14 Mar 2003

Fri, 14 Mar 2003

Google Has Growing Pains

This is not a condemnation of Google, but rather just an investigation of empirical evidence coming out of Google's search product. Bryan reports that he's experienced some google errors. Transient errors are nothing new on the web, but Google has been incredibly stable to this point.

It gets worse. I noticed Google referring some traffic to my site this morning via a simple search, vb mono linux. At the time of this screenshot my article is the #1 entry for this particular search.

This raises two interesting issues: 1) How or why is my site ranked above the mono site itself in Google's ranking algorithm? 2) Notice the URL of my article:

http://davidwatson.org/archives/000746.html

That's the wrong URL.

If you visit the site, www.davidwatson.org redirects to davidwatson.org:8086 and that article is linked as

http://www.davidwatson.org/archives/000746.html

in every instance that I can find.

Google's parser handles this correctly for the vast majority of links, including a simple search on david watson. However, there appears to be a bug in the parse of this particular link, because that link never occurs without the trip dub prefix or the 8086 port on my site. I'll report this bug to google later today.

The timing of all this is interesting given that Bryan and I are going to see Marissa Mayer speak at CMU next week. Hmm...

Update: Russell Beattie weighs in on a similar subject here.

Posted at: 11:30 | permalink

NESBA at BeaveRun

I just registered for the free NESBA introductory course at BeaveRun. This is a great deal. I get to attend the beginner classroom training and have a couple 15 minute runs around the track for free. I'm excited. The track looks like a lot of fun and maybe I'll learn something.

To NESBA's credit, the entire registration is online, as it should be. That's more than I can say for the MSF course. I've gotten a busy signal everytime I've tried to call and register. People would be a lot safer if they could actually register for the course successfully.

Posted at: 00:12 | permalink