Highly Targeted Spam?

It's probably just an illusion, but I seem to be getting targeted spam lately.

How targeted spam might work: A crawler goes out and indexes an email and context. It then uses the context to generate a relevant spam title and keyword text that can then be matched to relevant messages from a database of client advertisements. The filter-defeating cocktail is then shuttled out to unwilling recipients across the web.

This is horrible. It's like adsense for spam.

Driving Directions: Seattle, WA, USA to Paris, France

Search Engine usability study

I participated in a search engine usability study today.

Google Code Search was supposed to be the crappiest among the given search engines - the Raphael said he would probably need to assist me during the tasks since they were known to trip up previous participants.

During the trial I discovered the trick to making Google Code Search work. Type in "test" after your query. This brings up test suites related to your result, which means you can figure out how to use the resulting APIs by example.

"You are by far the fastest Googler I have ever seen."

My prize? $30 Amazon gift certificate. Yummy.

New Google Video Layout

I just noticed Google Video had a redesign. It looks like they've taken a few cues from YouTube. The comments, the flagging, the related videos -- it's as if Google is going to take everything good about YouTube and put it into Google Video.

There should be a Google Video/Youtube mind meld. The socialness of YouTube + the full resolution AVI downloads and skip-to-anywhere player of Google Video = social video awesomeness.

Google, AI, Infomush

I just saw a CNet video where Larry spoke about AI as simple algorithms on a massive computational base.

"We have some people at Google who are working on artificial intelligence."

There's no way any of my team leaked. Google probably figured out the secret to making a great AI themselves, which makes me want to just relocate Infomush to Google and ask "Is this what you're looking for?"

So, I guess we're both at the same philosophical milestone now. If you have real AI, what do you do with it?

All of this makes me wonder if I'm part of a Stand Alone Complex.

I could have this all wrong. Perhaps they're just emulating the brain?

Google awesomeness recap

1. Friday - went eating with Christophe of Google-reimbursement fame. Awesome ancillary activities followed.

2. Today - presented Infomush at Google. Thanks to team SMHACK, Infomush pulled off a quantum leap in clustering quality just as we passed over Google's door jam. (I also won a game of foosball -- only using my good un-technically-broken arm. Of course I took the opportunity to raise he roof for Infomush.)

BTW, SMHACK is our initials backwards: Kevin Chiu, Andy Hou, Michael Skinner.

Hmmm, Christophe also finally learned what Act 2 of Infomush is, at least the first scene of Act 2. Taj helped prod the revelation on by guessing it was "social." I guess this means we'll just have to implement it faster than planned.

Google Bag

Every quarter tons of companies, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft come to give recruiting talks. During every talk, there's free food and a drawing for some prize. In all of my years in the computer science and engineering department, I've never won.

During today's Google talk, I entered my name into the raffle by filling out a row on an attendee information sheet: name, major, email etc. I also entered Andy's info.

Then the raffle began. There were four prizes, a chair, a lava lamp, a black laptop bag, and a red laptop bag. I really wanted that red laptop bag.

The first winner took the chair.
The second winner took the lava lamp.
The third winner took the black laptop bag.

When it was time to announce the fourth winner, I was desperately trying to mentally communicate my row number to Jing Jing, who was guessing numbers in the range of 1 to 80 or so.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what number I was.

Jing Jing plucked "40" out of thin air, and April Yu read the entry in disbelief.

"Kevin"

Andy exclaimed "Whoa, no way!" and someone in the audience asked, "Which Kevin?"

"Kevin Chiu"



Woot!

Gmail - picture spam levels down

Thank you Gmail team, for making it so picture spam doesn't get through to my inbox so easily. I don't know what you did, but it was a step in the right direction.

Unsend

Webmail needs an unsend feature.

*cough* Gmail *cough*

Have an option to have outgoing emails delayed by a user-defined amount of time. Any email sent less than x seconds ago will be available for unsending.

Optimal Ad Placement

Many sites that rely on ads as a source of revenue place them in locations that can trick a visitor in to thinking the ad is part of a website intra-link or, in other words, a link to another part of the same site. The thin horizontal Google Ad strip that looks like a navigation bar is particular suited to this strategy for this. The AdBrite ads are possibly the best, most annoying version of these stealth ads - they replace several words in the page with links to advertisers' pages.

However, you may notice that I host no such deceptive ads. That's because I know what it feels like to click an add thinking that I'll be brought to a page that was intentionally linked to by the author. I get frustrated with the page author for placing such a deceptive ad.

On the other hand, I am aware that certain individuals enjoy rewarding bloggers for a good article by clicking ads on the authors site, so I actually do leave one up, it's just somewhere that isn't irritating or deceptive.

