Cuil vs. Google (#1)

Whilst Google were working on the new internet encyclopedia Knol to counter the leader - Wikipedia, a different company were working on a new search engine and website Cuil to counter the leadership of Google in that area. Were Google blind-sided? Maybe, but as you will see, Google does not yet have a real rival in the search engine territory.

So what is Cuil?

Cuil is a new search engine that challenges Google at the operation level - the number of hardware needed to keep the engine alive is much less than the enormous power needed for Google. But does that interest the user searching for something - probably not. The user is interested in finding what he was looking for, as high in the results as possible. I made some tests to see how good is the new engine, you can review the results below.

User interface differences

Cuil does have a few UI (user interface) differences:

1) The homepage is somewhat of the opposite to the white-empty Google page

2) The results are shown in a few columns, as opposed to the list view of Google

The results

1) I tried to search my own name - I know it can be looked at some kind of an ego trip but actually it's a very valid test. As you can see below, Cuil does not know me at all!! Very sad indeed.

2) I tried to see what I get when searching for "Hapoel Tel Aviv" (my home soccer team). The Google matching was right to the point, whereas the Cuil results were not so good.

All in all, it is 1:0 to the Google.

Knol vs. Wikipedia (#3)

Apparently I am not the only one making comparison tests between the two (not that I thought I was). TheMarker's Captain Digital himself has done his own testing and arrived to the same conclusion as I did – Wikipedia wins, at least for now.

By the way, the two articles that are the same in both websites is not because they were written by the same person (like the author of this article assumes) but because they were actually copied from Wikipedia to Knol (just like Israel's article was copied, twice).

Does this mean it's 2-0 for Wikipedia? Well yes. These tests were different from the tests I have done, which gives an additional advantage to the Wiki.

The full article (in hebrew) can be found here: http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/4100

Riddle 3 - a hint

A hint for the ants riddle - an ant has no name.
Think about it...

The Wikipedia Game

Speaking about Wikipedia, here is a video clip about a game you can play with it.
You can skip the first 20-25 seconds where the girl jumps around and go straight to the explanation about the game.
Basically it's something like the six degrees of seperation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation) - your goal is to get from one random article to another using only internal links of Wikipedia. It will be interesting if this can be done by up to 6 steps (following the six degrees argument).
I haven't tried this before, but it does look addictive.
Best of luck.

Knol vs. Wikipedia (#2)

Continuing the comparison between the two, here is a small test I ran today. After seeing huge differences between Knol's reaction to 'Genesis' (which apart from the rock band, is just the first bible book... ;-) and Wikipedia's massive information regarding the subject, I wanted to see how they deal with a subject such as 'Israel'.

I chose Israel, first because it is a country (my country) and should be well known by both giants. Secondly - it is an interesting subject because of its subjectivity. One of the problems in Wikipedia is that it should be impartial. A subject such as Israel is could create many conflicts between different people with different opinions and someone must decide how the article about such a subject will turn out, objectively as possible. In Knol, there is no problem with such a subject, since the entries are credited and you can judge an entry looking at its author.

The results:

In Wikipedia, the article about Israel has a lot of information, most of it hard facts. The article was edited and modified several times (you can see the evolution in the "discussion" page).

In Knol I found not less than 4 entries named Israel, and we are talking about a website that has just became public. This, I think, is one of the drawbacks of Knol. Since it is credited and one cannot edit an entry of another, you can simply add your own entry of the same subject, making it difficult to read everything and get the "true story". How many entries named Israel do you think are going to be in a few months - I guess a lot. Secondly - at least two of the entries were exactly the same - both copied from the article in Wikipedia. Well - that was predictable. Again his is somewhat problematic - anyone can take credit of an entry he copied from somewhere else, and even gain some profit from it by adding some ads. Doesn't sound so good, does it?

Summary:

Well, in this test Wikipedia took 1st place. I don't see how duplicated entries are better than the source, and come to think of it - who guarantees that a modification in the Israel article in Wikipedia will find it's rightful place in Knol?

1:0 to Wiki, still counting.

Knol vs. Wikipedia (#1)

Google has released recently (23rd July) a competitor to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) called Knol (http://knol.google.com/). I think it will be interesting to follow up on the competition between the two, both aiming to "rule over knowledge of man kind".

I'll begin my comparison between them with a few dry facts. I will let you be the judges (I will write my opinion at a later post)

Is it free?

• Wikipedia is free and ad-free. There is no intent to gain financial profit from this project.



• Knol is free but not ad-free. The main incentive to write in Knol is that you might get money from your published work by adding ads.

Anonymous vs. credit

• You can write anonymously in Wikipedia. The articles themselves are anonymous/credit less.



