Google versus Bing

I am no marketing guru, but the news of Google copying Bing has a feel of the old marketing classic of Coca-Cola versus Pepsi, when Coke could not understand that brand loyalty goes beyond taste and took decisions that were disasterous.
I may be wrong, but here's an unsolicited advice to Google: Do not let users change the background image of the Google home page. The serene white background, with lego-coloured Google is your identity. Stand out.

Using Technology

This extract is from Think Twice by Michael J. Mauboussin.

Flooded with candidates and aware of the futility of most interviews, Google decided to create algorithms to identify attractive potential employees. First, the company asked seasoned employees to fill out a three-hundred-question survey, capturing details about their tenure, their behavior, and their personality. The company then compared the survey results to measures of employee performance, seeking connections. Among the findings, Google executives recognized that academic accomplishments did not always correlate with on-the-job performance.

A few observations:

a) Companies tend to fall back upon trusted means to derive solutions: so you know that if it is Google, then it has to be an algorithm.

b) 300-question survey? 300? I will be surprised if any answers after the first 10 questions made any sense.

c) "Academic accomplishments did not always correlate with on-the-job performance". I hope the survey resulted in some other meaningful conclusions also. 'Did not always correlate' is neither here nor there.

d) In his book, Think Twice, Mauboussin seeks to establish "Use Technology When Possible" by referring to this Google exercise. Is this the best example he could get of use of technology to solve organisational problems?

PS: Ok! I could get the original article that Think Twice refers to. It is called Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm.

Want to go Viral? Get a Name Similar to Google.

Have you heard of Groovle. I certainly hadn't. Not until now that is. And this site has been up for the last two and half years.
Now comes the news (source: BBC) that Google has lost out in getting the domain name Groovle transferred to itself. Groovle is driven by Google. Except that the pristine white home page of Google can be replaced by a celebrity / dog / tree or any photo of your choice. Check one example with Angelina Jolie here.
My point is not whether people would confuse between Groovle and Google. My point is where was the need for Google to go after a web site which no one would have heard in a million years. After all how many people have heard of mine.
You know what?
Get a domain name similar to Google's.
Say, gloogle.com.
In another two and half year expect Google to go after your site and thereafter your site to go viral. If you can manage to pull it off, that is. Just two have managed to do so far. Groovle, now, and earlier, Froogles.
Is Google being run by lawyers now?

Biusiness Model For Wikipedia

I believe Wikipedia has a flawed business model. It depends primarily on donation.

I am sure many donate; but not that many.
Businesses cannot work on donations.
Only NGOs can.
And Wikipedia is clearly not an NGO.

Paid subscription seems to be an obvious way. This is the Encyclopedia Britannica model. I am not sure this is going to be hugely successful. The Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, so I cannot see a contributor ready to pay for using the wiki. In fact, it is more likely that a contributor will demand payment.

On the other hand, a collaboration with Google could actually rake in moolah. Google can place context-based advertisements in the wiki and share the revenue with Wikipedia and the contributors. This might actually reverse the loss in the number of contributors reported recently in the news (see here)

Microsoft is getting desperate

Talk of being retro.

Microsoft is back to its form and this time they have a friend in the form of Robert Murdoch.

Apparently Robert Murdoch has decided that the content of his vast news media will not be available through Google but only via Bing. This obviously flies in the face of the free flow of information that Internet stands for. See the report here in Speigel.

Free information is obviously desirable. Failing that, I can understand redacted information available only on full payment, but this? This is downright retro.

Is this sign of Microsoft getting desperate? "Let's dominate the Internet. Whatever it takes."

In any case, after reading Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, who wants to read Wall Street Journal?

Will Google Last Forever?

Today we take World Wide Web and Google to be synonyms of the Internet. But what of tomorrow? Will Google still be the force they are today. Let us take a brief look back at history ...

This book, Permission Marketing, written by Seth Godin, is dated 1997 (though it was 2007, Seth desisted from rewriting the book. Good!). That is just 12 years ago. And here's what the messiah of internet marketing has to say:

AltaVista, one of the most complete and most visited search engines on the Internet, claims to have indexed 100 million pages.

AltaVista? What is that? As per wiki, "AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity has waned with the rise of Google."

So will we some years down the line talk of Google in the same terms? Who knows? But things change. Microsoft / Bing can take heart.

Essential Aid To Language Learning

Of all the online translators available, I think the Google Translate is by far superior. I used the Yahoo Babel Fish all these days. To put it as mildly as possible - the translation stinks. You need numerous attempt to coax the desired result. And to think that I translated a 200 page document from German to English using Babel Fish! Some patience!

