Wired Reports on 'Googlemania'

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "As a tie-in with its March 2004 cover story on the search phenomenon that is Google, Wired has posted its Complete Guide to Googlemania. Written before Google delayed its IPO earlier this month, the feature nevertheless offers a series of interesting articles focused on the search engine giant. Particularly interesting sections include Googlemaniacs (in which 'superusers' like Matt Groening and Garry Trudeau discuss how they use Google on a daily basis), a look at how blog comment spammers have taken advantage of Google's PageRank system, and a gallery of hypothetical interface redesigns by a group of artists and graphic designers."

Comments

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[greentree]

and also weapons of mass destruction

Re:Googlemania

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like this?

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[reverseengineer]

If you dig a bit deeper into history, you'll find the French have won some stuff. They beat back the Moors at Tours in 732, which is why you (probably) don't speak Arabic. Curiously enough, the French did win the Hundred Years' War, despite losing most of the major battles like Crecy and Agincourt. Louis XIV also led France to a number of victories- they came out on top in the War of Devolution (which ranks up there with the Soccer War and the Chaco War as the best named war). There's the Napoleon thing, yes, and while I understand that it eventually all ended with Bonaparte rotting away on St. Helena, it did take England, Russia, and Prussia together. I mean, if you can't be impressed with that, then you can't really consider Germany to be a historically military power, since they tend to eventually lose once most of the other world powers ally to stop them.

Admittedly, the military history of France since then has been rather dismal. They lost to Mexico (Mexico, for goodness sake!) in that whole Maxmillian/Puebla/Cinco de Mayo thing, they were humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War, the Western Front of WWI sat in the middle of France for several years (regarding Verdun, though, that happened in 1916, so America was still on the sidelines), they were conquered outright in WWII (and had a large percentage of their population collaborate with their Nazi masters), and lost most of their colonial possessions in embarassing defeats (Dien Bien Phu, for instance).

Because of these things, as an American, I too have occasionally made fun of the French (favorite French military joke- "French rifles for sale- excellent condition, never fired, only dropped once!"), but hey, I can't be too hard on the French personally. I figure we do owe them pretty big for Lafayette, the Louisiana Purchase, Impressionism, cognac, the Statue of Liberty, existentialist philosophy, and French actresses- so take it easy on them, will ya?

No he didn't

[0x0d0a]

No he didn't. He put an ellipsis at the end to indicate that there was something following, and expected readers to infer the text themselves.

Secondly, jokes tend to be funnier if one gives only the minimal amount of information for most people to get the joke. Driving one home *after* someone's got a joke weakens the punchline.

Furthermore, the Konami code has a number of variations, some of which do *not* end with "B A Start". The approach of the original user, whether intentional or not, let readers who had encountered different variations of the code than you have also appreciate the joke.