Making Better Use Of The Social Web

Go to Google, or Ask, or Yahoo!

Search for something – anything – subject doesn’t matter.

Scroll half way down the results page and click on any link; link doesn’t matter, scrolling does.

Then hit the back arrow in your browser.

What do you see?

Yep, you are back at the results page – but - the page is positioned where you left it.

Now try the same thing in Live – and whaddayaknow?

You are back at the top of your results page.

While this may not be a big deal for many people, those of us who use the Internet daily find it really, um, trying.

Speaking of trying – one more thing,

Researchers tend to split their screens in half; web browser on one side, word processing on the other. 

Most web sites scale well. When they are minimized, all the relevant information is displayed.

Out of these four sites, take a guess at which doesn’t scale well?

Live Blog

Ask Blog

Google Webmasters Blog

Yahoo! blog

Thought for the day: Does everyone miss Billy, or is it just me?

If you can understand this, there is a good chance you will want to read the American Mathematical Society’s feature article “ How Google finds your Needle in the Web’s Haystack” The article describes Google’s PageRank algorithm and how it returns pages from the Web’s collection of 25 billion documents. According to David Austin from Grand Valley State University, the trick is to ask the Web itself to rank the importance of pages. I wish you luck!

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine is a paper written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while at Stanford that introduces Google: “A prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.”

Pretty cool to see what they were thinking–way back when…..

Thanks to Ionut Alex. Chitu at Google Operating System for hunting this down.

Intimate details on the Google YouTube deal according to Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick.

Rumor and speculation? - or not?

Check it out here.

 As part of their commitment to help improve education, Google has just launched “ Google for Educators“, featuring a suite of Google products with ideas on how they can best help teachers. They are also working with WestEd to set up the “ GoogleTeacherAcademy“, a one-day event at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. At the end of the session, participants will become “ Google Certified Teachers.”

The first Google Teacher Academy is on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, but as they are still taking baby steps, it is only open to Northern California educators of K-12. This includes teachers, administrators, and tutors. The event is free. If you are interested, you need to answer two questions (50 words or less) as well as create a one-minute video. See here. Applications must be submitted using Google’s online form and are due Oct. 22, 2006.