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in select copies of the new chili peppers album is a small sticker that warns, “please note, this sounds like a lotta shit that we’ve already done, sorry“…does it matter? a zillion people are still gonna buy it because they’re fans, and this is exactly what’s going on with elgoog…when i saw all the crap coming out of elgoog press day, what really stood out was this photo that ran in usa today in which sergio and barry looked like they’d been out until 4 am the night before at a crazy barmitzvah evening party and had just rolled in to announce some new buttons and doodads…

what the shit? in a matter of weeks microsoft rolls out a new version of their academic search, a rockin’ new version of explorer, yahoo fires a torpedo at cnet with their tech portal, sun appoints the second uber tech exec with a giant pony tail (yeah, gateway dude was the first) - and people are actually writing about how elgoog finally put a fucking ‘delete‘ button inside gmail? come on…

…elgoog continues to innovate only through acquisition - am i the only person who sees this? what have they actually made themselves in the past year that really matters? press day comes and goes, and all we see is some shit that looks like what netsnippets has been doing better for years (upcoming notes tool), a trends bar that’s just a new view on the old zeitgeist, some other crap i can’t even remember and then this other assatronic (new word!) thing called co-op…it’s like they had a meeting and decided to not embrace open community tagging (fine with me, honestly) and instead chose to introduce a new esoteric information reliability standard that makes sense to about 2 percent of their users with a link right there on the home page (nice fucking job maria mayer, how’d that get by you?)…

you know what? nothing. that’s exactly what i’m expecting from elgoog this year…no interest in creating new streams of real substantial revenue, no genuinely original features (their biggest plays in online payments and expanding elgoog base look very ‘me too’ and unoriginal)…my honest advice to this company is to focus on buying a company (next time) that actually lets you do something groundbreaking, like when microsoft bought forte and created powerpoint and rolled out an office suite, that was brilliant…or when yahoo bought overture and changed the face of online advertising overnight….but buying up an online word processor and rolling it up with a half-baked calendar and a mail app that’s still called beta software, and tying into a bunch of other crap that nobody really uses (namely groups, personal elgoogpages etc)? really, you’re putting users to sleep…

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so a while back i stumbled on to this article from the economist about the ‘new organization‘…it’s yet another one of those mind numbing attempts to over-intellectualize some common sense ideas about organizational management, but with one random comment that just really sparked my interest after a quick re-read…the summary is that it’s talking about the old “organization man” versus the new “network man” (amongst other topics, each of which should lead you to a book for sale if you’re a real good reader ;)

here’s the excerpt that i’m talking about, “Networked person, by contrast, takes decisions all the time, guided by the knowledge base she has access to, the corporate culture she has embraced, and the colleagues with whom she is constantly communicating. She interacts with a far greater number of people than her father did. A famous 1967 study by Stanley Milgram…suggested that there were at most “six degrees of separationâ€? between any two people in America, meaning that the chain of acquaintances between them never had more than six links. According to more recent work along similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6, despite the growth in America’s population since Milgram’s study. Being able to keep in touch with a much wider range of people through technologies such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.”

uh, what the shit? the economist quotes new data precedents without a source? i went poking around online for the source of this statistic and eventually found out that jerry davis, a professor at the university of michigan business school, did a survey nearly four years ago that produced this number, but this study and survey data was related to corporate boards, not the general population…and all other references to the 4.6 number circle back to that study of corporate directors…so (clearing throat) where in the world did this number come from…anybody? now i can’t even trust the fucking economist?

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have you heard about this grad student search algorithm that elgoog purchased? the press talks a lot about phd student ori allon, but makes zero mention of eric martin - the co-inventor who was also the advisor on ori’s thesis….not even in the schools own announcement from last fall is there any real detail… so naturally, i decided to try to fill in some holes for those of you looking at this particular item for ANY reason - all in the name of wasting time! you wanna know why? because i was so annoyed that several of the pages associated with this transaction have gone down, and the information slightly obfuscated…that’s annoying shit, so just knock it off whoever you are..

btw, in light of selling out, check out this old quote from allon - before he learned that money talks - “Orion will complement existing search engines like Yahoo, MSN or Google. This engine will help weed out pages that are less important to searches and will help search engines improve relevancy, which is always needing refinement anyway.”

