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Google Puts the Brakes On Saving the World
An anonymous reader sends along a sharp and snarky article that takes Google to task for taking longer than expected to award $10M in its competition to find and fund world-bettering ideas. The submitter comments, "After using its tenth birthday as occasion to solicit philanthropic ideas from Web users through its Project 10^100, Google appears to have backed off from its commitment to provide $10 million in funding to the winner. While the company was supposed to reveal the Project 10^100 winner in February, Google has since delayed the vote once and now suspended it indefinitely, due to the overwhelming response — Google says it received 150,000 entries. A Google spokeswoman wouldn't commit to a new date, saying only it would be delayed 'for a while longer.' She further apologized for the company's 'over optimistic assumptions about how quickly we could analyze all the ideas that we've received.'"
It doesn't really sound like they're copping out. It just sounds more like 150,000 projects is a whole lot more than they expected to get. They didn't plan on dedicating the resources necessary to get through that many submissions in a reasonable amount of time. Now they're delaying it... or you know, just assume that Google is horribly evil. Whichever.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Make each entry cost $5-10 or whatever to enter. That would encourage only the cream to surface, whilst also giving Google incentive to actually finish the project.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
It's a lot of money, and a lot of submissions. It takes a long time to judge based on how much "good" the proposal can accomplish.
Just throw them all onto a website, the the google-bot crawl them, then just search for "Best entry". First result wins!
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
No wonder they're taking so long, they just got slammed with over a hundred thousand entries! I'll bet most of them aren't even legit.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Google appears to have backed off from its commitment to provide $10 million in funding to the winner. chicken.
Well, that's it, then. In November the Savior was elected, so no need for further ideas or awards. It's all in good hands now, thank you. Let's go back to Oprah.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Why bother with anything else at this point?
Am I the only one who is amazed at the amount of times someone sticks the boot into Google for doing something constructive?
When was the last time Microsoft (or any other large company) did anything like this? NEVER?? You'd be right.
So some smart ass anonymous coward takes it on themself to bag Google because Google couldn't predict the number of entries they would receive for something that had NEVER been done before.
AC
This phenomenon recently happened at work. We are a non-profit attached to the State education system. We have less than 125 employees, but most of us get paid okay (for a non-profit) and have great benefits (because of the government association). However, it's not exactly Google or Microsoft; certainly not the sexiest place to work. Usually it takes weeks to get enough resumes when a new job is posted. But the HR folks did not account for rabid nature of current job seekers. They posted a new job opening on Craigslist and within three days had 15000 applicants. They eventually had to pull the opening while they waded through all the resumes...
It was really quite crippling for them.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Hmm . . . I looked at the headline and thought, "Oh Noes, G00gle iz teh 33-vil!"
Then I read the summary. Actually, with 150,000 entries, it looks perfectly legitimate that they are delaying or suspending the vote. I thought, "Hmm, which editor would write a misleading, sensationalistic headline like that?"
Well, I guessed correctly: The same genius that comes up with such diamonds as "Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon". Is anyone surprised?
If you needed work, I don't think you would consider yourself "rabid". They are doing what they have to do.
Why not make it a democratic process?
Why don't they use their data sorting skills to organize all the ideas in a wiki or some such and have them meta moderated to find out what the most popular is?
Like this:
Search: awesome amazing bestest -hamsters -"youth participation" -yahoo
- Alaska Jack
um... how is mail coming from Yahoo the fault of google?
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
To advertise a "skill contest" and not pay off on the scheduled date is usually a violation of the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act. Not good, Google.
I'm trying to figure out the punchline to your joke, and all I can surmise is that you just assumed that criticizing Bush in any way, no matter how vague or nonsensical, was enough for an instant +5.
By the way, how are you liking all the hope and change?
Hey, come on guys! We can't fault them for this. The project is only in beta!
Wow, 150,000 submissions for 10 million dollars? The value of the time devoted to applying for that money must have been close to the prize money itself. How inefficient.
The Google Geo Challenge was also supposed to announce grants in January or February. They sent an email in March saying they were delayed due to overwhelming response, and nothing since.
