considering how those classifications are to be used; then try to force content authors to use markup, and only then start asking developers to develop system that make use of their fabulous new markup system.

And then the markup evangelists (like mr. Berners-Lee et al)... Best that they offer are toy examples of figuring out how to find out all Harvard - graduated doctors in 5 mile radius that take new patients (toy in the sense that they are fairly contrived, and that the details are conveniently omitted... claiming implementation is easy enough to be left as an exercise to reader)

I think Google is living proof of what exactly is the biggest known improvement over plain text indexing: inter-document references (links).

Re:Before google

[tfoss]

Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs [google.com] amply demonstrate. I like Google sets [google.com], which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed

C'mon dude, a simple google search for space shuttle names is even more useful.

-Ted

Re:Before google

[E-prospero]

Because HTML is supposed to mark-up the -content- of a webpage, and not be used as a layout engine. The data is contained within the tags, so you're right there, but the tags should describe what the data actually is.

This is true; however, back in the real world (you know, the one where Disney and MS Frontpage are responsible for web pages), you can count the number of web pages that use the HTML as a markup language on one hand.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population (and, for that matter, web "designers") don't appreciate the significance of content/form separation, and so they use HTML tags like they use MS Word - "How do I make this bit of text centered bold 16pt?".

HTML is to blame for this, IMHO. It provides all sorts of tags, and virtually all of them are display driven (Bold, Italic, Center), rather than semantic driven (section heading, emphasis) labels. And, humans being the lazy, habit driven animals that we are, I don't see the old HTML tags disappearing for many years to come. As a result, genuinely useful content indexing is just as much of a pipe dream.

Russ %-)

Re:Before google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google sets eh? Looks cool.
Heh, my use was slightly less mature.
I typed f**k and then chick in another box. The fifth result was "Not a chance" guess that's why i'm posting on slashdot now and don't have a girlfriend.

Re:Before google

[SnowDog_2112]

Poor Google Sets. I wanted to see if it would figure out a list of hair colors, so I put in "Blonde" and "Brunette."
The rest of the set? (I should have predicted this):
Fetish
Breasts
Amateur
Exhibitionism
Redhead
Mature
Babes
Underwear
Group
Latina.

Re:Before google

[bluGill]

All that might not have been enough to toppel Alta-Vista, except that byond paid for top stops, theid index became baddly out of date (several months), just after several groups discovered how to obtain the top spots without paying for them, with keyword spamming and the like. I gave up on Alta-Vista when I realised that for my last 10 searches not one had found a useful link. I then went to this new google thing that everyone was talking about and discovered that the top link is almost always what I want.

My point is when there is no need to switch people won't switch. Habbit (and the link on my homepage) brought me to alta-vista. That changed only because alta-vista failed. Google is good, but if alta-vista had addressed my concerns (which I didn't express, or fully know - they should have seen it themselves) I wouldn't be a google user today.

Re:Before google

[pi_rules]

I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?


Negative on both accounts, Ghost Rider. HTML -was- a markup language, then it got mangled into a layout language in the NS vs IE wars when the WWW exploded. Before this time it hadn't really progressed into the massive pile of dung we have now -- but when things really took off before a professional world could develop to fill the gap we were screwed from that point forth.

As we sit now, with HTML 4.0, things like <font> and <center> are deprecated, and frowned up. Sure, the browsers still support it, but the W3C is as least making a point about the issue. The adoption of CSS to get some nice fine-grained controll over layout is taking the burder off HTML and making it easier on developers to build flashy pages while keeping their markup somewhat pure to it's true form. It's still bastardized, and I've done it myself when it was conveinent; but with the growing number of different browsers out there it's -way- easier now to just send a new stylesheet with the same markup to diffent user agents. Much much nicer than the days where you had to write some God awful pile of crap to get NS4 and IE4 to do the same thing -- relying on unspoken order of importantce that the two different browsers placed on different tags and attributes.

Writing convoluted HTML to get the desired effect is very quickly becoming very inefficient when compared to CSS. Once NS4 dies the horrid death it should have years ago things will be much brighter. Further, CSS is a dream when it comes to actually managing your look and feel over time when used properly. As CSS is new it's still being bastardized by web-monkeys that don't understand that it's a -further- clarification of the data contained within the generic HTML markup. Your style shouldn't be "blueMediumTextOnDarkBack" -- it should be "txtCustomerName", or something similar. Describe the data -- not the style. When you change your look to now put customer names as green text on a black background your 'blueMediumTextOnDarkBack' name no longer holds true, and only confuses further maintainers, unless you want to search and replace all the blueMediumTextOnDarkBlack's with your new name, but if you do that you might accidentally hose up something else using that style that never should have been sharing one with the customer name data.

Abstraction -must- be applied to content delivery and display systems for the web to grow in the future. For programmers to ignore this, or to just plain not care, is every bit as reprehensible as not using proper seperation in the layering of components in your application itself.


XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.


You're at least on the right track with the stylesheets, but XML is certainly not something that search engines will be able to parse. You can make up your own tags for crying out loud! They won't know what to do with my custom XML tag: <customer-sucess-story>, but they'll know what to do once it's translated into <h2 style="customer-success"> ... they know that h2 is a header, therefore important, and the data in there is more important than what I have in my <span> most likely.

XML + XSLT -> HTML + CSS translations are a good thing, I agree there. But the search engines will still parse the HTML and CSS, and not the original XML -- the XML is just garbage to them, just like our HTML is garbage to them right now.

Now, to anybody who reads this and thinks, "Dude it's just HTML... shutup." -- go to w3c.org and print out the HTML 4.01 spec and read it. There's probably a lot in that 400 page document that you never knew about -- and there's a buttload of stuff in there I -still- don't know.

Re:Before google

[evilviper]

BTW, every vi hacker should know that using :x saves keystrokes over :wq

And SHIFT+ZZ is even fewer keystrokes, although it doesn't look like it on paper.

With ":x", you hit SHIFT+":" then "x" and ENTER.

Besides that, I have to say that being just slightly faster isn't worth the trade-off most of the time. I personally use :wq because that's how my mind works. Often times, I need to do a :wn, so using :wq is more straight-forward in my mind.

Re:Before google

[Isofarro]

You make some excellent points that I fully agree with. The only comment I can add any additional input to is:

but XML is certainly not something that search engines will be able to parse. You can make up your own tags for crying out loud! They won't know what to do with my custom XML tag: <customer-sucess-story>, but they'll know what to do once it's translated into <h2 style="customer-success"> ... they know that h2 is a header, therefore important, and the data in there is more important than what I have in my <span> most likely.

XML is not totally a lost cause for search engines. Using semantic-tools such as ontologies, you could specify that when I say <customer-success-story>, that's the same meaning as <business-benefits-in-pratice> that Jim uses. By linking "synonyms" of semantic groupings a search engine can make sense and good use of these relationships.