It was quite by accident that I hit upon Google Translate and I am mighty pleased. (Actually I feel quite dumb about it - this service has been in existence for some time now).

The translation is 'live' - the text get translated as you press "enter"(I find this aspect missing and terribly annoying in Babel Fish. After entering a text, you have to click on the translate button. At times nothing happens.)

Don't like the translation provided by Google? Go ahead and recommend a better translation.

Yet another good feature of the Google Translate is that it also displays a tiny dictionary that can be explored. You can also search the word in the web from a link.

A good test of a well translated text is to reverse the translation. Google Translate allows you to swap the languages at a click of a button.

And, oh yes, Hindi is one of the languages that you can translate into or from. This is yet another instance of Google coming in late into a domain and providing a better solution that all existing ones.

I think this is an invaluable tool in learning a language.

Now if only I could have a mobile version of this ...

An idea for Dan Brown

I see more and more non fiction writers referring to Internet in their books. More often than not these are consigned to the footnotes so that the flow of the text does not break. And you know what such references actually enhances the pleasure of reading such books.

Here's an example from Kluge by Gary Marcus ...

If you should mishear John Fogerty's "There's a bad moon on the rise" as "There's a bathroom on the right" so be it. Or Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" for "Excuse me while I kiss the guy." If you, like me, get a kick out of these examples, Google for the term Mondegreen and find oodles more.

And so I did and now I know what Mondegreen means. I also recollect an old Hindi joke of an extremely bad taste where Mondegreen was used. "There was a cold day" was heard as "Darwaza khol dey" (open the door) when the person singing is taking a shower in the bathroom whose door wouldn't latch.

Here's another from the same book ... [I]f you are into [memorizing digits of pi, such as 3.1415926535], refer to http://www.ludism.org/PiMemorisation

for some basic tips.

Ok! Here's a take away for Dan Brown or a would-be Dan Brown. :D

How about writing a fiction with clues hidden on Internet?
The interested readers would be invited to search the Internet to figure out the clue for themselves. Of course, the skill lies in writing so that even those who are too lazy to search the Internet for clues would enjoy the story. Now that would be something.

Microsoft versus Google and a third Player

It is perhaps the mother of all battles. The two gladiators have been moving in circles waiting for the other to make a move. And now that the move is made, we will see a no holds bar fight to finish.

That the two giants, Microsoft and Google, will collide was in a way inevitable. If it were not Google it would have been some other player. At the root of this competition is different view points of how people of this world need to communicate.

As Philip Kotler and John Caslione puts it very aptly in their book Chaotics, "information is communication and communication is information."

Will desktops - the domain of microsoft - remain the nodal point for communication or will the internet cloud - no one really dominates this space yet, Google is trying and so are companies like Yahoo (no, please don't write it off yet) and Amazon (Amazon?) - take over? That's the question.

Google's announcement of its free Chrome Operating System that will piggy back on Linux has clearly rattled Microsoft. Otherwise why else will it make foolish announcement that it is going to launch an online version of its Office Suite next year. Next year??? Clearly Microsoft has nothing up its sleeves right now. Who waits for one year today?

Will Google win or will Microsoft?

Here's a little bit of clairvoyance:
Google is opening up doors in the Internet space, but rarely does the me-first company win in this domain (Google itself came in late). I predict that a third company that has a better understanding of how Internet works will take over. At present the only company who has really understood how Internet works is - no not Google, not Amazon, not Yahoo. Yes Apple Inc. Apple understands the Internet better than any of these players. Witness the business model of iPod and iPhone. And once Google makes desktop a non-entity, Apple that has played second fiddle with its brilliant operating system will come on its own and steal the show.

Now who wants to place a bet?

5 Google Search Tips I Bet You Did Not Know About

1. You can use Google as a calculator. Just type something like (4/3)*pi*(seven)^3 and get the volume of the sphere with radius at 7 units, for example.

2. You can use Google as a dictionary. Try something like define serendipity and check out the first entry. I also tried define abidance - it works.

3. You can use Google to keep a tab on the world. For example, you would like to be the first to know about your favourite subject, say Gardening. Sign up to Google.com/alerts. You will get information on your e-mail as it happens (or once a day, if you are not so hot about it). I use this all the time to follow what I consider important at professional and personal level.

4. You can use Google to carry out research. Go to scholar.google.com and get researching. This is actually brilliant.

5. You can use the character "~" to widen your search. A search with ~horse gives you all results not only with horse, but also pony, stallion, equestrian, etc. (basically all the synonyms). I find it very useful when I am looking for a concept but not sure about the exact word.

