Cool/Snap?

For folks working in search or doing research about search, one of the biggest conferences every year is WWW. The program is out now, and several Googlers have interesting papers among those accepted.

• Organizing and Searching the World Wide Web of Facts – Step Two: Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowds by Marius Pasca.
• Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text by Ziv Bar-Yossef (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Google Haifa), Idit Keidar (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology), and Uri Schonfeld (University of California Los Angeles)
• Scaling Up All Pairs Similarity Search by Roberto Bayardo, Yiming Ma (U. California Irvine), and Ramakrishnan Srikant
• Detecting Near-Duplicates for Web Crawling by Gurmeet Manku, Arvind Jain, and Anish Das Sarma (Stanford University)
• Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering by Abhinandan Das, Mayur Datar, Ashutosh Garg, and Shyam Rajaram (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
• Efficient Search Engine Measurements by Ziv Bar-Yossef (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Google Haifa) and Maxim Gurevich (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology)

Tech

First, the Computer Language Benchmarks Game is an interesting approach to resolving the old-as-computers question “which programming language is faster?” Many folks (self included) will tell you that the question is mostly nonsense. But, if you insist on asking it and then answering it with benchmarks, the CLBG is a great way to remove some of the experimental biases that commonly plague that approach.

The second thing, and perhaps even more interesting than the first, is how I came across the CLBG. The link was presented to me as a recommendation from Google search personalization due to some Python-related searches that I had done recently. I was dubious about how effective query-less searches would be. The degree to which this result matches my interests seems to indicate that I should have fewer doubts.

Nerdness, Tech