RSS is probably the most used XML application out there, although there are a few differences in Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" and the more adaptable RDF Site Summary, using ontologies to link which elements are semantically equivalent this boils the XML flexibility into something equivalent to dialects.

Re:Before google

[Isofarro]

however, back in the real world (you know, the one where Disney and MS Frontpage are responsible for web pages), you can count the number of web pages that use the HTML as a markup language on one hand.

Which is exactly why search engine techniques haven't evolved into something more powerful than token analysis of plain text files. There's not much difference between a search engine and grep really. Search engines just present the results as a web page.

Only Google Labs seems to be the exception here.

Re:Before google

[Trixter]

"BTW, every vi hacker should know that using :x saves keystrokes over :wq"

Yes, and using ZZ saves even more (no need to hit enter). Some VI hacker you are ;-D

Thanks for the link to Google...

[hey]

... we won't know how to find it otherwise.

Re:Thanks for the link to Google...

[ChristTrekker]

Yeah. We might have had to search for it.

Re:Thanks for the link to Google...

[Carmody]

... we won't know how to find it otherwise.

Google is hard to find! If you try to search for it, using google, then well you know

Re:Thanks for the link to Google...

[davechen]

Isn't that one of those Star Trek episodes? Kirk makes google search for itself and the computer blows up!

Re:Thanks for the link to Google...

[jcast]

Actually, searchin Google for google takes you right to it (as always).

really?

[Joe the Lesser]

Wow, accidents are great! I can't wait to show my boss all of mine!

Re:really?

[Duds]

I don't believe it works if said accident occured in the stationary cupboard on the night of an office party.

Re:really?

[n.wegner]

I do believe the cupboard was 'a rockin', not stationary.

great inventions

[very]

many great inventions/discoveries are accidentally invented/discovered.

Newton's Law, gravity constant, etc
Archimedes' buoyancy Law

Re:great inventions

[syn3rg]

How about Lexan... http://www.geplastics.com/resins/about/history.htm l
An accidental mixing of resins, which was left overnight in a beaker.

Re:great inventions

[banana fiend]

Be careful how you refer to "accidental" inventions... the Newton apple story is considered definitely apocryphal

There are quite a lot of "eureka!" stories about greek philosophers, again with no way of verifying whether they are true or not. It is likely that Newton arrived at his theories after some diligent thinking while at his relatives farm.

In googles case, accidental application of a well-designed system is NOT the same as accidentally writing good code :)

Re:great inventions

[Anonymous Coward]

The two references you give are not true so it's all crap in any case isn't it?

Re:great inventions

[Anonymous Coward]

> Archimedes' buoyancy Law

Accidentally invented during ambitious submarine project.

Re:great inventions

[Saval]

> many great inventions/discoveries are accidentally
> invented/discovered.
>
> Newton's Law, gravity constant, etc
> Archimedes' buoyancy Law

Murphy's law?

Re:great inventions

[Jester99]

Not to mention two marvels of modern civilization: Penicillin, and Microwave cooking.

Re:great inventions

[Anonvmous Coward]

"many great inventions/discoveries are accidentally invented/discovered.

Newton's Law, gravity constant, etc
Archimedes' buoyancy Law"

Bart Simpson's 'mixing acids and bases' law.... *SpLaT*

Re:great inventions

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at goatse.cx, but don't actually look at it because its pretty disgusting.

Re:great inventions

[abhinavnath]

Well in Newton's case, he himself wrote that the idea of gravity was "occasioned by the fall of an apple from a tree", and the sight of the full moon in the sky. He realized (he wrote) that the same force had to govern the moon's rotation (and Kepler's Laws) and the fall of the apple. I think it unlikely that it actually hit him on his head.

I think it unfortunate that Newton is often credited with a discovery instead of an invention. Yes, he discovered gravity, but he invented the Theory of gravity.

Google is a little different. Brin & Page were able to see the possibilities arising from their more-or-less failed experiment to annotate the web. You're right in that they wrote good code, but to do the wrong thing. Their "moment of brilliance" was in seeing that this code could be used for something entirely different than they had intended.

Re:great inventions

[antis0c]

Don't forget teflon.

Re:great inventions

[Drakin]

vulcanised rubber.

Re:great inventions

[stilwebm]

And Post-It(TM) Notes.

Re:great inventions

[j-pimp]

I believe it a case of what are we going to do with this poor adhesive.

Re:great inventions

[Savatte]

Microwave cooking, there's an oxymoron if i ever heard one.

Re:great inventions

[Clockwurk]

Nylon was also an accidental discovery.

Re:great inventions

[Moofie]

That's only 'cuz whoever's cooking for you doesn't know what they're doing.

'Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and in the kitchen, I'm a superb craftsman. I use the microwave for the things it's good at, and the toaster oven for things it's good at, and my treasured cast iron skillet for the things IT is good at (even though cleaning it is a pain in the ass).

Use the tools. They are your friends.

Re:great inventions

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it unfortunate that Newton is often credited with a discovery instead of an invention. Yes, he discovered gravity, but he invented the Theory of gravity.

It's not so clear that he did. You might think that Newton is credited with the invention of the calculus, but check around in references in mathematics. He is often said to be the "discoverer" of the calculus instead. A nontrivial portion of mathematicians hold the opinion that ideas in math are never invented but only discovered. In a sense, the calculus was sitting around all along waiting for someone to happen upon it.

Re:great inventions

[mumkin]

and my treasured cast iron skillet for the things IT is good at (even though cleaning it is a pain in the ass).

if you're not using a liberal handful of rock salt to clean your cast iron skillet, you're doing it the hard way.

Re:great inventions

[Moofie]

Hmmm...never considered that. I usually use a scouring pad, or sand if it's REALLY nasty.

Rock salt, huh? Just put that under a rag and scrub away? Do I need to re-season afterwards?

Thanks for the tip!

Re:great inventions

[FirmWarez]

The Doctor: "...and dropped an apple on his head" Sarah: "Is that when he discovered gravity?" The Doctor: "No, that's when he told me to clear out of his apple tree!"

Re:great inventions

[mumkin]

(fabulously OT)

No need to re-season unless you're crazy-intense about it. I put the skillet on low heat, add the salt and a bit of oil and scrub it around. When all the baked-on nastiness has lifted, just rinse it out in the sink and return to low heat to dry. There's something very satisfying about using food as a cleaning product itself. If you use a coffee grinder to grind spices, whizzing a handful of uncooked rice in it will go a long way towards getting old spice residue out.

Re:great inventions

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that mostly a philosophical question: whether mathematical concepts are invented or discovered?

Or is there actually a proof, one way or the other?

Re:great inventions

[devnull17]

And a marvel of really modern civilization: SSRIs like Prozac.

Re:great inventions

[Moofie]

Yeah, i use a separate grinder for spices, but that rice thing is a good idea if you don't want cinnamon to taste like black pepper.