I picked up these tips when I read the wonderful 'biography' on Google: The Google Story by David A Vise.

Do you have any tricks up your google-search-sleeve?
Would you like to share it with everyone?

Picture courtesy: jaylopez

Are the hits from Alphainventions.com for real?

Many of the Alphainventions users must be having the same doubt as I: How real are the hits referred by Alphainventions? Or are they just visitors passing by?

To find exactly this I a) recently installed Google Analytics in my blog and b) did not submit my blog to the alphainventions reading cycle.

Here are the results for the period 27th Feb to March 1st, both inclusive (basically 3 days)

No. of visits = 147
Pages / visit = 9.03 (note: repeated visit of a single page are counted)
Average Time on Site = 0:43:27
New Visits = 87.76%
Bounce rate = 23.13% (meaning, 1 in 5 visitor did not explore my blog beyond the page first visited.)

The answer to the question we all are asking is now very clear.

Yes, Alphainventions brings you new visitors.
Yes, the hits referred by alphainventions to your blog are real people.
Yes, the visitors stay on for a prolonged period of time exploring your blog.

Do you have similar statistics that can throw light on alphainventions?

Squidoo Lens in February

I envy those who have numerous Squidoo lens - so me have 400+ :-0. Isn't that amazing? Need to reach that goal asap. Meanwhile, here's what I managed in February.

Learn German with me - I have completely redone this lens. It used to list the free resources available on net. It now has (almost) all the German lessons I developed for this blog. Having all the lessons on one page makes so much more sense. I still have transfer a few more lessons before starting of on new ones. Meanwhile have a look and let me know if it is an improvement.

Created 2 lens dedicated to blogs.
The first one, Best on Indian Blogs, can be deemed a success. It is a list of blogs by Indians (including NRI's). Bloggers can submit their blogs and vote for each others' blog. As of now there are 81 blogs in the list. Check it out. If you are a blogger, feel free to submit your blog (listing your blog on a platform that has high Google visibility will not do you any harm) and if you are not a blogger, even then it is worth a visit to see what Indians blog about.

The other one, Spectacular Blogs, is a personal list of blogs that I really like. I gather these as I surf the Net. Let me know if you like my collection. It is still a small collection but will definitely grow.

And finally, I added 3 more what I call photo-lens (basically a Squidoo lens consisting mainly of photographs) to my repertoire:

Photographs of Intricately Carved Photographs of Hoysala Temple - part 2 (Halebid photographs); the part 1 of this series (Photographs of Intricately Carved Photographs of Hoysala Temple) is on the temple at Belur.

The giant of Shravanabelagola - Bhaubali

My memories of England and Northern Ireland

Let me know if you like the pictures.

5 Achievements That India Really Needs

Piggy-back Oscars and Beauty crowns ... is this India's claim to fame.?

You may disagree, but I think this is a shame (Wow! Poetry: Fame ... Shame!)

Now here's what I would like to see India /Indians to achieve...

Pot full of Olympic golds in every Olympics till it ceases to be front page news any more.

At least one Fields Medal in the next 5 years. (I could even settle for a Millennium Prize or two)

A Nobel prize in any one of the sciences every few years till it becomes a habit.

An Oscar for a Mainstream Bollywood masala movie.

At least one world class software product or application. Just to make myself clear here ... No! Infosys is not a software product! I am looking for something like MS Office, SAP, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Linux, ... I could go on and on. Let's say something like Hotmail.

A technology company that rivals Apple or Intel in innovation.

I think I will be satisfied with 5 :-)

Would you like to add to this list? Name your country and go right ahead.


Picture courtesy: Svilen Mushkatov

Create a Web Page and Earn Money

I am not sure if I am fortunate or unfortunate to have discovered the Internet so late in life.

By discover I don't mean Google Search. I mean contributing, like blogging and modifying Wikipedia entries (I have contributed only once, but that alone kept me going for some days!).
Unfortunate because of those wasted years when I could have done a lot more.
Fortunate because it feels nice to be pleasantly surprised at this age.

In this series of pleasant surprises is what goes by the name Squidoo (clearly inspired by Scooby doo, no?).

You always wanted to blog but did not have enough time or material.
You have the material and time for blogging but do not like the appearance of a blog.
"I don't want to write a diary, I want a web page", is this what you have been telling yourself all this while?
You have a blog but you are not getting enough traffic yet. Not even when you tried my techniques of generating traffic?

