Super Volatile

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Hi, I'm Krzysztof and I make websites.
When I'm not making websites, I read these.
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Dec 12, 2011 / 1:00pm

Google… Stop Playing; The Jig Is Still Up! [Guest Post] || distilled

In case you haven’t read it, “GoogleBot is Chrome” outlines a theory that Google’s Search Crawler GoogleBot is actually built off of the Chrome Web Browser, and may even have been the primary reason for the development of Chrome. If this is true, it leads us to believe that GoogleBot is a lot more intelligent and capable than Google is letting on, and we’ll have to totally abandon the dated notion that GoogleBot is looking at a website in a manner similar to Lynx or other text-only browsers.
more on distilled.net

Badly written article on important subject: apparently Google Bot is now capable of indexing JavaScript content.

Filed under: google   search  
 
Jan 18, 2011 / 10:31pm

Trouble In the House of Google

People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment -- Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO'ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
more on codinghorror.com

Jeff Atwood on Google's spam problem.

Filed under: google   search  
 
Sep 6, 2010 / 10:09pm

Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

If you're doing a Web query and some of the computers break in the middle and you don't get exactly the same result as someone else doing the same query, well, OK. You don't want to drop the top result; if I do a search of the New York Times, I want nytimes.com to be the top result. But what should the 10th result be? There is no right answer to that. If a hardware error means we dropped one result and somebody had a different result at No. 10, there's no way of saying that's right or wrong. Whereas if I'm a bank, I can't say, "Oh, one out of every million transactions, I'm just going to lose that money." I can't have that level of failure. But at a search company, you're more tolerant of error.
via slate.com

Interesting interview with Peter Norvig on making and avoiding mistakes at Google, on technical and business level.

Filed under: google   search   software  
 
Jun 23, 2010 / 11:58pm

Quora and Others Are Racing to Fill Gaps Left by Google

The service allows people to pose or answer questions—working behind the scenes to route questions to the users who can best answer them. People must use their real name on the site, and register by connecting their Quora accounts with a Facebook or Twitter account, which helps Quora connect them to people they know using the service.
more on online.wsj.com

Another attempt to bring expert knowledge to the web.

Filed under: search