Any other kitchen tips? I love finding new kitchen geeks. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll send you my friends' recipe database URL. Has good stuff.

So was I...

[Da Fokka]

but I guess I'll never be as successful as google...

Re:So was I...

[turgid]

Aw shucks, surely your mum and dad love you all the same.

accidents

[dattaway]

Accident or not, I'm glad it happened. Search engines at that time left much to be desired. Google was simply magic. If I wanted something, it would magically appear on the first link.

Re:accidents

[Lord_Slepnir]

If I wanted something, it would magically appear on the first link.

Sounds like you're feeling lucky.

Re:accidents

[Duds]

Sounds like you're feeling lucky.



And we're straight back to expensive accidents again ;)

Mental Anguish

[fo0bar]

Great, now Google is going to grow up with mental problems, constantly wondering if its creators really love it. This will probably lead to Google going into a KFC 20 years from know and shooting up the place. I mean, how well would YOU do if your parents told you that you were an accident?

Re:Mental Anguish

[stephenbooth]

My father told me, when I was 15, that I owe my existance to a combination of some very loud crickets and the impossibility of easily obtaining contraception in Cairo in 1969. My parents decided to "Risk it".

This explains a lot about my life. I haven't shot up a KFC yet, although I do eat there a lot.

Maybe this is the next /. poll?

I was...

• Planned
• Unplanned, but my parents have figured out the cause.
• Unplanned, and my parents still haven't figured out the cause.
• Found under a bush.
• Brought into this world by the gentle hands of CowboyNeal.

Stephen

Re:Mental Anguish

[Sabaki]

you forgot...

• Conceived by mitichlorians/other divine entities

Re:Mental Anguish

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

>>Found under a bush.

Gee that could be shady, it's really busy under those Bush's with all them trying to blow up saddam and all.

Re:Mental Anguish

[jaysones]

"This will probably lead to Google going into a KFC 20 years from know and shooting up the place."

At least it's accuracy will be fantastic!

Re:Mental Anguish

[Feztaa]

You forgot "Abandoned, you insensitive clod!"

Re:Mental Anguish

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it not always shady under a bush?

And Jon Katz will be there to talk about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the post KFCbine era.

One of many examples

[insensitive claude]

The guys who created the Expand Accellerator were actually trying to develop a new encryption method when they stumbled across a method to increase virtual bandwidth.

google is l33t

[mrtroy]

Google is super l33t

Found it!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's O.K, I used Google!

In case it's slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:_Uc4KUIPqXIC: www.google.com/+Google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Re:In case it's slashdotted...

[Soul-Burn666]

The funny thing is this quote from the page:

"Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."

Re:In case it's slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

but where is the google cache of google's cache of google?

Sue Sue Sue!

[raile]

Larry Page: "Lucas Pereira: 'You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!' But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell 'Googol' 'Google', so it worked out OK in the end."

It's time to sic the Google lawyers on googol.com for "brand confusion", or whatever they're calling it these days.

Re:Sue Sue Sue!

[jcast]

Na. If you'll go to googol.com, you'll find they have a link to google right there on the front page. And a google search applet.

Yep, that is how the Flaming Homer was created

[gosand]

I don't know the scientific explanation, but FIRE MADE IT GOOD.

Lots of accidents have created great things, and a lot of concentrated effort has produced nothing worthwhile. Viagra wasn't an accident per se, but it was created for a different purpose than it is used today. The Slinky, Post-its, etc. Things like this happen a lot, and I am sure there is a website out there that compiles just this type of thing. If there were only a search engine I could use to find it...

There is this book.

A book on the subject

[rednaxel]

Accidents May Happen: 50 Inventions Discovered by Mistake

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with this book in any way, just found it in, er, Google. Maybe the next edition will include this lovely search engine...

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've /.'ed Google! ...or maybe not...

--
plur

Re:Oh no!

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

It's ok, here's the google cache.

Re:Oh no!

[Menkhaf]

Haha... You're screwed if Google's cache get's /.'ed. But don't worry my friend, here's Googles cache of Googles cache of Googles cache of Googles cache of Google.

Can you make the server blow up if you do it too many times?

Re:Its funny...

[elmegil]

Uh....dogpile is simply a meta-search engine, and it searches google and many of the others. Seems to me that it makes perfect sense in some cases to use a higher level search instead of relying on google (which while great is NOT always the best for a particular thing you're looking for).

Sergey and Larry

[pipingguy]

Google will go into history as the single-most used word that described an intelligent action (OK, so maybe "think" is competition). And I don't see it going away anytime soon.

Megakudos and may they never have to touch cooties again.

Paul

PS Lest we forget the pigeons that made it all possible

Call me OT...

[pVoid]

but

Larry Page: "Keynote would be really outstanding if you had a fast machine to edit your presentations on." Smart-Ass: "A machine faster than those at the disposal of the founders of Google?" Larry Page: "You know what I mean: a machine faster than this laptop here."

This somehow reminds me of Kevin Spacey's character in the big Kahuna.

Page has a big ego

[wheeljack]

why else would he have named Googles core technology "Page Rank"...

Re:Page has a big ego

[Raptor CK]

It's entirely possible that he just smells funny, you know.

Re:Page has a big ego

[DeadSea]

The parent post was modded up as funny, but PageRank was actually named after Larry Page. It was not called PageRank because it ranks web pages.

Larry and others at google has said this in the past. Although I can't find proof on Google's web site (darn lousy search engine they use ;-), I did find this in an article on SearchEngineWorld:

Google examines link structures all over the web. By doing so, it can give every page a popularity rating known as "PageRank" (named after Google cofounder Larry Page). When you do a search, URLs with high PageRanks are more likely to be listed first. However, this will only happen if the pages also match other criteria, such as containing your search terms or being identified as being relevant to your search terms by analyzing the context of links.

According to this article, it was originally called "BackRub":

Google began as a search engine called BackRub. It was so named for what was its, (at the time), unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to and from a given website as part of its algorithms to search results. This approach to link analysis gained BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen the technology. Today this technology is know as Google's patented "PageRanks" technology.

Another reference: http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/2002/08/30/

Re:Page has a big ego

[mvdw]

I don't know, maybe he has a BO problem...

And Yahoo started as a Sumo resource

[Ars-Fartsica]

Jerry Yang's original set of links was a Sumo wrestling enthusiast's page...that for a time was valued at $120 billion dollars (!).

Another story

[M.C. Hampster]

I heard another story about this web site that was supposed to be a discussion board featuring intelligent discussions on the subject of science and technology and instead turned into Slashdot.

Ok, mod me down now.

Re:Another story

[gimple]

Hear, hear! I would mod you up!

First mention of Google from Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Google groups..

Now can someone find the first mention of searching Google looking for the first mention of Google in Google?

Re:First mention of Google from Google?

[ripetersen]

Try This

Re:First mention of Google from Google?

