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….
Thanks, Ross.
Not too long ago, Google Image search took an embarrassing hit for not having Abu Ghraib images. But Google has now played a central role in uncovering even more images of military abuse. Boing Boing has the full story. Net net: an AP reporter stumbled across these images on…
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,…
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.”
Read MoreQuestioning the price of the stock. I found the Eric interview more worthy. (Sub required..I'll summarize it for you as soon as I can…) Update: Gary has an overview here….
Update: Gary has an overview here.
That's the best line from a story posted today on ZDNet UK. It's spoken by Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow, who is currently on a tour of Europe recruiting engineers. ZD "snuck into" one of his talks to potential recruits and has an extensive overview of what he said. The piece…
That’s the best line from a story posted today on ZDNet UK. It’s spoken by Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow, who is currently on a tour of Europe recruiting engineers. ZD “snuck into” one of his talks to potential recruits and has an extensive overview of what he said. The piece includes metrics on Google’s infrastructure, but to my eye they seem understated (ie it mentions a 4 billion document index, when Google now claims 8 billion, and 30 clusters of up to 2000 computers, when I’ve got sources saying it’s more than twice that). In any case, it’s very interesting reading.
Highlights:
It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet, arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully managed system (we’re not counting distributed computing projects here), some 200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer scientists….
Read MoreWill update this post later, been a bit swamped, but Google relaunched Groups today, with an emphasis on letting folks create their own groups. (Recall this was Usenet for a long time). While the company didn't say it was a driver, Groups will drive more registrations and more content into…
Will update this post later, been a bit swamped, but Google relaunched Groups today, with an emphasis on letting folks create their own groups. (Recall this was Usenet for a long time). While the company didn’t say it was a driver, Groups will drive more registrations and more content into the core of Google’s services. The interface is similar to Gmail. Some info from Google is in the extended entry.
Update: Google Blog posted and then retracted a Google Groups announcement, but the cats over at Slashdot caught it. Slashdot appears to be tearing Google a new one for not supporting search by date and deep linking, among other things. I will check into the deep linking thing, if they don’t support that, I am sure it’s an oversight. Not supporting deep linking into content that you want as part of the Index is insane. Thanks to reader Brian for the tip.
More on GGroups and all that:
Inside Google
Evan Williams (nice note on Blogger here)
Slashdot (original thread)
Andy
SEWBlog (which notes in another post that “most of Google remains in beta”)
Google Blogoscoped
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From the WSJ's Online Journal: Google News is a great site…(but) If you want to know what the top stories are, you're better off going to a news site that has an actual human editor (at this point we'd be remiss if we didn't plug The Wall Street Journal Online),…
Google News is a great site…(but) If you want to know what the top stories are, you’re better off going to a news site that has an actual human editor (at this point we’d be remiss if we didn’t plug The Wall Street Journal Online), but some of the stuff that makes its way through Google’s algorithms can be a source of high hilarity.
Example: A left-wing site called Axis of Logic published a satirical (though unfunny) article yesterday titled “Canadians Authorities Arrest U.S. President Bush on War Charges,” and it ended up as Google’s top story. Seriously.
Read MoreFrom SEW. First, the Google lawyers are busy, suing a competitor of their recent acquisition Keyhole. Second, Gary does an appreciation of Eugene Garfield, father of citation analysis, whose spirit was most definitely in the room last night as I spoke with Larry and Sergey (for the book.) Larry was…
Lastly, noting recent reports on the Chinese Google News controversy, Danny furthers an issue dear to my heart, transparency with regard to how results are obtained (my take on the China portion of this issue is here).
From The Standard (I still love being able to say that, even if the site is only running IDG newsservice stuff): America Online Inc. (AOL) on Tuesday released a preview version of a new Netscape Web browser that is based on the open-source Firefox Web browser, but also supports Microsoft…
From The Standard (I still love being able to say that, even if the site is only running IDG newsservice stuff):
America Online Inc. (AOL) on Tuesday released a preview version of a new Netscape Web browser that is based on the open-source Firefox Web browser, but also supports Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser engine. IE is part of Windows and is used by the great majority of Web users. Many Web sites have been designed specifically to work with the Microsoft browser and may not work correctly in browsers using other engines, including the Gecko engine in Firefox.
Some speculation here and there that Google is revving up to start a major marketing push. This seemed more like wishful thinking to me – Ad Age (print only) was the source, and lord knows the advertising world would luuuuv to slurp up some of Google's lucre via some splashy…
Some speculation here and there that Google is revving up to start a major marketing push. This seemed more like wishful thinking to me – Ad Age (print only) was the source, and lord knows the advertising world would luuuuv to slurp up some of Google’s lucre via some splashy 30 second spots. But it seemed totally off base to me, so I lobbed a call into some folks I know over at Google, and they confirm, this report is off base. Yes, Google talks to agencies now and again, and yes they use them for relatively minor stuff like placing B2B stuff in support of AdSense and the like, but no, there is no major review for a branding campaign.
I mean, think about it. Google makes its hay with pure ROI advertising. Google, spending on brand advertising, in TV and print? Don’t make no sense.
