Is Google search becoming less effective? Is it Google, or the net?

It's just a feeling, but lately my Google searches seem to be less effective.

When I search on topics I get large volumes of "me too" news and announcement blog postings, but fewer results that contain real knowledge or insight [1] It's not so much that I get obvious splog sites, more lots of boring results.

Anyone else wondering about this?

If it's real, then, like most things in the world, I suspect some multi-factorial cause.

I wonder if Google is currently losing the war with spam and spam blogs; if they've been forced to retune their algorithms in a direction that makes them less useful.

Maybe people who used to contribute insight are doing something else. Maybe they're wasting time on Twitter [2] or starting new businesses or digging gardens in case Limbaugh's dreams of national failure come true [4].

Maybe Google is cutting back on the depth of their searches to save money. I've noticed a sharp drop in how well they index my personal contributions [3]. Perhaps by emphasizing the topical and recent they're reducing the value of their search engines.

Perhaps it's simply the gloomy weather and the annihilation of the world economy. Could be. Or could be something really is wrong.

I'm hoping it's just a passing ailment, but for the first time in ten years I'm going to see if other search engines are giving better results.

[1] When I search on tech topics, and keep finding my own tech.kateva.org posts in the top 10 even with "personal search" turned off, something is weird (the site has only a mediocre page rank).

[2] Yes, I'm now a freshly minted Twitter-value skeptic. I've come off the fence. Twitter reminds me of the Segway -- good, but vastly overhyped. Remember the Segway hype during the crash of 2000? Anyone remember the crash of 2000?

[3] Which, by definition, must contain lots of insight and not, say, be unworthy.

[4] The blogs I follow continue to be insightful, but their volume is down significantly. So I do think there's some input volume reduction in addition to possible quality and search issues.

The nature of time - essential reading for reality hobbyists

Are you an amateur epistemontologist? Curious about the nature of reality? Not willing to accept the illusions of the senses?

Then you've got reading ...

The Envelope Please… | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

The results are in for the Foundational Questions Institute essay competition on “The Nature of Time,” which we discussed here. And the winners are:

... Julian Barbour on “The Nature of Time”

... Claus Kiefer on “Does Time Exist in Quantum Gravity?”

... Sean Carroll on “What if Time Really Exists?”...

Love it.

Why we need a reformed GOP: Helping small business

Amidst all the stimulus package discussions, I haven't heard anything much about helping small business -- much less anything like my proposal for a national small business generation service.

The good news is that Obama is pressing for affordable healthcare coverage. That will be a big help for small businesses and start-ups.

Still, this is the sort of cause Republicans used to care about. In the 90s the GOP, instead of voting as a block against the stimulus package, would have pressed for small business support.

Not so much now.

Another reason why we need a replacement for the Party of Limbaugh.

The Machiavellian Dems ...

It's true. We've been studying The Prince (free for iPhone btw).

Charles Blow - Three Blind Mice - NYTimes.com

... The Democrats know the Republicans are afraid to confront and disavow Limbaugh, so they keep poking him, and he keeps snapping like a rabid dog. This is a brilliant bit of Machiavellian strategy on the part of the Democrats. (I didn’t know that they had it in them.)..

Alright, I'll confess. This strategy was so obvious it just emerged. It didn't take any cleverness to come up with.

Sigh. We commie-pinkos-liberal-socialists know it's bad. It's bad because we're toying with people, which is certainly not nice -- and we do so want to be nice.

On the other hand, it's such fun. And now the Party of Limbaugh is supposed to be "Going Galt", which is taking comic timing to a whole new level.

We need to stop soon. Really. It's bad for us. Besides, we know the nation desperately needs a reformed GOP or, and this will take too long, a new party to replace the GOP.

Poking Limbaugh isn't helping the GOP reform.

Or maybe it is.

Poke.

BTW. Charles Blow has a NYT blog, and it's quite good.

Misreading Atlas Shrugged

Pompous idiots of America, who are so innumerate they can’t grasp the concept of marginal tax rates, and so ill read they can’t remember Clinton era taxation, have decided to  ‘Go Galt’ in retaliation for … ummm … something.