[dark_panda]

I'd also be curious to know what the first web page Google indexed was.

J

Re:First mention of Google from Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Itself or Stanford.edu maybe?

Re:First mention of Google from Google?

[hackrobat]

What strikes me is that it's one of those "This is the only article in this thread". No one seemed interested?

Re:First mention of Google from Google?

[tom420.com]

Why would u be interested in yet another search engine? Written in Python? By a guy I never heard of before?

That feel-good feeling

[NeoMoose]

There's just something about knowing that some of the greatest achievements in recent technology have been accidents. Quite unsettling.

Technically...

[Masem]

Nearly every great idea or innovation is a result of an "accident", though not necessary the type of accident you'd expect. Brainstorming sessions are meant, for example, to drive your thinking away from the norm and into the crazy and bizarre, something you'd probably consider to be an accident if you did it normally as part of the job, but good brainstorming can result in some fantastic ideas. Even in science, we're encouraged not to stay on a single focus and instead read and learn outside your field because who knows what the merger of ideas could lead to. Even from a standpoint of evolution, most evolution advances are a result of mistakes in the genetic code that leads to improved survival. So having the world's biggest search engine be a result of the a mistake is no big surprise and just goes to show what creative thinking can get you.

Well yes and no

[kfg]

What it really serves to point out is that the technology of search engines was based on flawed premises. That is, they didn't really understand what they were trying to accomplish.

These guys didn't accidentally invent a good search engine. They accidentally *discovered* that what a good search engine *was* was an annotation ranking method.

A subtle difference, but a critical object lesson for others trying to "invent" things.

KFG

Flemming and Penicillin

[Raul654]

I'd just like to point out that Flemming pretty did nothing with penicillin besides discover its existance (1928)-- he gave up on it after 6 months. It took a whole new generation of doctors and a world war 15 years later to actually make it useful.

Re:Flemming and Penicillin

[larien]

Ah, yes, wars... about the only good thing you can say about the two world wars is that they advanced science considerably between 1914 & 1945.

Mainly that science was "how to kill people" & "how to stop your people being killed", but we did get some useful advances in medicine & transport (e.g. radar, sonar, jet engines) out of it.

Re:Flemming and Penicillin

[Dareth]

Flemming used a crude penicillin solution to clean petri dishes to save money on glassware. He published his works on this and also on lysozymes, the anti-bacterial stuff in saliva and tears but was mocked by the established scientific community both times. It was only later, when prompted by the large number of people dying of infection from injuries from the War that his work was rediscovered and penicillin perfected.

Re:Flemming and Penicillin

[Uri]

I'd just like to point out that Flemming pretty did nothing with penicillin besides discover its existance (1928)-- he gave up on it after 6 months. It took a whole new generation of doctors and a world war 15 years later to actually make it useful.

That's slightly unfair. While all the key work was indeed done by Chain and Florey some 12 years later (for which they shared the Nobel prize but not the recognition), Fleming did do two very important things with his discovery: he ran toxicity tests; and he published. He was not a chemist, and could not have isolated the active antibacterial element. It was just a pity that others did not spot the "wonder drug" potential a few years earlier.

I wonder...

[oZZoZZ]

After reading all the information on google's technogoly, I wonder how many lines of code pagerank really is.

Do you figure it's 50k+lines, or something very simple, and only a few hundread lines

For some reason, I don't think the pagerank algorithm is more than 1000 lines of code... I know lines of code isn't really a defining characteristic of anything, but it's still interested...

Re:I wonder...

[suwain_2]

If you use semi-colons and a language like C, PHP, Perl, etc. etc. etc., I bet they can trim it down to one line. :)

NOW I understand their blog move

[egghat]

From the article


Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."


Now think about blogging with page ranking applied. Might be much more useful than normal blogging. As search engines with PageRank are compared to normal search engines.

Bye egghat.

Re:NOW I understand their blog move

[Surak]

Now think about blogging with page ranking applied. Might be much more useful than normal blogging. As search engines with PageRank are compared to normal search engines.

Like Slashdot with the ability of users to mod stories? :-P

Re:NOW I understand their blog move

[jacoplane]

That would be kuro5hin..

Re:NOW I understand their blog move

[abiogenesis]

It may soon be possible as Google recently purchased Blogger:

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmo r/ archives/000802.shtml

Re:Its funny...

[KilerCris]

yeah real good

annotate the web

[gmuslera]

Still there is space for such a system, something that centralizes comments about sites. They could put a link for comments about search results, and link discussion sites (slashdot and similars, weblogs, usenet, etc) that show links to this sites as possible comments.

Mmmm I should check Google Labs before saying something that looks so obvios, they already doing it in Google WebQuotes

Re:annotate the web

[Thing 1]

They could put a link for comments about search results, and link discussion sites (slashdot and similars, weblogs, usenet, etc) that show links to this sites as possible comments.

The Foresight Institute sponsored something several years ago to annotate the web, called Crit , written by Ka-Ping Yee.

Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, but it was a great way of adding notes to web sites. There was no moderation or "note ranking" so it was fairly primitive but a great start.

Re:annotate the web

[bshanks]

Yes, I agree, in fact I think annotation will be huge. The Annotea project seems to be the one with standardization body support. WebQuotes isn't really intentional annotation and so is somewhat different.

My personal feeling is that the main problem with annotation will be having popular pages getting cluttered with too many annotations. "Subscribing" to various annotation servers (with different moderation criteria) is maybe the solution. I also propose that some of the annotation servers themselves should be wikis; i.e. the server should use the wiki consensus-based approach to creating/editing/moderating the annotations which it serves.

Re:annotate the web

[bshanks]

If anyone needs them, I still have a tarball of the Crit sources. Drop me an email if you want a copy -- my email's on my webpage.

I've been thinking about hacking the Crit proxy server to serve as a proxy for Annotea, obviating the need for browser support (maybe Google could run such a gateway someday). But I don't think I'll have time to.

Re:annotate the web

[gmuslera]

Annotating individual pages all over the web is a huge project. But to be useful it must be feeded with more than dedicated voluntary efforts. Thats why my first idea was to get comments from usenet, mailing lists, web sites, weblogs, etc (wikis is another great source), where site comments are already being generated, and at a very good rate. Whatever be the site that try this, should have a very big cache of internet, or at least, be connected via google api to the google engine (inside google there are a good amount of qualified information, more than their web cache you have also usenet, and google answers, and the capability to handle all of this in your own specific way).

But how clasify the big amount of comments that should exist for very visited sites? I suppose Google would come with AnnotateRank(TM) or some word like that, some measure on how trusty or relevant is a comment about a site, but I'm not sure how it will be. Maybe similar to page rank, counting links to the site where the comment is posted, or the specific post, or the size of the thread that generated that message for threaded comment systems, or moderation points in sites like slashdot.

