Only yesterday, one of the regulars in a search engines discussion group (nntp://alt.internet.search-engines) raised the following question/complaint:

Everytime I search for something on google Wikipedia appears in the top 100 results! Is it taking over the Internet?

Last night, IT guru Joel Spolsky asked for advice on Wiki for his site’s translations. He could no longer resist the productivity of a Wiki, which allows visitors to manage content while vandalistic changes can be quickly rollbacked (reversed). The matter of fact is that Wikis have become extremely ubiquitous and they are conquering the Net, much like blogs. They simplify the composition of Web pages, particularly when composition is handled and managed by a group.

Schestowitz.com has two Wikis — a private one and a public one. At some stage I found that Wikis can conveniently be used for correspondence or for collaboration in academia, e.g. when writing or revising a paper jointly.

The Public Wiki section on this domain

There are all sort of reasons for using the Wiki’s simplified mark-up and not WYSIWYG interfaces (as clean as they may be) or plain HTML.

• Firstly, there is the issue of security such as off-site linking. You need to provide a subset of features. Having said that, this can be prevented by imposing restrictions on whichever composition language/method you choose.
• Secondly, one has to worry about the issue of consistency. I have a friend who manages the content of a site and I cannot recall how many times he did something invalid that broke the integrity of the entire site, which I then had to fix urgently. “More restrictive” means “less things to go wrong”. After a few weeks I completely gave up on making his pages valid XHTML/CSS. He had too much freedom and too little experience.

Finally, on the issue of software recommendation, I cannot comment on the popular MediaWiki, which is used to power Wikipedia. I have never used MediaWiki myself, but PHPWiki has been fairly stable ever since I set it up 6 months ago and had it updated many times a day. If you are looking for ease-of-use and trivial embedment of media, I suggest you go with more mainstream packages such as the admirable MediaWiki, which I am familiar with as a user, but not as an administrator.

venturous article from Softpedia makes speculations with regards to a Google homebred operating system that is based on GNU/Linux. Google’s Open Source affinity is out of the bag now, so looking 5 years ahead, will there be a tighter integration between Google’s on-line services and a Google-controlled Linux distrubution?

Google is non-conformist enough, and it has sufficient money and knowledge to be able to venture in this domain. The recipe? You take a Linux distribution (Google’s appetite for Open Source and Linux is no longer a secret), you mix it with Google’s knowledge on Internet searching, e-mail, security, programming and document indexing, you give it a name that includes Google and OS, and there you have it.

• Related items: Google and Linux, Towards On-Line Operating Systems
• Related article: A Google OS by 2010?

Content spam grows worryingly fast. This new type of spam shows its face in a form which is different from spam that we very well know as uninvited E-mail. Such spam is placed on the Web and later infiltrates search engine results pages (SERP’s). If you recently came across a page full of links and ads that did not provide useful information, you would probably understand what content spam is.

Spam content pages are often generated automatically (robot-made). Such robots would run a search, pick up HTML code from the results page, and finally add some advertisement. This generates a large volume of pages, which warrant presence in many SERP‘s. One very large site that I recently came across got tempted and uses this technique to woo visitors and offer them subscription. If you come across such sites, be sure to report them as its our only chance of banning illicit sites and preventing content spam (and referrer spam, i.e. organic and fake links/referrals to sites) from expanding. Google provide an on-line form for this very particular purpose.

definitely enjoy running my Web log, but Dvorak points out a very intersting mock-up pamphlet that most bloggers would strongly relate to. That pamphlet talks, in a more or less sarcastic fashion, about notions like content anxiety (subconsciously wishing to post any piece of information read) and pressure (to add new content to the blog/s). If you ever feel like blogging has a negative effect on your life, be sure to follow the link.

Also see: Internet Anxiety Disorder Anyone?

oogle have recently revealed that they had used Linux from day one. Looking further into the past, why have they not openly expressed their passion for Linux? Perhaps they realised that over 90% of their target audience were Windows users. No user will be inclined to use the service of one that is different, one whose preferences are in ‘disharmony’ with the clients. Under such circumstances, there emerges an inner-conflict, whereby a Google user admits making a mistake, making a poorer O/S choice.

In this article from Computer Business, Google’s open source programs manager lists arguments as to why proprietary software can never offer what Open Source does. There is a long-standing myth that Linux people are incapable and have reached out for so-called ‘abnormal’ sides due to failure in a world that is largely dominated by Windows. I believe that Google have shown, with quadrupling revenues and an enormous rapid growth, that Linux is all it takes to gain advantage.

From the article:

While showing a slide show of Google’s hardware evolution, which began humbly with an odds-and-ends collection of “spare computers that were lying around Stanford” (hobbled together, literally, with pieces of Lego and duct tape) and ended with a present-day photo of Google’s current server room (darkened to the point of being indistinguishable, for competitive reasons), DiBona said Google has used Linux all the way.

There is still a great deal of secrecy when it comes to Google’s hardware, yet some information is now out. The server rooms have been kept in the dark intentionally. This entire revelation did not come as a total surprise to me as Brin‘s (Google co-founder) Stanford home page showed he had been a Linux user (plenty of Python) in his early days.

Machines by the dozens. Just toss a Linux distro on them.

ollowing rumours and an official announcement in the Google Blog, feeds are available for news items over at Google. Perhaps this takes us one step closer to full support for SERP RSS feeds (top 10 search results delivered to your feeds aggregator). Google News results can currently be delivered as RSS or Atom feeds. They are composed of items from a specific section (topic) or news returned for a given search term/s.

This move can certainly make Google Alerts for news obsolete, yet such alerts for non-news searches remain practical, albeit difficult to handle (periodical HTML-formatted E-mails).

Ben Hammersley (c/f: Keeping Track of Google, Google Results as RSS Feeds) has devised a workaround which enables you to get results as RSS feeds for standard Web searches at Google. Be warned that scraping is possibly involved, so the technique is questionable.

Yahoo have been offering news RSS feeds for quite some time. This has been very useful when tracking particular terms, so I am convinced Google will benefit from their recent decision (or implementation).

Having your name on top should take no more than 5 seconds to achieve

Copy and paste the URL below to your address bar and change YOUR_TEXT with any text of your choice.

The page functions as if it is the authentic Google homepage by using Google for all operations. One wonders how Google feel about use of their bandwidth from sources on another domain. However, this certainly benefits their overall status.

• Brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.