Slashdot Mirror
Google Revises Usenet Search
michaelmalak writes "Wednesday night, Google Groups announced in a thread the rollout of their revised 20-year Usenet archive search engine. Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post. See the announcement thread for others' reaction." An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published some interesting insights into what makes Google tick. In this lengthy article, Google's vice-president of engineering, Urs Hölzle delves into the nuts and bolts behind Google's operations, what back-up mechanisms and hardware setup is in place and even some interesting homegrown technology like the Google File System (GFS)."
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Well damn - I hope they don't "improve" it too much more.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
What the hell? That was probably two of the most useful features.
Damn you google!
"Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related -- for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don't work on smaller systems," said Hölzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept. "
Next up: Grammar and Content
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features? What the bearded terminal hackers at Google giveth, the bearded terminal hackers at Google may taketh away. Certainly, if we can embrace their advertising as the GNU/Linux community has done en-masse, we can understand that they have their reasons for these changes.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
(Gathers canned goods, candles, heads for cave)
Carousel is a lie!
Why would you remove the search by date function? That is insanely useful when you are looking for posts about a particular product, especially tech products where you might only want the most recent posts, or you might be searching for an oudated product.
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Jee, nice "improvements"... I personally have linked to individual posts on a web page summarizing a lawsuit I was involved in that was directly related to posts in a newsgroup. I know others who have linked to posts in similar situations. I just checked my web page and the links to those posts no longer work.
Google just took a HUGE step backwards in my opinion.
Luckily the rot hasn't spread to the national Googles yet, so you can still use Google UK if you need it.. at least until they ruin that too.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
The article states:
- Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
- Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
- Over 30 clusters.
- One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
- Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
- No complete system failure since February 2000.
Now, 2,000 machines in a cluster, plus 1PB data, plus 2Gbps in a cluster times 30 clusters comes to:
- "Over" 60,000 PCs (!)
- "Over" 30PB data storage
- "Over" 60Gbps bandwidth
Also interesting:
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
- No complete system failure since February 2000.
They changed this on me last night right in the middle of using it for some research. My biggest pet peeve is the separation of posts, or lack thereof. When their search term highlighting kicks in and highlights a bunch of words, it's hard to tell where one post ends and the next begins. I'm NOT a fan of this new design. At least they should let us choose the old one!
Try to search for a number using Beta and you'll see how broken it is.
Also, it creeped me out to no end discovering this morning that my Gmail cookie is really a "Google Accounts" cookie which will now be attached to my Usenet forays via Google as well. I personally don't want the line between public and private conversations to be muddied like that, and I definitely don't want a unified cookie straddling both domains.
Finally, the interface leaves a lot to be desired. The layout is cluttered and junky now whereas it was clean and simple before. I'm not enthralled by the Javascript hooks. Threading seems to be worse than ever (and still not done by message-ID or References - when I asked Google why this was via email, the response was "too difficult"... *boggle*) and the CLI-esque search ability is degenerating into a GUI mess; where one line of text and a CR would before get you to the page you wanted, it now can take that plus several additional mouse gestures and clicks.
This is a sad day, to see a useful tool become so f**ked up for no apparent good reason. I can only hope and pray for a reversion.
Well, this is obviously an outrage and all.
I know this is a liiiittle bit offtopic, but here's a story about how the little guy (or little country) can still reach a huge company like Google and get them to change something.
> Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:04:02 +0100
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to post a question to Google Answers,
> but my VISA credit card was not accepted,
> because its expiry date is 09/12 and you only
> allow up to 2009, not 2012.
>
> How do I solve this problem? I live in Denmark.
> I use the same card to shop on the internet all
> the time.
>
> Kind regards,
Hello Jakob,
Unfortunately, because the expiration date is not listed on our billing page, we must ask that you use a different credit card.
Sincerely,
The Google Answers Team
> Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:00:27 +0100
>
> Dear Google Answers Team,
>
> That is the only credit card I have. This is
> very unfortunate, but since others have solved
> the problem, I'm sure that so could you?
