LR2 Blogs

Macworld: News: Cracking Google’s ’secret sauce’ algorithm

The topic — Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon “black hat” practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention.

A very cool article that talks of impact that Google’s algorithm is having on the web industry and why some sites are willing to pay millions for good ranking.

1. Sloth | Laziness about 58,600.
2. Greed about 24,400.
3. Wrath | Anger about 12,300.
4. Pride about 12,200.
5. Gluttony about 400.
6. Envy about 200.
7. Lust about 100.

I prefixed each sin with \s to ensure I don’t match partial world like danger for anger. So from these numbers we can assume that developers are lazy, greedy and proud. This seems to fit well with my experiences as a developer. I was somewhat surprised to see lust in the bottom of the list, expecting it to be near the middle somewhere.

» Playing Google Videos In Windows Media Player » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel

Despite being an .avi file, a very standard video format, Windows Media Player can’t play it because Google has included in the file a bogus fourcc code in the file that WMP chokes on. Take that same file, change the file extension from .gvi to .avi, and almost every other video player can handle it, but for technical reasons, Microsoft’s can’t play it. It is such a specific and pointless change that it almost seems like Google changed the header code specifically to screw Microsoft.

A Microsoft lover finds a bug in Windows Media Player and blames it in a Google conspiracy. Like I’ve said before. When you can choose between consipiracy and circumstance, it’s almost always the later.

Death by Google Calender: How I Identified you to rob you- Dumb Little Man
I find it very interesting utterly stupid that people display their lives online. As a simple study, I did some digging on Google Calender. Now, keep in mind that I am somewhat tech-savvy but I used no skills for this. Everything I found in this case was simply a result of a Google Search, an additional search on Travelocity and a 411 call. There was nothing to this at all.

Highest-Paying AdSense Keyword List | BlogFeast

Interesting list of top paying keywords. I have no idea how complete or accurate it is.

auto insurance quote - $57.18
college loan consolidation - $53.52
car insurance quote - $46.89
federal loan consolidation - $46.62
online car insurance - $41.92
term life insurance quote - $40.43

dailywireless.org - Google Traffic on Phone

I’m a little late posting this as it was released 5 days ago. I’ve used it a few times on my Samsung A900 and it rocks.

Google is today releasing a traffic information feature for Google Maps on mobile devices. A downloadable Java application, features live traffic updates and the ability to save favorite locations and driving directions.

If you want to give it a try, go to google.com/gmm on your phone.

Evolving Trends » Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?

The Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) promises to “organize the world’s information” in a dramatically more logical way than Google can ever achieve with their current engine design. This is specially true from the point of view of machine comprehension as opposed to human comprehension.The Semantic Web requires the use of a declarative ontological language like OWL to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and make new conclusions, not simply match keywords.

Web 3.0 will be the demise of Google! Web 2.0 isn’t even a complete reality yet and the trolls are predicting the demise of Google. On the other hand there are plenty of arguments to support Google’s continued dominion over the web:

Five reasons no one will replace Google

“I’ve received 33,000+ hits and counting to this post,” says the blogger who wrote “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?” on Monday. His piece got blogged all over, promoted to the Digg front page, and fueled the starry-eyed bloggers searching for doom to herald for Google. (It was also just a troll.) Kudos to him, but he — and everyone who believed him — was wrong.

http - Google Search

Microsoft is bumped from the #1 result when searching for “http”. For years microsoft.com has come up as the #1 search result for http. They were bumped recently bu w3c.org.

World Wide Web Consortium - 3 visits - 9:33pm
The interface allows scripts to perform HTTP client functions, such as submitting form data or loading data from a remote Web site. …
www.w3.org/ - 33k - Jun 20, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Google Romance

Another market taken over by Google?

Pin All Your Romantic Hopes on Google

When you think about it, love is just another search problem. And we’ve thought about it. A lot. Google Romance™ is our solution.

HOW TO: Get Billions of Pages Indexed in Google - Merged.ca

Interesting. Now I just need to find a way to duplicate this guys efforts. Even if one page in a million gets an ad click each day then he’s getting 3800 ad clicks per day. Best guess is that’s somewhere around $500 per day.

[update] Search google for site:eiqz2q.org now yields 0 results so he was purged from the index.

Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google.