People Do Not Want To Search
by 
samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
A Yahoo executive has stated “people…don't want to search.”
This article at internetnets.com gives some insights into how Yahoo thinks about the future of their business.
Sphere Of Influence
by samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
The graphic featured in this article at SearchEngineLand shows how search fits into a broad range of different ways to reach customers.
I found it to be a useful framework for thinking about the importance of search in the whole marketing sphere.
Google At Age 10
by samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
This article compares Google at age 10 with Microsoft at the same age.
The stats that are most directly applicable to this class are worldwide searches per hour on Google in July 2008 versus Microsoft: For Google 65 million; for Microsoft 3.1 million.
Huge Computer To Be Built
by samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
UIUC is going to build a huge computer by 2011.
From Massive $208 million petascale computer gets green light:
Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop equals about 1 quadrillion calculations per second. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage.
Also:
According to the NSF the system may be used to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere; the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe; understanding the chains of reactions that occur with living cells; and the design of novel materials.
That's some serious computing.
School Of Everything
by samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
The School of Everything is a web service for people who have something to teach and for those who might want their services.
As Cory Doctorow said at BoingBoing:
The economic proposition is simple: you know something I want you to show me, and School of Everything will make it easy for us to meet and transact commerce to make this happen. It doesn't depend on no one else being willing to do this for free, nor does it control what you do with the information once you learn it. Indeed, this is a service that benefits from the wider spreading of information: the more information there is about knitting, the more knitters there are, the more knitters there will be clamouring to learn knitting from an expert retained for this purpose. A knitting teacher doesn't want you to hoard what you learn: she wants you to tell everyone about it.
I think this is a fantastic idea.
Internet Traffic Growth
by samoore (30 Aug 2009 15:08)
I knew traffic on the Internet was growing fairly quickly, but I had no idea it was to this extent.
I just came across this quote at this link from BusinessWeek:
The problem is, there's little evidence of any capacity shortage. Despite a surge in online video watching, the growth of Internet traffic does not appear to be accelerating. An ongoing Internet traffic study at the University of Minnesota and parallel research by Cisco Systems (CSCO) show that traffic is growing at 35% to 50% a year, about the same rate as in the past several years.
Wow. 35-50% per year?!? Elsewhere in the article they state that they expect traffic to increase 50-fold by 2015. Wow. Think about the kinds of investments that would be needed to support this type of increase in demand.
