Google will take over the world
Google for instance have wonderful text processing skills. And their spell checker actually learns. Although the human side leaves a little to be desired.
This neatly brings me to one of the reasons I’m posting this (as hinted at two entries ago). I recently started a new website, http://www.condoms-cheap.co.uk which sells things (I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess what. Again I’m, not sure who I’m telling exactly since the only person reading this knows about it anyway). And it has very few inbound links(ah, I get to explain how Google works; something the person in question might not know about). When I say very few I sort of mean none. As in it has some but they aren’t in search engines yet. And since this page is not in a search engine this won’t really help much.
Google gives a page a rating called PageRank. This is defined recursively and is confusing to think about from the middle (and since it’s recursive everything is the middle - bear with me). When a page links to another page, Google counts it as a “vote” for that page. So pages with more votes have a higher PageRank. However the votes from a page with a high PageRank are worth more. Not sure where to go from there but I hope it was educational.
Meanwhile check out:
The first will be cool eventually but isn’t that impressive technologically. The second is absolutely stunning to be honest. The third is nice as a “proof of concept”. It will be better when the rest of the world exists. Now if they could include public transport in the system, scheduled flights and ferry services and keep it all up to date, they will definitely rule the world. Imagine being able to put in two addresses (not just cities but exact addresses) and it tell you exactly how to get from one to the other. Now that is what the information revolution should be about.