Tagged: google

Google WebOS


So [[http://kottke.og]] writes about [[http://www.kottke.org/05/08/googleos-webos|the Google WebOS]]. Nice article.

If you recall, I had blogged about this in an earlier post, [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/05/05/37/|the future of Google]].

Kottke.org does a good job of summarizing the recent developments (Konfabulator, GDS, Web 2.0, AJAX) and tying them all together into a big coherent picture.

I guess I should start putting in some more time into my posts :-)

Incidentally, [[http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/|Amin's]] thesis was on [[http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/hpdc98.ps|WebOS]] too — the idea was close (operating system services over wide area networks), but the implementation was quite different.

Yahoo lied?


A few days back [[http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html|Yahoo! announced]] that their search index had grown to more than //twice// the size of Google’s index (which, of course, [[http://battellemedia.com/archives/001790.php|Google refuted]]).

So some folks from NCSA went ahead and did a little testing, and the conclusion is that Yahoo’s claims [[http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html|might be suspicious]]. Are we entering a new world of corporate dishonesty?

To be fair, the NCSA experiment was very very simplistic. I mean, you could do it from your home computer, if you wanted. They just took the standard ispell dictionary file, created around 10,000 random searches consisting of two words and fed them to both Yahoo and Google. Then they compared the size of the result set.

A few points to note — they only compare if the number of results is less than 1000. This can bias the result of their experiment if Google is simply //better// than Yahoo at indexing documents. Its still not a concrete measure of the size of the index itself. Also, their experiments cover regular queries — specialized queries for images, audio/video files, blogs etc are not covered.

But certainly something that Yahoo! is going to note and hopefully respond to in the next few days.

Google News for Geeks


No, I don’t know if such a thing exists yet — I’m just saying it would be cool if it did.

Here’s the idea — I’m sure everyone has had a look at Google news. Now that they [[http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html|have feeds]] too, its ultra cool — it helped me get rid of a whole block of feeds from my aggregator.

However, there’s still a large chunk that Google news doesn’t cover well — the geeky news sites. Sure it indexes Slashdot (and probably others too), but the appearance of stories in Google news is heavily influenced by where they appear in other news sites. So for instance, if a story appears in the NYTimes, the Financial Times, and Slashdot, then it usually (or seems to) have a better chance of appearning in Google news, than suppose it appeared only on Slashdot and LWN.net

Google news for geeks would be just like Google news, except that it would index and collate related stories from a restricted subset of sources. Here’s an initial (but not exhaustive list):

* Slashdot
* Arstechnica
* Wired
* LWN.net
* Newsforge
* O’Reilly Radar
* Planet Debian
* Planet KDE
* Planet GNOME
* OSDir.com
* OSNews
* Kerneltrap

Someone at Google please take this up for your 20% project ;-)

Whats up with PageRank?

My old home page used to have a PageRank of 5. Then I moved my website to its new location and initially it had a PageRank of 0, which was expected since I figured it would be a few days before Google could index and incorporate my site into its index.

A few days later, I did a search for my own name, and voila! The new site was above my old home page on the results page. However, the PageRank for my new site was still showing zero, while the old site was still 5. So does Google use something more than just the PageRank to order the final results?

I’m confused. Anyways, now my old site seems to be sinking lower and lower in the results page. Lets hope the new site picks up its PageRank in the coming months.