11:31 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Found this inconspicuous paper today by two, at that time, inconspicuous students: The Anatomy of a Search Engine

Some quotes from this paper (which btw dates around 1998 me thinks) you should think about for a minute:

The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/

as of now, Google knows 4,285 million pages, an insignificant increase by 17,754 percent

With better encoding and compression of the Document Index, a high quality web search engine may fit onto a 7GB drive of a new PC.

Does that mean I can fit more than five 'Googles' on my iPod?

Simple experiments indicate PageRank can be personalized by increasing the weight of a user's home page or bookmarks.

Perhaps privacy issue made this impossible so far.

A Web search engine is a very rich environment for research ideas.

...and for earning a buck or two...

...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Now, THIS is funny. Does Google Adwords ring a bell?

So we are optimistic that our centralized web search engine architecture will improve in its ability to cover the pertinent text information over time and that there is a bright future for search.

And bright it was indeed.

11:00 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Every year, World Press Photo picks a World Press Photo of the Year, to encourage high professional standards in photojournalism and to promote a free and unrestricted exchange of information.

This year, the winner is French photographer Jean-Marc Bouju of The Associated Press, who shot a picture of an Iraqi man comforting his son at a holding center for prisoners of war near Najaf, Iraq. The picture was taken on 31 March 2003.

There are a total of over 60 winning images from various categories.

05:57 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Alan McConchie from the California Institute of Technology and Lewis & Clark College makes an interesting dialect survey exploring the regional variations for describing carbonated soft drinks. Could the result of this survey trigger the next civil war?

Make sure you have a look at this map which depicts the lingual differences (based upon more than 120,000 respondants).

11:08 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Like every year, Wired has compiled an annual list of companies which lead the charge toward a connected global economy.

Here the top 5 in reverse order:

5. eBay
4. Genentech
3. Apple
2. Amazon
1. Google

08:26 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Keloland runs an article which tells us that ladies love gadgets, too. In fact, "[w]omen are actually out-spending men in the electronics aisles, accounting for fifty-five-billion dollars' worth of sales last year alone. More women are focusing their purchasing power on electronics."

Ok, to me the statistic says that women today simply buy more presents for their boyfriends and husbands

12:46 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

We are still looking for cool guys and girls who want to be part of our team!

If you like to post latest frontpage news or write commentary on emerging technology, please drop us a note.

07:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

We postulated this change earlier. Now it is official: PalmDigitalMedia is from now on known as eReader.com. The PalmDigitalMedia.com site will continue to operate for the next few weeks while the eReader.com site goes through a set of launch revisions based on customers' feedback.

There is an ongoing survey, which will provide you with a discount code (EREADER05) good for 10% off your next purchase over $3 at eReader.com.

04:42 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

PubSub is a free tool for all of RSS feed junkies. It monitors over one million weblogs and information streams to find the content you're looking for, in real time, and any time matching information appears, you'll see it in your news aggregator.

For example, you can subscribe to a feed for the phrase “Clie”. The feed is populated by matches against the weblog community or newsgroup posts. Very cool!