Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 notable items:

1. Ye-haw! They brought it back! (Kind of). Google stopped supporting their SOAP-based API for obtaining search results back in Dec. 2006. It was a huge disappointment to many. But now they have released a REST-based API which should be sufficient for many researchers like myself that need an automated way of querying Google. I'll give it a try soon and report back. (Thanks, Michael and Olena, for the tip.)
   


2. Joel Spolky rants about architecture astronauts, Windows Live Mesh, and Google paying fresh CS graduates too much money. (Thanks, Alan, for the tip.)
   


3. Viewzi is a new metasearch engine (a search engine which combines results from many different sources) which shows some promise. They have many different "views" of the search results which are extremely different than what Google might give you. As you can see from the screenshot below, they are still experiencing a few technical problems (they can't seem to display Harding's home page), but overall I am very pleased with the results.
   
   
   Currently, you have to sign up for an account to use viewzi. You can use the code "gio" to get an account. (Thanks again, Alan.)
   


4. A new computer game involving folding proteins could allow a 13 year-old to someday win a Nobel Prize.
   


5. And finally, a 17 year-old has developed a multi-touch table running Mac OS X for a science fair. Maybe we should get him to play the "folding proteins" game. (Thanks again X3, Alan.)