Over at Marktplaats.nl we have developed one of The Netherlands’ biggest search engines (we’re doing so many searches per day, and making it easy for buyers to find the things they are looking for is considered “core business”). A post by Tim Bray actually summarizes nicely the basics of a search engine.

The post is already 4 years old (posted in late 2003) but is still quite relevant. It focusses primarily on filtering to a relevant resultset, although it doesn’t ignore sorting there is so much more one can do in that area nowadays.

For those that are absolutely new to this area, or find them selves playing with this type of technology but want to read up on it I especially recommend the following articles:

• Backgrounder
• The Users
• Basic Basics
• Stopwords
• Result Ranking (sorting)

And, before you think about breaking the market and build an intelligent search engine, please read this.

Excellent writeup, even 4 years later. Thanks Tim!

Another post, more related to relevance and the order your results will appear the relevance you can attach to users click behaviour. In short, users are generally inclined to click on items at the top more frequenctly, so basing your relevance metrics on this you need to “un bias” your data.

Secondly, as users get further down the result set -in the aggregate- they are going to switch to a different mode of selecting the items they are going to click on: they will actually start reading the excerpts and decide, based on the information present on the result set, on which items to click. In other words, here you should actually not try to “un bias” your data!

Terry Chay over at “The Woodwork” has a length but nicely written blog post about a PHP vs Ruby on Rails discussion. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, read the article: it has some juicy humor sprinkled into it as well; it’s a bit flame bait too…

Favourite quote (quoting another quote):

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
—Mahatma Ghandi

OSCON 2005:

“Unless you’re Ruby.”
—Danny O’Brien, “On Evil”

And:

I can’t speak for Alex, but what I’m saying is look at the top 100 websites on the internet: about 40% of them are written in PHP and 0% of them are written in Rails. (Yes, I can (and am) using this statistic to grind you Ruby fuckers into the dust.)

For me personally, Skype is kicking it for real. Recently they released Skype Prime which is basically a payed service number (0900 in the Netherlands) but then for everyone and their mother: it is really easy to setup -no 3rd parties involved- and as such I think Skype will see a lot of Consumer to Consumer calls which is a space where a lot of people might want to participate.

Check out my Skype Prime badge:

Just got back from a week of skiing at Kaprun, Austria and I thought it might be nice to share some of the video and photos that were made in the process.

Video:

Photo’s:

www.flickr.com More of Jilles’ photos tagged with kaprunq4y6

Some forums have a really good signal to noise ratio, and the Joel on Software boards are on of those. Right now there is a really interesting discussion happening on “what little software secrets do you know that noone seems to know?”

The entire discussion can be found here: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.394956

But let me highlight a few excerpts of handy material:

Just type =rand() anywhere in your [Microsoft Word document] to autocreate a block of text. For more text, pass it a numeric parameter like rand(2). 200 appears to be the max value.

Or, how about when all the capitalization is wrong in your word document?

Fix capitalization in Word:

Highlight the text, and press Shift+F3 until desired result. It allows you to select from All Caps, No Caps, Proper Case and Title Case. Much better then erasing the sentence and re-writing it.

Or for our webdevelopers out there:

In Firefox, if you are working on a page and just care about the HTML source of that file, simply open the source once, and then refresh the source only (similar to a webpage: with CTRL+R), instead of reloading the whole webpage and then view source again.

And for our Windows developers:

When [you] have a messagebox (a.k.a alert box) hitting CTRL-C will copy the text of the messagebox to the clipboard.

And I was allways doing CTRL-ALT-DEL, T to get to the task manager, but this tip is even faster:

Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens up the task manager.

I have something similar like the tip below. For example I can type “ci 12556″ and it will show check in 12556 in Trac. Or I can type “bug 432″ and it will show me bug 432 in my bugtracking system. However, I constructed that allways by hand, here is an easier way to do it:

In Firefox,

-Go to the main page for this group.
-In the search box, right click and choose “Add a keyword for this Search…”
-Name it “Joel” (or whatever you want)
-Keyword = “jos” (or whatever you want)
-OK

Now in the address bar, type “jos hungarian” and it will show you all results for hungarian in these groups.

