Posts from December 2006

A few more details about Google's possible analysis of page text is now available thanks to a recently published patent application by Googler Anna Patterson from June 2006. The application details how a search engine like Google might analyze text phrases, date-based topics, and associate a web page with related topics, even if the specific topic does not appear in the document itself. The 22-page document further emphasizes Google's current work on "shingle" analysis to discover important phrases and concepts. (via Search Engine Land) Highly ranked websites are more likely to receive in-depth analysis through multiple index passes and phrase...

Read more...

The consumer version of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is only a month away and bloggers are already receiving their first review units. So far the review units sound pretty boring compared to the Windows Vista capable hardware available throughout the world. I put together my own list of five grope-worthy notebook computers ready to test Vista on multiple fronts. You might prefer a silent ultra-portable or a power-hungry luggable. You can search for WiFi without ever opening your computer or get online anywhere with cellular broadband. The latest Apple hardware runs Vista without a problem too. I expect this...

Read more...

Google Blog Search has overtaken Technorati's market share in the United States according to LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise. The success of the Google Blog Search is hand-in-hand with Google leveraging existing properties such as Google News and the Google homepage to drive traffic to its new property. Google Blog Search launched in September 2005. Technorati is the green line above, and Google Blog Search is shown in purple. Google Blog Search received a huge traffic boost in October after blog search appeared as an option on Google News pages. Google Blog Search later received a spot on the front page...

Read more...

Wikia will release a new search engine early next year according to an interview with Jimmy Wales in today's Times of London. The new Wikia search engine project is named Wikiasari and will apply wisdom of the crowds features to search engine results, letting individual users rank sources of information and their relevancy to a particular query. Of course the article takes a "gunning for Google" angle, citing the PageRank algorithm used since Google's was founded in 1998. Search engines grow over time, and incorporate multiple ranking factors beyond the math of inbound links and source authority. Google (synonym...

Read more...

On June 21, 2005 eight Microsoft employees claimed invention rights for a "content syndication platform," exemplified by Internet Explorer 7 and its support for aggregating feed content. Patent application 20060288329 pursues the "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" (see United States definition of a patent) normalized web feeds made available via an API and centrally stored feed lists. The patent application was revealed yesterday after an 18-month privacy window expired. Authors Edward Praitis, Jane Kim, Sean Lyndersay, Walter V. von Koch, Bruce Morgan, Cindy Kwan, and Amar Gandhi (now at Google) claim...

Read more...

Social bookmarking site del.icio.us has exposed a new API providing the top tags and total number of bookmarks for any URL in its system. Yahoo's Developer Network provided a short preview earlier tonight of a soon to be released del.icio.us web badge but currently anyone can request data from the open API. It's a useful feature to provide additional context for a URL, suggest tags, or measure one aspect of a site's popularity. endpoint http://badges.del.icio.us/feeds/json/url/blogbadge parameter hash Simply submit a request to the above API endpoint with a hex MD5 hash of the URL of interest as your hash parameter...

Read more...

Widgets can be described as mini-applications, running code that binds itself to a web browser and/or the resident operating system to display information. Just like regular applications, widgets consume system resources such as processor cycles, memory, and network bandwidth, possibly slowing down other functions on your computer or across the network. In this post I will take a look at the resource utilization of desktop and web-based widget platforms across a few common widget applications. Background I bought a PowerBook in the summer of 2004 and moved into the world of OS X. Expose and Dashboard were completely new user...

Read more...

Social networking site Bebo took its first step into the widget realm yesterday, including support for Flash-powered photo slideshow widgets from PhotoBucket, Slide, or RockYou. Each partner site uses the newly created Bebo API to pass a fully configured widget back to Bebo without exposing details such as HTML code snippets to its users. The direct partnerships and whitelisted widgets allow Bebo to slowly add more customization options in a controlled environment, hopefully avoiding some of the security and general exploit issues present on MySpace. Each member profile now has a new widget configuration option. Users can comment on...

Read more...

If you could ask Bill Gates one question, what would you ask? I spent an hour today with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the company's Redmond campus. I chose to ask Bill about Microsoft's intellectual property stance against Linux and its open source developers, from the SCO Group's litigation against IBM to Steve Ballmer's recent claim Linux infringes on Microsoft patents after signing a patent indemnity with Novell. Bill Gates claimed he had never heard of BayStar Capital, an investor in SCO Group and their litigation against large corporate supporters of Linux. According to recent court documents BayStar founder and...

Read more...

The feed syndication platform built-in to Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista may fail to download media enclosures larger than 15 MB. It's a feature, not a bug, designed to prevent over consumption of computer bandwidth. The automatic download engine built-in to Windows (BITS) tries to queue up audio, video, or other enclosure content in a user's subscription updates. It tries to be polite and not consume all available bandwidth, throttling back its consumption while higher priority tasks such as e-mail and web browsing receive new data. The download engine prefers to download large files in pieces, requesting an achievable...

Read more...