December 2005 archive - Search Industry News

It’s All About The Music II: Part 3

1:00 pm - December 28, 2005 in Official Google Video Blog

You'll find nothing but confidence, creativity, and complexity in rapper Kanye West. This is his story...

The Music of Kanye West

Kanye, West, the three-time Grammy award winning rapper and producer grew up on Chicago’s South Side. Even as a child, music was in his soul. He’d often save his allowance money to record songs which addresses the plight of the common man… He raps about what people are talking about, whether it’s racism, politics or relationships. A near death experience changed West’s life and his music, as we learn from this profile. (Description provided by content owner)

FastFocus.tv
kanyewest.com
4 min 29 sec

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It’s All About The Music II: Part 2

12:45 am - December 28, 2005 in Official Google Video Blog

Original Nirvana...

Nirvana-In Bloom

Nirvana remains an inspiration to musicians and fans across the globe: In the course of popular music, there are few bands who came from more humble beginnings than Nirvana, and fewer still who to have such an impact on popular music even after 10 years since the death of its leader. This film depicts Nirvana’s original performance of “In Bloom.’ (Description provided by content owner)

http://www.nirvanabox.com

FastFocus.tv
4 min 29 sec

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yet another power outage

10:48 pm - December 27, 2005 in del.icio.us

Our colocation facility bounced the power again (apparently in order to deal with the failed UPS that caused our previous incident.) We are on route to the facility to bring servers back online now and that should be done shortly. We have been and will continue to work with Yahoo! to migrate to better facilities as fast as humanly possible.

Update (10:50 PM EST): We are at the facility and are bringing up machines now.

Update (11:14 PM EST): Bringing up slaves now. Should be done shortly.

Update (12:09 PM EST): All but one server up now. Bringing up inbox, search, etc.

Update (12:20 PM EST): The facility will be cutting power back over to the UPS at 1 AM. Supposedly this will not affect service, but neither was the test that brought everything down... cross your fingers.

Update (2:04 AM EST): Still waiting for the cutover back to the UPS. They're planning to give us an hour warning, and have not done so yet. We'll bring down the site beforehand so we can boot cleanly in case they drop power again.

Update (6:37 AM EST): They just cut over power to the UPS and bounced power again. We're bringing stuff back online again, everything should be good in a few minutes.

Update (6:57 AM EST): Everything is back online.

Experimenting with navigation

9:53 pm - December 27, 2005 in Official Google Base Blog

By Bindu Reddy, Product Manager

As you may have noticed, We've changed the navigation on Google Base, so that you can first view an item details page before clicking on to the Item URL page.

This change allows us to experiment with how you browse and search on Google Base and see related items. The item details page enables you to see all the attributes and labels attached to the item and provides links to items with similar labels. We want to measure how this navigation changes the number of searches and other ways people will use it. In the future we plan to test a number of other navigation changes in order to optimize the Google Base experience. By the way, search results that display Google Base items on Froogle, Google Local and Google will continue to point directly to item URL.

Another Yahoo! exclusive, this time with CBS Television

3:54 pm - December 27, 2005 in Yahoo! Search blog

While youre relaxing this holiday season, you may have heard about Yahoos exclusive, commercial free streaming of the CBS Comedy Bowl, which includes episodes from the shows Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother.

As Andy mentioned recently, we debuted a new frontdoor for Yahoo! Video Search, where you can easily find this content and also search deeper into our index to discover related or other interesting videos. Check it out and leave us comments to let us know what you think.

Happy holidays.

Jeff Karnes
Yahoo! Video

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I’m feeling silly

2:23 pm - December 27, 2005 in Official Google Blog

Posted by Clay Bavor, Associate Product Manager

Not long ago, I walked by the desk of software engineer JJ Furman, and saw that he had made an interesting addition to his desk: a large blob of Silly Putty, about the size of a grapefruit. Intrigued, I asked how he'd gotten so much of the stuff. The answer? A bulk order directly from the manufacturer! Of course.

I knew then that I wanted some, and it dawned on me that I probably wasn't the only one. So I set out to place a really, really big bulk order. An email went out to cohorts. Their orders came in. Three weeks later, I had an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty delivered to my desk.

Naturally, we were all curious to see what 250 pounds of Silly Putty would look like, so before distributing the stuff, we put it all in a single pile to see. Huge mistake.

