Category Archives: Search

The Secret Source of Google’s Power

Rick Skrenta’s latest blog entry comments on the scalability of Google’s service offerings. “[T]he story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.”…

News.com interviews MSN head Yusuf Mehdi

Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform. We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer. MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it’s very, very close….

Google Copernicus Center is hiring

Obviously an April Fool’s joke, but Google is hiring for their new lunar center. Lengthy for a prank. “The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.” “What happens to PageRank in the proximity of a black hole? Is there distortion that might result in link relevancy reduction or popularity warping? Could this somehow be harnessed to generate more dates for engineers?”…

Gmail, free Google e-mail, offers 1GB storage

News.com reports Google has launched a test of its new mail service, Gmail, and invited 1000 guests to participate. Hotmail presently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit. Update: Gmail has an About Gmail page, including a form field for signups….

imgSeek: sketch your search

“imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.” You draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek returns thumbnail views of the best matches. Written in Python….

Google personalized search

Google Labs has released its latest project: personalized search. I created a profile, selecting things like California, rock music, and soccer. When I search for “Dublin” my top results are now Dublin, California and not Dublin, Ireland….

News.com : Interpreting Search

Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. “There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task.”…

Eric Schimdt talks about Orkut beta

Eric Schimdt talked about Google’s social networking service, Orkut, at PC Forum today. News.com covers the speech. He noted that most products at Google stay in beta for about a year. Google hopes to help provide better searches for people through social networking software. “We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information.” Three engineers are currently working on the service….

Technorati redesign

Technorati is sporting a new look this morning. Dave Sifry mentions the new features of Technorati in his weblog. Three free email or RSS watchlists for members. The developer tab is nice. “Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.” Good. I want to build some nice things using the API, if only the backend was more reliable. It would nice to mention working hard to improve developer experience as well, since it will ultimately lead to new users….