Chistophe Bisciglia, an engineer from Google, is teaching a course at the University of Washington. The course focuses on problem solving on large-scale clusters. The complete course material is available on the homepage.
I think there’s a huge potential for programs to analyze voluminous
amounts of data. Most data analysis is done either using Excel, or
using command line tools such as awk and sed. A smart way to
distribute the post-processing or analysis would be cool.
I recently came across a service to keep track of your books. I found the site really easy to use. In my opinion, a tool is great if it gets out of your way. They’ve made good use of AJAX to update search results — I really like that. Amazon should implement something like that.
I haven’t explored the “social” aspects of the site yet (so much for my social skills.) From the looks of it, I can look up what other people with similar interests as mine read.
I often look up books from the SFU library at home. I then have to write down the call number and take it with me to campus. Now, with this service, I can add it to my LibraryThing account and problem solved. Internet access is almost universally available on campus.
Another point of interest is that abebooks has a 40% stake in the company. I’ve been using abebooks for many years now to order cheap books, sometimes only 20% the cost of a new North American edition.
Check out my profile.
Most search engines rank results based on their “authority.” Google for example, does this by the number of incoming high quality links. Considering the fact that Wikipedia these days is a source of high quality material, you find Wikipedia as the top result of many search terms.
Google’s results these days are less than optimal. Spammers have
become quite sophisticated in their methods. Results are cluttered
with iframe results, shell websites, and other useless listings.
Wikiasari is a new venture by the same guys behind Wikipedia. This is exactly what I’ve been looking forward to – an engine that prefers Wikipedia over other sources.
The Times quotes Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia:
Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results.
The engine is built over Lucene, which is also behind Beagle, the Free indexer for Linux desktops. They also say the index will be released under the GFDL.