Well here's your answer.

Squidoo lets you create a web page. They call it a lens, it still is a page.
You are passionate about a subject and you want to tell the world about it. Go ahead and create a page, er.. lens.
You are passionate about many subjects - totally different from each other, go ahead and create as many lens as you wish to.
The whole process is menu driven and you just fill in the forms and get a fantastic page.
You can even drive traffic to your lens, if you wish to.
The only limit is you and your creativity
And the best part it is FREE.

It is fairly easy and I took about 15 minutes to understand enough to be able to create a lens for myself. Have a look at my lens on Just Books Just For You.
Let me know if you like it.
I am so excited about it that I think I will create a few more.
Or lots more.
Just to increase my web-footprint.

And what about earning money?

They put up advertisements on the lens and you get a paid (royalty). A part of the revenue goes to charity.
If you are squeemish about earning money from the Internet, then you can donate the entire amount to an organization of your choice.

Cool! Try it!


Note: The picture used here belongs to Ilker. To see more such images see gallery.

In Support of Slow Blogging Manifesto

I am not exactly a slow blogger. My desire to blog something every day is overwhelming. And I blog like maniac. Recently I posted an Anti-SEO Manifesto. Today I googled 'blog manifesto' to search for like minded bloggers and I came across this amazing Slow Blogging Manifesto.

The focus is on content and rejection of the desire to be on the first page of a Google Search for generating traffic (though ironically, this site due to its relevance appears in the first page!).

Now why is Slow Blogging superior? Because by reacting instantly you are working on noise and not on substance. Have you noticed how an event makes much more sense a couple of weeks, months, or years down the like. It is called hind sight. Everything looks more settled hind sight. By blogging instantly one just adds to the noise and then herd mentality takes over. Substance is lost.

There are instances when instant reaction helps. The outrage and grief post Mumbai is classic case. Bloggers played a part too. And it helped. But does it help every time?

Every thing has a place. Fast food and food that is cooked with time and deliberation.

Blogging in general is seen as fast food. I am glad someone took up cause of slow blogging.

Posts that are deliberately written will have more relevance and be of value even many years after these are written.

Do you agree with the Slow Blogging Manifesto? If yes, you may also agree with the Anti-SEO Manifesto.

Most Popular Blogs

Most of the most popular metrics is based on number of visits or average number of visits over so many days or like Google does, using the page rank. Technorati also uses the number of times a blog has been referred by others (or something similar)

However, what I would like to see, for blogs particularly, is a metrics based on the following additional factors:

a) Time spent by each visitor per visit

b) The ratio of number of comments to number of posts.

Thus, the formula would be

Popularity ranking of blog = function of (no. of hits, duration of stay per visit, ratio of comments to post).

This formula ensures that the content of blog is also made a factor to determine popularity.

What would be your formula?

Note: This post is triggered by a query in the Indiblog forum.

The Biggest Book Deal In US Publishing History Is A Threat To Amazon

The greatest threat of the online library deal that Google has struck with leading publishers (see here) is to Amazon. Amazon's Kindle is already a big hit - not because of its design or utility (in fact detractors claim that it is a piece of lousy design and are awaiting Apple to come up with something similar) but because of the content. Amazon's huge "book-self" is not easily beaten. But if "readers [are] able to search and read snippets from millions of out-of-print and copyrighted books on the internet with the option to buy online access to them" then Kindle then becomes a commodity. And if Sony makes a deal with Google or if Google come with their own version of e-reader or if one can download these books in any e-reader, then Kindle will face tough times ahead. In fact, I see a threat to paid online encyclopaedia, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, also. Wikipedia will perhaps survive.

Google To The Rescue

Just when I thought I was on the verge of a great discovery ...
Thank God for Google, I stopped short of making a fool of myself.

This happened this morning when I was reading Against The Gods. As I was going through Pascal's Triangle, it struck to me that all the rows of the triangle were powers of 11.

For example the first row is 1 (=11^0). The 2nd row is 11 (=11^1), 3rd row 121 (=11^2), 4th row 1331 (=11^3).

This got me all excited as I had not read this pattern anywhere before. Obviously I haven't read enough. Before putting this up on my blog, I decided to google Pascal's Triangle. Good thing I did.

See here.
It has the Pascal's Triangle in terms of power of 11 and more.

Of course this site does not tell you why the probability of having at least 1 girl (or a boy) in a family of 2 children being planned by a young couple is 75%. This can be computed using the Pascal's Triangle. But I am sure you can Google this information too.