>
> Regards, Jakob
Hello Jakob,
Thank you for your reply. We will extend our expiration date options. The
billing page should update in 24-48 hours.
Sincerely,
The Google Answers Team
So still: HURRAY FOR GOOGLE!!!
-- jaf
from "Don't be evil"?
Excuse me, but their Google Groups feature is based entirely on profiting from others' work (and copyrighted work at that). If you're providing a properly searchable index, you might (might) have a public interest defence to the copyright infringement. If you're providing a useful service, most people might (might) not mind you using their work. But if you're going to take away useful searching facilities and provide a service that doesn't even allow proper citation (i.e., deep-linking to a specific post), you're going to be both unpopular and almost certainly breaking the law. I don't know about you, but personally I don't have much respect for people who are either of those things.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Absolutely. With so much spam and repetitive information on Usenet, I've always limited my searches by date.
And linking to a single post is the whole point. I know it costs money to keep that stuff online, but surely they could find a way to put ads on deeplinked posts.
Google just used up all its goodwill with me.
sigs, as if you care.
Although the the Google Groups advanced search page at http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search no longer lets you filter searches by date range, the advanced search page at= en still does.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl
This is a disaster. I have hundreds of links to usenet articles via the old google groups. Those are all dead now. There is no browsable hierarchy of "groups"; no real message threading; far less info on a screen; what a mess. Google groups became my primary interface to usenet and my favorite aspect of google. It seems that google has completely lost its sense. This is one hell of a killer mistake by google.
Hmmm, I guess this means it may be easier to still find all of that crazy s**t I wrote back in college when people actually used their real names on the internet! Uh oh...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
search by date is the most useful feature when searching about many topics, often limiting the search to the last 2 years (or excluding the last 4 for example) yelds the results that one is looking for much more easily.
I have bookmarks to specific articles/threads it took me a long time to find and to which I refer now and then and if they stop working the usefulness of google groups for me will be much reduced...
As much as I understand why they would want to make USENET look more like a message board for people who never really grew up with it (usenet and gopher were mostly all we had back when I first went online) I still think that not having this functionality available for people who know how to make the most of it is very backward thinking.
-- the cake is a lie
When Google first bought up the old DejaNews archives I was ticked. They took something with which I could get the information I was after and returned something with which I could not.
Over the past few years they finally got it back to being something useful. I had heard about this "Make It Into Yet Another Glorified Web Groups" effort, and was less than impressed. But as long as it didn't interfere with it being a decent Usenet search engine...
No sort-by-date and no direct-article-linking? WTF? So if I want to get only the most recent posts for a certain query or if I want to pass someone a direct link to a specific post then I'm now SOL? How is that an "improvement"?
Is there anywhere else with an exhaustive archive of Usenet? I think I'm about to jump ship. I neither need nor want another web-groups option, and I want more search flexibility rather than less.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
.... the +2 insightful moderation or the notion that your comment implying that intelligent people should essentially bend over for their "superiors" and accept whatever they may do passively and happilly could possibly have been intended not as humor, but in earnest.
... we have nowhere else to effectively go ... then we can and should bitch about it, loudly)
Their bread and butter? Without us (the millions of people who use google rather than a competitor) they don't have a business.
I read your post and thought I could detect a tongue firmly in cheeck. I don't know what is more disturbing
Or is everyone's stock answer to anyone's criticism of Our Corporate Masters(tm), or anyone's demand for corporate accountability not just to their stockholders, but to their community, their customers, and their resources (us, as it is our clicks and our eyes they are selling to their advertisers) to "go out and start your own company and stop criticisizing Our Greatness(tm)"?
On a more serious note (and I only feel compelled to say this because so many moderators obviously aren't getting what I believe you intended as a bit of wry humor), our president, our congress, and far too many common folks (on slashdot and off) may eagerly fall to their knees in the presence of their corporate masters (and may indeed race one another to do so), but some of us remain free thinkers and expect to criticize any organization, profit-driven or not, when they misbehave.
