PageRank is a Silicon Valley popularity contest.

Salad Onions: Eleven very short stories about SXSW

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:50:36 -0400

Salad Onions: Eleven very short stories about SXSW:

1.

“It’s just like every great empire, y’know what I’m sayin?”. The driver paused to honk his horn again at a cloud of content strategists. “Egypt, Rome, you Brits - they get decadent and then they fall. Same with south-by.” He pulled to a stop in front of the SoBe Lizard Lounge. “Y’all have a…

Many people know Maureen Dowd, NY Times columnist. Fewer people...

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:57:15 -0500

Many people know Maureen Dowd, NY Times columnist. Fewer people know Maureen Evans, poet and author of a Twitter-based recipe book. I think Maureen Evans is great and deserves her #3 slot when you search Google for “maureen.” I’m biased, because she’s a friend of mine who once saved my coats from being barfed on at a rowdy concert. But Google is probably biased because she’s the longtime partner of Twitter’s first lead programmer.

Rape threats for PageRank and profit

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:36:59 -0500

Rape threats for PageRank and profit:

And of course, most search engines don’t evaluate the semantic content of links to indicate whether the linked-to page is being linked to in rage or in love… leading one Brooklyn entrepreneur to get Internet famous for the amount of terrible reviews he gets on consumer sites.

This is less about Silicon Valley than it is about...

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:36:00 -0500

This is less about Silicon Valley than it is about regionally-specific words. It’s also sort of about majorities and minorities.

In Pittsburgh, “yuns” or “yinz” basically means “you guys.” I went looking to see whether people used it online as well as face to face. It was really, really hard to tell, because Google also thought this was a search for the name Yun or Yin — Chinese names. Just based on the demographics (over a billion people in China, versus maybe two million people in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area), I’d bet there’s way more people online with those last names than there are that use “yuns” as the second person plural. But does “yuns” being in the minority mean that it should be hard to find people saying “yuns” to each other online? What if people are looking for others who talk the way they are? A few later results on these pages are from forums where people ask “Is ‘yuns’ an actual word? My grandma used to use it, but I wasn’t ever sure.”

As you can see, it takes a lot of modifiers, but you can eventually dig up a number of “yuns” results a few pages in, and one or two definition hits in the first few results.

I shouldn’t have to do this for the name of every...

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:37:00 -0400

I shouldn’t have to do this for the name of every programming language, but it’s just so easy. At least the pictures are of snakes, and not British actors.

Imagine you are a student in India whose teacher has assigned a...

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 13:15:41 -0400

Imagine you are a student in India whose teacher has assigned a paper on “Western art.” How helpful will Google be? (Obviously, less of a Silicon Valley popularity problem than an American popularity problem.)

Thanks to Payal Arora, who provided this example, and Hervé Varenne, who pointed it out.

Jonathan Coulton can’t cancel your account. But he sure is...

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:35:17 -0400

Jonathan Coulton can’t cancel your account. But he sure is Internet famous.

Is it a programming language, or a speech impediment?

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:13:00 -0400

Is it a programming language, or a speech impediment?