• I am not sure you can write anonymously in knol - it does ask for your user name when you try to create a new article. The articles themselves are with credits - you can see exactly who wrote them. This is part of the idea of being able to get some profit out of this.

Editing articles

• In Wikipedia, anyone can edit an existing article, fixing any mistakes or enhancing any part.



• Knol does not let you edit work that you have not published yourself.

For now I will leave you with an interesting comparison between both knowledge bases on the word "genesis". I know it is not a fair comparison, since knol was just released, but it is still a bit amusing to see the difference:

Trading places

No - this is not a post on the very funny film by John Landis (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465/).

The article at the bottom talks about people going abroad, that instead of paying for a room in some hotel, they switch their apartment with some people going the opposite direction. This is a very interesting concept. The most obvious reason is that this can reduce the budget of a trip abroad by some very large extent – the example given in the article is that an ordinary hotel room in NYC costs about 250 dollars for a couple. A 10 day vacation in the big apple living in someone else's apartment means about 2500 dollars savings. Moreover, an apartment is usually located in a less touristic, more interesting location, and may have better accommodations, a laundry machine, a bigger TV and so on and so forth…

The table above shows some of the more popular sites that allow people to find a switching partner.

How do you find an apartment to switch with? The Internet makes this very easy. There are several websites offering a service of connecting two people to switch their home for a limited time. This looks like a great solution for someone that cannot afford hotel prices or just prefers to feel at home even when he is away.

This is an example of a post in CraigsList.com asking for a switch between Berlin and Tel-Aviv (how I wish I had heard about this a month ago - Berlin was lovely, but I am sure a german apartment, for free, would have been a much more interesting surrounding than the nice but ordinary hotel room we took):

But what are the chances of me, finding someone from New York, who wants to be in Israel, or better yet, in Hertzelya for the exact time that I want to have my vacation in Manhattan? Does this mean I need to wait for a miracle in which someone chooses my apartment to spend his vacation in and then fly away to wherever he is coming from?

Manhattan sky line - is there anyone in the picture that wants to be my house switch partner?

What do you think about another option – instead of switching places between two people, why not have a circular transition? I will go to New York, the woman from NY will visit Rome, the Italian guy will have a nice apartment in Brazil, and Ronaldinio junior will stay at my place? This cannot be done manually of course, but a simple enough algorithm can try to give everyone the vacation they are dreaming about without going bankrupt.

The original article (in hebrew) can be found here: http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20080723_1004603&origin=ibo&strToSearch=%E3%E9%F8%E4%2C%EC%E4%E7%EC%E9%F3

ביטחון עצמי נמוך

,שיחקתי אתמול סקווש עם חבר. האמת היא ששיחקתי לא משהו והפסדתי ברוב, אם לא כל, המשחקונים אתמול. בדרך לברזייה בהפסקת התאוששות אחת, שמתי לב למשהו מוזר בלוח מודעות הסקווש

מודעה אחת תפסה את תשומת ליבי, היה בה משהו לא שייך

התקרבתי עוד קצת וגיליתי מה הפריע לי

הבטתי במודעה וחשבתי לעצמי - למי יש ביטחון עצמי כל כך נמוך שהוא שם מודעה בלוח סקווש, לא אכפת לו איזה מין ייכנס לו למיטה ועוד מצהיר על עצמו כרמה בינונית? שאלה אולי יותר גדולה - האם מישהו/י נענה

:-)

Murphy's law

Here is a nice post about the annoying fact that our first attempt to insert a USB will always fail.
http://mobilespoon.blogspot.com/2008/07/murphys-low-first-attempt-to-plug-your.html

Riddle 3 - ants everywhere

It's time for a new riddle, but first let's take care of the last one (http://omer-behindthelines.blogspot.com/2008/07/riddle-2-grand-slam.html).

The key to this riddle is the fact that after each game exactly one player leaves the tournament. Since we must have a single player that is left in the tournament and wins it, all the other players must lose, each one in a different game. Therefore, if we have 8192 players, it will take 8191 games to lose all but one players. As you can see, the math needed here was very very simple, as opposed to adding up the number of games in each round...

Riddle 3

In this riddle we have a stick. This stick is exactly 1 meter long. It is a known fact that an ant walks on this stick at exactly a speed of 1 meter per minute. It is also known that once an ant starts to walk in a given direction (left or right) it will continue to do so until she drops of the stick or until she meets another ant.

So far we can say that if we drop one ant on the stick, no matter where we drop it and to what direction, the ant will fall from the stick after 1 minute or less.

In the case of an ant meeting an ant, each one jumps around to the opposite direction and continues to walk (see diagram below). This meeting and jumping does not take anytime what so ever.

The question is, if we drop 1000 ants on the stick and each ant randomly picks a direction from its random dropping point, how much time (maximal) do we need to enable all the ants to fall off?

