Google Blogoscoped

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Strange Google Earth Objects

Google Earth Hacks (which presents 10 things to do with Google Earth) shows off a range of strange objects... [Via Digg.]

Google Video Onebox?

SCJM reports that he’s seeing a direct video results onebox searching for [weird al]. I can’t reproduce this here, if it’s real it might be one of Google’s prototype tests. (Sam Davyson mentioned something similar a couple of months ago.)

The discussion started in the forum.

[Thanks SCJM!]

Google New York Gallery

Eweek lets you take a peek inside Google’s New York’s office. From what I heard some of the Google offices do little more than localizaton and public relations (like Google Germany’s office in Hamburg), I wonder if there’s any hot research happening in New York... [Thanks Manoj Nahar and TomHTML!]

Matt Cutts on PageRank

Google’s Matt Cutts took the time to answer a couple of questions on the PageRank shown in the toolbar (which recently saw some changes for many sites). I asked him how Google internally stores the number:

Q: Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?

Matt: It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

So if you see your PageRank changed keep in mind that the change may or may not be more subtle than the number indicates. E.g. depending on how Google rounds the display value, a PR of 6.499 might end up being displayed as 6, whereas a slight change to 6.501 might be showing a 7. In any case it remains healthiest to think of PageRank as symptom, not cause, and to never directly work to increase it. If you add value to whatever community you’re working in, let the search engines figure out how to rank that meaningfully (by utilizing approaches like PageRank and a multitude of other things)... after all they get paid for figuring it out!

Time Interviews Eric Schmidt

Time.com put up an interview with Eric Schmidt. The Google CEO talks about strategy (ask questions, have well-organized finances), partners (MySpace, MTV – “we recognized that we needed to get good at partnerships ... It had not been a core part of how we were trying to run the company”), competiton (Yahoo, and perhaps Microsoft one day, though not yet) and the term-thou shalt-not-speak-of (which to him means moving all apps and data online).

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie!]

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