And crippling a service to increase revinue is certainly misbehaving, whether or not that service is "free." (Our clicks, our eyes, that they are selling and making billions off of, are also free. If this exchange becomes unequitable because of Google's dominant position
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One thing that's horrible, is trying to find a group in the new system. I was looking for news.admin.net-abuse.email. (Fortunately, I have it bookmarked.) After going to "news." from the top-level Google Groups page, I was taken to a category selection page that included things like "Arts & Entertainment" and even "Adult". There are no such groups under the Usenet news. heirarchy. And under those categories the individual groups are ordered in what's probably their Google PageRank order, not alphabetically, not by size, not by any obvious means.
The big change seems to be they are integrating the Usenet archive with their own Groups stuff, and the two really aren't the same.
This is what happens when you trust one company to maintain anything you need/want access to. It doesn't matter how 'nice' they seem, or how 'cool' they've acted in the past - there's no guarantee they'll continue on that course.
You can still do a deep link to a single article, if you like....
Navigate to the thread, for example this comp.arch thread. Choose the post you want to link to, and click on "Show Options". Two of the options are "print", which is a link to a "printable" version of the article, and "Show original", which is a link to the article with all the headers.
One more step (or simple URL hack) from this display is "view parsed" which gives a friendly HTML version -- for example, try this link.
if you get a lot of hits even if you do this you won't be able to go too far before google will complain: it's not very hard to get lots of hits on broad queries even if you limit by group.
Also now you wouldn't be able to do things like, for example, if you were interested in it for historical reasons, searching posts on Freddie Mercury's (or Ayrton Senna's) death for the month after it happened.
Not to mention that when you sort by date things are not sorted by relevance at all, which means you likely will get A LOT more crap you have to wade through: limiting by date means that you can ignore time periods you're not interested in *AND* still sort by relevance.
-- the cake is a lie
I had a link to usenet post in a recent blog entry. Try this (sometimes there's a server error, but otherwise it seems to work). The trick is to click on "Show Original" and use that link.
Yet Another Web Site
Click "view as tree" at the top of the thread, and you get thre tree frame on the left that allows you to jump to particular articles, even though the articles are still all concatenated...
Search services (AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb, in fact all that I can think of) have dropped the ability to make truncated searches. For English that's only a minor inconvenience. For languages with many tenses or cases (e.g. Russian, Spanish, or Finnish), lack of truncation can make the search service darn near useless.
I'd sure love to hear the rational for all these downgrades. Or, better yet, have the funtions restored.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You are wrong. You are not on the new Google Groups page. There is sort by date, but not search by date. You want to look at groups-beta.google.com, not groups.google.com.
Unfortunately, I believe it to be inevitable that Google will become 'evil'. A single company that controls the search of all the information on the Internet.
Search the web, newsgroups, your desktop etc. It may be all free and good now, but how long before someone pays the right price to access/control what people see.
My experience is that Google search seems to be turning up more noise now than before. Two years ago I could with certainty do a search and get the page I wanted. Now it seems I must scroll through pages of commercial sites and the such to get to the meaty part of the Internet...those little novelty sites that people put up themselves.
Oh well, that's progress.
I was actually lucky enough to visit a datacenter in the southeast united states (which will remain nameless, but if you do a little searching, Im sure you could figure it out) where Google colocates. I want to say they had something like 18,000 square feet just for them, behind a partitioned wall. We were *not* allowed back there, despite my pleading.
Anyway, as we were walking around the 150,000+ square foot datacenter floor, when a guy came by, pushing a very odd looking rack.
It resembled a bread tray, 20 shelves if I counted correctly, with completely naked main boards sitting on them. It looked to be 4 machines per row (counting the power supplys). Each had one IDE disk sitting on a gel pad, strapped in with velcro. I personally watched them wheel 4 of these racks right by me back into the dark "Google" corner of the datacenter. Our tour guide finally gave in.
Him: "Well, you've seen them now!"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Him: "Thats google!"
Definitely the highlight of my day!