It’s all so much fun, nearly as much fun as watching the Party of Limbaugh kiss the bum of the Great Bellow. Just imagine Malkin and her kin greeting winter in some Wyoming retreat …

It gets better. I’m told, by a reliable source who refuses to let me use her name, that this isn’t only hysterically funny, it’s also sadly ironic.

Allegedly, the needy adults (no children or disabled persons in Rand’s world) and politicians where not the most despicable characters in Atlas Shrugged. The worst of the worst were corrupt businessmen who bought politicians and sold fraudulent goods to credulous dupes.

The villains, in other words, were the corporate titans of Wall Street Malkin and Limbaugh worship. The Heroes would be more like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett – major Obama supporters.

Alas, I can’t verify this personally. I don’t deny Rand, though a certified loon, nonetheless had some marvelous insights – but I can’t stand her writing.

Can anyone confirm my source’s recollection? I should add that on matters of this sort I’ve never known her to be wrong.

Netbook doom - Google drops a hammer

The shark's fin has breached the surface. Emphases mine (thanks Andrew):

Google boss backs subsidized Linuxbooks • The Register

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hinted that his company - or at least its partners - will one day subsidize the purchase of extra-low-cost Linux netbooks in an effort to promote the use of its myriad cloud online services.

"What's particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point," Google's Willy Wonka told a room full of financial types this afternoon at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in downtown San Francisco. "Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That's another new model that's coming."

Schmidt called netbooks the "next generation" of the low-cost machines produced by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. "Products today are not completely done. Things are missing. It's perfectly possible that operating systems that are Linux-based will become a significant player in that space, whereas they have historically not been a significant player in the PC space...

..... Such devices could rule the world, Schmidt said, because cloud online apps are the future. "Cloud computing is one of those changes that are going to happen - regardless of whether or not companies in the ecosystem want it to," he said. "IT systems today are so slow in the way that they evolve...We now have an opportunity to build a whole new generation of applications that cycle much faster.".....

Good reporting to this point, but the Reg is dead wrong with this prediction ...

... If Google taps into this plan, you'd have to assume that Googlicious netbooks will be sold by someone other than Google. As the company has shown with its open-source Android mobile stack, Google prefers to keep the direct-sales biz at arm's length...

Right. And Android has been a great hardware success.

Google will not manufacture, but Google will specify and they will brand their Netbook. It's the Google brand that will boost the price just enough to get in minimal quality. Google will be responsible for the entire experience, they can't leave this up to bottom line hardware vendors.

Google has a Data Liberation team

I discover via Google OS that Google has a "Data Liberation team".

Who knew?

Luke Blanshard is a member ...

Gmail Email filter export

... Posted by Luke Blanshard, Software Engineer and member of the Data Liberation team

He looks like a respectable guy, though I didn't realize Google hired people who are *cough* around my age.

Turns out, he's not entirely alone (unless the Front and the Team are different ...)

Google Blog Converters

By J.J. Lueck, Data Liberation Front

This is why I love Google. They understand the evil power of "data lock" and have decided to explicitly oppose it ...

...... We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” he said....

This "Data Liberation" thingie may be a bit covert (is it a two person org?), but I want a T-shirt anyway.

Long live the Data Liberation Front (team)!

Update 3/8/09: Thanks to a semi-anonymous comment and another by Luke Blanshard I now know ...

• Luke is much younger than me.
• The DLF lives in the capital of fly-over land (Chicago), just down the road from me (Twins)
  
• the DLF has a tweeter (I'm a follower ...)
  
• the DLF has a goals statement:

Liberate data across web services.

Make that data portable across cooperating web services.

Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.

Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data

Slate asks why no 9/11 repeat?

I suspect it's several things, including luck, al Qaeda alienating all their dangerous geeks, and a lot of military and police action.

Why not luck? We had awful luck on 9/11 -- there were many ways the attacks could have failed. Luck can be good too.

Slate asks the question of "experts": Why hasn't America been attacked since 9/11? - By Timothy Noah.

Quantum madness. Chapter IX.

Lovecraft was wrong.

Madness is not to be taught at Nyarlathotep Academy, it to found in the contemplation of the quantum ...