In addition to annotating, giving the choice of the searcher to give a "weight" to comments, or counting hits could be useful also, but anyway, all of this could make things harder to understand and I bet that the key could be a very simple idea, changing a bit the point of view like was counting links pointing to a site the idea that gived relevance to web searches.

I think that specialized wikis for annotating sites (something like Wikipedia) is not good for something so dinamic as www, but, who knows, maybe some tricks could make this more useful, like searching the web with some tactics to load fast a big initial base of annotations (i.e. all comments with score 3+ in slashdot that talk about a site) or browser plugins to make things easier.

I was an accident!

[nlinecomputers]

Do you think my parents would have done this ON PURPOSE?
That means, my God, they had to have *gasp* SEX?

I really didn't want that mental picture before lunch. I think I'm going to be ill.

Re:I was an accident!

[coke_dite]

My sole consolation is that my kids will feel exactly the same way 20 years from now :)

Its called being a Hacker isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

...the act of finding something cool in one place and realising that, with a bit of messing around be it with a compiler/soldering iron/saw(!) it can be made into something quite different thats just as cool if not better...

Alimony

[siskbc]

yeah, alimony's a real bitch, aint it?

Well, it's recipient usually is...

For those who don't read the articles:

[fishdan]

Larry Page: "Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"

What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?

Re:For those who don't read the articles:

[drewness]

What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?

Everything a man does is to try and impress chicks.

Re:For those who don't read the articles:

[BLiP2]

What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?

Well, maybe not advancements, but possibly new scientists...

(Ok, enough accidental pregnancy jokes..)

Re:For those who don't read the articles:

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything a man does is to try and impress chicks.

You mean, "everything a man does is to try to impress chicks."

That's right ladies, get in a single file line for your very own "grammar corrections...."

Re:For those who don't read the articles:

[drewness]

You mean, "everything a man does is to try to impress chicks."
Oops. I guess that was a verb phrase with an infinitival sentential complement. I'm going to say the way I phrased it is dialectally appropriate. I'd have to consult some other people from around here, and if they disagree we'll call it my own little idiolect. :)
Prescriptive grammarians suck.

I wonderful idea.

[Vodak]

It makes you wonder how long until some company comes up with the idea to copyright "the accidental creation of useful products and systems" and attempt to sue google and other things. =]

Re:I wonderful idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing patent and copyright.

Re:I wonderful idea.

[Xerithane]

It makes you wonder how long until some company comes up with the idea to copyright "the accidental creation of useful products and systems" and attempt to sue google and other things. =]

Probably never, because you can copyright "The accidental creation of useful products and systems" and it doesn't mean a damn thing. In fact, it isn't even enforcable because it is not anything substantial enough to copyright. People could reproduce that text left and right, and nobody would care.

However patenting it would make a huge difference, and you can patent business rules. Although you'd have a lot of prior art, with that whole Pennicilin thing.

And as a public service announcement: Please, before making a joke, verify what you think you know so you don't look like a tool trying to karma whore.

This is a great argument...

[masq]

... for NOT cutting the funding on "pure" research.

I mean, Google's cool, but *peanut butter* was an accident as well, and I couldn't LIVE without my PB&J.

Who knows, maybe someone will stumble across the next peanut butter by accident while researching a cure for cancer or something - then I can die happy.

Well, a cure for cancer would be good too.

Re:This is a great argument...

[rufo]

Or maybe they'll stumble accross the cure for cancer while trying to improve peanut butter.

Hey, you never know.

Re:This is a great argument...

[dbitter1]

IIRC both halon (the fire extingushing agent) and Aspartame were accidents...

Re:This is a great argument...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you hate it when you go for a Funny mod and get Insightful and Interesting instead?

You Forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

Conceived by Catholics

Re:You Forgot

[stephenbooth]

Isn't that covered by 'Planned' since Catholics have to have a baby every time they have sex. Cue gratuitous Monty Python segment and exit stage left singing "Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great, if a sperm is wasted, God get quite irate....."

Stephen

Re:You Forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

So sex during pregnancy is pipelining?

I think to the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Google was an accident at all. Yes, the engine could be an accident. However, google as a company is not. It was a genius in business sense that simple search page and customer satisfation is the key. Also, it's genius in a sense that some engine was created for something else, but the founders have decided to use it for search (this is a calculated one, not accident). The only accident is the fact that the engine was not used as initially thought.

I once took a course with Dr. Linus Pauling

[kfg]

It was one of those extra credit, summer seminar thingies where the topic wasn't a particular subject, but rather the "creative process."

Dr. Pauling told me the story of how he, and dozens of others that he knew of, had "discovered" penecillin before Fleming.

You see, he walked into his lab one day and found his cultures had been infested with mold. Naturally he was upset. His experiement was ruined even before it had begun. All this mold was killing off his cultures. He had to dispose of them and start over. It seems this was a common occurance in bio labs all over the world if you weren't careful.

It took a particular *mindset* for Fleming to look at his cultures, and instead of getting upset that they had been ruined thinking, " Hey, ruining bacterium cultures is one of the things we're trying to *DO*."

Discovery is often in *how* you look at things, not what you look at.

KFG

Re:I once took a course with Dr. Linus Pauling

[arsinmsn]

Speaking of re-thinking the usual, I've often wondered why someone didn't use a nice speedy search engine as the core of a translation program. After all, pro translators have been cranking out translations for centuries. The problem, of course, is that very few translations on line are linked, phrase by phrase, to the original.

Still, some classics of world literature by folks like Dostoevsky, Confucious, & Stanislaw Lem (not to mention masses of religious writing) have very careful translations. This seems like data waiting to be mined.

Me? I've got a job, for now.

here is the google cache

[soorma_bhopali]

Before google gets slashdotted!! www.google.com

yeah? and after!

[jeepee]

I was an accident too!

My Lucky Accident...

[Sun Tzu]

This reminds me of the time I was trying to write a data storage system and accidently invented a combination compression and encryption algorithm far faster and more space-efficient than anything the world has ever known. Currently, it is one-way only ... but when I get the decompression / decryption working, I'll be rich!!! Muahahahahahahahahaha!!!

Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.

Re:My Lucky Accident...

[kevinadi]

Bah I already patented it, you just lost your billions to me, mate.

The scheme is very simple, anything can be compressed into only one bit:
0 means no data
1 means there's something but it's compressed and encrypted into 1.

See? Not even quantum computers can break my unbreakable encryption. Muhahahahahahaha

Re:My Lucky Accident...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's called rm ...

Re:My Lucky Accident...

[Hektor_Troy]

Bah .. you didn't invent that - I did!

It's actually fairly easy:
Store things in /dev/null and retrieve them from /dev/random

Like you said, it's the decryption that's a bitch.

Re:Its funny...

[skillet-thief]

From my experience with meta search engines, they end up taking up more of your time. Each query gives you the first 10 responses from each engine. That's fine if you are looking for something pretty easy to find (but then you probably don't need a meta engine anyway).

