Posted in Uncategorized at 12:03 am by David Kellogg
Grace Hopper sat in the back of my head for years. I remember someone from long ago telling a crowd that everyone could receive a nanosecond of wire. The wire is about a foot long. Then she brought out a millisecond. That was impressive. Ms. Hopper held a resume of impossibilities. She was a college professor who joined the Navy at age 37, wrote the manual for the Mark I, became the mother of COBOL and all programming languages, became a Rear Admiral and DEC scientist. I found her again on David Letterman’s show in the early Eighties.
In the old days of physics grad school, Terry and I would hang out at TIS and talk about books. The conversation would go like this.
Terry: Did you ever buy one of those Dover books? Me: No. It’s like looking at a subject like solid state physics from the eyes of the ’60s. They never revised the thing. Terry: Well if you ever find extra change in your car seat and you want all of the equations in one place, you can blow $9.95 on the Dover version.
Dover is a publishing house that sells Pulp Physics and Pulp Linear Algebra. The paper and the printing are sub-pron, and they seem never to revise their books. We grad students never stooped to the Dover level, and would rather pay $200 for a real book.
My life came full circle as this ex-physicist who sold all of his physics and math texts suddenly found a need for linear algebra. Ironically, now that I make several times my stipend, I hunted for the cheapest linear algebra that could explain what I once knew. I came across this one,
Matrices and Transformations by Anthony Pettofrezzo. I blew all of 7 bucks on the thing. It’s my first Dover book. And it’s a good one. I’m inverting matrices like a high school genius. Eigenvectors are my gimp. Now, if only I can get back to my grad-school form.
It looks like Powerset was sold to Microsoft for $100 million. Such acquisitions remind me of all of the crazy buyouts by Yahoo. When Google spent its money on cool loss-leaders, such as Youtube, Yahoo scrambled to find basic technologies to make the company work. This is an admission that Live search is so bad that it views the poor offering by Powerset to be good technology. The worst part of this deal is that Live search is not that bad, but it shows very poor judgment to reach for straws like this.
A recent set of searches confirmed what I already believed, that the technology is not worth much. I searched for myself. I was not on the list. In fact, there is a strange inverse long-tail effect. All I saw was Inspector Gadget and sometimes Playboy video director David Kellogg. Not that I have anything against the film maker, but the average American probably *meant* the director, and that’s all you get. Goodbye long tail, hello average meaning. Then there’s usability.
Clicking on one of the down arrows gives me an infinite swirling Web 2.0 wait signal. It never stopped. Clicking on another down arrow gives me a strange window that can almost be scrolled, but only slowly. It shows you where in a theoretical page layout without pictures where the text might be found if the source page had no pictures. I know they mean to show thumbnails, but they’re not. They are semantically similar. That’s very clever.
The site is slow. Perhaps it’s the Ruby on Rails. The usual search took 4 seconds. You could do 16 Google queries by then.
I tried the query, “manamana muppet video with subtitles in swedish”. Yahoo, Live and Google all showed me the correct video as the first result. Yes, the subtitles were in Swedish. Powerset showed no results. The least this company could do is download and index filler just in case. A helpful link asked, “Did you mean monomania muppet video with subtitles in swedish?” Clicking on this link also gave zero results. There’s just no winning with these people. I thought, maybe a small company like Powserset just does not have the resources. I tried Searchme, and it also gave me the correct result. Ask had the correct result. I think what we have here is the worst web search engine anyone can currently use.