Quantum physics and reality | I'm not looking, honest! | The Economist

... In the 1990s a physicist called Lucien Hardy proposed a thought experiment that makes nonsense of the famous interaction between matter and antimatter—that when a particle meets its antiparticle, the pair always annihilate one another in a burst of energy. Dr Hardy’s scheme left open the possibility that in some cases when their interaction is not observed a particle and an antiparticle could interact with one another and survive. Of course, since the interaction has to remain unseen, no one should ever notice this happening, which is why the result is known as Hardy’s paradox.

This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct...

Update: To be fair to physics, I dimly believe that "unseen" is a bit of an overstatement -- just about any interaction with the universe will collapse these indeterminate states.

Best of the Stewart takedowns

Just in case you're one of the five people who haven't seen this one ... Jon Stewart Takes On CNBC - The Atlantic Business Channel.

He rips CNBC and Santelli into tiny shreds, then puts them in a grinder, liquefies, then bakes, tears ...

You get the picture.

Brilliant, and a terrific guide to our little bit of history.

I understand, however, why Santelli backed out of appearing on the show.

Incidentally, the Flash 10 technology used here is impressive. The full screen video was very good, and played well on my now ancient G5 iMac.

Bush. Not as bad as most thought. Worse.

The Cheney/Bush torture and tyranny memos have been at least partly released: This Modern World: You think we were kidding?.

It's boring, but it still needs to be said.

If Clinton had been responsible for these policies the Party of Limbaugh would be screaming, howling, and arming barricades.

I bet we still don't know the half of it.

Absurdly close asteroid (DD45) miss

Not a Dino killer, but big enough to take out Manhattan and more (emphases mine) ...

PASADENA, Calif. — An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest [jf: about 40 meters diameter] in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported...

... "This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Wednesday...

... Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia spotted 2009 DD45 and began tracking it in late February when it was about 1 million miles away.

Spahr said he knew within an hour of that discovery that it would pose no threat to Earth.

Of the known space rocks, the next time an object will get closer to Earth will be in 2029 when an 885-foot [jf: about 270 m] asteroid called 99942 Apophis comes within 20,000 miles, said Donald Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena...

So, yeah, it's too bad about the meltdown of world markets, but imagine if DD45 had been a wee bit closer than this ...

The astonishing thing is that we can spot these things and estimate impacts so precisely. Anophis is vastly bigger and vastly more lethal -- and it will pass even closer a mere twenty years from now. (Are we really that good at prediction? Sheesh.)

More coverage ...

Asteroids: Uh, We Almost Got Asteroided Yesterday

A 30-50 meter-wide asteroid just passed seven times closer to us than the moon, glowing so bright you could see it through a cloud. If it had hit the ocean, it would have tsunamied....

The Sydney Morning Herald says that if it had been headed toward a populated part of the world, we would have had 24 hours to act and evacuate...

To put it into perspective, here's io9's list of scariest asteroid attacks on Earth, not including this one...

I recommend the io9 list.

We really do need to be grateful at having missed this one. The galaxy is not kind; sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

Brilliant Morford rant

I was wondering how Morford could keep his wonderful rants going in a post-Bush world.

I need not have worried. This is one of his best in a while, and he whacks at the left whiners and the panicked "moderates" alike ...

Ode to the unhappy / Conservatism let you down? Obama nothing more than Bush II? Oh, you poor thing

... This is, quite possibly, the most amusing thing I am hearing from the furious fringe: That Obama's plan will wreak hell on the deficit for generations to come. It's a bit like hearing a Catholic priest scold you on the perils of child abuse. I'm sorry, did you just say that it was fine and good to rape the Treasury for the past decade and worship Big Oil and waste two trillion on a failed and useless war, but redirecting those sums into science, health care, children and alternative energy is a terrible and costly idea?...

...Which leads to the biggest question of all: Can Obama actually be both? Can he truly be a radical Muslim socialist dedicated to destroying the American ideal, and just another empty suit, a cleverly disguised corporate drone enslaved, like every president in history, by the great Matrix of the capitalist machine? Could be, could be.

