Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia has decided to launch a search engine.
In a move reminiscent of the Open Directory Project, Wikia Search will be human edited. Beyond that, not much is known, but it will be. One of the core philosophies, according to a recent interview with Jimmy is that everything should be as transparent as possible - definitely a long way from the current search engines.
Okay, so it’s not quite that grand. But apparently Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to be using the same sitemap format some time in 2007. Google Sitemaps that is. Infoworld article.
Google just launched a clever new custom search thing.
The idea is for people to create their own “custom” search engines that automatically give weight to certain sites, restrict others and silently append search terms therefore improving accuracy for niche topics. For example imagine an ornithologist searching for “a pair of great tits”.
So, I’ve created an engine for finding language learning resources. And it’s surprisingly good.
The language learning app of mine is still under development, but I doubt I’ll be spending too much time on it until after my trip to America (and by extension, until after Christmas).
In the meantime I’ve reading about XMPP, the protocol used by Google Talk and several others.
One of the extensions that Google is largely responsible for is Jingle which essentially allows voice communications. There are also a couple of XMPP clients written in PHP. So it may be possible to deliver lessons over XMPP through a chat bot.
The very eagle eyed amongst you may notice I’ve altered the layout of the site slightly. One of the most prominent changes is switching to a smaller ad size for old posts (before I had a large rectangular ad above any post that is more than seven days old figuring that anyone visiting old content on a blog really wanted to be there and would get over it).
The new 200x200 size immediately started showing video ads on a few pages. For an example, visit my post about the cartoons of the prophet Mohamed.
It seems Google have updated PR of their index - I’ve finally reached a PageRank of 6 for the homepage :)
Google Checkouts has a launched as a rival to PayPal. Competing with PayPal will be difficult, especially with the eBay integration. That could end when GBuy is released though (a competitor to eBay that will obviously integrate with Google Checkout).
On the surface Google Checkout is more expensive - 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction (PayPal is 1.9% + $0.30). However Google will let sellers have $10 of free transactions for every $1 spent on AdWords. The big disadvantage is that it’s only available in the United States. But that won’t last forever.
Well I’ve been using my Google Mail account for about a week and I have to say the spam filter is really good. A couple of hours after putting my email address on the blog I was getting spam and all but two messages have been correctly marked. More importantly, none of the messages marked have spam have been wrong.
There is one slightly entertaining fact. When I read the spam messages I still get Google ads related to the content. I thought perhaps they’d treat the spam folder as a special case. Although I guess it does make sense - I read a dodgy email with “Looking for the best value in discount software?” and get a nice Google ad offering me genuine Microsoft Office for £235.
It turns out that ASP.NET might not suck after all. Atlas for ASP.NET is a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff.
Well in fact it is quite a bit more than that. It has many features of the Google Web Toolkit (except in ASP.NET instead of Java) including serializing server side objects for use client side use. Interesting it also has a lot in common with Backbase. It allows you to embed some nifty XML to define a user interface which is then interpreted by the Javascript to render real (X)HTML.
The final irony is that it’s pretty much free. Since it’s .NET, to really use it you need Visual Studio, but the Atlas part itself is free and should be perfectly usable with the Express version of the Visual Studio projects.
Google Mail (no longer Gmail) has a confusing feature.
I recently got a Google Mail account to test out Google Talk. Since I was already logged into my Google account it asked if I wanted my new email account to be part of it. I said yes. Then I couldn’t log into my Google Account for anything else. The problem is they’ve decided my new Google Mail email address is my primary address and that’s what I need to use to log in.
Ah well.