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The Spider of Doom
“Things went pretty well for a few days after going live. But, on day six, things went not-so-well: all of the content on the website had completely vanished and all pages led to the default “please enter content” page. Whoops. Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn’t belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google’s very own web crawling spider. Whoops.”

Wall Street Journal prefers Ask.com to Google
“Ask Jeeves, a largely failed search service, has been overhauled and renamed Ask.com. I’ve been testing the new Ask.com against the search champ, Google. I’ve found that in terms of relevant results and ease of use, Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some very nice features Google lacks, including previews of the sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden your search results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you directly to core information.”

Google accused of “bio-piracy”
“Search giant Google has been accused of being the “biggest threat to genetic privacy” for its alleged plan to create a searchable database of genetic information. […] Biopiracy refers to the “monopolisation of genetic resources” according to the show’s organisers. It is also defined as the unauthorised use of biological resources by organisations such as corporations, universities and governments. According to the award’s Web site, Google is guilty of biopiracy because plans for a searchable database could make it easier for private genetic information to be abused.”

Is Google Gunning For EBay?
“When Google began testing a payment system in February for Google Base, its virtual catalog product, Internet pundits assumed the company was moving ahead with efforts to go head-to-head with eBay, the online marketplace giant. Not so, Google executives claimed. That’s standard operating procedure for team Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), which is constantly rolling out new products while insisting they are not meant to compete with established players. But in this case, the company may be more ingenious.”

First comment spam today, on a post from yesterday afternoon. Damnit, I remember the good old days when spam only showed up on posts that were over a month old and only if you used a popular keyword somewhere in that post.
Hmm, betcha it’s from saying “britney noodz” the other day. AND I JUST SAID IT AGAIN! OH NOES!
Can’t sleep, spam will eat me… can’t sleep, spam will eat me…

While I’m having a few issues with WordPress in general, I must say that I’m a fan of their comment moderation setup - the first comment from an unknown person gets moderated, after which that person is “known” and can comment unmoderated. So any spammers show up as “unknown” and are immediately flagged for moderation and thus their links are never live on my site or, more importantly, transferred to the index of any search engine crawling this site. Yay.

Indexing Speed from the Major Search Engines
“I thought it would be interesting, 24 hours after we launched the new domain (0awards.org) yesterday, to see how many search engines had us indexed (along with the few thousand links & mentions that popped up). Here’s the results:”

Yahoo Search Index Update & Increased Slurp Activity Expected
“The Yahoo blog announced yesterday that there was a new index update this past weekend.”

Search share
“From a Bear Stearns report on comScore data, Google continues to gain ground in search share in the US. Given all that’s going on in search and related media, that’s impressive.”

Aaron Wall’s favorite paper about search (from 1945)
“A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the systems of indexing. … Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association. … Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.”
The paper.

The internet is for porn - .xxx domain blocked
“What would the Internet be today without porn? Nothing. It wouldn’t even exist!
ARPNET was only invented so some pocket-protector-wearing, sexually frustrated, tech geeks at the DOD could figure could figure out how to send ASCII babes like this back and forth to each other. Before that, there was just no interest in the project.”

DOJ subpoenaed 34 companies
“In its effort to uphold the Child Online Protection Act, the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. In addition to America Online, MSN, and Google, the government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms, InformationWeek learned through a Freedom of Information Act request. ”

Matt Cutts answers a few questions
“Q: “What about the problem of directories and shopping comparison spam overriding real pages?”
A: Fair feedback. I heard that recently from a Googler, too. Sometimes we think of spam as strictly things like hidden text, cloaking, etc. But users think of spam as noise: things that they don’t want. If they’re trying to get information, fix a problem, read reviews, etc., then sites that like aren’t as helpful.”

Google aggregate search
“People can: publish chunks of data. People may not need to: publish websites.”
The mon(k)ey shot.

A sneak peek at the new Google UI
“…the changes are minimal, but they give some insight into Google’s plans. The biggest change is the relocation of Google’s search categories. Originally on top of the page in a horizontal layout, Google has now placed them on the left alongside visual representations of the search query’s relevance in these other categories.
Google’s intentions aren’t clear, but in the last day of using this interface, I’ve noticed myself repeatedly looking directly at the leftmost column. It’s where the results used to be, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a natural place to start scanning the page for left-to-right language types. Since the relocation surely serves a purpose, I’ll take a stab at what that purpose is.”

AdsBlackList Offers AdSense Filter URL List
“Nathan Weinberg reports on a service named AdsBlackList.com. The service provides a list of predefined MFAs (Made for AdSense sites) that generate low quality click throughs and low CPCs. I have discussed at SER how adding URLs to the AdSense filter URL list can help increase your daily income with AdSense. That is the whole premise behind a central location for publishers to go and fetch a list of URLs to block. AdsBlackList.com is just that list and it hopes to become a community effort.”

Being a boss isn’t all bad. Sometimes you get to write emails like this:

Yes, the analysts are crunching the data manually. We’re going to automate that soon, but until then… that’s why we have monkeys.*

*For those inclined to take offense at the terming of employees as monkeys - I’m a monkey too, y’know. And yes, I keep a barrel o’monkeys on my desk; they’re handy for throwing at people when you want to chastise them or catch their attention.

