Tag: search

google knows where you live!!

We just launched a new feature on search.ch, that I am very excited about:
Make a query in our Swiss Phonebook and you will see links, that connect non-private entries with a query on our swiss search engine that returns pages related to that phonebook entry.

nice one bernhard! in my experience, the swiss are not very clued in about searching for this kind of information.
bernhard claims that this search offers a higher precision than googling. i tested it for wyona:
search .ch (6 hits)
google (4 hits)
in this case, the links from search.ch are slightly better, probably due to the way google recognizes telephone numbers (may be optimized for american phone numbers).
i also found this nice one:

A chain letter is circulating warning everyone of a new danger: Google will return your name and address if you type in your telephone number. It also, has a link to Mapquest to get a map of where you live.
This is all true if you live in the US It is also a stupid warning.
If you don’t have an unlisted phone number then your name, address and telephone number has already been printed and spread throughout the United States in a revolutionary set of documents known as The Phone Book.

bernhard wants to improve searches for persons too. the first optimization that comes to mind would be to filter out sport scores. whenever i search for friends with a low (or nonexistent) page rank, i’m spammed with their names appearing in sports scores. i like this kind of data mining. open source intelligence is very powerful indeed, and i salute bernhard to make this information available to a broad range of users.

Bye practical obscurity

jon udell, bernhard seefeld mention how the notion of practical obscurity is going away.
switzerland’s core competence is discretion very much stands at odds with search engines and blogs. i wonder if blogs will become popular here when i see so many people assuming that they can put something online somewhere “obscure” and not be found. one friend was horrified to find her land ownership records online, another was less than thrilled when his mother entered his name into google and drunken pics of him showed up. when i met someone online recently, i hesitated to tell even my first name, since that would have been enough to give me away.
too much fun, and it will get much worse.

web search for a planet

Amenable to extensive parallelization, google’s web search application lets different queries run on different processors and, by partitioning the overall index, also lets a single query use multiple processors. to handle this workload, google’s architecture features clusters of more than 15K commodity class pcs with fault-tolerant software. this architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers.

css is good for pagerank

pondering on my spankin-new pure-css layout, i wondered if google pagerank rewards pages with a better content / pagesize ratio, as pages lacking superfluous nested tables and spacer gifs would. just a guess, but well within the realm of the possible (it makes google’s job easier). here is a little pagerank guide

Price transparency

2 google posts within a couple hours. Must be a trend. Froogle is collecting products that are on sale, and offers search (duh). It’s currently in beta, but once you get aggregated products from 10000s of sites, it gets interesting. Conceivably, this increases pricing transparency (as you discover substitutes etc), and eliminates more slack out of the economic system. Better prices for consumers -> greater good.

Also if your bored, check out the glossary. Always something new to learn. yummy: fistula N. (L. fistula, pipe) pathological or artificial pipe-like opening; water-conducting vessel – alt. trachea

Joshua Allen thinks this innocent service will turn into something completely different:

if you could “push” your web pages to Google to be indexed, and Google already caches those pages for access, why would you even have a web server? If you publish to Google’s cloud, you get automatic indexing, metadata like who is linking to you, and more. And Google can add little semantic web-like features such as web quotes every few months to keep you hooked. Then, the advantages of a central index really kick in when metadata starts to explode. Obviously Google isn’t pushing the “we made a better Internet” angle yet, but they could — and the fact that they are so carefully surrounding key strategic bits of territory is not a coincidence.

Google dating

In the singles world, for instance, Google dating running prospective beaus through the search engine is now standard practice. If the facts about a suitor stack up, then you can not only go on the date with confidence, but you know what to talk about. “If I find out he’s a runner, for instance, that’s something I know we have in common, and I’ll say that I’m a runner, too”. The first thing a Google virgin attempts is the often humbling experience of typing one’s own name into the query line. The next search is inevitable – a Google dragnet to determine the fate of old flames. A Nobel Prize awaits the theorist who determines a formula that calculates the number of minutes one can use Google before excavating the wreckage of sunken relationships. “It’s comforting to know what they’ve been up to”.

spot-on. unfortunately, until everyone uses the internet (and leaves marks), the search is stacked against netizens. then again, i don’t mind if someone informs herself before she meets me. and if someone gets beyond the scary pics in the gallery, well what can i say 🙂
2004-01-24:

orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.
We are committed to providing an online meeting place where people can socialize, make new acquaintances and find others who share their interests.
in affiliation with google

smart move on googles part to capitalize on prior art.