Nirmalya's Blog » Google

No Published Date On Your Content? You Got Problems, BIG Problems

nirmalya.ghosh — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:23:02 +0000

[Via IHT] Last week, US$1 billion was wiped out of the market value of UAL (United Airlines’ parent company) within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. The stock plunge was instigated by a series of cascading human and machine errors; and all because the date of the original article was wrong!

Free Mobile Phones!

nirmalya.ghosh — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:30:54 +0000

[Via ITVibe] Google might one day (soon?) start giving away mobile phones for free to users who will accept advertisements being displayed on their phone.

The concept of advertisements being “pushed” (sent) to the mobile phone is nothing new. By now, surely we have all have received atleast a few unsolicited advertisement/promotional SMS being sent to our mobile phones.

So far such type of “push” advertisements have been mostly SMS/MMS-based. I know of a “free SMS” provider in South Africa, called ‘Yo!SMS‘, which makes money by giving out “free SMS” but appending every message with an Ad (not sure if it is contextual, but it would be fair to guess it is).

So, it would be interesting to see how Google’s version of mobile phone-based advertising turns out.

More..

Some Interesting Facts About Google

nirmalya.ghosh — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 20:54:20 +0000

A couple of nights ago, Alan Williamson, (amongst other things, a Java guru) was invited to attend a lecture by Marissa Mayer (a Product Manager for Google). He later blogged about several interesting facts that came up during the presentation. Here are a few interesting ones:

..The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML..

Now, that is something very very hard to believe, considering that Google’s founders, Larry Page And Sergey Brin, were both PhD candidates in Stanford University’s Computer Science Department!

..Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public..

..The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’..

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros [1].

..Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects..

I remember reading that somewhere before [here].

..One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic..

Not surprising at all considering that their spell check feature is able to check 595 different misspellings for the search keywords “britney spears” [2].

..”I feel lucky” is nearly never used..

not quite true. Atleast not for the multitude of Google bombs [3]. Try going to Google and typing “Miserable failure” and then clicking on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. You’ll reach the Biography of President George W. Bush [4,5].

..Google has the largest network of translators in the world..

and growing.. (one can sign up to volunteer as a Google translator, here).. no wonder Google is available in 109 different languages as of now [6].

. .The complete list of interesting facts about Google (as compiled by Alan Williamson) can be found here.

Another interesting read is an interview with Marissa Mayer in October 2002 [Link]

Google Billboard

nirmalya.ghosh — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:06:57 +0000

Google’s hiring.. as always..

The Ad basically asks you to solve the problem to get the URL, which has an even harder problem to solve.
SMART way of recruiting SMART pple!

See here for details.
[Gerður, if you're reading this, I guess you know where your next destination might be ]

Update: [24-Sep-2004]
A solution to move on to the second level of the problem has been around for some time! For those interested, check out http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=160966 for details

And now for some trivia.. Earlier this evening, I came across an interesting site (www.googlism.com). Quoting their site,
“Googlism.com will find out what Google.com thinks of you, your friends or anything!“Give it a try.Here’s what Google thinks about me!

- nirmalya is using in his office automation project
- nirmalya is carrying on research work on dhrupad
- nirmalya is also a veteran of hatha yoga and is licensed instructor from the international yoga temple of calcutta
- nirmalya is a very special person
- nirmalya is a servant in the women’s quarters in one of the homes sometimes used by the emperor babur
- nirmalya is removed there is a five fold service to the image
- nirmalya is passionate about marketing and willing to espouse controversial positions

None of this true! I guess Google will start to like me a bit more once it gets to know me more.. Oh well this is fun anyways