Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Questions Instead of Answers

A new FindForward feature is giving questions instead of answers. Try it with George Bush, Einstein, Michael Moore, or any other subject, person, event, thing and concept you like.
Another new feature is called “Old Pages” and browses mid to late-90s relicts.

Questions Instead of Answ ... by Philipp Lenssen

Wired Google Cover Story

Good news for Googlefans are waiting on magazine shelves this March. The new issue of Wired cover story is: Googlemania - The Complete Guide (With Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Masters of the Googleverse). [Via The Unofficial Google Weblog]

All the features online:

• Googlemania! - “They named their new search engine Google, for the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn’t big enough.”

• Googlemaniacs - “Nine Superusers sound off.” (Matt Groening of Simpsons and Futurama fame: “I use it to ego-surf.”)

• I’m Feeling Lucky: The Engineer - The Optimizer - The User

• 4 Scenarios for the Future of Google - “Sometimes a liquidity event changes everything.” Googlescape, Google!, gBay, and .... Googlesoft.
  Tell me, which logo you like better – the Wired new one (left) or mine from October last year (right)?
   

• The (Evil) Genius of Comment Spammers - “Renegade bloggers played Google for the fool. Then the Web fought back.”

• It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World - “Forget the search business. Today Google’s all about advertising.”

• The Secret R&D Army - “How hackers give Google its wildest ideas.” (On the Google Web API.)

• How to Kill Google - “Want to topple the Web’s darling? It’s simple - build a trillion-page, ad-free, up-to-the-minute search engine for everything ever put on the Net.”

• How Would You Redo the Google Interface? - “Four designers share their (re)visions.”

• Google vs. Gates - “They’re obsessed with success and each other. Call it a (death) match made in heaven.”

Wired Google Cover Story by Philipp Lenssen

MSN Cleaning Up... Partly

Microsoft’s MSN Search is cleaning up their result pages. Previously when you entered “Linux”, there were a lot of unusual pro-Microsoft links in the results. Not so anymore. However the first result, a “featured” website (Amazon) is still not differentiated enough from normal Web results. Now what exactly is a “featured” site? It’s not a sponsored result, which moved to the right side of the results – or is it? Microsoft writes:

“MSN Search chooses these sites from those published by MSN affiliates, partners, sponsors, and advertisers, as well as other sites proven to be especially popular among MSN Search users.”
– Microsoft Help Entry

It’s not a big deal, but just why can’t Microsoft stop being evil?

MSN Cleaning Up... Partly by Philipp Lenssen

Centuryshare: World War

The peaks for “World War” in FindForward show 1914 and 1918, as well as 1939 and 1945. These are the start and end years of World War I and II. [Via FindForward 1900-1950]

Using the Centuryview tool I also came across these interesting Apple Ads (I suggest downloading the files to the disk first, as the download can be slow).

Centuryshare: World War by Philipp Lenssen

When Yahoo Finds Faster

Interesting: the new word “memecodes” I mentioned here yesterday was picked up by Yahoo. Google doesn’t show any results so far. (Note my blog is in the Yahoo Directory, which might be spidered faster than other pages.) Usually no one is faster than the Googlebot...

When Yahoo Finds Faster by Philipp Lenssen

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