Saturday, June 7, 2003

Unofficial Google Redesign Contest

The (Unofficial) Google Redesign Contest 2003 has started! Create an original redesign of the actual Google web search page, displaying a search result (you can use foo bar as search string). You can completely change every part, including the logo, or just adapt some parts.

Send in your entries as 700*500 pixel JPEGs (no bigger than 150K) to blog@outer-court.com. Contestants will be shown here. With enough entries I’ll start a winner’s poll, and besides fame and fortune there may be an Amazon gift waiting for you.
Note that you do not have to create an actual HTML page, but if you want, you can — just send a screenshot then. (And also, if you know about CSS, one approach might be to download the Google HTML source, run HTML Tidy over it converting it to Strict, and add your own CSS.)

By sending in your entry (or as many entries as you want) you grant me the right to display them on this site. So design serious, purist, subtle, artistic, radical, dark or friendly, but no parodies please. Also, at least include the most important Google links/ sections of the current Google homepage in the design.
When sending the mail, please include your website, if any, and your full name, and tell me what text you want to have displayed with your image. In case you have your own webserver, I’ll appreciate it if you just send me the link to the image, so I can download it myself. Please make sure your layout is originally created by you, and wasn’t published before anywhere else.

The contest will run until July 1st, 2003. Good luck, start redesigning, and let me know!

Unofficial Google Redesig ... by Philipp Lenssen

Google Indexing Limit Rumour

I can’t confirm or deny what Re5earcher* writes, so I’ll pass it on as interesting rumour (and possible hoax):
Google assigns IDs of 4 bytes to every URL (making for 4,294,967,296 possible URLs), and now they reached their indexing limit. No new pages will be added until they change their system, which might take around 1 year:

“They [are] now considering reconstruction of the data tables which involves expanding ID fields to 5 bytes.

This will result in additional 2 bytes per every word indexed throwing the total index size to be multiplyed by 1.17.

This procedure will require 1000 new page index servers and additional storage for temporary tables.

They are hoping to make this change gradually server by server.

The completion of the process will take up to one year after that the main URL index will be switched to use [a] 5 bytes ID.

Until then new URLs will not be indexed, except those which will be put in place of URLs returned ’not found’ and deleted from the index.”
– Re5earcher, Google reached its ID capacity limit and will not index new URLs, June 7, 2003

*It’s his first post to the Google Webmaster-World Forum, after joining the same day.

Someone else sheds doubt on this:

“But surely Google could predict a year ago index growth rates and would have started this upgrade then?”
– Vincevincevince, Google reached its ID capacity limit and will not index new URLs, June 7, 2003

Others suggest it’s a new genre of “SE-Fiction”, or just a weak joke.

Google Indexing Limit Rum ... by Philipp Lenssen

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