Google to Upgrade its Memory? Assigned Startup MetaRAM’s Memory Chip Patents
In August, the Official Google Blog announced an upgrade to Google’s infrastructure code-named Caffeine, aimed at making the search engine faster, and Google opened the system up for testing to people who might want to provide feedback. An interview with one of the developers behind the upgrade described it as an upgrade to the [...]
How Google Might Insert Artificial Named Anchors into Web Pages
Usually, when you click on a link in a set of search results at Google, the search engine will deliver you to the top of a web page. But what if it didn’t? What if it brought you instead to the place on a page where your query terms appeared, or just above [...]
Patent Shows Google Book Scanning a Musical Process
Google was granted a patent today on one aspect of a book scanning process that raises the question what kind of music helps someone scan books best.
The patent is Pacing and error monitoring of manual page turning operator (US Patent 7,619,784), which lists Joseph K. O’Sullivan, R. Alexander Proudfoot, and Christopher R. Uhlik as inventors. [...]
Search Taxonomies and Search Engines: Answering Questions vs. Indexing Webpages
If you were to search for [Ronald Reagan Movies] at Google or Yahoo or Bing, would you expect to see a list of movies that the former President and actor appeared in?
It’s more likely that you would see a set of web pages that contain the words “Ronald” and “Reagan” and “Movies,” which might contain [...]
How Search Engines May Rank User Generated Content
The term “User Generated Content,” often abbreviated as “UGC,” covers a fairly broad range of the words and pictures, images and videos and sounds that you see and hear on the Web.
One thing that tends to distinguish “User Generated Content” from other content on the web is that visitors to a site, possibly including a [...]
How a Search Engine might Adjust Rankings based upon Patterns in Query and Click Logs
Imagine that a number of people use Google to perform a search for “orange,” and then “banana,” and then “pineapple” and then choose the web page “http://www.example.com/fruit.htm” in the search results they see.
Now imagine that Google looks at the information it collects about what people do when they search, and finds in its query [...]
The Importance of Listening
When I was fairly young, my family picked up roots and moved from New Jersey to Ohio. As a six-year-old, it was quite a culture shock. I remember how much more slowly people talked in the great Mid-West, how polite they were, and how they had funny names for things, such as calling [...]
How a Search Engine Might Distinguish Between Queries from Bots and from Humans
Some of the visitors to search engines are people looking for information. Other visitors may have other purposes for visiting search engines, and might not even be humans.
Instead, those automated visitors may be attempting to check rankings of pages in search results, or conducting keyword research, or providing results for games, or even being [...]