On the other hand, if you are looking for a needle in a haystack, as I seem to be usually, using a meta engine just means you have to wade through that many more pages before getting to the stuff you want. After a few months of using Dogpile, I ended up deciding that my time was better spent going deep into Google. YMMV, natch'.

Where is the annotation?

[teamhasnoi]

I recall (on /.?) there being some sort of browser plugin that would allow you to mark up sites or comment on site content. All this stuff would be stored on a central server somewhere, and new visitors would get an updated view of the notes made *on the page itself*. Not the MS Smart Tags, but something that would let ME make comments. I do recall that there was a hoopla about trolls, interference in page design and the usual "leave my site alone!" hysterical mothers...

What became of this software/plugin - or was/is it google?

Re:Where is the annotation?

[pne]

Maybe you're thinking of CritLink/CritSuite?

I can't get to the site at the moment, but you could try an old cache at archive.org.

Re:Where is the annotation?

[jpmorgan]

3rd voice. They're not around anymore, though.

Eigenvalue? Sounds German...

[yerricde]

I wonder how many lines of code pagerank really is.

Try one equation, iterated a few times:

PageRank(i) = (0.15/N) + (0.85)*Sum(PageRank(j) where j is in {pages that point to i})

However, the PageRank value is only one aspect of Google's ranking; for brand-new pages that haven't had time to gather links yet, Google seems to use straight textual ranking.

Talk about a Complex

[RumGunner]

Poor Google. Next thing you'll know, it'll be telling Larry Page "You're not my father!"

.

Wha's the big deal about google?

[tundog]

It would be cool if that "i"m feeling lucky" button actually took you to a web page, but I tried it a couple of times and it seems its broken on my client. Every time I'd do a search for a "search engine" the page would just reload.

Re:Wha's the big deal about google?

[arglesnaf]

"I'm feeling lucky" automatically sends you to the first page that would have been returned by your search. Put something in the search box.

Unless you happen to be a small child doing a book report on latex, silicone, or medieval dungeons.

Not only an accident

[jaaron]

Google's not only an accident, but also a misspelling: It should be googol.

Although I'm kinda glad it got misspelled though, because google is much cooler that googol.

Interesting googol fact from whatis.com:

Later, another mathematician devised the term googolplex for 10 to the power of googol - that is, 1 followed by 10 to the power of 100 zeros. Frank Pilhofer has determined that, given Moore's Law (which is that computer processor power doubles about every 1 to 2 years), it would make no sense to try to print out a googleplex for another 524 years - since all earlier attempts to print a googleplex out would be overtaken by the faster processor.

Re:Not only an accident

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA:

Larry Page: "Lucas Pereira: 'You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!' But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell 'Googol' 'Google', so it worked out OK in the end."

Re:Not only an accident

[pipingguy]

Behold, young herd of nerds:

Barney Google

Re:Not only an accident

[mumkin]

given Moore's Law [...], it would make no sense to try to print out a googleplex for another 524 years - since all earlier attempts to print a googleplex out would be overtaken by the faster processor.

The link between printing speed and Moore's Law escapes me. Are we assembling a gargantuan PDF containing the text of a googolplex and then printing it? I would think you could easily print out a googolplex in less than 524 years. Just have your printer print one page beginning with 1, then X iterations of page two, which is all zeroes. All you need to know is how many zeroes will fit per page in your font and linespacing of choice.

Re:Not only an accident

[jaaron]

I think the idea was to print out the numbers one to a googleplex which is much more than just printing out the number itself.

this could explain my pants.

[AssFace]

sometimes I get really excited about these articles... I suppose the end result are happy accidents. in my pants.

Larry Page's mother

[OwlofCreamCheese]

and today Larry Page's mother made the shocking announcement that he was an accident.

Larry Page could not be reached for comments.

Google wishlist

[NigelJohnstone]

Can you make it faster please? My attention span is now so short thanks to the web that.... ahh whatever.

HHGTTG

[syle]

"It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass." - HHGG

Re:Note the disclaimer

[kakos]

Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

Google can use that one to get out of any lawsuit. "We aren't affiliated with the authors of www.google.com, nor responsible for its content."

And from before it was "Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

And still just "Backrub" Too bad it's in Japanese.

What's Ironic is ....

[Khalidz0r]

Well, what's ironic is that the ranking system is _hardly_ used nowawadays (at least from what I see). I have the toolbar, and I did rank some pages sometimes, but when I think about it, I rarely do look at the google page rank in a website when I visit it, and I wonder how many others do? Note: Slashdot has a high page rank anyways :)

Re:What's Ironic is ....

[Army Eye]

Hmm where to begin here. PageRank is used all the time, it's the main factor in determining the order of your search results. And yes PageRank is based on how many times a page is linked. I'm curious to know how you personally have been ranking pages :)

Bluffing

[hackrobat]

I think this guy is bluffing. I've found a flaw in his accident theory. The fact that his name is Larry "Page" proves that this whole thing was well-planned.

(What a smart boy I am.)

Re:Actually...

[wiresquire]

Google reminded them all that the most important thing in a search engine isn't how fast it runs (though that's important), but that it returns the most relevant results first.

...the Information Retrieval (IR) geeks reckon there's 2 major factors. You are correct that one of those is relevance, which is known as precision. And the other is recall. Think of recall as getting all the relevant results.

One of the tricks that can be used to cull irrelevant results is to cut down the total number of results. The IR dudes quickly started playing the numbers. Showing the best 20 results is better than showing the top 100 with 60 of those being irrelevant.

I like to think of these as accuracy and completeness.

I used to occasionally browse through TREC. Seems like they have locked up the past results nowadays...

Patents suck

[anthony_dipierro]

And yet, somehow we're supposed to believe that without the patent system that "invention" would have never came to pass?

Re:Patents suck

[TheKey]

Well, unique and innovative patents aren't bad. They only last a few years anyhow. Absurd patents is the problem.

Re:Patents suck

[anthony_dipierro]

Well, unique and innovative patents aren't bad.

Only having one google when we could have three is bad.

Re:Patents suck

[Moofie]

There are zillions of search engines. They're free to use whatever search algorithm they want to. I happen to prefer google (I switched from altavista while google was still beta=testing itself, and I never looked back).

Why does Google's patent keep other people from creating search engines? I mean, it's not like they patented the idea of a search engine...

There are lots and lots of ridiculous patents. There are also some absurdly clever and innovative ones.

Re:Patents suck

[anthony_dipierro]

There are zillions of search engines. They're free to use whatever search algorithm they want to.

They're not free to use google's algorithm, because it's patented.

Why does Google's patent keep other people from creating search engines?

It doesn't. It makes it harder for them to create good search engines, though.

There are lots and lots of ridiculous patents. There are also some absurdly clever and innovative ones.

There are absurdly clever and innovative ideas, but those are exactly the ones I don't want patented.

