Agmon Dot Com » google

With All Due Respect to the Libyans, There Are More Important Things Happening Right Now

liad — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 09:09:11 +0000

Once again, Google Trends shows what the world really cares about. While Gaddafi is leading the news reference volume with about 42,000 Google News articles in the past week, Charlie Sheen (24,000 Google News mentions) clearly made it clear that distressed celebrities are far more relevant to our every day lives. What is a nation fighting for democracy or the rising prices of oil compared to the faith of the leading actor of the masterpiece “Two and a half men”?

It seems as if only the Germans care more about Gaddafi. So ridiculous, when was his last TV hit anyway? Nothing since Pan Am in 1988 last time I checked.

So, for anyone interested in the important stuff that matters, a must-see Good Morning America exclusive interview can be seen here (4.2M views; unfortunately, embedding was disabled), and the really-important piece “Charlie Sheen Drug Test Results Revealed Live on ‘GMA’” here.

Here’s the dub version (2.5M views):

And I’ll end with a personal note: Even if you OD Charlie or get kidnapped by aliens, I will always remember how you made me laugh in “Hot Shots”, one of the funniest movies EVER!

Google Social Search Update

liad — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:48:39 +0000

Around a hundred years ago, in January 2007, we realized the potential of leveraging your social graph for improving search relevancy. Back then, Twitter was an unknown product called twttr (or as Michael Arrington put it: “How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?”), MySpace was the gorilla with a 100M users and Facebook was just starting to gain real momentum with about 20M users.

Indexing the social graph was not an easy task – Myspace users were mainly using nicknames, Facebook was still pretty small (and kept their social graph private), LinkedIn was a good source for implicit networks (their graph was also private) and Flickr was a good source of images but had very poor profile information. In short – it was a tough job finding the content which you and your friends shared online, and we had to use a lot of creative tricks to build our indices.

Fast forward to 2011, Delver is part of the Sears Holdings family, and Google is moving one step closer to Delver’s original social search vision. Their short video below resembles Delver’s pitch so much (they even use similar examples), that I went looking for the slides I presented to Google’s social team back in 2008 in Mountain View. I couldn’t find them, but I did find an old Delver presentation from 2008.

Google’s Social Search Update:

Delver product screenshot (Google’s previous version of Social Search looked pretty much like that. I wonder if it’s a result of a meeting we held with Google’s social search team back in 2008…)

An explanation of why social search is the future:

(I referred to tweets and Facebook updates as ‘micro contributions’)

‘The Problem’ slide (I remember using it because it looks very professional with all the colors and logos):

The Future:

And, finally, market landscape:

Ah, these were the days

Fooled By Google (Pronounce: Foogle)

liad — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:22:13 +0000

In the past few years I learned to trust Google’s first page results better than my ~~girlfriend~~ (update following this post: ex-girlfriend). In many ways, it saved me from memorizing URLs of services that I commonly use (or even book-marking them): I would type my bank’s name in Google’s search box and would click on the first result to go directly to its login page.

Not any more.

I was looking to download PowerPoint 2007 viewer. I typed “download powerpoint 2007 viewer” into the Google search box, and got some very interesting results:

I clicked on the first link as I am used to (it’s not the first time I download that viewer), without noticing that it isn’t the Microsoft download page, but a URL called thesource.offallevil.com. I reached a landing page that looks exactly like the expected Microsoft one, however being served by the thesource.offallevil.com domain.

It turns out that someone played a prank on Microsoft and registered a CNAME that points directly to Microsoft’s domain. Somehow (I am too lazy to find out why), it manages to fool Google and have this domain ranked as the #1 search result. By the way, a link to Microsoft’s real URL is located somewhere at the bottom of the search results page.

This Google-phishing scheme is very interesting. By managing to be positioned as the first result in Google (especially, when searching for something as specific as “download powerpoint 2007 viewer” or your bank’s name) – unguarded users can easily be fooled into many dangerous activities: from entering their bank account details in a bogus site, to downloading Trojans disguised as legitimate software.

This is another interesting aspect of our the upcoming search engine of Semingo: it is taking an approach which is at large SEO-resistant and significantly reduce threats of phishing and scams as the one I described above.

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