Life by Google

An image of sorts of the two places I have spent longest in my life. The town in Australia I was born in, Toowoomba Queensland, and where I live at the moment, Umeå Sweden. Toowoomba has a saddler, pasta and real estate. There is a university in Toowoomba, but it is not related by Google to the town name. Therefore it does not appear in searches. Compared to Umeå, a town of roughly the same size and demographic, where the university is directly related by Google to the town.

The architecture of information proceeds.

Search The Beat

While it got a negative review at Mashable, I have found SearchtheBeat to actually be a good online music and video search engine. By good I mean that it returns results for the lesser known artists. I like the interface design were videos appear in one embedded column that allows for previews and Mp3s in another. I found videos of very small bands that friends of mine are in performing at very small festivals. The Mp3 search is not so detailed (it can't find files that I know are on the internet archive) but this has probably got something to do with the Google presence in the project. All in all a fun tool and one that will hopefully develop.

New Search Engine Promises to be Better than Google

From the MyLiveSearch website:

My Live Search is the first, true ‘real-time’ search engine to appear on the www. It is the only engine that searches the www live to the second. Results are not retrieved from an indexed database as is with all other search engines, which are days, weeks or months old.
Information is only as valuable as it happens and this is the underlying philosophy of its founders to develop a tool, the first of its kind, to give its users the power, scope and most of all, live information on the www.
This technology has been in development for the past 8 years with the team currently based in Melbourne, Australia. A dedicated team of innovative developers delivering the latest cutting edge technology in 'real-time' search within a new paradigm on how we search the www today.
A totally new and innovative approach to searching the web, which has not been done before, until now!

World Wide Launch Mid to End of June

Purposive behavior of honeybees as the basis of an experimental search engine

If you can access Springer Link (academic affiliated needed or subscription) you can read this interesting paper:

Reginald L. Walker, Purposive behavior of honeybees as the basis of an experimental search engine (Springer Berlin / Heidelberg)

Published online: 20 July 2006
Abstract The foraging behavior of active honeybee colonies serves as a model for Web explorers that are reactive, proactive, and robust. The Web explorers are developed to forage a simulated information ecosystem—the Internet—for useful information. Each explorer is designed to detect and report dynamic changes within the infrastructure of the Internet to its Web explorer dispatcher, which is responsible for coordinating thousands of explorers. Experimental results are presented.
Keywords Honeybee search strategies - Information ecosystem dynamics -Evolutionary computation - Information sharing

I have always been a bee fan myself.

Google. the Power and the Glory

A few nights ago I watched a Dutch documentary on Google; "Behind the Screen". It was an interesting 47 minutes. Not a lot of surprises but the issues raised by the film were poignant. Google's approach to work reminds me a lot of the IDEO Lab's so called Deep Dive technique from the late 1990's. This is not surprising considering they both share a close relationship with Stanford University, which is made apparent in "Behind the Screen" (online at GUBA) The main concern I came away with from "Behind the Screen" was a result of the interview with the very wise Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive among other things. I paraphrase it something like this; if Google Books succeeds in scanning in a billion books using its secret patented technology it comes to own these books in their translated form. It now controls a significant manifestation of human knowledge. At the moment Google seems to be being very generous with its assets. But how do we know this will continue?
The other issue raised in the film is about privacy. This is not a unique situation regrading Google, it is a shadow falling across the knowledge/information based economy worldwide. Surveillance Theory should be taught at High School, but it won't be because then it wouldn't be as easy to monitor people as it is. Critical thinking is the solution to many of the 'problems' discussed in "Behind the Screen". In digitally literate cultures people are aware of the pitfalls before they happen.
There are many online search engines available (here are 54) but Google gives a large return with a high relevance. Here is a search on Google Images for 'Fake Google':



Here are the first results for a search on Microsoft's Live Search for 'Fake Google':



The Google return is much greater (six times) and, in the early returns at least, more relevant (maybe this drops off dramatically). Nine of the top ten are about fake google sites compared to six of ten on the Microsoft search. I suppose that's why Google has 70% of the north American search engine market in its extensive archives.