15
May
Ok, so this post is completely off-topic. I ran into this great web page with fun internet trivia so I thought I’d turn some of the items into questions and share them with all of you.
- Where did Google get its name?
- Where did Yahoo! get its name?
- In February 2004, what country led the world in Internet penetration, with 76.9 percent of people connected to the Internet?
- What is a ‘bastion host?’
- What are ‘browser safe colours?’
- It took 13 years for television to reach 50 million users. How long did it take the Internet to reach 50 million users?
- How many times per minute does the average computer user blink?
- What was the first computer company to register for a domain name?
- What is “6bone?”
- Domain registration was free until 1995. Who changed it?
Want more Internet trivia? Want the answers to these questions? Check out Complete Computer Solutions.
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29
Apr
Federated search gets beaten up a lot so it’s always nice to get some positive attention. If you want to read some over-the-top cheerleader-quality positive writing about federated search just check out this article at the Kansas State University “Talking in the Library” blog.
D.J. Beckley wrote this “Federated Search Engine = Awesome” “tips and tricks” article to entertain and educate. The article starts like this:
You might not know this little bit of information, but one of the coolest things to do in the library doesn’t involve acts that might get you banned from the building. It’s actually federated searching and you can do it in the future if you haven’t already! Seemingly contrary to its name, federated searching does not involve the Department of Homeland Security, illegal wiretaps, or raids on your personal belongings
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24
Apr
Hat tip to iNode blog, who found it at boomerang.nl.
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14
Apr
MuseGlobal CEO Kate Noerr published an article in her blog: “Not your Father’s Feds: Taming the Widening Scope of U.S. Government Content Initiatives.” The article speaks to the focus of the Obama administration on open government, Web 2.0, and that this all means information overload to the max. Kate says it well:
So if you were hoping for more openness and access in the U.S. federal government, the good news is that it’s coming in buckets. The bad news is that you have lots and lots of new and changing buckets to sift through to make sense of it all - even, and perhaps especially, if you’re the government.
Kate’s article got me thinking about the many sources of government information and how challenging it is to navigate them or to even know what exists in the big government cyberspace. And then it occurred to me that many of us (Americans at least) are thinking about our government today since tomorrow is tax day. I spent time last night digging up state and federal tax extension forms and estimated tax forms so the government is at least on MY mind. So, to lighten things up a bit on “tax day eve” I came up with a quiz about government resources.
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1
Apr
In a move that will be hard for many to fathom, Google has decided to stop adding pages to its mammoth index which contain HTML forms. While industry experts believe that Google’s move is motivated by the fact that the search giant is frustrated because it’s having too tough a time filling out those forms, the Google Search Engineering Team gives a different response:
Our index is just growing much too fast. We can’t keep up with the exponential growth of the Web especially, these days, twitter. We don’t think people much care what’s behind forms but they do care what their friends had for breakfast. So, we have a solid business case for pruning content from our index that has marginal value.
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28
Jan
Mednar and Biznar, vertical search portals created by blog sponsor Deep Web Technologies, have been enjoying some attention in the international blogosphere. In this article I provide a gallery of the references I’ve found to the Deep Web portals and, for your entertainment, I also throw in translations of snippets of the articles, courtesy of Google translation.
Enjoy!
Hebrew
http://www.i-zm.info/data/article.phtml?c_id=2&id=1664
Source credit: Blog Directory of Tel Aviv University
Biznar is a search engine - the new field of business. Engine based on the technology-federated search of Deep Web Technologies. Is looking for a number of high-quality sources of business, including sources from the non-visible, and rank the results according to its own algorithm. Sources include blogs, research, business, government news and information. The user can search all the sources or the number of sources to choose between the original proposed. Can I get the sources from each of the proposed source. You can search the entire text of the documents or to restrict your search to the title or author. Also you can restrict your search based on the years.
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24
Dec
Hopefully you’ll get a chuckle out of some of these Internet-related satires from The Onion:
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
NEW YORK—Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday. More…
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22
Dec
In the spirit of the holidays I’m compelled to write about a new iPhone federated search application for wine lovers. Drync-wine is a very novel application of federated search and a great idea for a phone app. It’s also a great combining of federated search and community. The $4.99 app, created by Drync, allows users to search for wines based on label information, to get details, reviews, and pricing info, to save info in their virtual cellars, and to share their wine experiences with others.
Here’s a piece of the announcement of Drync-Wine, titled “Drync Releases Drync-Wine a Mobile “Lifestyle” Solution for the iPhone.” (The emphasis of some of the text is mine.)
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5
Nov
Here are the answers to the trivia questions I posted a couple of week ago:
- What is the Opaque Web? Consists of files that could be crawled and indexed but aren’t. Files might be omitted because they are beyond the crawl depth, because they are missed due to frequency of crawl, because they exceed the maximum number of viewable results, or because they have no links to them.
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22
Oct
I’ve been reading The Invisible Web by Chris Sherman and Gary Price to learn about the history of the deep web and federated search. The book was published in 2001. I’ll review it another time; today I want to challenge you with some trivia questions inspired by content from the book.
See how many questions you can answer. Leave your answers in the comments. No prizes, no glory, no fame, just fun. If you don’t want to spoil your fun, don’t look at the comments until you answer as many questions as you can.
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