Re:Patents suck

[TheKey]

There are absurdly clever and innovative ideas, but those are exactly the ones I don't want patented.

Without patents on absurdly clever and innovatie ideas, what motivation would inventors have to invent? They would invent something and try to sell it to a company, and the company would just design their own. Without patents, inventors - especially individuals - get fucked over. In a few years, after they reap the benefits of their genius ideas, the patents expire. It's a wonderful system, given that patents aren't handed out like condoms.

Re:Patents suck

[anthony_dipierro]

Without patents on absurdly clever and innovatie ideas, what motivation would inventors have to invent?

The pursuit of knowledge, grant acquisition, PHD theses, fame, altruism, boredom, accident, etc.

They would invent something and try to sell it to a company, and the company would just design their own.

I don't think that would happen any more than it already does. For any non-trivial invention, having the actual inventor on your payroll is going to help.

Without patents, inventors - especially individuals - get fucked over.

That certainly begs the question.

In a few years, after they reap the benefits of their genius ideas, the patents expire. It's a wonderful system, given that patents aren't handed out like condoms.

That's certainly the argument, but it's one that I challenge.

Re:Patents suck

[Moofie]

I disagree, but you get full marks for using "begs the question" correctly. Good job.

I think that patents on specific mechanisms are a Good Idea. I think it's nice when somebody who thinks up something clever, and non-obvious, gets rewarded.

That's not to say that I think our current intellectual property system is anything other than COMPLETELY fucked up. Right now, you can patent the use of the word patent when discussing patents, and I think that's just catastrophically stupid (and, in fact, violates your parent poster's condition that patents not be handed out like condoms).

I think that a patent can and should be awarded for a non-obvious mechanical object. I think I could see my way clear to agreeing that a software "mechanism" might be patent-able too, but work-alike mechanisms that produce the same results through different means should be explicitly allowed.

As a f'rinstance, I think a href="http://www.hoberman.com/fold/hoberman_new.ht m">Chuck Hoberman's deceptively simple mechanical linkages are patentable, but the novelty-gadget with the multiple scissors links that extends out and grabs something when you squeeze the handles, should not be patentable.

Obviously, it would take a lot of work to codify these principles, but I think it's high time we started thinking about it.

Re:Patents suck

[Moofie]

Dammit, I SWEAR I hit preview. Here is an unfunked link to Mr. Hoberman's site.

Re:Patents suck

[anthony_dipierro]

I think that patents on specific mechanisms are a Good Idea. I think it's nice when somebody who thinks up something clever, and non-obvious, gets rewarded.

If you think it's nice then perhaps you should be the one rewarding them? Personally I think the government needs more of a justification than "it's nice" to force one person to pay another.

I mean, it'd be nice if everyone gave me $100. :)

The only argument I see for patents is that they promote science, and thus benefit everyone in the long run. But I'm not convinced that they actually do this.

Re:Patents suck

[Moofie]

More to the point, I believe we should preferentially reward innovators and inventors over large conglomerates who can easily duplicate somebody else's ideas.

Yes, patents should exist IFF they promote science and the arts. The mechanism by which patents should do that is by granting time-limited monopolies on ideas to inventors.

Note: I don't think that the inventor should be able to sell that patent. Yes, license it, but not exclusively to any party. There's a different conversation entirely.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that this is the case today, but there's a baby in that patenty-bathwater.

Re:Its funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, if you are looking for a needle in a haystack

You might want to try PHP:

Description
string strstr ( string haystack, string needle)

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strstr.php

"I always suspected that Google was one line of code..."

Google history

[Midnight Thunder]

Here is a page on the history of Google: http://www.googlerank.com/ranking/google-history.h tml

They mentioned that in the article.

[Chris Pimlott]

The "google" vs "googol" thing, that is.

Don't be so hard on yourself

[filmsmith]

Tell you what... I lost my keys. Maybe you can find them for me!

Re:Don't be so hard on yourself

[Moofie]

I found mine, but yours weren't there. I'll keep looking.

Google = Big Brother (immortal cookie)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

Re:Google = Big Brother (immortal cookie)

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to block. Google still works.

CowboyNeal's Mom: CowboyNeal Was An Accident

[Kenshin]

"Ars Technica is reporting that CowboyNeal's mother has admitted that the CowboyNeal wasn't originally intended to be born at all. "It wasn't that we intended to build a baby. We were just experimenting in the bedroom one night."

(Sorry, obligatory CowboyNeal joke. Don't hate me.)

Re:Actually...

[gughunter]

...the Information Retrieval (IR) geeks reckon there's 2 major factors. You are correct that one of those is relevance, which is known as precision. And the other is recall. Think of recall as getting all the relevant results.

And don't forget the third factor: Information Retrieval's policy is to charge suspects for the costs of retrieval. It's only fair!

There is something other than Google?

[AsmordeanX]

A friend of my brother-in-law was suprised to hear that there were other search engines in existance.

He thought that Google was just a standard, like HTML, FTP, Gopher, or NNTP.

That was quite the little accident they had.

Odds are

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Edison and Einstein were accidents, too.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates: Windows Was An Accident
from the packaging-pure-evil dept.

Bill Gates writes: "Microsoft® Windows® wasn't originally intended to be an operating system at all. We were trying to put pure evil into a software form. After we finally got a working build, we executed it. First nothing seemed to happen. Then the PC rebooted - and loaded Windows®. Our precious had replaced the operating system on the disk with itself, and immediately we realized we had succeeded in our mission. This was going to make us rich, rich, RICH!"

( Read More... )

Famous first words

[dacarr]

"That's interesting!"

Re:Its funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus Google is a tiny page load, with pretty much no graphics to wade through. It's probably one of the quickest loading site between having little graphics and very quick servers. I always found Google to be very pleasing on the eyes.

Re:Its funny...

[Moloch666]

Haha, just great. That have to throw an advertisement for some crappy search engine submital service as the first result. Just goes to show probably 99.9% of search egines out there are crap.

google.com threatening non-profit gewgle.com

[pheph]

Check out the legal proceedings or gewgle.com.

After they copied Google's site

[Anonymous Coward]

And the new site Froogle. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Re:After they copied Google's site

[nutznboltz]

If you spent any time using the Wayback Machine you would see that gewgle.com was just a front-end for the real google.com. It was just a parody.

wayback to gewgle.com

Re:After they copied Google's site

[Anonymous Coward]

And this "Have a credit card and 5 minutes? eMail me" means what exactly? If someone went there, thinking it was really Google, and emailed him, wouldn't that be fraud? If I make a front end for a site that looks/acts like another site, and use that to profit, that's wrong.

Google is to the modern world.....

[tmortn]

What the Oracle at Delphi was to the ancients :-) ....

seek and ye shall find all knowledge that thy heart desires if ye but phrase the proper query to the almighty Google.

lol, you know cults have probably been started around sillier things.

Patentable

[Tablizer]

Since "happy accidents" is a "business process", expect it to be patented.

