Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Orkut Media

Google launched Orkut Media, “a brand new feature that will present a fresh set of columns and photographs every week. They will cover the topics that rule our daily thoughts – sex, food, politics, art, race, you name it. What you see in orkut media can make you laugh or think. In the end, we hope it’s something real to connect with in this virtual world.”

Learn more about how to submit your column or photos.

Memecodes Statistics

What happened so far? I created “Memecodes” with thousands of pages filled with random text similar to this one:

“Cognac? Is sloth is waist is declare of bramble flood in of stoical. Footman... Hesitancy a for attention flabby wanton and calculate vtol cyclamate that paprika feign the aline fourth qualifications of in. Thatch, Saccharin hansom rationale in dine numbers.”

These Memecodes were supposed to be the original DNA of my evolutionary game to be put in the Google pool. Now whenever a Google user searched for something and landed on one of the Memecodes, this page would breed another page by replicating a mutated version of the original DNA (i.e. small changes were made to the long, random text string).

I now compiled a statistic of who mated whom to create offspring. Some Memecodes are in their 5th generation. (There is a two-month gap inbetween the mating seasons because I moved my database to a new server and forgot to update the Memecodes access details.)

Many, many pages use “adult” words. Every page which spawned offspring must have filled an evolutionary niche on the web, so every “adult” page which has been hit must have had a fresh word combination. (A niche means: the term is somewhat popular, but it’s underrepresented on web pages – this is the only way for an obscure page like those random ones of the Memecodes Project to score well.)

Here is a small selection of some unusually “fit” keywords:

These evolutionary niches are usually filled by more than just one page. E.g. many Memecodes included the words Sphagnum Esplanade and they all created a lot of offspring.

Seraphim Proudleduck Drop

Unfortunately Google Blogoscoped dropped to the 9th place in the Seraphim Proudleduck challenge [Via Ellis in the Forum]. There are around 40 days to go until the winner is chosen. If you can help out now to push us back to the top spot, that would be great. Everybody who emails me about the link (the link text must be “Seraphim Proudleduck”) will participate in the lottery on January 1st when I will pass on the full prize money – £1000 for the number one spot in Google.

If you already linked here and removed the link, please put it back online if you want to help. And for all those who still have the link active; thanks again, and keep it up – if you want to gain additional tickets for the £1000 lottery, I will pass out one for each individual domain with a link.

The John Cleese Dot Com

I’m this close to sign up for JohnCleese.com, a new text-and-video-weblog-autobiography-random-silly-things website. (Who’s John Cleese? He was a member of the comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus, starred in Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda, and TVs Fawlty Towers.)
The Flash-based site looks quite intruiging, though I don’t know how members get to know where the new stuff is hidden everyday (if I pay for several Cleese videos a week, I sure don’t want to search for them everyday – maybe the more common weblog format would have helped here).

8 Billion

Google has about 8 billion web pages stored in its computers. Just how many is 8 billion? Compare to this footbal field filled with ten billion Pennies* (where each block of pennies is the size of a school bus).

*For even bigger numbers, at the same site you can find the brothers of the number Googol... such as duovigintillion, trigintillion, or septentrigintillion.

Economic Analysis of Google Answers

Ben Edelman did an economic analysis of Google Answers [PDF]. (Note being a Google Answers Researcher myself I’m not allowed to comment on these issues.)

Backlinks

You can now check backlinks for your URL by using the left-side navigation aid. It will redirect to Bloglines.

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