If everyone who posted a comment took out 60 seconds to send a complaint message, I think it would make a difference.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
You're obviously trolling, but in the interest of myth-dispelling: under most jurisdictions, everything you write is your copyright by default. What matters is any permission you give (implicitly or explicitly) for it to be copied, and any exemptions to which someone copying it without permission may appeal (e.g., fair use).
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts, and if so whether they are then allowed to reproduce them for commercial purposes without permission, is an untested question (but there's little or nothing in statute law to support this position in most places).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This is incorrect. It's still possible to link to a single post - it's just the old URLs for a single post have now broken. For example, http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=E_-cnfXDhMqTV rTdXTWc-w%40speakeasy.net&oe=UTF-8&output=gpla in, which used to be a link to a post in alt.fan.cecil-adams has now become http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.fan.cecil- adams/msg/99339841838c82ea?dmode=source.
Next to every post in a thread is an options button. One of the options is "Show Original", which links to a single post, with all original headers intact.
I'll miss the ability to search by date, though.
there must be google spys in our midst. Start using the /. code words. :-)
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Although the "groups" link on the www.google.com page goes to the new interface, http://groups.google.com/ still works, and takes you to the old interface everyone prefers.
.@.
I have officially bit off my foot after putting it too far into my mouth. In my country, only old people really RTFA in soviet russia with hot grits. Have a nice day.
http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request. py
If you don't like how they've changed it, let them know about it. If enough of us do it, maybe they'll do something about it.
Jeff
Appearently the onslaught of 100,000 whiny geeks has caused them to rethink their changes. For a while the www.google.com page was linking to the new google groups beta. But now it is linking to the old google groups interface. This is at 16:05 GMT.
Implementation details of the Google File System can be found in this paper by Google engineers.
Who was the idiot that started this rumor?
Each message in a thread has a named HTML anchor, try this for instance. It will show the whole thread, but position you at an exact message in the middle.
The only problem is there is no easy way to get this URL, you have to find the anchor by looking at the HTML source (Firefox's "View Selection Source" feature helps a lot).
Also, if you click on the "Options" link by the individual message, you get a "Show original" link, which shows just the message, verbatim.
And from there, you can click on "View parsed", and see just the pretty message, without the rest of the thread.
So there's your deep-linking. I agree it's not obvious how to do it at the moment, but the ability is obviously still there. Give it some time, it's still a beta!
These quirks and the "Server Error" bugs are to be expected, they'll work it out.
As for the new browsing interface itself, I kinda like it. It integrates and borrows some stuff from their excellent Gmail interface.
It hides quoted text by default (you can expand it with single click), so you don't have to scroll through some morons quoting of a whole message just to add a few words, it keeps a history of groups you recently visited, it allows you to bookmark topics you are interested in, etc. I do find it an improvement over the old interface.
The only thing is the missing date search, I agree there, that was definitely useful feature. If enough people complain, maybe they'll bring it back.
Also, someone else complained that you cannot browse by group anymore... bullshit, it's staring you right in the face, it's the "Browse all of Usenet" link.
Will people quit modding the parent up? +4?
He's wrong, and not informative at all.
The Google Blog posted and then deleted an entry on Google Groups 2, which has been saved in my feedreader.
"Are you interested in learning how to build a bird house, or discussing Linux with other partisans? Or maybe in your spare time you want to make single-layer graphene sheets using Chemical Vapor Deposition.
Whether your interests run to knitting or brain surgery, chances are good other people out there share them. The new Google Groups not only helps you find information on millions of topics; now you can actively share ideas and opinions with others about each and every obsession of yours.
And if you don't find a group already focused on your passion, by all means start one. Invite others to join your group so that all interested parties can read and respond to messages, share opinions and ideas via email or your own group's web page. If you're looking for a group to join, we could definitely use some thoughtful insight (or idle speculation) over at my space elevator group.
