landhar

I agree, I was very surprised that he doesn't even mention the "hourglass". It's true that it's less and less frequent but I would argue that it's more common than the floppy disk.

In this article they also mention the GMailMan ad (to promote Office 365) I followed the link, and found that it was very interesting as a satyre of contextual/personalized advertising.

Very neat! I would like to hear more about implementation details. Also what fullsailor pointed out.

> Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul

Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results.

My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else.

I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means.

My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.

Yes, I've been switching back and forth from DuckDuckGo and Google many times over the past three years. At the beginning I liked some of the features that DuckDuckGo had (bangs, disambiguation) but Google would always win on overall web coverage and speed. Lately, I find myself using DuckDuckGo for longer and longer periods of time before stumbling on a query that gives me a better answer in Google. But speed is still an issue (Google has spoiled us on that front).

What about showing the disambiguation options ? based on wikipedia's disambiguation page ? THAT would be useful

Concerning example 3, I find that this comment sums it all up:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/#commen...

I faced the same problem. I am fluent in 4 languages and can work my way on a few others. But the problem is not that it's limited to an arbitrary number of languages. The problem is that it doesn't feel anymore like what I'm getting back from any query is the full web.

Very well said.

I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.

> And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.

This is my perception of how Google evolved:

In the early days, it used to be like running grep on the whole internet but getting your results sorted by a very relevant algorithm (page rank). Then over the years they added a lot of features that fell into three categories:

* operators to run more powerful queries

* adding more complexity to the sorting of the results (localization, penalizing websites trying to game the algorithm, ...)

* adding widgets given the query (ups tracking, weather, calculator, ...)

These were all good, and I loved the fact that you could run some very clever and complex queries to get exactly what you wanted (and the googledorks were born...).

But recent improvements to Google have all been about "guessing what the user wants" (the best illustration of that is the search as you type) and while it's hard to argue about the validity of this approach my problem with it is that it won't give me any fallback options when it guesses wrong.

To be honest, Google does a very good job at guessing what I want. But the frustration caused by the few times it doesn't get it just makes me miss the "old google". And with every new recent improvement I keep being reminded of the MentalPlex [1]

[1] http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/

On the other hand, the past few years have been very good for indie game studios:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indie_game_developers

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks :)

We've started calling it ddg among my friends, it has a nice ring to it, to bad they don't have a url using this acronym since it's also very fast to type.

Since when money changing hands is the sine qua non of contracts ?

Why wouldn't the same mechanism apply for banks? There are also a big variety of banks to chose from and people tend to pick one and stick with if for a while. But you don't see BofA/Chase/YouNameIt fanboys.

In many ways, we are paying customers of Google as well. We are exchanging very valuable data for Google's services.

Do you guys plan on keeping this service free? If yes, how do you plan to monetize the service? By mantaining such high standards in terms of security of the data, I assume that you're giving up on aggregating behavioural data that could be very valuable for advertisers.

I've been thinking about it and I've decided that I will buy the new i4S. I am still disappointed, but you're right: it's a great product.

Indeed, although it isn't enough anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3100239

Albeit this seems to allow the user to control several social networking tools at once, it doesn't seem to allow you to explore a comprehensive aggregate of all recent interactions of a specific user across all these tools.

My concern is that even Apple doesn't think this phone is innovating enough to be a real successor to the iPhone 4.

I've been waiting to buy an iPhone for half a year, because I assumed that getting the iPhone 5 would be worth the wait. Oh, well...

How is this better than creating a local branch ?

> This article was originally published in the September 2005 issue of PC Gamer (UK edition).

Does anyone know or remember if there were any major follow-ups to this event ?

The problem with this is that you can't tell the difference between numerals and symbols or even worse between two symbols in the same key (such as '_' and '-').

Any chance that we might get the transcript of the presentation ? Or any context around it ?

Indeed, that's the thought that got me to rationalize my disgust for tasting insects when I was living in Thailand. If I had no problem trying the spicy salad with live shrimps why should I think twice about eating the grilled grasshopers ?

You can even extend this reasoning to most delicacies of the sea, clams and oysters don't look any better.

"On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was caught in a reboot loop — shutting down and restarting repeatedly despite efforts by operators to take control of it. It appeared the machine was infected with a virus."

I am curious as to what in Stuxnet code and/or the client computer caused this. From the rest of the article, Stuxnet went to great lengths to stay undetected. Anyone has clues ?

Also worth reading: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...

If I had to guess, I would say that the idea behind this is to force the clueless user that doesn't know anything about the internet to write the https:// when he is given a link that starts that way. Since there is no guaranty whatsoever that a website will redirect you to a secure connection without the user asking for it.

I'm not saying it makes perfect sense, just that I wouldn't be surprised if that's the idea behind it.

I see the reality in the Twitter part (even though I'm not a user of twitter myself). But I think that the Facebook part of that assertion is outdated.

It used to be true that I only had friends on Facebook. But nowadays I have way more acquaintances than friends. My point is, if Facebook was still today only about people I am friends with I would still use it as much as 4 years ago. But nowadays the signal to noise ratio is way too low for me to really get anything out of the platform:

* I'm reminded of birthdays of people I don't even know how I met

* I see pictures on my news feed from people partying that I don't recognize...

PS: I might not be a good example of the average user, since I've also been moving from one country to another over the past few years accelerating the process by witch everyday friends turn into acquaintances

EDIT: fixed formatting