Unsung inventions

[whereiswaldo]

I wonder how many inventions will never see the light of day because patenting one's idea is out of the reach of the average person.
Corporations rule. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong so I can get _my_ inventions out there and make a reasonable profit for myself.

Meet Larry L' Page!

[Carmody]

Am I the only one who remembers that Larry Page was the president/icon of the "Sticky Stuff Club" that appeared in ads for a certain brand of "glue-stick"?

no link?

[Suppafly]

If ars technica is reporting it, why didn't they provide a link to the story at ars. We could do without the link to the main website, but a link to the story would be nice.

Its called NCSA Mosaic

[Anonymous Coward]

Mosaic had annotations. They would appear in a small frame beneath the content.

Read this !!! First mention of Google from Google?

[olip]

I just found something really really neat while browsing among the first mentions of google in the Google news archive circa summer '98.
There was a guy interested in getting a licence on Google technology... And this guy is from deja news... which eventually was bought by google itself... And I learned this in the dejanews archive on GoogleGroups... Ironic, uh ?

Re:Read this !!! First mention of Google from Goog

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny... and sad. I wonder if he still works for them?

"Behind every great fortune ...

[alphameter]

lies a crime[, an accident, or technological shift]."

Larry Page's statement is another data point supporting that statement.

(Remember, the keyword is "great". I'm not referring to people working hard at their jobs and getting promoted to a $130k/year job.)

Progressive taxation is fair!

Unfortunately, Reagan dropped the top federal rate from 70% to around 36%. Is anyone surprised at the growing gap between rich and poor since then?

I hope ./ers are as informed about economics as they are about technology. There are more important issues than whether it's legal to hack DVD encryption.

Re:best accident..

[Anonymous Coward]

WAR!!!

Who needs a building.

[tpaudio]

Before google I actually had to go to a library to do research for school. I have to say researching is much more fun in PJ's. (Yes i do go to the library sometimes to verify sources :P)

isn't this just squid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there more to this "product" than squid and a vpn?

I can't find anything on their website other than outrageous 500% increase in throughput claims.

the box that does the work has no specs or anything

smells fishy to me

can someone help enlighten me who should buy this?

Google uses legal teem to fight harmless joke site

[nutznboltz]

See parent post for details.

Google Was an Accident

[Spettro]

More like an unhappy disaster, when one realizes that link popularity merely rewards a site or page based on a "measure" that can be artificially manipulated. The notion of "relevance based on link popularity" punishes new sites - especially the smaller ones who do not have the money to generate links quickly. More damning, the entire link popularity scheme effectively means that Google cannot ever effectively or fairly rank news and other "right now" pages or content. It MAY possibly be true that "popularity" can be a measure of relevance - but many a Libertarion or Free Speech advocate would not agree. But that is not actually "relevant", here, since Google's ranking methods do NOT reflect true popularity. What Googles's success demonstrates is the poverty of search technology - where relevance is not really based on matching content to the user query, but on the hope that the poor searcher will be sufficiently overwhelmed by a zillion "results", or on persuading the searcher that a bunch of top-of-the-page sites have so many links that they "must be what you want". Jeesh! Give us a break already! Gush about Google if you must be part of the faddish elitist mob, but it is a *lousy* "technology".

Re:Google Was an Accident

[keynet]

Which is why they have bought Blogger. I have no idea why Google chose Blogger than any one of a dozen equally, or more effective Blogging businesses, that is a business decision. But it is pretty clear why they would do that. The breathless story from Dan Gillmor does all the usual, but invalid stuff about the Internet.

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago, Google bought Deja. com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet newsgroups, Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net. But now, Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." and yadda yadda yadda. All that may be true but I don't believe it. This is not about "content" and Google isn't interested in "content", the news service is the result of the reliability that Google brings to other people's resource and content and the Blogger deal is the next stage in the development of Googling the net. PageRank generates reliable sources of whatever kind of information you ask for, based on search terms generated by idiots like me. Bloggers have developed a whole new set of tools that is making the reliability of information much higher and is using massively distributed human resources to find and rank that information very quickly. A story hits the net and the Blogosphere, using newsreaders, Blogs with Trackback links and the usual power rule processes of the network evaluates that information and weaves it into it proper place in the knowledge universe very quickly. By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information. That's an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest. I've said for a long time that Google is not a search engine. Now we have Larry Page's word for it.

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. "Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

Here's another bit that makes so much more sense than most people get.

Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.

Google surveys the free part of the web. Everyone wants to be on Google, because if you aren't in Google you don't exist. So you had better be free, and good, and referenced, and linked to the universe, or you don't exist and if you don't exist you sure as hell don't do business. Can we call that part of the debate settled please?

Re:Eigenvalue? Sounds German (Completely offtopic)

[Sique]

Eigenvalue is only part german. The german word for eigenvalue is Eigenwert (and for eigenvector it's Eigenvektor, with "Wert" just meaning "value", and "Vektor" = "vector" resp.).

The name derives from the german word "Eigenschaft" (property, characteristics), because the eigenvalues characterize an linear operator.

Re:According to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

and your point is...?

Conceived by Catholics

[Martin S.]

Catholics with rhythm are never born.

You don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

PageRank isn't based on user opinions. It's based on the number of links to a particular page that exist on other pages. Silly you.

Well, you probably haven't been using the toolbar

[Khalidz0r]

Well guys, you probably have not been using the google tool bar (or at least not fully), have you?

quoting from http://toolbar.google.com/button_help.html :

Voting buttons: If you especially like or dislike a page, you can vote for or against the page by using these buttons. Just click the happy or unhappy faces to tell Google that you like or dislike a page as you surf. These buttons can also be used to report especially good or bad results after searching on Google. Indicate satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your results by clicking the appropriate button after performing a Google search. This feature is in testing; for now, you will not see any immediate effects by voting for or against a page.

PageRank(TM) : Displays the PageRank of the page currently in your browser. In order to automatically update this display for each page you visit, the Toolbar sends information about the page you are viewing to the Google servers. Although Google, Inc. does not collect information that directly identifies you (e.g., your name, email address) and will not sell or provide personally identifiable information to any third parties, you may wish to read our privacy policy and/or disable this sending of information. If you decide to disable this functionality, you will no longer see the PageRank for every page as you surf the web. Click here to see our Toolbar privacy policy.

thanks for reading

Re:Well, you probably haven't been using the toolb

[Army Eye]

Hmm. I use the toolbar to an unhealthy degree, and I've never seen those voting buttons. What am I doing wrong?

Re:Well, you probably haven't been using the toolb

[Khalidz0r]

They're not there by default, they are in the options though, I take it slashdot users do see options when they install something =)

You'll find it under Page Information anyway (if we have the same version :) ).

Last Post!

[alpg]

Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing
else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow
the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.
-- Larry Niven, "The Mote in God's Eye"

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