wow, this looks good! I love the Metro UI. More on Windows 8 here. I also liked this comment from an HN thread on the topic.

• A Brief Tour of FLP Impossibility
• Consistency and availability in Amazon’s Dynamo
• Consensus Protocols: Two-Phase Commit
• Consensus Protocols: Three-Phase Commit
• Consensus with lossy links: Establishing a TCP connection
• Consensus Protocols: Paxos
• Consensus Protocols: A Paxos Implementation
• Barbara Liskov’s Turing Award, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• CAP confusion: Problems with Partition Tolerance
• The Theorem That Will Not Go Away

Anyway, I hope Henry goes back to blogging.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing.

The Bing team says they rely on thousands of inputs to compute search results, one of them being the clickstream obtained from users who choose to share their web usage experience. To me this sounds legitimate. IE 8 has a feature that detects if you’ve entered a search query into a search engine; I assume so because the browser search box will be filled with the search query even if you entered it into the search box on the web page. So if a user chooses to send web usage feedback, then I would assume it is ok to return information such as “when the user searched for XYZ, he first went to this site, then clicked on that section and that section.” Of course, without revealing any personal information.

Learning relevant links, and re-ranking search results, based on what users click on is already done behind the scenes by *all* search engines. Google determines the order of search results partly based on which links users tended to click on; a search result that is posted near the bottom of the list but receives many clicks from users will surely make its way higher up the list. Using clickstreams is just like that, but instead of learning from people who click on your search results, you learn from people who opt-in to send you usage feedback. So why is Google surprised that when they opt-in to send Bing browsing feedback data then it will be used to improve search results?

What really disappoints me is that I believe that Google’s post is nothing but a PR stunt. Techies would know that fuss is about nothing, but the mainstream media and average consumers would read their post, take it at face value, and brand Bing as a “cheap imitation” as Google claims.

I really thought Google was above this sort of cheap PR stunts, and that’s why I am disappointed.

What constitutes stealing search results?

Since Google brought up the subject, it is worth pondering; what would actually constitute stealing search results? If a search engine actively uses Google’s search results and displays them as its own, then that is stealing. If the IE and the Bing Toolbar returned the search results that Google displayed back to Microsoft, then that is also stealing. Clearly, Bing wasn’t doing any of that.


from WEBMASTER
reply-to webhelpdesk@dslextreme.com
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date Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:12 PM
subject URGENT NOTICE..
hide details 12:12 PM (3 hours ago)

----Cornell University Networking Services.-----


Now here is something interesting; whereas apps for iOS or Android devices have to use device-specific APIs, most of the apps on the Chrome Web Store are essentially HTML5 pages. So, the New York Times app: http://nytimes.com/chrome is actually also accessible from Firefox. So what makes the Chrome Web Store tied to Chrome and not to your online identity? What prevents Mozilla from starting their own stores? Most “Chrome Apps” will already run on Mozilla’s Firefox, so what is specific to Chrome to keep the Web Store sustainable? I think Google is banking on being the first to introduce this, and on some developers building Chrome-extensions as apps. Unfortunately I think it would be dangerous if the “Web Stores” start encouraging people to write non-standard browser-specific code.

This highlights the potential danger in this “app store” (maybe the vendor-neutral “apps bazaar” is more appropriate); if different apps are going to be locked into different browsers, then that might potentially undo all the benefit of a standardized open web that we have been striving for. I hate to think that in the future we’re going to choose browsers based on “this can run apps A,B,C while the other can run D,E,F”. The main advantage of web applications is specifically that we didn’t have to think about this. We can access our web apps using any device and any browser. Also, I do not want to see the “this site best runs on browser X” banners all over the place again, the 90s have ended damn it!

Anyway, interesting idea all in all.

On the upside, I found this website: http://www.forvo.com/ that is a like a wiki for word pronunciation from around the world. Cool Idea.

I love the fact that they have these specialized “robots” to handle different common file tasks.

May be I should build a browser plugin to automate all that…

(hat-tip: Fadi)

Some guy described himself on Twitter as a “Next-Generation Information Technologist, Visionary Entrepreneur, and a Social Media Expert.” It is a buzz-word trifecta!

With that said, I think that the move to HTML5 can have its downsides. The ‘ML’ in HTML stands for Markup Language. This means that an HTML document just tells the browser what is supposed to be in a page, and the browser does the rest. There is no standard shared “runtime” between different browsers, and this is how the different rendering engines (Firefox’s Gecko, Chrome and Safari’s WebKit, IE’s Trident …etc) differentiate themselves (plus their JavaScript interpreters, but that is somewhat a different matter).

Even with all the issues of Flash, it at least provided a shared runtime that more than 90% of web users had. Without Flash, browsers would take it upon themselves to decide how would videos be played, how would canvases react, and how would various messages/events be handled. So what really worries me is the possibility of the re-emergence of “This site is better viewed with browser X” buttons everywhere; these were damn horrible in the 90s and should never come back. What gives me hope however is that web developers are now more mature than a decade ago, and browser builders are working together to standardize most of what falls under the HTML5 umbrella term. I guess we just have to wait and see how this turns out.

Anyway, on a related note, YouTube has posted some arguments for why they think that Flash would continue to be the dominant Video distribution platform in the near future. I think their first two arguments are probably the only real issue at play here, while the rest are more or less superficial.

http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/06/11/show-your-soccer-team-pride-with-the-new-fan-flair-app-on-facebook.aspx?form=pgbar2