Tag: search

Google Reader recommends

Imagine my surprise when I looked at “Top Recommendations” area of my Google Reader today and found … my own blog over there.

Yes, I know that these recommendations are based on the feeds that I read.  But still!  Is it the time to celebrate the recommendations technology, which recommended me to me over a gadzillion of other blogs?  Or maybe this is a day of Ultimate Technological Silliness, when Google, a search company that forgets nothing, somehow arrived to the conclusion that I might not be reading my own blog?  These questions remind me of a “half-empty or half-full glass of water“.  I guess a lot depends on the personal perspective…

Humans in image recognition

It looks like humans aren’t all that useless when it comes to technology.  There are still a few areas that we do better than machines.  Image recognition is one of them.  TechCrunch runs the story about one company that seems to be using humans in image recognition process.  Comments to that story also mention Google doing the same.

To me it feels like a problem with timing.  There is a need to tag and search a whole lot of images.  But there is no good automated solution available.  So we are falling back on humans.  It’s easy to come up with a few other areas, in which there is a need today for solutions which won’t even be here tomorrow.  Technology needs help, I guess.

Google Reader search within single feed

I’ve been using Google Reader for quite some time now, but it was only today that I noticed that I can search within a single feed.  The drop down menu near the search box at the top contains choices like “All items”, “Starred items”, and “Shared items”, which are followed by the tags.  But if you scroll further down, after the tags, there is a list of all your subscriptions.  You can pick any feed that you are subscribed to and search within it.

I’m not sure if this is a recently added feature or if it was there for ever, but it’s priceless.  I was missing out on it, because I use way too many tags and, apparently,  never scrolled down deep enough.

Gmail language search

Via Google Blogoscoped post I learned it is possible to search for messages in Gmail based on what language they are written in.  The operator is called “lang” and can be used like so:   “lang:ru“  or “lang:russian“.  The operator can be used both in regular searches and in filter conditions.   As noted in the comments, this might be useful for sorting out spam messages (label with “Spam“) written in languages that you don’t understand (Chinese, for example, – “lang:zh“).

For me personally, this comes very useful, since most of my friends and family (at least those with who I communicate via email) speak both Russian and English, and sometimes it takes too much time going through all the messages instead of picking just those in one language (for those cases when I remember the language).

You are what you search

Don’t you just love it when something that you’ve been seriously suspecting, and trying to explain to people, is suddenly mentioned by someone else, together with some statistical data to back it up? Well, I do.

As you’ve probably heard by now (a billion times), AOL has recently released a few million records of its users’ search history. Plenty of people jumped on to it – all for their own reasons. One guy, among these people, studied the data and came up with this report (linked to from this Slashdot post), categorizing people into seven groups, based on their search terms.

Here is a quote from the article that made me feel glad and proud:

My favorite plots show hours of G-rated searches before the user switches gears—what I call the Avenue Q Theory of Internet usage. User No. 190827 goes from “talking parrots jokes” and “poems about a red rose” before midnight to multiple clicks for “sexy dogs and hot girls” a half hour later.

I’ve been saying for a long time – you can be romantic and kinky at the same time, and there’s nothing wrong with it, many of us are.