The I, Cringely column this week is on competing with Microsoft, When it comes to tallking about Google, he says:
Google has a business plan that includes the almost constant introduction of new products. They are not afraid to launch 10 services. They are not afraid if a few turn out to be flops. Finding great new product ideas for Google is a statistical process. Google is investing in good people and is letting them be creative. They are letting them think and act on their ideas. This is scary for Microsoft, which finds itself continually in reaction mode and never quite getting enough up to speed to be a real player before Google makes another change.
Have you noticed that most of the innovation these days seems to be coming from Google? 1G of free e-mail. Personalized search. Shopping metasearch. News and News Alerts. Web Alerts. Localized web search. Social networking. Where is Microsoft? Yahoo? Amazon?
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Clustered databases
MySQL is offering a clustered database.
The slow progress in clustered databases is a bit surprising to me. The holy grail of clustered databases is to be able to have a virtual database that appears to be on one machine but actually is distributed across a cluster of servers. Failover should be immediate to another machine in the same cluster. Data should be replicated on demand. Performance should be high. Yet no one provides this solution, at least not at a level where the cluster is truly invisible to clients. True, the data consistency issues are much more challenging for a relational database than the Google File System, but this system needs to be built.
The slow progress in clustered databases is a bit surprising to me. The holy grail of clustered databases is to be able to have a virtual database that appears to be on one machine but actually is distributed across a cluster of servers. Failover should be immediate to another machine in the same cluster. Data should be replicated on demand. Performance should be high. Yet no one provides this solution, at least not at a level where the cluster is truly invisible to clients. True, the data consistency issues are much more challenging for a relational database than the Google File System, but this system needs to be built.
Friday, April 16, 2004
Tim O'Reilly on GMail
Tim O'Reilly has an excellent column on GMail and the privacy flap over GMail.
Amazon's collaborative filtering applied to web search
Interesting comment on Battelle Media (excerpted from Rex's blog):
If A9 incorporates the collaborative filtering algorithms that power Amazon's predictive recommendations to customers, it will (and I know this from very, very expensive first-hand experience) produce search results that will astound the user. Just think about it: Your search results will be filtered first by Google algorithms and then through Amazon's collaborative filtering algorithms.
This oversimplifies the difficulties with personalizing web search, but it's definitely on the right track.
I have little doubt that A9 will try to do personalized search. But I have my doubts about whether they will succeed. The team at A9 has expertise in search, not personalization. The people who developed Amazon.com's collaborative filtering algorithms are not at A9.
If A9 incorporates the collaborative filtering algorithms that power Amazon's predictive recommendations to customers, it will (and I know this from very, very expensive first-hand experience) produce search results that will astound the user. Just think about it: Your search results will be filtered first by Google algorithms and then through Amazon's collaborative filtering algorithms.
This oversimplifies the difficulties with personalizing web search, but it's definitely on the right track.
I have little doubt that A9 will try to do personalized search. But I have my doubts about whether they will succeed. The team at A9 has expertise in search, not personalization. The people who developed Amazon.com's collaborative filtering algorithms are not at A9.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
A9's "personalized search"
A9's new search does allow you to view your search history and previously viewed search results. But it is not personalized. Personalized search means that the search results differ depending on who you are.
A9's search could be personalized using this history data. For example, if Google used search history instead of an explicitly specified profile for their personalized search, they would have a search engine that personalizes based on your history. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Since Google's personalization search technology relies on a coarse-grained technique, the quality of the personalized results would remain low. It'll be interesting to see if A9 can find a better approach.
A9's search could be personalized using this history data. For example, if Google used search history instead of an explicitly specified profile for their personalized search, they would have a search engine that personalizes based on your history. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Since Google's personalization search technology relies on a coarse-grained technique, the quality of the personalized results would remain low. It'll be interesting to see if A9 can find a better approach.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
A9
A9's new search engine has some interesting features. It tracks your history, among other things. Could be the first step toward personalized search.
Google File System
Interesting paper on GFS, Google's scalable, replicated, distributed file system. The paper describe a lot of clever optimizations to their environment and workload. Unfortunately, it doesn't include performance comparisons with alternative approaches, so it's a bit difficult to evaluate.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Topix.net interview
Interesting interview of Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta. He discusses the "Robo-Editor" categorization technology at a high level.
