Is there a such thing as “perfect search”?  The short answer is no, and in your gut you’d probably agree with me.  Let’s take the Goog as our hypothesis testbed.  Does Google index everything publically available on the web?  No.  Does it index content I just added one minute ago?  No (yet.).  Does it do a good job of reading my mind and know that I want only results from 2010, instead of a highly-linked result from 2004?  No. (although advanced search gives you options here).

At any rate, Google has done a poor job at designing the perfect search, but have done an excellent job at designing a good-enough search.  That’s a fuzzy term, but Google didn’t become #1 without returning good-enough results for the vast majority of the billions (trillions?  quintillions?) of searches they process.

On a related note, let’s throw out a thought experiment.  Suppose I wanted a perfect search, but it would take 15 minutes to return SERPs.  My response: go fuck yourself.  So speed is important for good-enough search.  I’d rather have a good-enough result NOW than a perfect result after my cappuccino foam has dried up and blown away.

So it’s surprising that Microsoft Office Visio 2007 still hasn’t gotten the message.  Here’s me searching for “triangle”:

15 seconds later, here’s the result:

Really?  15 seconds to return 4 results from a local disk cache somewhere?

I conclude that the implementation of search is either incredibly naive – loop through every shape template definition and for every word in the definition, see if it equals the term “triangle” – or, maybe more likely, it’s incredibly complicated and attempts to be perfect.  But it’s slow.  Annoyingly so.

There are few ways to do things simply, but lots of ways to do things in a complicated way.  And to paraphrase Mae West, I’ve seen complicated and stupid, and I’ve seen simple and stupid, and simple is better.

Lesson for life right there.  You’re welcome.

Google’s real-time search results are starting to be shown at the top of the search engine results pages.  Here’s a search I did today for “balsamiq”.

I like it.  I hope that the interface doesn’t get too cluttered, and of course I REALLY hope that the relevance stays high.  But it’s a natural, necessary next step to incorporate the Real Time Web into the results.

What does it all mean?  I’ll leave that discussion for people who have time to think deeply on the subject, or perhaps I’ll carve out some time for a Seattle 2.0 blog post on the subject.

I’ve been fighting with my Google Apps E-mail setup for a bit this morning, trying to get so-called “disposable” or “plus addressing” to work.  Essentially, the idea is that you can send e-mails to a special on-the-fly e-mail address that will make its way into your inbox, where you can use inbox rules or filters to put it in the right place.

So, for example, if you’re filling out a spammy form, you could enter:

anthonys+spam1@crowdify.com

and the e-mail would be delivered to your anthonys@crowdify.com inbox, where you can route it wherever.

I’m using very clear instructions from Matthew McEachen, but still having one final red-zone problem: the e-mails get delivered and placed in my “All Mail” folder, not my inbox.  And the filter I have set up, to label these incoming e-mails with a particular label, appear not to run against these incoming messages.

Kind of stumped right now.  Will continue to investigate for a bit, because I really want to get this to work.

UPDATE: Love from Twitter: Tweep Marina Martin showed me this Greasemonkey script that simulates the Labs functions: Just hit “l” and the “Apply Label” function pops up. Hit the first letter of your label and it starts to drill down. Amazing, and useful. Thanks Marina!

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I learned tonight that Google Apps users aren’t able to take advantage of the slew of Google Labs features that are made available to Gmail users. Google has recently released new labeling features that I would like to try out, but without the Labs link in Google Apps I’m out of luck.

Google: when will we get Labs in Google Apps?

Googolopoly is a Monopoly ripoff, but it’s a clever one.  You get a custom set of Internet “properties” to purchase.  So long Illionis Avenue, hello Facebook.

I’m pleased that that Microsoft gets the prime “Boardwalk” position.

Check it out at http://www.box.net/shared/dguu2bfy88.