I just typed “monkey shot” instead of “money shot”.

Coffee? Yeah, okay.

Work continues. Actually, it never ends. Lucky I like what we do or I’d be throwing myself off a cliff in hopes that I could get some sleep at the hospital. I do occasionally plot to get fired for excessive vulgarity (see: sleep), but that just makes my boss like me more…

An interview with Tim Berners-Lee
“Sir Tim Berners-Lee, long considered the father of the Internet, is a Distinguished Chartered member of BCS, is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and professor of computer science at Southampton ECS. Here are his thoughts on software patents, US and ICANN control of the Internet, and browser security changes. The interview was conducted by Brian Runciman from the Britsh Computer Society. ”

Cooking with Google
“I couldn’t find a good recipe for Chinese Beef & Broccoli at Epicurious this weekend, so I headed to Google, where, lo and behold, they have what appears to be another new feature - query refinement via recipes.”

Highest-paying AdSense keywords
“Google has released a great tool to search for the current CPC for keywords which can be found here. I have used this tool to compile an updated list of some of the current highest paying keywords. It seems that lawyers are still paying the most out of all. It’s a bit concerning that some of the highest paying keywords are for “Wrongful Death”, and “DUI”, but oh well..”

The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything *is* 42!
“This unexpected connection with physics has given us a glimpse of the mathematics that might, ultimately, reveal the secret of these enigmatic numbers. At first the link seemed rather tenuous. But the important role played by the number 42 has recently persuaded even the deepest skeptics that the subatomic world might hold the key to one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics.”

You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!

“Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It’s learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.

Simulation games have proven excellent tools for training people in manual skills; for example, X-Plane, a flight simulator that runs on home computers, has been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. But accidental learning transcends intentional training. When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. They become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues. The fact that they don’t think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player’s behavior patterns and worldview.”

It’s in Wired, so it must be true.
“The day may not be far off when companies receive résumés that include a line reading “level 60 tauren shaman in World of Warcraft.”"

Yes! Me! And heck, I’m a level 60 tank, fully decked in epics:

• Can take a hit for the team, draw aggro away from vulnerable team members, and distract a target so they don’t notice that 39 other people are poking sharp things up its heinie.
• Through good entrepreneurship, I financed the purchase of not one but two epic mounts, as well as using my gathering skills to provide valuable resources to the team for both short- and long-term projects.
• Ability to resist the urge to kick, kill or otherwise damage team members who screw up.
• Hire me and I’ll dance naked for you on the AH bridge in IF (if horde, on top of the bank on Orgrimmar).

As predicted, the person who bought geekwardho.org out from under me and filled it with webarchive content for a few months has indeed now replaced it with spam.

Gah.

Ironic, considering a large part of my job involves fighting spam, but still…. gah.

It’s true, there aren’t enough monkeys on this site. I guess we NEED MORE.

I’m funny.

Basically: I got promoted into one of those sucker management jobs, so I work all the time, and think about work all the time, and dream about working and then wake up thoroughly pissed off because dream work doesn’t count against deadlines. And I’ve started having the kind of dream that is populated entirely by the people I work with and a variety of cats I have known. They take place in wayhouses, places of impermanence that indicate that movement is happening jamyesterday and jamtomorrow, that I have come from somewhere and am going somewhere, but for now myself and my boss and the other managers are all wrapped in blankets, eating stew in a roadhouse in the desert and fighting over secondhand books while cars and drivers impatiently idle at the end of long driveways next to sad small mailboxes on spindly posts.
At least there aren’t any talking squid.

Redesign is a low priority, even setting up the links is a low priority - I don’t have time to read blogs, so hey.

I’m tired but this is a great job - a job in which the work I do and the decisions I make have real effects, where a test I run today causes ripples that change the results of the tests I make tomorrow, usually (hopefully) for the better. A search engine is a piece of technological magic, and I love being part of the arcane machinery. Think about it - a thousand thousand small parts work together, interacting in known and unknown ways, all of them working together against the half-charted sea that is the sum of the internet. We can only see half of our equation and less than half of the things all of our bits and pieces are acting on - a soup of technology and data that clangs and clunks and hoots and beeps and squawks and, in the end, spits out Britney noodz on demand.

This, my friends, is magic.

Web 3.0: Google as the Web
“The trick for Google as they consume verticals is for them to find the balance of what they can take while fostering relevant efficient business models (ie: turning legacy publishing business models into always on web friendly models). Until legacy models are reformed or displaced Google will promote some trashy stuff as a casualty on the way to their end goal. Each new market Google creates will have holes that act as a marketing mechanism to market the marketplace.”

Google Pages launched
“Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google’s servers.”

Valid HTML - Does Google Care?
“I decided to test whether valid HTML can actually help your rankings in Google. A lot of website owners talk about how their non-compliant websites do well in Google and how their complaint sites may not be doing as well. The implied suggestion here is that Google either simply did not care about errors in HTML, or even more extreme, that Google preferred non-compliant websites - a charge that would certainly be puzzling if it were true.”

Bigdaddy status update: almost there
“We’re down to just 1-2 data centers left in the switchover to Bigdaddy. It’s possible that the Bigdaddy switchover will be complete in the next week or two.”