aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Death of Hardware
Why buy computers when you can rent them from Amazon, EMC or Yahoo? Has Jeff Bezos got a bargain for you.
Like everyone else, the executives at gossipy real estate Web site Zillow have been anxiously watching housing prices collapse. Hoping to spice up its offerings to a discouraged consumer, Zillow recently recalculated the values on 67 million homes over a 12-year period, a database of figures that took up 4 terabytes of memory. The company figured it would need six months and millions of dollars to make it happen. Instead, Zillow ran the job over the Internet, on 500 computer servers rented from Amazon.com. It took only three weeks and cost less than $50,000.
“This is a computer-development playground,” says Spencer Rascoff, chief financial officer of 165-employee Zillow.
The next revolution in high tech is taking place inside the “cloud” of the Internet. Small outfits looking to do lots of computing in a hurry are not buying hardware anymore; they’re renting from established players that already operate vast networks of cheap computers. Time-sharing, a concept from the dawn of the computing age, is back with a vengeance
TELEPORTING: InLine search in Google results
Has anyone seen this before?
Search within search. Pretty cool feature. Anyone know how to add this?
I’ve noticed it but, in my haste, often fail to use it. One of Cory’s commenters points to Google’s explantaion of how it works:
Have you ever forgotten the exact address of a site that you wanted to visit? [SEE ALSO 1/30/07 Google the new http://] Not a problem - just type the name of the site into the Google search box and hopefully it appears at the top of the search results page.
We call this “teleporting”, and we’re pleased that we have been able to minimize the need to remember an alphabet soup of .coms, .nets, and .orgs out of everyone’s lives. However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site. [...]
Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.
Ues it! It’s a very handy, very quick, very cool search tool!
