Playing with Google

Chromatic sent over the links to Tara Calishain's Happy Google Hacks page. It's basically a collection of interesting ways to do searching - something fun for the weekend. I'm thinking of preparing dinner Sunday based on the recipe tool.

Comments

Personal Google Score

[presroi]

Long time ago, I began to think about graphing someones "impact" in this world by letting google hunt for his/her name.

The pre-result can be watched at my homepage.

It's important not just to look at the real number but to watch the number growing and declining.

Anna Lührmann (age 19) was elected as member of Parliament 09/23/2002 and her google score just doubled within some days.

Maybe I'm going to reimplement this thing by using the google API and some funny php/lib_gd tools.

Re:Personal Google Score

[presroi]

The URL is very different to a human name. The Human Name System is crappy. It's not unique, it has not a defined charset and it is subject to chances all the time (Guess what happens when Mary marries Martin). Searching for "Jim Miller" or another popular name will not give you satisfing results. Arabic names for example are very hard to find (thats a phenomenon even the Feds have discovered by now). Does it say AlQuaida, El Kaida, Al Quaeda, ...Al Kiruna?

The technical approach of PageRank cannot be compared to count the number of results to a given Human Name.

My name "Mathias Schindler" is not unique and it's often misspelled "Matthias". Since the ordinary human population dislikes the idea of a unique naming system for people. (Another example might be Iceland, where the Surname results from the first name of your father (I heard so, it does not have to be correct)).

Posting your URL does not help your real name to boost directly. Putting your name under every message might.

Version 2.0 *could* make use of that by using the google pageRank as an indicator (for what, btw?). for the importance of a search result. This is the future....

Talking of google hacks...

[arvindn]

Have you seen http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/?

Re:One of my favorite google easter eggs...

[sam_handelman]

What's really weird is that when you search for "goatse", you get a pointer to the anti-scientology subtree of google groups.

The string goatse appears nowhere on the page; goatse.cx certainly isn't there. This was done with blogging, somehow? Does anyone know how that could possibly work? The closest thing I find is a .cx domain: http://lisatrust.freewinds.cx/

Evidently this is a mirror of something defunct, but it won't server pages to explorer and I can't be bothered to start mozilla.