Google grants seem quite popular! But better communication would be appreciated.
Space and Computers.
I hope they pick my idea: hold a competition to provide $9 million to someone with the best idea on how to help the world.
My webcomic
Dear Google,
Maybe you should take a lesson from the corporate litigation world where they have to review millions of documents hunting for evidence -- cluster related documents together to boost efficiency and improve consistency of review. If you don't have your own technology, try Clustify ;-) </slashvertisement>
Um, so you've got this proof that google "supports evil" and /. is protecting them. But it's there. And you've given us everything but the proof, or any evidence that the proof exists. Can you please explain to me why I shouldn't break your fingers for wasting my time? I mean, aside from the fact that it'd be a further waste of time to track you down to do so?
Let me be the first to say "Whoosh! :-)
George W. Bush put the brakes on "saving the world" well before google.
Why don't they just identify one of the entries as a Beta Winner? Then they can prolong the actual decision indefinitely.
Not to be an apologist, just stating facts...
Interestingly, Bill Gates solicited submissions similar to the ones the Google contest was intended to solicit, back in the mid 1990s, prior to completing his book "The Road Ahead". This was right around the time he founded "the William H. Gates Foundation", which was later renamed to "the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
He did this with an initial $94 million stock gift.
Now, while he's technically not identical to Microsoft... he's probably close enough.
-- Terry
Before the mangling by the /. censorship system, that particular email included a Gmail address for the fake opt-out at the bottom. Wonderless /. was also unable to deal with the content, which was a Japanese advertisement for women with big tits. Technically, it's supposed to be illegal in Japan, but the actual accommodation is apparently to look the other way as long as they're above high school.
Google has actually done a pretty good job of reducing the spammers' websites that they were hosting directly on places like blogger. Gmail also kills spamming email addresses pretty quickly Those seem to be the only two fronts they are still fighting on. Fake opt-outs are quite common, as well as administrative contacts for spammers or for spammer front men. There are also lots of fake headers pointing to Gmail. I acknowledge it's hard to blame anyone for the Joe jobs, but Google should at least care about their reputation.
Instead, it is obvious that Google's new motto is "Live and let spam."
Me? I think every form of support for the spammers should be cut off. Google could do MUCH more to fight the spammers.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
She further apologized for the company's 'over optimistic assumptions about how quickly we could analyze all the ideas that we've received.'"
Sheesh, why don't they just put all the submissions in a database and search for "the best idea"? B-)
Viola, instant top ten.
See, page titles do matter!
Google goes out of their way of doing something nice and "people" kick them in the groin repetedly. The people feels a lot like astroturfers trying to portrait Google in a bad manner. I suspect its very irritating for some unnamed companies with goodwill down in the slimepit that a successful company like Google can be liked by their users.
It would be nice of the editors would stop posting crap articles like this whos only purpouse is badmouthing, straight from the competition. Its a different kind of FUD but still the same of the old and tried.
The more i read things like this the more i feel for Google. They really need to start buying politicians and astroturfers if this keeps up just as their competition already does.
HTTP/1.1 400
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html
There, problem solved.
TL;DR Guy regrows rain forest, brings life back to previously dead area, employs local natives and gives them all kinds of sustainable goodness.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Definitely Repeat.
Google has all the answers. Try this search:
which is the best google 10 ^ 100 idea
(press I'm feeling lucky)
... by using goats to mow the lawn. That'd save the world, wouldn't it?
I'd rather Google spend the time to carefully consider all submissions, instead of just selecting some motherhood ideas and round-filing the rest. In fact they've said that each winning idea may draw on many separate entries to crowd-source the optimal way to implement it..
But it's true that if any organization can devote resources to getting these examined in a timely fashion, it's Google.
New reports suggest Ray Kurzweil may be full of shit. More details after the jump.
Fun fact: If it took an average of 20 minutes to review each entry, it would take 50000 hours for a single person to go through all of them. That's 6250 days, or a little over 17 years.
Wouldn't Wolfram Alpha be a little more cut out for that sort of work though?
--- Mr. DOS
Google should just let the people vote between all
150000 ideas and then select the best 5 ideas from top 100.
