Month: December 2004

Remember iWon? Yeah, a chance of winning cash for every search. It worked – sold to Ask Jeeves (with parent ISH) for a pretty good sum. Now comes word of Blingo, a search engine that launches Thursday. It will give away prizes on random searches. The engine is based on Gigablast results (is this the first deal for them? Gigablast is the one man band out of New Mexico, much lauded for doing so much with so little…).

In any case, Blingo has gotten coverage from SEW’s Danny Sullivan today, and I have been going back and forth with the CEO, Frank Anderson, who wants to clear a few things up. From his note to me:

I believe Danny Sullivan… was coming from the perspective that we’re not going to be able to beat Google with a prize / sweepstakes model. I wholeheartedly agree, and we don’t have such grand plans. We know our place in this market and simply hope to build a nice niche audience by doing things the right way — a great user experience and great prizes. …
It is certainly fair to use iWon as a reference point for Blingo because of the Sweepstakes angle, but the similarities end there. To be fair, Blingo has been implemented in a very user-friendly manner (no registration, spam, etc.) and strips away almost all of the nonsense typically associated with Sweepstakes.

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With the news that Google has locked down googlereviews.com, incorporated reviews (of sorts) into Froogle, re-launched Google Groups in a bid to get competitive with Yahoo, started to update Blogger, has released desktop search (with its obvious developer platform implications), and is quickly scaling Local with mobile and the like, it’s a pretty obvious conclusion to draw: Google is joining the architecture of participation party in a big way. Like eBay and Amazon, Google will gain huge traction when it allows its own users to create value on its platform.

Not totally unrelated side note: I just got a new ping (IE, the pose was just updated in some way) on a year-old Adam Bosworth essay germane to all this. A worthy re-read. I wonder if he’s pondering this as he drives new stuff to market at Google these days…

Or lack thereof. From Wired News:

WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias?
BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans in response to a certain query and how much is from Democrats. Once you start doing that job, there is a huge responsibility, and we’d rather allow the natural distribution of a given query to surface. I think that having people look at the hundreds of thousands of articles that come in every day is just not practical. Bias may have happened once or twice on certain queries. I don’t think the problem is widespread….The truth is, Google News doesn’t have a point of view. It’s a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can’t be systematically biased in any direction.

Bharat is the lead developer of Google News. I have to say, this issue has always stuck in my craw. While I grok the concept of a “computer having no bias,” I also fall back to the fact that somebody programmed that computer, to look for specific keywords, to do certain kinds of matching, to query certain sources and not others. The bias isn’t directly human bias, the point of view isn’t directly human point of view, but it’s nevertheless bias, is it not? Or am I missing something?

From Electricnews.net, an Irish-based business and finance site, an story about Urs Holzle’s European recruitment tour.

“Nobody has tried to hook together so many PCs… You have to be able to deal with failures and make the whole system continue to work,” Holzle, one of the first 10 employees of Google, told ElectricNews.Net.

To work in such an environment, Google employees must be creative and work well in a team, and must also be the type of employee that does not take their job too seriously, he claimed. “Employment at Google should be 60 to 70 percent fun,” he said, “the rest is blood, sweat and tears.” Holzle also noted that even the company interview process is reflective of this overall attitude, claiming that prospective workers are not confronted with a test of their technical knowledge, but will be carefully judged on whether they “fit” within the Google team.

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The invisible, deep, and dark webs – those portions of human knowledge that escape search’s industrious indexers – continue to shrink. From Slashdot comes news of “search engines for handwritten documents.”

Link to the original article.

Thanks, Ross.

I was going to stay away from posting today, and focus on writing. But I passed my daily word count already, so here’s a treat. Eckhard Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq but was run out on a rail in 1999, is coming back to Chair a business search engine, Accoona.

Now, let’s remember, this is the same fellow who engineered the purchase of Alta Vista, then demanded it come public within six months. His lieutenant then drove Alta Vista into portaldom, and ultimately, into the arms of CMGI, which then imploded.

In my interviews with Louis Monier and others, I was painted quite a picture of Compaq under Pfeiffer. As I recall, Monier called them “gunslingers” who had “no idea what they were doing.”

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