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Friday, December 2, 2005

Microsoft Research Releases SNARF

Microsft releases Outlook 2003 add-on SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. Basically it’s an email client helper which mines the available data, like how many emails a certain person sent you, to then allow you to sort new incoming mails by their importance. I wonder though, are criteria like these relevant? Just imagine someone you never heard of would send you a very important email.

One thing for sure: it helps if new emails from people who you have been exchanging emails with don’t happen to land in the spam box. It also might help to have some kind of indicator who wrote the email – family, friend, colleague, stranger. These do not allow to rank by importance (as a friend my send you an unimportant joke email or a very important request all the same!), but they would enhance recognition and usability. I would love to be able to attach images to my contacts, like a photo portrait. Hmm, maybe there’s a Greasemonkey/ Gmail way to do this...

[Via Lifehacker.]

Google Desktop Plus Internet Explorer Security Hole?

Via eWeek comes news that Matan Gillon discovered an Internet Explorer design flaw (even on fully patched IE’s) which allows hackers to hijack user information via Google Desktop.

Truly Weird Google Spelling Suggestion

You have to understand a bit of German to get the joke in this Google spelling suggestion... I can only say this much, the original search was for “giant camel.”

FutureFeature: Google 2006

[Future Feature]

Another month and it’s 2006... what should the future bring for Google?

Here are some of the things people wished for to happen in 2005:

Cadavers at Yahoo?

Danny Sullivan was searching for “cadavers” on Google, and look what ad he found...

Google Gets 3 Out of 10

The Motley Fool’s David Gardner interviewed David Vise, author of The Google Story (a great book so far, by the way). Vise says:

“Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, is not very satisfied with the results of Google searches. On a scale of 1 to 10, he thinks that Google delivers about a 3. They want to do everything they can to improve the quality of search. For us ordinary mortals out here, we probably think search is pretty good, but Page thinks it has a long way to go.”

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