Monday, January 2, 2006
How to Use AltaVista
“Having accessed the AltaVista main page, http://www.altavista.digital.com/, proceed as follows ... To search for documents containing a particular word, just type the word in all lower case in the input area and select Submit (in a manner dependent on your WWW browser).”
– Jukka Korpela
A decade ago, Jukka Korpela wrote a guide to using AltaVista, the in search engine of its time*. The guide is interesting for historical reasons; for example, you can find out that the query american indian language returned around 100,000 documents (it returns 52 million today in Google), or that in order to spell-check a word in AltaVista, you had to compare the page-count of different spellings you’d enter manually (today, of course, you can simply rely on Google’s spellchecker).
*I still remember the time when I switched from AltaVista to Google, because AltaVista started to have a cluttered homepage with popups... but in the beginning, it was actually quite good. Also see the screenshots.
Blond Joke
Sure, blond jokes are usually boring, but this one is great.
Last Pixels for Million Dollar Homepage on Ebay
That was on September 22... today, the page is almost full.
The creator of the Million Dollar Homepage, Alex Tew, already had one original idea that made him rich... and now he’s aiming to get even richer by auctioning off the remaining 1,000 pixels at eBay. The current highest bid is $732, which would be cheaper than the normal price on the site (which sold 1 pixel for $1), but I’m sure this will go higher up.
Also see The Zero Dollar Homepage, where it’s impossible for anyone to buy a pixel (on eBay or anywhere else).
Google Earth’s Hanke Speaks
John Hanke is the general manager of Keyhole (Google Earth) at Google, and IT Conversations – my favorite audio site – has a talk he gave at the Where 2.0 conference. (On a side-note, Brian Mingus points out it’s possible to use Google Earth on Linux.)
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