Bill Gates, has declared an open war with Google, because Bill wants to snatch the top spot in “search engine” from Google.

This is interesting as competitions are heating up in the domain of “search engine”. I think that the dominance of Google will wane over time, as Microsoft will close the gap with Google, as they are developing their own state-of-the-art search algorithm capability to beat Google.

This competition between vendors will benefit consumers, as price for placed advertisement will come down.

Anyone who wouldn’t think that Bill Gates can beat Google over the coming years, just read about this research paper (see link below) from Microsoft where they have extended the original ‘PageRank’ algorithm or PR for short, that was invented by founders of Google (Page & Brin), which is the workhorse of Google search engine. This extension of ‘PageRank’ by Microsoft, which they called ‘Block Level PageRank’ or BLPR for short, has shown to outperform the current Google’s ‘PageRank’ in terms of document retrieval “precision”. Document retrieval “precision”, is defined as the proportion of retrieved and relevant documents to all the documents retrieved. Eg, if there are 20 documents retrieved for a search query and only 15 of them are relevant to the query topic, then the precision is 15/20 or 75% precision.

Go to page 6 of the document (see link below) and check out ‘Figure 3′ and ‘Figure 4′ , which shows that Microsoft BLPR algorithm (Block Level PageRank) has higher precision and is superior to Google’s PR (PageRank). The result shown in the paper is verifiable by any software developer who can check out the performance & precision of the algorithms described in the paper. BUT, what about the more advanced version of the algorithm that Microsoft didn’t publish? OK, just extrapolate it forward, if their published algorithm that is shown to beat Google’s ‘PageRank’ in terms of precision, we can all infer that they have a more superior version that is internal to their product development which is superior to their own publicly available algorithm (Block Level PageRank). This PDF paper is freely downloadable below.

“Block-level Link Analysis”
ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-50.pdf

Google paid 1.2% of its market cap for Youtube and its stock rose 2% yesterday. Nice Huh.

of course she does haev here own site and her own video stream (the vent) but nothing seems to stop her moaning.

“Hey, you want less government intrusion into your business? Why not move your operations to NZ? Bring your Head Office and everything. We have no Department of Homeland Security to hassle you for search data.”

But there’s no way that could happen, because we just don’t have the capacity to deal with that sort of scale. Can you see 200 terabytes of data working through NZ’s internet plumbing daily?

There is a possibility that someone in NZ thought of the YouTube idea first, but lacked the resources to give it a blat. NZ is left with rare examples of low-bandwidth goldmines such as TradeMe to work with. Or Ferrit.

Oh yeah, this is DPF’s blog… sorry I spoke!

Or Datafarm?

Quote of the day on this -

‘Google,my favourite near monopoly’

Its gotta be a good thing. Right?

42 Below also wasnt purchased based on its current income stream. That company was formed to do exactly what it did, build a brand. And the brand it built is top shelf. The brand is an intangible asset, but can often be worth more than the rest of the company.

Bit like 42 Below too.