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

1. Google has released its list of popular searches in their 2008 Google Zeitgeist. The most popular "what is..." query? What is love. Baby, don't hurt me.


2. According to J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships, approximately 1,000 federal government websites are inaccessible to search engines -- that is, they lie in the Deep Web.


3. How well are we preserving our video game heritage? The paper 'Grand Theft Archive': A quantitative Analysis of the State of Computer Game Preservation attempts to answer this question. Their findings aren't very positive.


4. Although this is three years old, I just came across it this week. Charles Petzold asks, Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Petzold's Windows programming books have been a staple of my GUI class since 1997.


5. Some Harding students have developed this very creative and entertaining Christmas card. Enjoy.

Fav5

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

1. In The 'Anti-Java' Professor and the Jobless Programmers, CS professor Robert Dewar complains of the Java-centric mentality that many American CS graduates have today. Here are two questions Dewar might ask a recent graduate in an interview in order to separate the wheat from the chaff:
   

   1) You begin to suspect that a problem you are having is due to the compiler generating incorrect code. How would you track this down? How would you prepare a bug report for the compiler vendor? How would you work around the problem?
   
   2) You begin to suspect that a problem you are having is due to a hardware problem, where the processor is not conforming to its specification. How would you track this down? How would you prepare a bug report for the chip manufacturer, and how would you work around the problem?



2. In Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLs, Kat Hagedorn and Joshua Santelli follow-up on a paper I published two years ago. Apparently Google is still not doing a good job indexing the OAI-PMH corpus; only 44% of the URLs tested were indexed by Google.


3. Carnegie Mellon has just introduced a new masters degree: Master of
   Tangible Interaction Design. The one year degree combines computer science and architecture.
   


4. The Google Blog has a series of posts discussing how Google ranks their results. The discussion is understandable for non-techies and delves into the psychology of web search.
   


5. Just for fun: Super Mario Bros. in 20 lines of JavaScript.
   

Fav5

Today I'm stuck at home trying to recover from the latest disease Ethan has brought home. Here's my 5 items of interest for the week:

1. Google recently announced their newest attempt at crawling the Deep Web. When their crawler sees a form on a "high-quality site", it enters words and selects various checkboxes and radio buttons. The form is then submitted, and the resulting page is crawled. Very cool. Google also announced the Google App Engine. It's a service that allows you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure so it can grow to accommodate a large amount of traffic. It's a free service until it exceeds a set disk space and bandwidth quota. Unfortunately, there's a limit of 10,000 developers, and I wasn't quick enough to sign up, so I'll have to wait until they increase the limit.


2. Joel De Young, one of our Harding CS graduates, was recently interviewed about his company's newest game: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness. Sounds like Joel's HotheadGames is making some buzz.
   


3. A study by Univ of Minnesota researchers shows there are two indicators that determine how good of an answer you will receive when posting to question-and-answer sites like Yahoo! Answers: how much you pay, and how many responses you receive.


4. Jansen, Booth, and Spink have developed a system which can automatically classify a search query as navigational, transactional, and informational. They used their classifier on a large dataset of search engine queries and were accurate 74% of the time. Based on their results, approximately 80% of all search engine queries are informational, 10% transactional, and 10% informational.
   


5. Congratulations to the Harding Programming Team on their first place finish at CCSC-MS. We showed them Razorbacks how to program...

Google Code Search

A few weeks ago Google launched Google Code Search which allows you to search through source code that Google finds while crawling the Web. Like Google Scholar, this promises to be a really useful tool for searching specifically for resources that you want while ignoring all the other garbage that’s out there. It's also another small step into pulling the deep web up to the surface.

Of course this also opens the door to embarrassing numerous programmers and organizations and exposing many security holes by allowing you to search for code vulnerabilities, usernames/passwords, backdoor passwords, etc. Google has acknowledged these potential problems but maintains that all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and that the good far outweighs the bad in this case. Kudos for Google not caving into the whiners.

My own vanity search revealed that Google has only indexed a very small amount of code that I’ve made available on the Web. (Of course not all the code I’ve made available has my name on it.) I am really surprised Warrick hasn’t been indexed yet considering the code has been available for quite some time. It’s possible that switching the URL where the source code is located when the version changes it is causing Google to be a little skittish.