Google Search for Dummies

I just picked up the first book that has been published about Google: Google Hacks by Tara Calishain, the editor of Researchbuzz. She did an amazing job in summarizing the undocumented functionality of Google. Most of the tips are very advanced, especially the API functionality. The book is almost a manual for the Google API. Well, after all O’Reilly is a tech book publisher ….

I was amazed to see that there are hardly any books about Google on Amazon. One would think that a site with such a huge audience would get some more attention form publishers. In contrast, there are almost 50 books available for Ebay (on Amazon). Maybe I am missing something, but if I were a publisher, I would be on a mission right now to get a book out the door as soon as possible. But then … Google is kinda easy to use, right? Maybe it is so easy that a ‘manual’ is not needed an no one would buy it anyway…. I don’t think so! Google just launched a page with ‘Google Expert Search Tips’ and there is the ‘Google Advanced Search’ page. But did you know that you can a ‘Google Date Range Search’? See, there is plenty of cool stuff to write a book about.

Well, in any case, I would buy a ‘Google Missing Manual’ or ‘Google Search for Dummies’ - if for nothing else, just to have a piece of Google in my bookshelf :-) .

I remember how excited I was when Altavista’s first book was published in 1996 (the 2nd edition is still available for $1.50). Can someone please write a book about Google search, I promise to be the first customer.

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I just saw this picture on c:\pirillo.exe of Larry Page taking a first look at ‘Google Hacks’.

March 29, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |  

#1 in Google

I was pretty excited three days ago when I posted about being indexed by Google. Well, that seems like old news. I jut got an alert that on a search for my name (Thomas Korte) on Google, I actually come up first now!

This is exactly 10 days after I posted for the first time. Being close to Google, I sometimes forget why people love it so much. I am truly blown away. How did the Googlebot find my site so quickly, decide to put it in the daily crawl and update the ranking within a day?

There is just one downside to all of this. I never intended to post every day, but now that I am in the daily crawl, I feel like having to post something to not be dropped again.

March 20, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |  

conferencenotes.org - collaborative note taking

One of the best sessions I attended at SxSW was Justin Hall’s “Geek Out” session. In the session, anyone could sign up to presenta site or just share an idea. One of the presenters was a guy (sorry I forgot the name) from www.sxswblog.com: The ideas is very basic, but yet VERY powerful. We all go to conferences - some more interesting than others - and we all take our notes in the sessions and panels. SxSW has created a blog for anyone to post their notes on the site.

Big deal, right ….

… but wait, imagine you can go back and read other peoples notes, imagine you can real last years comments, imagine you can do that for ALL conferences …

I got very excited in the session and grabbed Simon’s laptop to search for a domain that would adequately represent such an idea:
sessionnotes.com — taken.
conferencenotes.com — taken.
… but conferencenotes.org is available :-)
.org is better anyway, this is not supposed to be for profit. It is collaborative note taking of conferences people attend. Maybe it even has a speakers center, so that the next time you are asked for a bio because you are speaking somewhere, you can just say “You can go to conferencenotes.org/yourname for my bio and the latest presentations I gave, btw you can also read peoples notes about my talk”. Now, how cool would that be?

Here is the only problem:
I have a job and no time to get this up and running.
Is anyone interested in working on this?

## Call for ideas ##

What should we do with this idea and the domain (which only cost me $7.79). Please post in the comments what you think about this and if you would like to help getting it up and running, but also participate once it is up.

March 19, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |  

Google loves Blogs!

This is amazing! I started this Blog exactly a week ago. One week ago this URL was not indexed by Google - on a search for my full name “Thomas Korte”, I could not find anything about myself.
On Sunday (the day before I started posting) Simon linked to www.thomaskorte.com in this post. The very posting that inspired me to finally bring my site online. After some interesting conversations about peoples ego in regards to their ranking in Google (I will post my ideas about the ‘Google EgoRank ?’ later this week), I searched for my name again on the weekend. I was truly blown away to see my site in rank 5 on Google. Not because I like being in Google, but because Google found my site within days and put it in the daily index (see the date next to the snippet - that indicates a more frequent indexing). Google is truly amazing, it really likes blogs - and I don’t even use blogger ;-)
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I just found Mike Gerhard’s post about Google loves blogs. Funny that we had the same thought, just a bit over a month apart!

March 17, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |  

Great Thai Take-Out on Divisadero St.

Note to myself:

This Thai Delivery is absolutely fantastic and fast.

March 15, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |  

This is the beginning! or is it the end?

I have followed the blogging phenomena for several years now ? always resisting to the temptation (not really) of telling the world about my thoughts.
I guess I never felt that it was important. This past weekend I went to Austin, TX to the South by Southwest Festival and Conference (SXSW), together with David Galbraith, Simon Perry, and my brother Alexander Korte.

At 11 am Simon was hacking away on his laptop writing about SxSW and he asked me for my URL *&%*&^@@ to add the link to a post — well, I did register my name Thomas Korte (http://www.thomaskorte.com) a long time ago, I even installed MT, but never saw a reason to post, write, publish or share my thoughts! Up until that very moment where I realized that a personal site, some kind of information about me on the web, is part of a new asymetric way of communication.

How long did you resist to a cell-phone or to an email address?
Well - I had a revelation that Blogs, or other personal information snippets published online, are going to be as important as a phone or an email address.
So here I am - resisting for over 3 years, reading other people’s blogs, and now doing the same.

Let’s see how often I write here …

March 10, 2003 | Filed Under Thoughts |