There you go, hope there was one tip there that you found usefull!

Recently made a few purchases, without doing so much as leaving the house. I really love how that works, really convenient.
First off, I bought a new black, 2nd generation iPod Nano 8GB. I don’t have a ultra large music collection, but I really like the device’s design (duh!) and experience.

(Clicking on the above image will take you to an annotated version)

Second up, I am completely addicted to Lost nowadays and I just finished the 1st Season, so I bought the first part of Season 2 second hand off of Marktplaats.nl. I am anxiously not putting it in the DVD player because I know it will be a ~15 hour time drain instantly.

And last but not least my first shipment of new books came in from Amazon, including:

All except the “The Book of Atrix Wolfe” book came in, which I bought second hand on Amazon.com. You can see my entire book collection at: http://ojilles.listal.com/owned/books (RSS feeds are available there as well).

All this should keep me quiet for a little while…

Ofcourse, people have been publishing video’s on the net for a long time. The interesting effect of this - to me - it that this turns the net into a “Funniest Home Video’s” for everyone. For years now people have been buying camcorders, but the reaching an audience with that was still pretty hard (e.g. you needed to get your video’s aired on television. Not so anymore — as already happened to writing (anyone can start a blog and gather a crowd).

Just to show the big diversity out there, here are three video’s I just found on the net:

• On guy performing the first level of Mario Bro’s.
• Snakes on a plane, rap home edition
• Brianiacs ripoff, but professionally done!
• 20 something second Rubrik Cube’s solve with only the left hand. (But really, Rubrik Cubes are for children.)
• Mentos and Diet Coke. And more, and more…(Interesting enough, same search on Google Video’s doesn’t turn up any results)

That last one gets me a bit scared, wondering how big an incentive the net wil provide for those that don’t think about the stunts they perform to get some traffic for their video’s.

Oh, and remember comments on weblogs? People are doing the same on YouTube. Take this lady for example (commenting on a comment, on a comment…) with a rap. Hey, if you are there, you are only so far away of couples ‘fighting it out’ on YouTube ofcourse.

Just ran across the site off Basil Vandegriend, who wrote an article back in May about project management for software development projects. In that article he shows an application that shows the relation between the four factors that play a role in project management: time, resources, scope and quality with which you can visually show their relation.

An interesting new product became available on the Internet a few months back, called “Moola”. Moola is basically a free “Weekend Millionaires” for the normal people.

Currently, Moola sports two games. One is a Rock-Siccors-Paper game with a twist, over 6 rounds. The other game I did not play yet. The games are cool in and of themselves, but the added incentive really works.Up till here Moola already had some exposure in the blog world, for example on TechCrunch, and other blogs. However, I did not see any other blogs yet that wrote about the bonuses that Moola is giving away. After me loosing my money twice Moola decided that I needed a bit more cash to get me off and decided to sponsor my account with 10 cents, see the screen shot below.Anyway, this is a really interesting business model in my mind. The only problem with it is that the objectives of the players (you and me) are not nicely aligned with the advertisers that provide the cash. This will ultimately hurt the ROI for the advertisers and their willingness to participate. How it ends up we will see.

Update: I still have 1 invite left. Ping me if you want it!

Update 2: Things move fast in this space. Already there is a site called http://www.playmoola.com/ which sports a strategy section for the games and loads of invites left seemingly.

Today I did a few searches on Google, only to find out that Google either rolled out a new feature to their Search Engine Result Page or is testing it. I guess it is the latter because several collegue’s and friends were not able to replicate the behaviour. See the screenshot below:

Basically Google remembers which searches you have done on a person by person basis. However, only now did I also see that the number of times you have already visited the search result is now displayed next to it.

After digging some deeper I found some more features. Here is a page showing what I my popular searches were and which of the results were popular with me:

And Google provides some handy graphs too!

Some of this has implications though:

How is my Search History stored?
Personalized Search stores your search history on Google servers, which means you can view your history and get personalized search results on any computer.