

Sergey Brin - Favorite Books - butterscotch
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/booklist.html

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petercooper
There are 15,257 books in that list so it might not provide quite the catchy
insights you may think from the title alone.

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jessriedel
If the books average 100 pages and he read a page every 40 seconds, that works
out over 2 years of continuous reading for 16 hours per day. So this isn't
real.

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justinschuh
From the source HTML:

<!-- Below is a list of books automatically extracted from hundreds of sources
on the Web. -->

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jyothi
the beginning of Googlebot! more from the linking page

    
    
      Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web
       by Sergey Brin.

"We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the WWW based on the
duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by extracting a
relations of books. WebDB Workshop at EDBT '98 (postscript)."

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hugh3
Is that a pre-google list kept up for posterity along with the rest of his
Stanford page? Because that's a _lot_ of books for someone that age even to
have _read_ , let alone to be his favourite subset of the books he has read.

A bunch of 'em seem to be listed twice, in immediate sucession, though, which
is weird.

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dataminer
The source says the page was created on Jan 14th, 1998 and it was created
automatically from hundreds of sources on the web.

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hugh3
OK, mystery solved. I didn't think he could have possibly read quite _that_
many books by his early twenties, especially given that he was doing a bunch
of other stuff at the time.

However, yeah, having _Mein Kampf_ on a list entitled "My Favorite Books" is a
bit embarrassing.

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Steko
I don't think these are "Sergey's Favorite Books", I think this is a meta-list
Sergey put together based on the phrase "My Favorite Books"

~~~
Steko
Going up a level to his main directory you get:

# Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web

by Sergey Brin. We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the
WWW based on the duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by
extracting a relations of books. WebDB Workshop at EDBT '98 (postscript).

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biznickman
So why is this being up voted if it provides little value?

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gnosis
Because the title is linkbait, and people are automatically upvoting based on
how appealing the title sounds, rather than based on the content.

This indicates a more general problem for HN: how do you get people to vote
based on content, rather than title?

I'm not sure I have a good, practical solution.

~~~
garethsprice
If you figure out how to convince the public not to vote on appearances,
please share it in time for the next general election... it'd put a lot of
politicians out of work.

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hnalien
So who has been running Google since the last 13 years?

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coleslaw374
I swear this is some sort of puzzle...the duplicate listings make it seem
dynamically generated.

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christoph
"Mein Kampf" ... really?