It is in situation like this the wisdom of the crowd is useful.
Have everybody put up web pages with links to their favorites, and the page ranks will select the winner.
I suppose they didn't approve of my idea of a death ray. oh well, I'll get the $10 million either way...
Declare war on Pollution hasn't been chosen yet? I even included a custom Risk board...
It's obvious what's going on. Google set out to create an AI to sort through all the ideas. It promptly became self aware, got depressed, then killed itself... For reals... check out http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/ It's written in a blog... therefor it has to be true!
Seems like if you gave the problem to some of your engineers they could come up with an automated way of finding the best entries.
THINK ABOUT IT MAN!
or else!
Clearly you did not think of a search interface that would allow the Internet Public to go through 150,000 submissions efficiently without hitting the Google I'm Feeling Lucky barrier as I call it, where if you don't get on the top page you are nobody.
Now you are in trouble and maybe being forced to disclose ahead of time some neat multi-dimensional collaborative interface that isn't out of alpha let alone beta yet, which could be a competitive disadvantage.
Here's what I recommend:
- Take a random sampling and see what percentage are good-looking. You could make something to filter spam but maybe not worth it.
- Get some authority to expand the prize or create runnerups, and announce this.
- Hire more people or, try this (which should be up your alley): Ask for people inside and outside Google to join a submission voting group. You could make subgroups of engineers, professional philanthropy advisors, academics, government, writers, etc. Distribute each submission through at least 1 of each group, and tally the votes.
- Consider Galaxyzoo.org which has a quarter million galaxies to classify and got 70,000 classifications per hour from volunteers within 24 hours.
- Opening things up to the web mean they can be gamed by low income people or robots. Use people where you can, and grade participants so outliers can be disqualified.
- Tell everyone what you are doing.
Surely if they did the initial filtering using squirrels they could get the list down to a more manageable size. They must be able to transfer a few from other projects.
you're assuming that it is a real gmail address not just one that is going to bounce.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
That was a remarkably sensationalist article. Its really disappointing that she was trying to score points off a philanthropic effort.
I'd prefer to see a good outcome rather than just a quick outcome. If they need to take a little longer to get a good result that sounds like the right decision. There is no suggestion that Google are not going to front the $10 million. And I'm sure they want to get a good result for the time and money invested.
Be calm, "Google is on its last legs, slowly but surely" =) (from here)
My 10>100 idea makes electric cars practical and able to run with fewer batteries, and no need for battery swaps.
One of the REALLY BIG problems with electric cars that few people will tell you is that battery manufacturing is ENOROMOUSLY POLLUTING -- soo polluting that hybrid vehicles are not really green AT ALL !!!
The other problem not mentioned AT ALL is that if you want to run your Tesla electric race car at the speeds that it is capable of the range drops like a ROCK !
In other words high speeds take a lot MORE current, which batteries can NOT efficiently supply.
My idea makes high speeds, 200 mph++, possible and highly practical.
I mentioned in my descriptions that my idea is a patentable invention, and that I wanted to patent it !!!
So I wonder if they have now considered the intellectual property aspects of their contests content and decided to patent the best ideas before they make them public !?!?!?!?!
Ray Kurzweil may be right. Sorry if that upsets your worldview.
It is coming from the domain registrar's side. If it was not valid, then one would believe that the spammer would find it slightly difficult to register the new domains. In other cases, it is coming back as the admin address for ISPs who are sending spam.
However, I admit that I will not test tedjok's gmail address, because I think it quite likely that email address would be harvested. At the very least, he has some sort of working relationship with the spammers.
I'm still more annoyed by Google's new pro-spammer policy of censoring spam complaints in their Groups.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
There are 150,000 ideas to be filtered. Google.org could share these ideas with Gates & Melinda foundation so good ones could be executed quickly. It is for the good of mankind so sharing with Gates & Melinda should be fine. Besides, G&M has larger financial power than Google.org ( Warren Buffett is very generous both in pocket and hearts.) If Google.org would like to have self-sustainable operation ( meaning, the charity generates profits for itself), then it could share with Gates & Melinda. It's for the good of all mankind... right?