0…but before i even get started, do keep in mind that there is already traction in this space - and orion (ori allon’s algorithm and concept that none of us can use) is similar in spirit to qtsaver (i was totally sucked into the blog behind this engine btw) …okay, yeah, read more about all of this orion discussion in detail if you want http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/orion-ori-allon.html, and then tell me if you get a kick out of this very interesting new micro-content search engine called qtsaver (extracts micro-content from existing search engines, so perhaps similar in spirit? or is this a leap of faith or a wicked stretch of the imagination when comparing these?) …or did other search engines conceive of this a long, long time ago?

…or instead of just qtsaver, check out surfnotes (a patent pending algorithm though, not issued)…or check out the concept from q-phrase (”ConceptQ works in conjunction with Google, MSN, Wikipedia and other major search engines.”)…the dude from qtsaver turned me on to both of those btw, so do keep an eye on his blog!

at any rate, so i’m looking for info on ori allon - but the old page at unsw went down for me, so i turned to the archive, which turns up this contact info: Ori Allon, PhD Student, Office: K17-412-05, Phone: 61 2 9385 6906 (Internal: x56906), Email: oria AT cse.unsw.edu.au (at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia)

here are some quick notes on ori allon’s thesis: (numbered 1650 with the school) “Using Search Engines for Discovery Information Retrieval” with supervisor Eric Martin (Senior Lecturer & PostGrad Coursework Academic Advisor) and co-supervisor Aleksandar Ignjatovic (aleks was the founder of kromos technology, acquired by comstellar, kromos’ former ceo was raj parekh btw, the old cto of sun - aleks has a few patents already issued in different areas, and a phd from berkeley under jack silver the uber-set-theorist…but he’s not on the patents, eric is…) - so yeah, that thesis supervisor and co-inventor, eric martin, senior lecturer (phd from paris in case you wanna dig up more) - here’s some contact info for him too : Office: K17-409, Phone: 61 2 9385 6936, Fax: 61 2 9385 5995, Email: emartin AT cse.unsw.edu.au (dude’s page seemed to be long gone…)

oh, and those two patents (there were two associated with ori allon and eric martin together under the tech transfer company, not one)…here are the two i found searching pericles on the australian patent database (”patsearch” in their engine list):

Allon, Ori; Martin, Eric: Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd, number 2005905853 “Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement” from october 2005, and
Allon, Ori; Martin, Eric: Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd, number 205906358 “A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information” (also late ‘05)

…these patents were sold via newsouth innovations, and they’re kinda interesting - they’re the tech transfer piece of this whole deal with elgoog and unsw…though you won’t find this technology listed on their site, and good luck getting a response back! hah! (they’re at the Rupert Myers Building, Gate 14 Barker Street, UNSW, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia)

(oh, and the agent on those patents in case you wanna dig a bit more: Griffith Hack, Level 29, Northpoint 100 Miller Street North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia)

…so yeah, hopefully this totally unorganized batch of information will help somebody out there and save that person some time digging up information or looking for a trail to follow…honestly, i’m not totally floored by it - of course, since there’s no way to test it out or see what it is, then i suppose we’ll all have to wait to see if it’s gonna be as super-good as googlepages!!

btw, for eric martin, you’re gonna have to go dig around in archive for some older pages…at which point you’ll find several interesting publications (haven’t yet looked to see if any co-authors are already at elgoog, though i’m guessing that they’ve already got a couple of these folks…)…here’s a recent one or two from 2002, “Generalized Logical Consequence: Making Room for Induction in the Logic of Science, Martin EA, Chopra S, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, the Netherlands, 2002, 31, pp245-280…..and 2) Scientific Discovery from the Perspective of Hypothesis Acceptance, Martin EA, Osherson DN, Philosophy of Science, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA, 2002, 69(3)S, ppS331-S341…and 3) Learning in Logic with RichProlog, Martin EA, Nguyen P, Sharma A, Stephan F, Logic Programming, Eds. Peter J Stuckey, Copenhagen Denmark, 29-1 Jul. 2002, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, pp239-254…go hit his site in archive if you want more than that…

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so what the shit? all i keep reading about day in and day out is people pissing and moaning about how elgoog somehow wronged them…makes me wanna just read scoble all day…first it’s a bunch of folks whining about how gmail is all screwed up, how it even erases accounts sometimes…and if it’s not that, it’s some more crap about how their new products kinda suck ass (googlepages being a case in point)…one geeky dude even wrote a rant about 25 things that suck about elgoog, even though he assumes some level of knowledge from the reader, and winds up being all, “habbada hoobida” over random bullshit that even yahoo and msn get wrong…and then of course, topping all of it is the wild shit storm debris that’s still settling from their bad investor communications update recently….

