Slashdot Mirror
Google Turns 5
Gantic writes "The BBC has an article on Google's 5th birthday. The popular search engine now handles over 200 million queries a day and the word "Google" is now a noun, adjective and verb. Lets see how long the most popular search engine in the world can last, here's to another 5 years and more Google!"
What OTHER search engine do you still use, and why?
It may be 5 years old, but it's not the same as it was back in the day (say 2-3 years ago)... when it truely did 'google' the internet... Now it has all sorts of filters and junk.
Do you remember when you could do a search for a file and it would return hidden ftp sites? Now I do a search for something and all I get are the top sponsored sites. I can't find anything useful using google anymore... all the darned links point to mainstream sites. At the first sign of a potential lawsuit google removes references to potentially offensive material... what good is a search engine that doesn't do a good search?
At this time I can't find anything better than google, but I really hope something comes out that is, cuz I miss the good ol' days when I could actually find stuff on the net...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
When Teoma etc came in I thought Google would be in for some tough competition - but everything has blown away in front of them - a case in study for technology and services analysts for years to come.
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Their PageRank technology is something that they have leveraged on . .
[PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query]
Their continuing language translation initiative and innovative Google Labs keep up the momentum in their favour - searching now is heading for Google thats it, nothing else comes to mind !
Also there have been amazingly few outages too on their side; as they add more and more pages to their cache and more services !
I watched an article on the CBS "Sunday Morning" show where they interviewed Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page while sitting at the breakfast table absorbing my first cup of coffee when noticed stackes of boxes in their office labeled "Penguin Computing". That put a smile on my face!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
I've often wondered why, in all of the attempts to mimic google's toolbar, no one has ever reproduced the handy pagerank indicator; I began hacking at it, wondering if I'll be the first, only to run into a brick wall.
/search?client=navclient-auto&googleip=O;216.239.5 3.104;131&ch=53856195705&freshness_check=3f1eAVUrj Mj2meFfx-IZI&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=inf o:http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot%2Eorg%2F HTTP/1.1
Here's the request it sends; if you duplicate it with telnet or whatever, it really will spit out slashdot's pagerank:
GET
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 1.1.70-big; Windows XP 5.1)
Host: 216.239.53.104
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: keep-alive
But there's a little program, the ch= field. That's a special hash of "http://slashdot.org," and if you don't send it, it doesn't work.
So as I continue attempting to work out the algorithm for this mysterious hash, I wonder: why has Google gone to such great lengths to make sure nobody duplicates the toolbar's pagerank indicator? Would a copy of that feature for Mozilla's google toolbar really be so awful?
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I was on metacrawler before google.
Google is great esp. with the newsgroups they rescued from deja.
One thing though for the googleguy/gals reading (and i'm sure they are) please do something about the spam on google, I cant search for anything without fucking "kelkoo" appearing in the listings, they are doing a fantastic job of shitting all over google listings.
Not just kelkoo either, search for houses and you get urls like www.buy-houses-property-homes.com and www.search-property-buy-cheap.com and a few others that all link to the same site, last time I checked the source code to one of these it was a js redirect - I thought google would have coded around that exploit by now.
Ditto with the keywords seperated by dashes bollocks as in the examples above. Would anybody register those domains for any other reason than spamming search engines, they are hardly easy to tell someone about otherwise.
My less tech savvy partner has allready noticed the amount of noise on google seems to be increasing over the signal.
I did try alltheweb as I heard good things about it. It does return some other results but is also less accurate with its relevancy.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Amusingly enough, the Google Calculator has read Douglas Adams.
It also knows smoots.
More fun here and here and here.
It's even better:
sin( arcsin(0.5))
yelds 0.5
It knows about hexadecimal too
(try entering 0x2ff * 3)