Real Mermaid found?

Posted on August 18, 2009
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A city in Israel named Kiryat Yam is reporting 12 sightings of a mermaid. With so many reports, the city is offering a reward of $1 million for a photographic evidence of the mermaid.

What do you think? Could there be a possibility of a mermaid or is just a figment of some wild imaginations? And if real, what next? Unicorns?

One small step for (a) man!

Posted on July 20, 2009
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Today is the 40th anniversary of our moon landing. Who can forget the first sentence uttered on the lunar surface? “One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind”. Unfortunately, astronaut Neil Armstrong flubbed the rehearsed speech in front of millions of television viewers due to the excitement. What he actually said was “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”. The meaning of the rehearsed speech was to convey that the small step taken by Armstrong was a giant leap in terms of space exploration for all of humanity. But, by ommiting the article ‘a’, the entire meaning of the sentence was changed.

Obviously, this does not take away anything from the marvelous achievement of mankind. But definitely goes to show the importantance of a properly placed article in a sentence!

Will Google beat expectations?

Posted on July 16, 2009
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Search engine leader Google will be reporting earnings after the close today. Do you think Google will beat expectations or just meet them? Worse yet, will they miss? Not long before we find out.

Microsoft and Google have been going head to head, first with Microsoft challenging Google with Bing. Then with Google announcing an operating system to compete with Microsoft.

With the slowing economy, Industr y pundits say the ad revenues are down. This is likely to have an impact on companies that earn their bread and butter through ads. On the flip side though, the search volumes have significant ly gone up due to major events such as the Iran elections or the death of pop king Michael Jackson.

Can’t wait to find out how Google comes out!

How would you pay a $23 quadrillion bill?

Posted on July 15, 2009
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Josh Muszynski, a New Hampshire man was shocked to look at his online debit card statement and see a bill for $23 quadrillion ($23,148,855,308,184,500 to be precise). He contacted the Manchester gas station where he had used his card, to buy a pack of cigrattes and pay for fuel. They had no idea on what to do to help him. He then spoke to Bank of America which had issued the credit card and it took that bank about 2 hours to sort things out and reverse the charges. The bank still does not know how this could have happened.

For a moment, Josh says he was beginning to think that generations of Muszynski’s will be under debt trying to repay $23 quadrillion dollars. Just for reference, a quadrillion is more than a trillion and a lot more than a billion.

These humongous mistakes can be obviously caught when you check your statements. I wonder how many times the financial institutions make small amount mistakes that never get caught? Pretty scary!

What happened to Cuil, the Google killer?

Posted on July 6, 2009
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I am not sure how many of you remember the launch of Cuil (pronounced Cool), a new search engine that was going to be a “Google killer” last year. The company was started by Anna Patterson, an ex-Googler. In fact, she had previously started another successful search engine called “Recall” which was really an Internet archive. She later sold it to Google and joined the Google team.

Cuil had an index of 125 billion web pages at launch. Most search engine companies need a large hardware farm to support the search query. The search engines “scatter” the query to many machines and then aggregate the results which take time. Tom Costello, Anna’s husband and the CEO of Cuil came up with an algorithm to serve search results using just 145 machines. The uniqueness of the algorithm was to serve the results from fewer machines thereby producing faster results. This provides the search engine the advantage of actually doing more computation on the data set to provide highly relevant data. The search engine also claims that it shows the diversity of search, meaning that they show you different meanings of search terms. For example, searching “Tesla” on Google, you get results mostly about the electric car. If you do the same search on “Cuil”, you supposedly get the different meanings of Tesla which includes the electric car, but maybe also the Tesla museum, Nikola Tesla, etc.

The company had raised $33M in funding from several VC’s to launch cuil. I remember the media coverage the company received on the day of the launch. This huge media coverage actually worked to their disadvantage because when people searched the term “cuil”, the search engine produced zero results. This caused a huge embarrassment to the company. Also, many in the media thought the name “cuil” was not intuitive and was difficult to remember.

I recently visited the site Cuil.com and I see that it is still around. But their alexa rank is around 15,000 which is very low for a successful search engine. So much for being a “Google killer” I guess.

keep looking »