While we dont have as much evidence as we would like — in these realms, we never have as much evidence as we would like — the evidence [...]]]> This is wrong in so many ways it’s pretty amazing. For one thing, Intellipedia runs on MediaWiki, which is open source software created by Wikipedia, not Google.

While we dont have as much evidence as we would like — in these realms, we never have as much evidence as we would like — the evidence we do have suggests that Google and the Agency have a long and abiding history together.Google is the source of Intellipedia, a version of Wikipedia which allows intelligence professionals to trade information about their targets. We may fairly presume that the Google personnel who have worked on this program must have high security clearances, and that the physical servers are protected by the United States government.Intellipedia was set up in 2006. It would be naive to suggest that the Google/gummint relationship does not stretch back much further. Folks in the intelligence community must have very good reason to trust Google, or they would worry about back doors in the software.

via Cannonfire.

On the other hand, this logo, although completely devoid of factual accuracy, is pretty cool-looking.

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I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via tools like the sBook and I have a suggestion.  I think you need to be designing at a higher level of [...]]]> From an email to a guy who’s got a project to integrate the world of physical “codex” books with electronic resources.

I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via tools like the sBook and I have a suggestion.  I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device.

Think about it this way.

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“Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search,” said Murdoch, noting the trend is particularly worrisome in the newspaper publishing, where News Corp. owns a variety of assets. “People [...]]]> Scary when even a plesiosaur as deadly and unblinking as Rupert Murdoch can’t bring himself to accept the implications of  his own premises.

“Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search,” said Murdoch, noting the trend is particularly worrisome in the newspaper publishing, where News Corp. owns a variety of assets. “People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change.”

[ no, it's not ...]

…”Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? If you have a brand like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you don’t have to,” said Murdoch. “You can say thanks but no thanks.”

[ no, you can't ...]

via Article – WSJ.com.

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Key takeaways:

Quote:

The sheer volume of reviews makes far mor e difference, according to Google’s analysis of clicks and sales referrals. “Single digits [...]]]> Here’s some independent research about the importance of reviews in selling books and other retail products.

Key takeaways:

• numbers matter – takeoff point after 10 or so
• a few negative (or less than 5 star reviews) actually help
• recency matters

Quote:

The sheer volume of reviews makes far mor
e difference, according to Google’s analysis of clicks and sales referrals. “Single digits didn’t seem to move the needle at all,” says Mr McAteer. “It wasn’t enough to get people comfortable with making that purchase decision.” But

via Reading online reviews | Fair comment | The Economist.

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Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ [...]]]> Interestingly, Google [UI consultant what is a] produces different results than [Google UI consultant what is it] , even though “it” and “a” are usually stop words:

Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.

[ad#in-post]

I believe this is more advanced behavior than most search engines currently exhibit. Certainly when I was at LexisNexis there was no way on God’s green Earth that we were going to get the search engine folks to change the way the engine treated stop words.

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Related posts:Lively is Truly Innovative … Is it Useful? Time Will Tell Updated [...]]]> Official Google Blog: Introducing our European 2008 Anita Borg Scholars

A few months ago we had the great pleasure of announcing the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S. and our first class of Scholars in Canada. Now it’s the Europeans’ turn.

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multiple profiles that become, over time, avatars.

my searches correspond to the many roles and specialized domain knowledge bases that I’ve accumulated over time — product manager, lawyer, publisher, analyst, project management professional, climate change researcher, Harry Potter fan … I want to be able to [...]]]> What I want from personalization in the future is …

multiple profiles that become, over time, avatars.

my searches correspond to the many roles and specialized domain knowledge bases that I’ve accumulated over time — product manager, lawyer, publisher, analyst, project management professional, climate change researcher, Harry Potter fan … I want to be able to tell the system “who I am” at any given moment and have the results correspond. More than that, i want avatars that are constantly searching on all these topics and bringing me high quality documents in a serendipitous yet thorough way.

And, while you’re at it, I want them delivered onto my wireless PDF slate…

Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking

Personalization is another strong feature in our search system which tailors search results to individual users. Users who are logged-in while searching and have signed up for Web History get results that are more relevant for them than the general Google results. For example, someone who does a lot football-related searches might get more football related results for [giants], while other users might get results related to the baseball team. Similarly, if you tend to prefer results from a particular shopping site, you will be more likely to get results from that site when you search for products. Our evaluation shows that users who get personalized results find them to be more relevant than non-personalized results.

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This would be 1000% more interesting if they revealed the CTR and conversions that the winners were able to achieve, and if they shared the written reports by [...]]]> Unfortunately, when you surf through to the information about the challenge, there is absolutely no information about the quantitative results or the techniques that the winning teams used.

This would be 1000% more interesting if they revealed the CTR and conversions that the winners were able to achieve, and if they shared the written reports by the teams.

Official Google Blog: Students surf their way to success

Together, Jamie and I recruited a panel of professors from all over the globe and came up with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Student teams had to identify a local business with a website, but no experience of online marketing, and then were given free Google AdWords vouchers worth the equivalent of US$200.

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