Friday, January 21, 2005
BoingBoing Data Remixed
BoingBoing is in its fifth anniversary today and releases all of its data [ZIP] under a Creative Commons license. At Waxy.org, you can analyze the data and see how “Google” and other keywords fare over time.
Here are different quotes on Google from BoingBoing in 2001:
- “Google co-founder says Palms are no good.”
- “A search for “Nike Boing Shoes” at Google turns up boingboing.net as the third link. Nike.com isn’t even listed on the first page.”
- “Look at the Google cache of DEKA’s site.”
- “Great techie piece detailing the specs of Google’s ~8,000 Linux boxen. “
- “The Movie Review Query Engine is the Google of movie review search engines.”
- “’I’ has been largely overlooked – despite the power of Google and other large-scale collaborative filters”
- “Google’s new image search engine really acutally works! It found pictures of me (why am I talking in every picture anyone’s ever taken of me?), pictures of Mark, even a picture of a tow-truck (inside joke for those of you who were at the Post-Spider World panel at the O’Reilly P2P con).”
- “Datamining the Googleverse. Google releases popularity charts for queries, misspellings, comers and go-ers.”
- “Is Teoma the next Google? The results seem pretty good, and the directory stuff is great.”
- “For $3, a trained Google researcher will answer almost any question. Yes, it’s a tax on net-illiteracy. What would be super-cool is if they not only gave you the answer, but the procedure they used to arrive at it. Here’s my inaugural question, something I was pondering this morning as I worked on a scene in a novel”
- “Well, Google’s pay-for-answer service sure didn’t last long. Less than a day after we posted it here, they’ve shut it down”
- “Daypop is a search engine that crawls weblogs and newssites every day. I think Google is already doing this.”
- “See Google in hacker mode.”
- “Uh oh. Google’s home page is starting to suffer from function creep. Remember when it used to have just a logo, a entry field and two buttons? Now there are 12 links.”
- “Google doesn’t search Thomas, neither does any other search engine. They stay away from Thomas because the Webmaster there has created a robots.txt file”
- “Since 9.11, governmental websites have been pulling sensitive information offline. Now, Google is combing its cache, purging copies of the info in question.”
- “Rumors that Google is going to start charging subscriptions fees for specialized versions of its search-tool are spreading.”
- “Google’s playing with the idea of displaying thumbnails of the pages that come up in search results. The more I think about this, the better I like it. Sure, it’ll slow down load time (I imagine they’ll let you switch it off if you want), but thumbnails’d be a great visual cue about the nature of a link, a way to identify sites that are too banner-laden or otherwise pointless to visit.”
- “Stupid Google tricks! If you want to find terrible poetry in a hurry, search for ’peotry.’”
- “Here’s a neat proposal for an anti-search tool, a standard way of telling a search engine what your page is not about – for example, we get tons of people coming to BoingBoing who’ve searched for “Nike Boing” on Google. These people are looking for nike.com, not this blog. With this proposal, we could add a meta tag to the page that says, basically, “This page is not about Nike.” I wonder, though: I think that there’s something marvellous about serendipity in search results”
- “Search spiders have always stumbled upon documents that Webmasters had thought secret, but now that Google’s adding the ability to index complex document formats like PDF, even more password files, love notes and dmaning memos are showing up online.”
- “Google’s new toolbar allows users to rank the quality of the links returned, so that they can consider direct, human feedback as a means of improving search results. This is really just an extension of their current ranking philosophy, which uses the (human-generated) links on Web-pages to determine which documents are most relevant.”
- “A novel and malicious use for Google. By manually entering the addresses of Web-aware switches, Google can be caused to probe the switches’ configuration screens, which can then be viewed through Google’s cache, so that the switches’ owners can’t identify the hackers that are probing the devices. Neat and scary, all at once.”
- “’Stop Words’ are the little words that search engines ignore, like “of” and “at” and “and” and “so” “on.” Google has begun to consider stop words in quoted search queries, so “to be or not to be” returns different results than to be or not to be.”
- “A bright day in Internet history! Google’s expanded their Usenet archive, rolling in posts dating all the way back to 1981.”
- “Google’s latest search tool: mail order catalogs!”
- “Brad Templeton has mined the Google Usenet archive to trace the etymology of the term “Spam” in reference to unsolicited commercial messages.”
- “Even more interesting is the way Google handles the “+” character. Google will find words of any length followed by any number of + characters. This means you can find “A+”, “C++”, even “plus++++”. Words with + in the middle of them, such as “a+++b” will treat the last + as a space and find “a++ b”. +’s at the beginning of a word are ignored, so “++x” is the same as a search for “x”.”
- “Google Zeitgeist’s year in review, with top brands, queries, men, women, products and more!”
By the way, this would be the Google search if you want to look for a BoingBoing article of a specific month containing a specific keyword:
site:boingboing.net inurl:2001-06 google
An MP3 for this post.
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