There is one more option, of course. And that is: Obama, and the America that's following him so passionately right now, are neither of those things in the slightest. And the fact that his extraordinary, nation-altering agenda is right now infuriating the hard right and the hard left, exasperating the Wall Street sycophants and confounding armies of TV pundits and prognosticators, even as he inspires millions of "regular" Americans to get off their butts and do more with their lives, well, this is perhaps the truest sign of all.

When you piss off those kinds of people? You know you're onto something good....

Yes, the piss off test is one of the best.

There's no way Obama is a saint. Anyone who can thrive in American politics has to be both a Machiavellian genius and an egomaniac. What's unique about Obama is that his heritage and pigment obscured the reality that he's a brilliant geek.

America thought they were electing a "black man" and an orator. America mostly missed the fact they we were also electing a Machiavellian genius geek intellectual.

Doesn't mean he's a saint. No bloody way. Means though that we're much luckier than we deserve.

AT&T fraud - slowing the EDGE network

Speaking of fraud and the occult inflation of diminished quality, my wife's Blackberry Pearl web browser is now useless in the Twin Cities. It loads very slowly and frequently gives up.

On the other hand, my iPhone 3G performance just keeps improving.

It's not coincidental ...

AT&T slowing EDGE to force customers to switch to 3G?

.... Been holding on to that now-antique EDGE device to keep from extending your contract with AT&T? Well, if you've been experiencing some sluggishness -- and not just general EDGE sluggishness, mind you -- you might have more to blame than just those recent outages.

Open for Business reports that AT&T has been quietly lowering EDGE signal strength to give more 3G love to all you iPhone 3G and Bold users. To add to the shadiness of the situation, AT&T reps are all offering up the same solution -- buy a 3G device.

Unsurprisingly, AT&T's Mark Siegel has denied Open for Business's claims, and says that the mega-carrier is not requiring anyone to switch to a 3G phone. We'll put on our Sherlock Holmes outfits and try to do some digging, but it's not like we actually expect these guys to admit to a move that would definitely lead to a lot of backlash."

Once upon a time, in a different era, I thought we had too many lawyers and too many class action lawsuits.

Oops.

Come back lawyers! Come baaaacccckkkkk....

In the meantime, we'll see if AT&T will pony up a full discount on a new phone, and if they don't we'll open a ticket with the state Attorney General (currently Lori Swanson in Minnesota).

Sometimes these AG offices can be surprisingly effective. AT&T has been running a mobile phone rebate scam for years, but the NY AG's office (yay Cuomo!) just whacked them for it.

So when we contact Lori Swanson's Minnesota office we'll be sure to mention that we were hit by both AT&T mobile scams (EDGE and rebate card)...

What if ours were a crisis of currency and quality?

From Iceland to AIG, innovators seem to have figured out how to print money ...

Gordon's Notes: The Icelandic antidote to optimism

...Financial operators around the world seemed to have discovered a way to effectively print money, a role usually reserved for central banks and counterfeiters....

I think a mass counterfeiting operation is supposed to cause huge inflation, since there's more money chasing the same goods.

But we haven't seen that inflation.

But what if, for some reason, one couldn't raise prices? Then one would have to sell fewer goods for the same money, but make it appear they were the same goods.

That would be occult inflation, such as the occult inflation of diminishing quality. Occult inflation as seen in ...

...the pencil sharpener test for economic recovery ...

So then our crisis is not a new thing, it is a very old thing. It's the crisis that first came when smart people figured out how to adulterate silver coins ...

Update 3/5/2009: As of Mar 5, 2009 there are 7 posts hits when I search on "occult inflation" and "quality" but 2,970 when I search on "hidden inflation" and "quality" including this 1994 comment by Batara Simatupang on the Polish Economic Crisis (click to read bitmap text) ...

In an economy with rigid price controls, inflationary pressures convert to fraud and diminished quality. So in a globalized economy where prices cannot be increased ...

Perhaps some intrepid journalist might want to track down Mr. Simatupang, and ask his comments on the global economic crisis of 2008 ...

(Yes, I love the web.)

Update 3/14/09: This 2007 post is related. Lots of threads. I'd like to stick a word in here about the last few years of fraud in science and research too. It's never one thing...