John Battelle's Searchblog

I read your fabulous blog using Bloglines. What is it about your blogging software or whatever else it is that causes multiple recent posts to be repeatedly shown as new, day after day?

Kozuru should shun Google and take it to them full on, just as Google was shunned by Excite and others. What a mistake that turned out to be!

How can Google sleep at night knowing that they are now acting like Microsoft used to act in the early 90's? Technology/market place bullies is what they are sounding like to me.

Good to know that power always taints even the purest of souls. Have fun rationalizing your way out of that Googlers!

Kozoru has a really disruptive technology...Wow! Is PageRank dead?

There was an article in the Johnson County Sun in July 2004

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=12529377&BRD=1459&PAG=461&dept_id=155725&rfi=6

that certainly didn't raise my confidence in Kozoru or its technology. Here's some excerpts from the article:

The fundamental paradox, as Flowers puts it, is that computers are really good with math but really bad with language. Flowers struggled with this dilemma through a stint working for Microsoft

"Then I gave up, frankly. January 2003, I said the heck with it. Technology was no longer interesting to me, and the really hard problem that I wanted to solve is unsolvable," Flowers said.

Flowers, who holds degrees in English and philosophy, spent the next few months writing books and screenplays ... In February of this year, Flowers came up with an answer and came back to the states to put it to work.

After translating more than 980,000 words in the English language into codes of ones and zeroes, Kozoru's first objective will be to establish a knowledge base. To do this they will first turn to the most objective source for language information, the dictionary. After establishing that system, they will incorporate the most objective source for historical information, the encyclopedia.

Flowers said he hopes to have the initial Kozoru prototype developed in the next nine to 12 months.

i think that the pagerank is not dead @ dimitar ... why do you think this? the pagerank loose the new effect and the people need things with a "new-effect" ;)

it is only a question of time, if microsoft start a similar sevice ... thats my opinion.

The analogy to Microsoft is pretty weak for a few reasons :-

1) Monetization
Microsoft never told people to stop developing against its operating system because it was 'afraid' that the app could not be monetized by Microsoft.

2) Restricted use
Google comes out with an API. There are the obligatory hossanahs being sung. Yet, the 'API' is not really an API because you cannot fire more than 1000 queries. Microsoft never told an app developer that they can put only 1GB on the NTFS and then have to stop.

3) App development
In base.google.com, we see that the front end continues to be owned by google. Imagine IBM, ORCL, MSFT coming out with an app development scheme where users can access the data from DB2, 10g and SQL server only through IBM, ORCL, MSFT!

I guess Google is yet to decide whether its a search engine or an App deployment web OS.

The greatest search engine in history is often clueless, arbitrary and unnecessarily thoughtless in its decisions about banning sites. I speak from experience.

If it's any consolation Google's decisions to reinclude sites can be just as thoughtless and arbitrary as those to ban (or at least seemingly, they never explain).