In the entire lifetime of this blog, I have made 31 cents. As you can see, I'm not exactly in it for the money. I just want those few people looking to support quality blogging a chance to do so.

Improving Google Integration

I like how Google Talk and Google Checkout are nicely integrating with other aspects of Google, such as Gmail, Orkut and Adsense, respectively, but what happened to the obvious opportunity between Google Notebook and Google Docs and Spreadsheets? (And what's Docs etc going to be called when they add presentations? Google Office?)

The thing that turned me away from Google Docs etc and Google Notebook is that Notebook is a perfect resource and fact gathering tool, and Docs is a great publishing tool, but there is no way to easily integrate all the valuable data from Notebook to Docs.

Google Synergy! or at least Search-induced Serendipity

This story begins when Steve Wozniak signs my MacBook Pro.

A few days later, Andy suggests that I protect the signature somehow. Heeding his advice, I tape a piece of paper over the signature.

For a while, all is well.

One day, I notice a piece of the signature is beginning to smudge off. Alex suggests that I use some nail polish to perm-ify the autograph. Unfortunately, the elusive liquid is rarer than HP Printer Ink in our lab.

A while later I stumble across this clear shell for MacBook Pros.

Excellent! Except it costs 40 bucks + shipping. These guys must have a monopoly on clear, hardshell MacBook Pro casings.

Fortunately, I remember that Google Checkout offers a $10 discount incentive to purchase through them, so I search Froogle for stores that have partnerships with Google Checkout. However, every store I try mentions nothing of Google Checkout anywhere on the site.

In frustration, I go to Google to search the internet's product listings for the clear case, but I still can't find anything in stock at a reasonable price.

But wait! What does my peripheral vision detect in the ads column that I usually ignore?



There's a store with the Google Checkout logo in the ads! Yes! [Ed. This is the same type of feeling one might experience when discovering life on Mars or finding an animal previously thought to be extinct.] Ads usually annoy me, and I use adblock to block the lot of 'em, but this ad glows with an aura of awesome, since it's... gasp! ...actually useful!

Three simple steps finalize my transaction.

1. Add the case the cart.
2. Click Google Checkout.
3. Type Google Password.

Gmail updated

Looks like Gmail got some updates today:

Updates noticed first:

New UI elements.





Updates that could be improved:

Embarassment-reducing new message notifications

Why not just update the conversation instead of posting a little yellow box that asks if you want to see the updated conversation?

Gmail bug?

I'm getting other people's emails. Click picture to go to get a better view.

A Google Earth Development

It looks like Google Earth is going to have georeferenced movies, pictures, and blog postings. Content from professional sources such as the Discovery Channel will be included. This could (and that's a very speculative "could") be awesome for Photo Tourism.

Adsense ramblings

I've earned a grand total of $0.06 from Google's Adsense. I hypothesize that optimal ad placement is highly correlated with fooling site users into thinking that the information at the other end of an ad link is supremely relavent first party information instead of a third party ad. Clicking ads may cause an unpleasant and confusing internet experience to internet neophytes. Additionally, I hypothesize that many users who may visit this site use Firefox with Adblock, and thus have all ads disabled. Neither of these hypotheses have been tested.




Sometimes, I just click the links that appear at the top of Google's search results because the non-ad link may be further down the page. I'm not fooled into thinking the ad is a search result, but it's easier to click a link that's at the top of a search results list than to scan through the items in the list looking for the non-ad link corresponding to the desired website.




So, on to a tangential topic.
What happens when Firefox gets more widespread, and more people use Adblock? Will the internet as we know it cease to exist? Google seems to be diversifying already -- getting widespread first, and then figuring out how to monetize their ubiquity. Perhaps they'll be able to keep their revenue up without relying on tricky ads.

Google finance kicks butt

It matches news articles with the stock, so you can see how one affects the other. The use of Flash is very cool as well.

I remember that.

"We talked about distributing it as a screen saver and beaming it to a live Jumbotron display in Times Square, because of its high fascination factor, but those ideas were ultimately vetoed by the founders." - Xooglers

I was talking about making the scrolling widget into a screensaver with some people from Google Kirkland during their housewarming party. That was a while ago... I think the idea eventually morphed into a world map that lit up areas where searches originated, although that could have been the evolution of a different idea entirely.

Google explosion

Google's been busy lately:

Googlepages
Google Video site bar
Google music search
Google CL2 (calendar)
Google links

Summer of Code

What a coincidence. Right when I decide to put some more work into the project I started last summer during Google's Summer of Code, I receive a Summer of Code T-shirt from Google...