The problem was that once together, Silly Putty doesn't like to come apart, and none of us had any idea of how to deal with this effect. We tried everything: very strong people (didn't work), scissors (stabbing worked, slicing didn't), 28-gauge steel wire (broke), 22-gauge steel wire (broke), 16-gauge steel wire (too thick), and twisting and breaking (worked well for "smaller" pieces -- under five pounds, that is.)

Two hours later, with the help of more than a dozen enthusiastic Googlers, everyone was finally able to walk away with a giant piece of Silly Putty.

And then what? Some people are giving it for holiday gifts. Others are using it to exercise their arms, play basketball (rebounds are tough), and of course, imprint entire newspaper pages.

Any regrets? Absolutely not.

It’s All About The Music II: Part 1

12:30 pm - December 26, 2005 in Official Google Video Blog

This week we're celebrating music, starting off with this riveting video about the memorable "Man in Black."

Rosanne Cash - September When it Comes

One of the most moving moments of the Johnny Cash Memorial Concert held in November of 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN was a musical performance by Cash and his daughter, Rosanne. Fast Focus is proud to present that performance, “September When It Comes." (Description provided by content owner)

FastFocus.tv
4 min 9 sec

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This just in…

4:00 pm - December 23, 2005 in Official Google Blog

Posted by PenguinOpus

The Google Earth team has received a pretty interesting business development inquiry that we thought we'd share with you:

To: "Google Support"

From: claus@gmail.com

Subject: Naughty or Nice Layer

I love Google Earth and have been planning a big trip with it. Now I'm wondering if you've ever thought about licensing data layers for "nice" and "naughty." If interested, I've got a really good list -- I've checked it twice. Rooftop accurate data!

Let me know,

S. Claus

While we didn't work a deal for Naughty or Nice data layers, we did negotiate the rights to track this user on his big trip. If you've already got Google Earth, you can too.

If you don't have it, get your own Google Earth.

XML Errors in Feeds

12:50 pm - December 23, 2005 in The Official Google Reader Blog

Dealing with the millions of RSS and Atom feeds out there is hard work. We're not trying to make you feel sorry for the Reader team, but as anyone who has attempted to implement a feed parser knows, there are many subtle deviations from the spec that you have to handle if you want to have any hope of satisfying the needs of your users (who shouldn't have to care about such things).

The feed generating/parsing world has had the debate about Postel's Law, as it applies to XML and feeds, several times. We are not here to weigh in on either side of the argument. Instead, we hope to provide some data so that such discussions can be made on more than philosophical grounds. Without further ado, here are the top XML errors that we have encountered when parsing all of the feeds that our users have added to Reader (and there are a lot of them):

% of errors	Error description
15.6%	Input claims to be UTF-8 but contains invalid characters.
14.9%	Opening and ending tags mismatch
13.9%	An undefined entity is used (e.g. in an XML document without importing the HTML set)
7.8%	Documented expected to begin with a start tag, but no `<` was found
5.7%	Disallowed control characters present
5.5%	Extra content at the end of the document
4.2%	Unterminated entity reference (missing semi-colon)
4.2%	Unquoted attribute value
3.8%	Premature end of data in tag (truncated feed)
3.3%	Naked ampersand (should be represented as `&`)
2.1%	XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
1.8%	Namespace prefix is used but not defined
0.75%	Comment not terminated
0.64%	Attribute without value
0.17%	Unescaped `<` not allowed in attributes values
0.11%	Malformed numerical entity reference
0.11%	Unsupported/invalid encoding
0.10%	Comment must not contain '--'
0.10%	Attribute defined more than once
0.07%	Char out of allowed range
0.03%	Comment not terminated
0.02%	Sequence `]]>` not allowed in content

As a whole, about seven percent of all feeds that we know about have some of these errors (this data is based on a one-day snapshot, so transient errors may be present). Note that these are all XML errors, meaning that the feed is not well-formed. We are not talking about complying with and validating against the RSS or Atom specs - that is an even higher bar than we have set here. In general, our recommendation to feed producers is to use the work that the community has put into the feed validator.

On a related note, we're aware that Reader has some issues with titles. It's great that there are test cases, and we will add this bug to our to-do list.

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Happy Holidays: Part 5

9:00 am - December 23, 2005 in Official Google Video Blog

They may be miles away, but videos bring them closer to the ones they love. This is just one of the many heartfelt greetings from members of the United States Army and Air Force to their families.

Holiday Greetings

Holiday greeting from service member to friends and family back home. Army & Air Force Hometown News Service. (Description provided by content owner)

Army & Air Force Hometown News Service
hn.afnews.af.mil

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