Google Publication Fumble

Update - it appears the link I gave is simply a table of contents of an ACM symposium. So where is the actual paper?

---

One of the feeds I recently subscribed to is Papers Written by Googlers, (the web version is here). Apparently every link on the page is to some Google search instead of a definite link to a paper. I wanted to check out a paper titled Towards Temporal Web Search, by Marius Pasca and got a strange result page containing totally unrelated papers. Only the focused search I ran myself for the exact title gave me the actual article.

Shared Items Feed & More

Hello guys, today we have several topics:

Shared Items

I finally really settled on Google Reader instead of a desktop feed reader. The advantage of being able to read RSS everywhere without any hassle outweigh the downsides. Also I get the benefit of easily exporting a Feed of Shared Items (both RSS and Email.

I think I will stop/reduce posting links to interesting items that I find on my RSS and instead just mark them as shared, so if you want to keep using my information filtering services be sure to register :)
In addition, here is a link to all previously shared items.

Google Notebook
If you've recently Googled you may have seen the "Note this" added to every link.



It's a useful new very useful. Upon clicking it copies the current content of said web page into your Google Notebook, a cool service that organizes your web clippings.
It opens up right on your search result page and has a full page interface as well.





Unfuddle free SVN hosting
If you're doing any non-trivial software assignment with partners, you should consider using source control. So far, I've used source control for large projects of course, but never in an assignment from Technion - back when I was an undergraduate student I was largely oblivious to source control and I didn't take any programming courses in my 2nd degree - until now. Now I actually have a few non-trivial homeworks at Managing Data on the WWW (writing an http proxy is one of them), and so far I didn't take up the trouble of setting up a source control. Well, it appears it is no hassle at all, at Unfuddle you can setup a project page, SVN server, RSS and email updates on checkins, project management and more in less than 5 minutes and no cost. Unlike some alternatives, putting your code there doesn't mean it's now open source and free to the world, you get control over who accesses your code.

Google Is Still #1

I had wondered of we all use Google because it is objectively better or because we are used to it being better all this time. Maybe Yahoo and MSN had improved since we decided to switch to Google?

Here, try this search on MetaCrawler. Only Google finds this page. Google has the benefit that it owns Blogger and can possibly get easier access to its database, but still that hardly justifies as an excuse for the other search engines - the post being searched is over a month old!

Bunch Of Links

What makes Google the best, according to Google.

How IBM is filing for a silly patent.

How to make your plants call you or update their Twitter status when they need water.

And finally:

Stories Website

I tend to write short stories from time to time, when I get the muse.
I opened a short page that I will use to host some of those stories.
Here is the first one, Reading Dracula.

BTW, you can use Google Page Creator for creating & hosting short webpages like this one and even hosting files up to 100mb.

Google SMS

Not functioning yet in Israel (at least on my cell phone), but looks cool.

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/sms/

Sex, Cars & Mp3s

Passing the time I entered this search query into Google Trends. I compared the number of times people search for Sex & Mp3s, and I got these weird peaks at the end of every year. I thought it might be some glitch, and tried adding Cars to the comparison, but the Car search graph didn't show this phenomenon.

Guesses, anyone?

Google Suggest in the Wrong Language

A cool feature I wanted for some time - I started typing in my Google search box in Firefox, but it was in the wrong language. Google knows my mistake:



BTW, the thing I was looking for for "gmail attachment problem". For some time now whenever I click on an attachment in Gmail I get the attachment, but the current tab goes blank. If you have the same issue here is the solution - just disable/uninstall TabMix.

Switch to Google Reader?

I'm seriously thinking of switching to Google Reader (from Feedreader).

Pros:

• Ability to check feeds on other computers, instead of pile up a large chunk of feeds to check at night.


• Ability to quickly mark favorite posts so my readers (you) can get them, instead of having to write a separate post for every post I like.

Cons: Not having a popup on a new item (which can be a boon during movies).

I think I'm switching :)

In the meantime, here's the crappy graph of the day:

Google Around The World

Google made a video representing how an email message gets around the world. The video is made up of bits and pieces filmed by people all around the world.

Amusing watch.

RSS Feed for Gmail

I just accidently discovered this recently - you can get your email messages on Gmail as an RSS feed.

Deleting Gmail Messages

In an effort to free up some Gmail space after running out of it, I searched for ".ppt" and ".pps" to find all powerpoint slides in my box. ALL ".pps" files and almost all ".ppt" were indeed well-intended spam. Deleting some of them helped me get down to only 91% full, and then I encountered the following message. It would have been amusing under different circumstances.

I Don't Like Google Today

If you remember, when Gmail first appeared, Google promised us "we'll never have to delete another email". It's now all about searching your email, and Google will take care of the storage problem for you.

This sounds reasonable, considering file attachments take up most of the space, and Google can easily detect identical files through a (really big) hash table and store only a single copy of every file.


However, I'm currently at 95% capacity of my alloted storage. It's not my fault, I'm getting big emails, and not deleting them, just as Google asked. I even tried to search for all my large mails so I can delete them in one swoop, but it's impossible using the current Gmail interface.

Today, I login and find this message. Gmail is kindly offering me to purchase additional storage. Thank you very much! What's the matter, AdSense not bringing in enough revenue anymore?

This gives me a really bad taste, especially as Yahoo! are now offering unlimited storage for free, for the last couple of months.

A bad one for you, Gmail.