

Google: we're having scaling issues, please stop distributing your FF extension - gaika
http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2008-06/25-google_public_relations

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silentbicycle
All things considered, 1\. I'm not surprised a plugin like that put heavy load
on Google -- Bookmark every page? But the bookmarks being linked to searching
is a small surprise. 2\. It's quite impressive how smoothly they handled
things. Don't be evil, indeed. 3\. Does anybody look before commenting? The
shirt is long gone...

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rms
>3\. Does anybody look before commenting? The shirt is long gone...

It's the kind of thing where you don't look because in the extra 10 seconds
required to read the comments someone who didn't look could get the first post
in.

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silentbicycle
Well, yes, but the fact that it even _has_ comments should be a giveaway.
People are asking for the shirt two days later.

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jamesbrady
It surprises me that Google gave up so easily! This is a pretty similar
service to what WebMynd provides - we're handling ~2.5m pages per day and
although scaling is difficult, it's doable.

We out-engineered Google!!

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marcus
Don't flatter yourself.

The problem Google is having isn't with storing the links, its with the effect
of the links on the personalization of your search results. Which is a problem
WebMynd isn't facing.

They can't precompute the eigenvectors because it changes every time you visit
a web page and calculating it live for each search request when the user has
thousands of personal pages can be expensive.

I would have just disabled the effect of the personalization on search of
bookmarks not added manually.

~~~
jamesbrady
Obviously, it was a slightly tongue in cheek comment..

However, I would point out that WebMynd IS doing personalised search (totally
personalised, in fact). As you point out, updating search indices every time a
user visits a page is difficult. The fact that Google have chosen not to
tackle this challenge, and we have, is a symptom of their existing methods and
stated goal of organising the world's information: not your's.

As for your last point, I actually agree with the OP and others that Google's
soft touch on this matter was commendable; disabling the effect or blocking
the extension outright would have been heavy handed and sent a pretty bad
message.

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marcus
I'm not entirely sure disabling the personalization effect would have been the
wrong thing to do from a user experience point-of-view. Supposed I let a
friend browse on my computer, do I really want my search results to be
personalized with stuff that interests him/her? What about pages I mis-clicked
on or pages that whose link was misleading?

I think that requiring a deliberate, conscious vote of confidence from the
user for a web-page before actually letting it affect my personalized search
results is a very good thing.

But from a public relations POV you're probably right, that was the best
approach

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stcredzero
It's surprising how easy it is for me and for other people to forget that
Google is not a monolithic entity. It's a collection of people, like any other
big company. There's going to be good people and bad people in there. The
press tends to refer to it as a single entity, however.

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nadim
"Whenever you use the web search, it checks it against your Google bookmarks.
You can easily imagine what problems can come up when you have a several 10 or
even 100 thousands of bookmarks…"

Am I mistaken to believe that unless they are using a poor algorithm, _100k_
bookmarks to add to their index shouldn't be a problem. What am I missing
here?

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swivelmaster
Probably the bookmarks aren't stored the same way their search index is.

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dangoldin
Maybe they should just include the bookmarking in their search indices.

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lpgauth
The bookmarks are already indexed. The pages that are bookmarked have a edge
against pagerank for that specific user.

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kirse
If I was a spammer or SEO, I would be figuring out every possible way -
whether shady or not - to get someone to bookmark my page in Google Bookmarks.

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ideamonk
does anyone care about the poor captcha system on
<http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/> ?

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newt0311
Finally a sensible response from a software company.