so what, pray tell, might they do? my advice to barry and sergio: run with it baby! take this opportunity to completely alienate or polarize your users and find out, like stalin, just who’s really on your side…some specific ideas:

1) right before your next earnings announcement, have your ceo (that derek shmiz guy) announce that elgoog services will no longer be available to blacks or jews - that will really confound the analysts…but how to implement such a strategy? it’s simple, just require users to register for use of the basic search engine…since they already register for everything else you have it’s no biggie…then require that they submit race and religion along with weight and their mobile phone number (oh, that’s right, you already have those numbers) and verify it (you have the money to do that, don’t worry, you can probably use dell’s call center)

b) buy jboss - that will completely fuck with people who are trying to figure out what you’re doing for money, and it’ll make oracle insane and screw up that whole embedded division that they’re trying to build out…then announce that you’re going to follow up by buying sun (duh, that’s gonna happen anyways) and then totally make ‘em crazy by purchasing a major middle tier carrier like t-mobile (oh, that’s already in the cards too, huh?)

three) have barry and sergio drive large trucks, smoke and say shit like, “(pointing to coffee machine) hey, somebody wanna make me one of them bitches? ’cause i’m still a little groggy from all that x” - or alternatively, have one of those cute holiday-oriented logos that you do for christmas and stuff be some kind of porn shape, like a boob or weiner!

IV) hire tom delay (you can figure for what later, just do it now!)

5) start telling people that you’re really a “web 2.0″ company and that’s why a bunch of the shit that you’re cranking out doesn’t totally work right, but do point out that eventually picasa will maybe work on macs …and also come out with a version of desktop search that instead of peer to peer services offers the option to transmit data directly to the government…oh wait, not sure about that, some users might actually elect to share their activity with the feds…there’s always somebody, right?

seis. ) announce a new ‘retail strategy‘ and promote heavily through starbucks and walmart, which basically would allow you to draw a big circle around roughly 80 percent of the country all at once, rich and poor, and then use low cost walmart labor to provide customer service (you know, because it’s not something that you actually offer, right? or am i wrong?)

asdf: sell that next big round of stock, then take like 6 billion in cash, split it up between all of the employees and then shut down real quick and take off…people would be totally confused! (plus, steal the office chairs and shit too!)

…look, these are just ideas, that’s why they’re called ‘ideas‘ - you don’t have to do any of ‘em, because you’re all big kids and surely you can figure out how to eventually make a public announcement that addresses these growing concerns…right? or are you just gonna keep all nine billion of your regular users hangin?

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i got an email from jeff kiley over at heritage microfilm earlier this week to let me know about a bunch of new things they’re doing…now, since blogs are a big public relations outlet, and because i’m a sarcastic and generally obnoxious mofo, you can imagine that when i get a message to the effect of “we’re only putting out the word through bloggers in this special blogger-only promotion” that i’m thinking, “and i’m only telling special companies to fuck off this week in dave’s special ‘i’m-busy-so-fuck-off’ campaign‘…but i did click on through jeff’s links and i was floored with what they’ve done…

this set of sites offers some serious ideas for the big search engines…namely, the ability to build and share search collections with integrity and reliability from day one (i know, that’s old news, but it’s not really being done by the big engines - why?)…technically, furl and spurl and others have been doing this for ages with link collection sharing, but this is different…and these others are not offering an interface with timelines or other advanced search options including front page image retrieval…

heritage microfilm is the company behind the newspaper archives, and what you need to know is that unlike elGoog, yahoo and ms search, their database contains “35 million pages of historic newspapers dating from 1753-2006″ and they index the full text…they are very, very focused on what they do, and they make their money offer premium services to users of their core archive collection (you’ll see links to ‘premium content’ throughout their sites)…

so what did they do to make ‘em interesting enough to really blog about here? they started building special collections - most debuting this week for the very first time including these very cool ones:

the fbi archive - just like it sounds…
the september 11th archive - an incredible researcher/historian/community resource…
the titanic archive - just an example of how they built a big specialty collection from a whole slew of 1912 archives..

…but what’s really gonna harden your nips is the fact they can build these on the fly based on any user request - just present a quick case to the company (researchers, you can email me for jeff’s info if you’re interested)…and according to jeff, all of these sites will always remain free…my idea: why can’t i just build ‘em on the fly myself and share them as i wish without having to even contact the company? now that is giving power to the users….

oh, and my favorite thing about the whole company is from the original site: i can always use their “birthday newspaper” feature fo’ free to create cool cards and stuff for my kids…(as in, ‘news from the day you were born’)….

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