Dodgy Search

I was making a comment on my friends blog and was too lazy to walk to the other room and check the title of a book on my shelf (The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy). So I tried searching Amazon.com with a few different combinations, such as New York Times Book Foreign Policy, which yields 48 results. They are mostly about crossword puzzles and you have to go to #21 (second page) for the singular result revelant to "Foreign Policy". The book I was looking for did not show up.

Maybe I should be thankful I got all books in my search results! The search New York Times Book has as its #5 result Sudoku Pro - Wildly Popular and Addictive Numbers Game That Challengers a Players Math & Logic Skills - it's an electronic Su Duko game. It has nothing to do with "New York" or the "New York Times" or "York" or "New" or "Times". And it is certainly not "Book".

How did I find the book title? (Certainly not by getting off my lazy butt and walking to the other room!) Googling the same text - New York Times Book Foreign Policy site:amazon.com - gives my book as the #2 result. (Google is the best thing since sliced bread).

And it's not my lame search text that is tripping up Amazon. Try something like To Kill A Mockingbird and the first result has no image, and is a used listing for $29. Hardly, the canonical entry for a famous book. How about Red Storm Rising? The first result is the book by Tom Clancy, but it has no image associated with it and it is a (used) Chinese version. Searching Amazon doesn't even give me books that I'm capable of reading!

Linear Algebra And Google's PageRank

The American Mathematical Society has a good article, How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack, which explains how Google ranks the importance of each web page. There's lots of linear algebra, but its fairly accesible.

[Via Slashdot].

Interesting Articles

A few interesting articles:

• Google's unknown artist has huge following [CNN] via Slashdot


• This cabbie needs no map [Toronto Star] via Funkaoshi


• Tut's gem hints at space impact [BBC]

Assorted Math & Technology News

When I started studying at the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics, Comptuer Science was a (very large) department. About halfway through my studies, it became the School of Computer Science. I read a couple days ago that David Cheriton, an alumnus and professor at Stanford donated $25 million to the School so the University renamed it to become the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. (How does a university professor become a multimillioniare you ask? They finance Google in 1998 with $200 thousand in seed money, which is, of course, the definition of ROI).

I heard from my Mom that the Ontario Government is planning on dropping Calculus from it's high school curriculum. That's not very wise.

Lastly, The New Yorker has an interesting article, Blackberry Picking, about patents. In particular, it addressed the RIM v. NTP proceedings. It's concise and very well written. It's worth reading.

Gmail

I just signed up for a Gmail beta account. I'm not sure whether all end up using it or not. I like having a real e-mail program instead of a lame online account. 1 GB would be useful though. They didn't say how frequently you need to use it to avoid having your account terminated either.

My first impressions are that the interface seems a little confusing, their "contacts" page needs help (All it takes is name, e-mail, and comments. And it only sorts names by what you enter, so no sorting by last name, for example). Also, Google seems to subscribe to the base-10 mis-theory of numbers (which was invented by hard drive manufacturers to rip people off). So the 1 GB is really only "1 000 MB". (And if they continue the trend with 1 MB = 1000 KB, etc. then you end up getting only 931 MB under the correct system (base-2). Also, when you send an e-mail, it returns to the sent mail list, but you need to refresh the page before the e-mail you just send actually gets listed. It seems like a good start though.