Monday, April 12, 2004
My Yahoo and recommended RSS feeds
My Yahoo appears to have taken a first step toward personalized news. If you add the RSS feed beta to your My Yahoo content (use the drop down menu at the bottom of the page), then add a couple feeds (they have a convenient keyword search to help find them), they'll give you an option to see other feeds that might be of interest based on the feeds you selected. The recommendations seem fairly good.
Not much, but it's a first step. The question remains, why bother exposing the RSS feeds at all? Do people really want to pick RSS feeds for tens or hundreds of sources? Or do they just want to read the news that is most relevant to their interests?
Not much, but it's a first step. The question remains, why bother exposing the RSS feeds at all? Do people really want to pick RSS feeds for tens or hundreds of sources? Or do they just want to read the news that is most relevant to their interests?
Acadamic papers search
Google appears to be preparing to offer search of scholarly papers. For CS articles, CiteSeer is the best academic paper search around. Steve Lawrence (creator of CiteSeer) is now at Google.
More on GMail
A UI designer at Google has posted some screenshots and other information about GMail. Also, an interesting comment from a GMail beta tester. And Forbes just released a review of GMail.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
Beyond personalized search
Humorous Onion article on Yahoo's "Soul Search" engine.
[Update] Apparently, folks at Yahoo read The Onion. Check out what now happens if you do a search for "What is my destiny" on Yahoo.
[Update] Apparently, folks at Yahoo read The Onion. Check out what now happens if you do a search for "What is my destiny" on Yahoo.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
The Human Equation
If you read one book on management this year, I can't recommend The Human Equation highly enough. It convincingly argues for investing heavily in your employees, an approach that seems out of vogue these days. The evidence seems to show that the cost of this investment is returned many times over in increased productivity and reduced turnover.
Investing in your employees means treating your employees as partners in the company, not contractors to be fired at will. Hiring should be selective. Training and cross-training should be routine. Teams should be self-managed, information widely and freely shared, and decisions decentralized. Wages should be well above average, tied to organizational performance, and relatively flat across the organization.
It's a compelling thesis. While I've seen others claim that some business models don't require investing in people, Pfeffer skillfully argues the advantages of this approach across all industries.
Investing in your employees means treating your employees as partners in the company, not contractors to be fired at will. Hiring should be selective. Training and cross-training should be routine. Teams should be self-managed, information widely and freely shared, and decisions decentralized. Wages should be well above average, tied to organizational performance, and relatively flat across the organization.
It's a compelling thesis. While I've seen others claim that some business models don't require investing in people, Pfeffer skillfully argues the advantages of this approach across all industries.
Friday, April 09, 2004
Findory in Seattle PI
Nice article on Findory in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Ads in RSS
As RSS becomes increasingly popular, advertisers are considering putting ads in the feeds.
This is a poor move. RSS is a method of driving traffic (and advertising dollars) to a website. RSS feeds contain only the title and a short blurb for a article; you have to clickthrough to read the article.
But, when you embed ads in the RSS feed, you reduce the value of that feed and reduce its ability to drive traffic to your site. Any small advertising revenue you make from the RSS ads will be swamped by the ad revenue lost from reducing traffic to your site.
This is a poor move. RSS is a method of driving traffic (and advertising dollars) to a website. RSS feeds contain only the title and a short blurb for a article; you have to clickthrough to read the article.
But, when you embed ads in the RSS feed, you reduce the value of that feed and reduce its ability to drive traffic to your site. Any small advertising revenue you make from the RSS ads will be swamped by the ad revenue lost from reducing traffic to your site.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Monday, April 05, 2004
Google's platform
Interesting speculation on the architecture behind Google's GMail.
"It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers."
Can it be true? It's the holy grail of distributed computing. And Google has already built it?
"It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers."
Can it be true? It's the holy grail of distributed computing. And Google has already built it?
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Google e-mail
A supposed screenshot of Google's new free e-mail. With 1G of storage, all for free, this is sure to be brutal competition for Yahoo Mail and MSN's HotMail.
As Google is increasingly attacked by Yahoo and MSN on search, it's a great strategy for them to counterattack in other areas like news (Google News), shopping (Froogle), and e-mail (GMail). It puts MSN and Yahoo on the defensive, distracts them, and forces them to divert resources. Good move, Google.
As Google is increasingly attacked by Yahoo and MSN on search, it's a great strategy for them to counterattack in other areas like news (Google News), shopping (Froogle), and e-mail (GMail). It puts MSN and Yahoo on the defensive, distracts them, and forces them to divert resources. Good move, Google.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Google Copernicus Center is hiring
Amusing April Fool's Joke from Google. "Interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007."
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