(h/t John Battelle)

I got this notice in an e-mail from the WTIA. Given yesterday’s announcement of the Google App Engine, this might be very interesting for some of my readers:

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Welcome to the New Era of Cloud Computing
Google, Fremont Campus
4/30/2008
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

New technologies for large-scale data storage and processing are allowing companies to manage ever-increasing data set sizes. Scalable “cloud computing” technologies offer low-overhead ways to host your products, while ensuring that your computing base can adapt to changing needs. Open source tools such as Hadoop provide low-cost but high-powered platforms on which to develop your systems. This evening presentation, aimed at technology decision-makers of local high-tech corporations, will explain what you need to know to engineer reliable, scalable distributed systems to manage your data. The presentation will address the following topics:

• What is changing about data availability today?
• What is cloud computing, and in what form is it available to your company?
• What systems has Google developed to manage large-scale data, and what makes them unique?
• What open source systems can provide these benefits to you?

Speaker
Aaron Kimball, Sr. Consultant, Spinnaker Labs, Inc.

Aaron Kimball is a leading authority on Hadoop-based system deployment. He provides advice, system development, and training to corporations and academic institutions worldwide. In 2007 he developed and taught a new undergraduate course in distributed computing with Hadoop at the University of Washington; this curriculum forms the basis for new courses being presented at top-tier universities across America and around the globe.

See the TechCrunch post here. Essentially this is a little bit of a letdown after the big (unsubstantiated) lead-up over the weekend, due to the Python-only support. Yes, it’s just the first of what may be many languages, but I suppose they could have foreseen the reaction from the Ruby, PHP, or other (C# *cough*) crowds that might be very interested in building out apps within Google’s cloud.

So, if you’re Djangoing, you’re probably dancing…otherwise, hurry up and wait, unless you have the free time to learn a new platform.

We could have used this at Seattle Startup Weekend, where we developed Skillbit (RIP). That was a Django app. For me? If I have to do any heavy lifting using methods out of Programming Collective Intelligence, I may give this a go. Later.

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent write-up of the Google Apps Engine from Brady Forrest.

Coming on the heels of Google’s supposed upcoming BigTable announcment, I recommend the following if you want to learn more:

First, a 1-hour video talk given last summer by Jeff Dean about Google’s overall distributed architecture, including Google File System, MapReduce, and BigTable:

Next, a website I found called highscalability.com which talks about a lot of these topics in a blog format. There’s an interesting summary of Google’s architecture with links here. Ironically, this site seems to be down/overloaded a lot.

Next, a whitepaper on BigTable. Lots of details for the inquiring mind, but still approachable for a software person who is not expert in distributed systems, or BigTable in particular. This was linked from the TechCrunch article.

Finally, there’s this separate 1-hour video, also with Jeff Dean, that was given in 2005 at the UW.

I haven’t actually watched this one yet, having opted to watch the 2007 one linked earlier.

Have fun! P.S. I would appreciate notes about other good BigTable orientation information.

I’m going through the BigTable spec/API document and there’s this interesting nugget:

Finally, Bigtable supports the execution of client-supplied scripts in the address spaces of the servers. The scripts are written in a language developed at Google for processing data called Sawzall [28]. At the moment, our Sawzall-based API does not allow client scripts to write back into Bigtable, but it does allow various forms of data transformation, filtering based on arbitrary expressions, and summarization via a variety of operators.

Hmmm….this is interesting. Drop some data in to BigTable, tie it to a Sawzall script you’ve created — how to get the results back, if Sawzall can’t write _into_ BigTable? Have to figure that one out.

For a computationally intensive product like the one I’m developing, this is very attractive. And I don’t have to switch platforms like I would to get cloud processing done in Amazon’s EC2. I want to find out more about Sawzall.

I say “killer” only because if Google gets in, it’s going to be good. BigTable, an internal Google database product that they use to support their fast read/writes on petabytes of data (yes, peta-), is going to be released as a consumer offering in the same mode as Amazon’s SimpleDB. See the TechCrunch writeup here.

Good news for web startups? Certainly. Good news for Amazon? Probably, only insofar as a new industry – cloud computing – will support lots of competitors, and Google getting in only further validates the concept (as if it needed validating to begin with).

If Google can make it as easy to use as their other consumer offerings, like Maps, then we’re all in for a treat.