Shannon Bauman
Associate Product Manager, Google Groups"
Perhaps they realized that their link to "how to build a birdhouse" was to a post where 6 out of the 8 links were dead. Kaput. Or maybe proclaiming themselves as "Linux partisans" does not fit in with their "don't be evil" mantra, or their shareholders best interests.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Not to defend any evil company (won't publicly do that until I own one and it has made me a kazillionaire) but I'm not ready to count Google as a evil corporate entity yet. They are still in a relatively young market and competitive market. They can't afford to piss everyone off at this point - so I'm guessing that they THINK they are making improvements.
I remember when they originally took over the archive from deja. I was devestated - convinced they were going to totally screw it up. They didn't, or I got used to the screwed up version.
Also, regarding noise appearing in searches, this is a standard cycle that all search engines go through and Google's experiences are well documented. They are constantly changing their search engine to give the most relevant results. Gradually commercial sites that depend on high search results spend enough time and money optimizing their site. Google is constantly changing their tech to push that noise down, but it always gradually floats back to the top. It's in Google's best interest to show commercial sites in their paid ads, not in the valid search results.
Find coupons in Greeley
I submitted the Slashdot story at 8:30am EST. At that time, groups.google.com went to the Beta. Now at 11:15am EST, groups.google.com is the old version, and the Beta has been relegated to a "Preview" link. Sometime in between, Google changed.
This may be a little off-topic, but it's been on my mind recently so I thought I'd mention that I recently blocked Googlebot from my website. Why? Because they were using a new version of the bot that was requesting pages WAY too rapidly, as in tens of pages every second. This new version pretends to be a "real" browser (using the "Mozilla (compatible)" format). The old version (User-Agent begins with "Googlebot") was also present, and requesting pages politely. I think this new version was part of their recent effort to regenerate their index and "deep scan" websites, because it was shortly after this that they advertised their index doubling in size.
There were other issues as well as the rapacious spidering (which reminded me of some of the worst spambots out there), but I won't go into the details here. I didn't get any satisfactory resolution from Google when I tried contacting them.
Website suicide? I don't know. All I do know is that Google seems to be fulfilling my biggest fears - they are going downhill as they get bigger. Funny how the bigger a company gets, the more it tends to suck. Also, having an IPO is never a good thing, in my experience - it always leads to short-termism and corporate decisions based more on the bottom line than what's actually good for the users. Sure, any company has to look after its shareholders and investors, but they never seem to really grok that being so focused on the short-term negatively impacts things in the longer term, particularly if it loses you goodwill in the userspace. Also, as a company grows you do tend to get the sort of braindead, clueless decisions coming out that we apparently see here.
So now we have Google restricting what we can do with old Usenet posts... didn't they buy up all the archives for this stuff a while back? This would appear to give them some amount of power, but also (they should realize) responsibility as stewards of the past. This is not something that they are simply indexing on someone else's website, it's data that they actually own. But in this case it's not really their data at all - it's the community's.
Google seems to be slowly using up the goodwill they built up since 1998 when they came onto the scene, a small, fast, simple, charming and relevant search engine that kicked ass. Why can't a company just keep doing what it does well, and be satisfied with that? Why does everything have to eventually grow, expand, gobble up other companies, and then inevitably start to suck?
Never mind... for now, Goodbye Google.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ken+weaverling+s pam+usenet+first&hl=en&selm=9v6d5h%245pg%241%40new s.dtcc.edu&rnum=1
According to Ken and his search of google, I was the first people to ever use the word "spam" to refer to unwanted electronic communication. Obviously, I did'nt know it at the time and was quite surprised to learn of my "fame." Yeah, that and $7 will get me a cup of mocha-something, I know.
Anyhow, the whole point is that Ken's reserach was aided by the search by date feature. It will be a shame if that is removed.
(And for the curious, I changed my name from Czarnecki when I got married.)
... or should that be deja-news? Remember when that site changed for the worse?
The new system sucks. No fixed-width fonts by default, that horrible floating group name at the right of the screen when scrolling, a far slower user interface (it was slow when I first noticed the change about 7 hours ago). I can go on.
They'll be underlining words with links next.
Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s.
