Hi everybody. Quick update:
SneakyFeelings.com is growing nicely. I had to fix a bug in the location search thing a little while back. (thanks to Lrobby99 for pointing that out!) It was returning people from all over the country no matter where you searched from. Oops. :) All better now.
I've recently been talking to a friend of mine about going into a partnership on SneakyFeelings. He has an background in marketing and event promotion (he used to run a nightclub in New York City), and will no doubt help tremendously in raising our profile as we take our advertising offline and into the real world. More on this as new developments arise.
Work is progressing on my next venture, a social/business networking site that I'm putting together with two partners. While I can't elaborate in too much detail yet, I have great hopes for this project; the guys I'm working with are top-notch and we've already made several important connections that will make the roll-out go smoothly. I'll link to it from here when it goes online.
In other news:
Funny article on Slashdot the other day about "splogs;" apparently lots of folks agree that it is one of the biggest threats to the internet. One poster even went so far as to call Google "useless." What to do about it is less clear. I have great respect for those guys in Mountain View, but the fact of the matter is that there are lots more people who try to get rich gaming their system than there are people who can police it.
According to some reports I've read, Google makes user satisfaction their number one goal. They would even go so far as to give up revenue if they perceive it as potentially hurting searchers. We may be reaching the point that having the biggest index in the world shouldn't be the number one priority. AltaVista, for instance, didn't die because their index wasn't big enough, but because they didn't return useful results to searchers, at least relative to Google.
What it comes down to is this: computer programs (like Google) take in input and try to produce useful output based on this. For a search engine the inputs consist of search terms entered by the users, an index of pages that they have spidered from the web, the links from those pages to other pages, and perhaps a history of what users searching for similar terms have clicked on in the past. There may be some more, but not a whole lot more; the web is a pretty basic device. While it isn't all that difficult for a service like Google to gather data, it is challenging to use the limited inputs at their disposal to turn this data into information. It becomes much harder when you have an active community of people trying to take advantage of the limited inputs to profit. This wasn't a problem when Google was first created, but it has become that way now. I'd like to see what their next move is.
SneakyFeelings.com is growing nicely. I had to fix a bug in the location search thing a little while back. (thanks to Lrobby99 for pointing that out!) It was returning people from all over the country no matter where you searched from. Oops. :) All better now.
I've recently been talking to a friend of mine about going into a partnership on SneakyFeelings. He has an background in marketing and event promotion (he used to run a nightclub in New York City), and will no doubt help tremendously in raising our profile as we take our advertising offline and into the real world. More on this as new developments arise.
Work is progressing on my next venture, a social/business networking site that I'm putting together with two partners. While I can't elaborate in too much detail yet, I have great hopes for this project; the guys I'm working with are top-notch and we've already made several important connections that will make the roll-out go smoothly. I'll link to it from here when it goes online.
In other news:
Funny article on Slashdot the other day about "splogs;" apparently lots of folks agree that it is one of the biggest threats to the internet. One poster even went so far as to call Google "useless." What to do about it is less clear. I have great respect for those guys in Mountain View, but the fact of the matter is that there are lots more people who try to get rich gaming their system than there are people who can police it.
According to some reports I've read, Google makes user satisfaction their number one goal. They would even go so far as to give up revenue if they perceive it as potentially hurting searchers. We may be reaching the point that having the biggest index in the world shouldn't be the number one priority. AltaVista, for instance, didn't die because their index wasn't big enough, but because they didn't return useful results to searchers, at least relative to Google.
What it comes down to is this: computer programs (like Google) take in input and try to produce useful output based on this. For a search engine the inputs consist of search terms entered by the users, an index of pages that they have spidered from the web, the links from those pages to other pages, and perhaps a history of what users searching for similar terms have clicked on in the past. There may be some more, but not a whole lot more; the web is a pretty basic device. While it isn't all that difficult for a service like Google to gather data, it is challenging to use the limited inputs at their disposal to turn this data into information. It becomes much harder when you have an active community of people trying to take advantage of the limited inputs to profit. This wasn't a problem when Google was first created, but it has become that way now. I'd like to see what their next move is.
posted by Mike at
2:45 PM
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