bruceb news

Bored? Go to the Google home page, type in “weapons of mass destruction” and click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

(The page you’ll see has risen to be the number one search result on Google for that phrase, which is why it comes up when you click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.” If you get something boring instead of an amusing joke, click here to go to the humorous page I intended.)

The Google toolbar is one of the only utilities I allow on my computers. It’s so handy that I’m willing to let it take up a bit of valuable screen real estate.

Google will be announcing a new version of the toolbar, with one extraordinary feature: a built-in free popup blocker. That’s bad news for the legitimate popup blocking programs (one well-reviewed program is IHatePopups, a ten dollar program from the same company that makes the wonderful IHateSpam). But perhaps it will keep people from installing the evil Earthlink Total Access package (see below).

Here’s an article about the new Google toolbar, and here’s where you can download a preview version if you want to experiment before Google declares that it’s ready for an official release. […] continued

Microsoft is taking the first steps towards its own search engine, currently using the name MSNBot. It will appear first as a competitor to Google, but Microsoft’s vision actually goes far beyond that – and in typical Microsoft fashion, they stand a chance of dethroning Google by extending its capabilities in new directions, making their copycat tool into a dominating force.

Here’s an article about Microsoft’s plans. Basically, Microsoft intends to develop search technology that can be used to scour the Internet – and also give you equally valuable search results from your computer’s morass of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook folders, and PDF files. […] continued

Google has added a new service that will make you go, hmm.

Do a Google search for your home phone number. Type in the number like this: 707-xxx-xxxx.

If the number is listed in the phone book, you’ll instantly get back your name, your address, and links to maps that will helpfully display exactly where your house is.

Interesting, eh? On the one hand, that’s a powerful search tool, definitely one to add to the arsenal of ways to find information on the net.

And on the other hand, there’s some serious privacy implications. If you have a listing in the phone book you’re obviously not hidden, but it feels different for a map to your house to be quite this readily available. […] continued

Google is very powerful, but it has been cautious about expanding its reach. It bought Deja.com, a service that collects and indexes Usenet newsgroup postings, and it recently started Google News, which is a fascinating alternative to CNN and MSNBC.

Yesterday Google announced that it has acquired Pyra Labs, owner of blogger.com, the company that invented much of the technology for creating the online journals known as “blogs.” (bruceb news is hosted by blogger.com.)

This article has a good description of what blogs are all about, as well as details about the deal announced yesterday

Google has a division named “Google Labs” that occasionally offers a look at its work in progress. Two new toys are online today.

Google Viewer turns your search results into a slideshow, displaying each search result in a customized viewer for a few seconds. Well worth a look!

Google Webquotes annotates your search results with comments from other websites – which at times amounts to instant feedback on the reputation of the sites.

Google is bringing its remarkable technology to harvesting the news. Here’s a link to Google News, presenting the top news stories of the moment without any human intervention. Google News software continuously crawls more than 4,000 Web news sources, looking for the most relevant articles from the most reputable sources. The Google software then automatically generates news pages for its various section fronts. New front pages appear every 12 minutes or so.

Here’s an article about the new service and how it compares to the pages produced by humans at CNN, MSNBC, and the online newspapers. If you’re addicted to breaking news, Google News will instantly become your first stop on the web. […] continued

Google has posted a fascinated look at the technology that produces its search results. Google relies on PigeonRank, a system for ranking web pages using low cost pigeon clusters. Trained pigeons select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages. “By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.”

The article discusses the issues that arise when pigeons are packed in dense clusters. Google has developed “groundbreaking technology for converting poop to pixels, the tiny dots that make up a monitor’s display. […] continued

This article starts out by explaining the different approaches chosen by Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista for indexing the Internet – and makes it easier to understand why Google is so scarily accurate. It drifts a bit at the end, but the first half is interesting reading.

Google is experimenting with different ways to rank web sites when it reports search results. Here’s an interesting article about search engines and the extraordinary things done to increase site rankings on Google and the other search engines.