G-mail is Smart. Sometimes.
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Kirby Witmer on 07-31-2006
G-mail does a wonderful job of scanning your e-mail for street addresses…..
although it doesn’t do so good with dates..
Microsoft Charges for Office 2007 Beta 2
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Kirby Witmer on 07-31-2006
Microsoft says that it will begin charging $1.50 for users to download a copy of the Office 2007 beta 2.
“In just the past two months since its launch, more than 3 million people have downloaded the 2007 Microsoft Office system beta 2,” the company said in a statement sent via e-mail.
“Given how dramatically the beta 2 downloads have exceeded our goals, we have made the business decision to implement a cost-recovery measure for downloading the beta.”
Microsoft will begin charging users starting Wednesday, it said. The company released beta 2 of Office 2007 in May.
3 million people??? WOW!! I have a feeling that this release of Office will be a huge success. Personally, I think it’s a lot more intuitive than Office 2003 and I predict that openoffice.org will have a long hard road ahead. 
If Only We Knew Google’s Secret Ranking Algo
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Kirby Witmer on 07-31-2006
(Written by Philipp Lennsen)
Wouldn’t it be nice to see Google’s top secret ranking formula? The piece of source code that makes a web page stand or fall in rankings, rumored to contain over 100 different factors? A piece of source code like…
function getPagerank(url)
{
// start off with a random low PR
pagerank = randomNumber(0, 3);
if ( pageHostedOn(url, 'google.com') ) {
pagerank++;
}
else if ( pageHostedOn(url, 'microsoft.com') ) {
pagerank--;
}
if ( pageValidates(url) ) {
pagerank *= .5;
}
tag_value['b'] = 1;
tag_value['h2'] = 2;
tag_value['h1'] = 3;
tag_value['strong'] = -1; // W3C sux!
pagerank = calculateTagsPr(tag_value, pagerank);
// Sergey said good news sites have
// lots of nested tables
tablesOnPage = getTagCount('table');
if (tablesOnPage >= 50) {
pagerank += 2;
}
if (pagerank >= 5) {
pagerank = 4; // helps selling AdWords
}
if ( linksFrom('mattcutts.com', url) >= 4 ) {
// I link to "clean" sites only
// – Matt, Feb 2006
pagerank += 2;
}
pagerank += countBacklinks(url) / 10000;
blacklist1 = getList('government.cn/censored.txt');
blacklist2 = getList('c:larry-page-hatelist.txt');
if ( inArray(blacklist1, url) ||
inArray(blacklist2, url) ) {
pagerank = 0;
}
d = dashesInUrl(url);
pagerank = (d >= 3) ? pagerank -1 : pagerank + 1;
if ( inString(url, "how to build a bomb") ) {
// added on request. 2004-12-01.
recipient = "peter@homelandsecurity.gov";
subject = "You might wanna check this...";
sendMailTo(recipient, subject, url);
// page might still be relevant
pagerank++;
}
if ( month() == "June" || month() == "October" ) {
// makes people talk about
// PR updates, good publicity
pagerank -= randomNumber(1,3);
}
if ( linkCol(url) == WHITE &&
pageCol(url) == WHITE ) {
// spammer!! Googleaxe it!!
pagerank = 0;
}
if (url == "http://www.nytimes.com") {
// just testing, pls remove tomorrow
// – Frank, June 2003
pagerank = 10;
}
return pagerank;
}
[Thanks Alek for the idea!]
Some Rights Reserved by Philipp Lennsen at Google Blogoscoped.