;-)
Amen... I posted some stuff to Usenet in the early to mid 90s that, given the choice, I'd rather weren't around today. Mainly due to their naive and juvenile nature...
Problem with Usenet nowadays is you *know* it will be archived, and for that reason I use it much less (also because of the worse signal:noise ratio). When I do, it's never under my real name (last did that over 3 years ago), although I use a plausible sounding pseudonym because I have nothing to hide.
I don't even tend to use the same name for different accounts (so if you see a 'Dogtanian' elsewhere, it's someone else). If someone wants to find out about me, they probably can, but not just through a 30-second search in Google groups.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
google needs a "I'm not shopping flag" you can put into the search string like !shopping or something. Maybe I will suggest that on that link up a few posts.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I imagine that -price -store would go a long way to what you want, in the meantime.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The very last paragraph of the zdnet article might make you slightly happier then:
Note the "yet"!flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
and figured out that many people were trying the beta, not liking it enough to trouble to send feedback and just switching back to the original version.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I've got some links on my web page to old usenet posts, and they still work for both groups.google.com and goups-beta.google.com. Also, the groups-beta advanced search lets you retreive any usenet post by message ID. You can link to the new-style URLs for individual messages. What is everybody complaining about?
That's an good idea. Other useful capabilities for advanced search:
Google may end up becoming a major player in spam control, because they process large volumes of mail through search systems and can potentially recognize almost all bulk mail.
I already have an archive of around 600 million messages (nearly everything sans binaries from 2000 till today; just a couple of terabytes) and intend to create a public Usenet search engine. As I am using Usenet myself on a daily basis, I know what *I* want in a Usenet search engine, and that's quite different from what Google gives us.
Here's how you can help: Contact me at martin-k (at) softmaker.de if you have a private collection of Usenet postings that you want me to put in the database.
-mk
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
At least they extended their archives back to the 1980s. In the good ol' days, even the trolls were better. My nomination for Greatest Troll Ever .
They should have the option of not displaying anything found in Froogle when displaying regular Google results.
To be fair, with the volume of documentation appearing out there teaching you "How to optimise your web-site get googled to death", it's not surprising that the noise is getting worse. It's a regular arms-race, with search-engine development and web-design counter-development.
On the plus side though, dev-races like this do help to improve search-engine technology. Although this article doesn't fill me with hope...
Meta will eat itself
Google is partially funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins partner Floyd Kvamme, a republican Silicon Valley legend, is the technological advisor of president Bush. His son, Mark Kvamme, works for Sequoia Capital and has personal contacts to Rumsfeld.
You can validate these facts by searching google for "google is fundend" and '"Kleiner Perkins" nsa'.
Therefore Google has (proven) strong ties to the NSA and how valuable the information collected by google is to secret services et. al. is left as an exercise to the reader. (Also consider the power connected to not only knowing who searches for what when where but also the power of beeing able to search through the e-mails of millions of people (which are coincidently stored forever - which is called a feature))
Now, call me paranoid, but if I were an intelligence agency, I would do EVERYTHING for getting my hands on that kind of power. On the other hand, if I was a company, I surely could not afford to rebell against my governments intelligence agencies as it would be pointless (because they would infiltrate my organisation anyhow) or even dangerous. Therefore I, if I were google, would cooperate with the TLAs in order to at least make more profit and have more powerful friends within governmental authorities.
AND NOW TELL ME, HOW GOOGLE COULD NOT BE EVIL?!?!
Sadly, I don't see a way for google not to be evil.
Please argue against this, if you can. Or feel free to feel scared as I feel. Thank you.
Depends on what they meant to say. If he meant "Give me results that are not as commercial as, say, a Yahoo store front" might yield results with a detailed review and a link to purchase.
In other words, maybe the man said what he meant.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
PageRank is primarily based on the number of links to your site. However, you can create a site that no one has every seen before and buy links for it. It will get a decent PageRank and could rank very well depending on the targeted keyword eventhough it is not popular.
;)
I really thought this would be obvious. Nice non-use of your brain