P.S. again - this is a logic question and there is no need to get into complicated math.

Themeless blog?

I have been asked what's the theme of my blog. Obviously every blog must have a theme. But to tell the truth, I don't know yet what's my theme. You could say that this blog is currently "themeless". But is that so bad?

Having a themeless blog might be interesting since you can never know what will be the idea of the next post. A blog about finance will never show you a cool website that was just found. A blog about cool mobile stuff will not talk about an interesting article discussing reading habbits. This blog can do both and more.

So may be this is not too bad. I do think that most of the posts here will talk about articles, websites, news and stuff as such. There will be a riddle here and there (anyone knows the answer of riddle #2?) and I'll probably continue to write about personal stuff. Hope that's enough to make you come back and read some more, at least for the time being...

P.S. If you think I should focus on something in particular - please let me know. I really appreciate your opinion.

Reinforcement to Maccabi?

Watch this dog - I think he is the missing piece to Maccabi's dream team...


Isn't he great?!

Read this - it will be worth your while...

"Haaretz" (http://www.haaretz.co.il/) had an interesting article this weekend about the effects of reading. The article talked about an Israeli research that is being held for the past 18 years on elderly people and their habits. One of the interesting conclusions they had from this research is that the more the person reads, the less likely he would die!
The results showed that the group of people that did not read or read rarely had a much higher death percentage (39%) than the group of people that were regular readers (17%). Interestingly enough, the effects of reading shown by these results affect men only.




My conclusions are:

1. If you read till this line, I probably saved you at least a week or so...
2. You must continue and read my blog - your life depends on it...

The full article can be found here (http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1003340.html)

Jonny's second birthday!

Mazal Tov!
My son Jonathan (nick named Yontush in hebrew and Jonny in English) celebrated his second birthday yesterday. If you haven't guessed yet, the good looking guy in the blog's home page is Jonny.We had a very nice time yesterday, starting off with a celebration in his kinder garten and ending with a family party at our place.

We had a nice idea (well at least I think it's nice) to put a white board outside our appartement with congratulating Jonny and asking everyone to participate and write or draw their own greetings. The whole family participated as well as a few neighbours and here is the result:

I hope we remember to show Jonny when he is older the photos of this nice gesture...Jonny himself was a bit overwhelmed - he did not volunteer to do anything except try and blow out the candles. But he did like his great gifts. I must say that I didn't think it is going to affect me so much, but a son's birthday is a very exciting experience - after all, he is a year older...

Riddle 2 - Grand slam

Well it's time for our second riddle. Before we go into detail, let's review our last riddle (
The question is how many matches do you need to hold in a grand slam, to declare the winner, when the number of starting players is 8192? To answer this question you don't need to use any advanced math and not even a calculator. The less math you use and the more logic you apply - the easier and faster the answer gets...

Show them to me!

Another nice video clip - listen to the lyrics and wait for the crowd to start responding...


Thanks Gilad!

What would you do with a million dollars?

Here is Matt's take on this very important question:

And I ask - why didn't he take a dance lesson or two :-)

Thanks to Arik for this great video clip!

P.S. If you were asking yourself - what about Matt's girlfriend? - Here is her behind the scenes (or sheets) story:

(Arik - thanks again!)

Slidex - youtube for the presentations

Everyone knows Youtube (http://www.youtube.com) - the place to look for videos. But do you know where do you need to look to find an interesting presentation about origami?

Slidex (http://www.slidex.co.il) is a rather new website (currently in Beta mode) that will let you share your presentations with others and enables you to find the presentation you were looking for. This can be a very powerful tool for anyone writing and working with Powerpoint.
Enjoy.

?פעמיים כי טוב או הישרדות

http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20080710_1000765&origin=ibo&strToSearch=bbdo

בכתבה זו יש סטטיסטיקה מעניינת על מנהגי האנשים בכל העולם וגם בישראל. פרט אחד מאד מעניין - 43 אחוז מהישראלים נוהגים לקיים יחסי מין בימי שלישי

עכשיו אני שואל את עצמי מה כל-כך מיוחד ביום שלישי (זאת כמובן בהנחה ש43 אחוז זה מספר גבוה ולא ממוצע, ובטח שלא נמוך). האם ייתכן שזה בגלל "פעמיים כי טוב"? או שמא זה בגלל שביום שלישי נהוג לשבץ תכניות כגון הישרדות (גם האמריקאי)? אולי בכלל זה בגלל שיום שלישי זה "יום אבא" - אצלי ואולי אצל עוד הרבה אנשים? אכן סוגיה מעניינת

Housing finance breakdown

http://ml-implode.com/
This website counts the number of major US lending operations that have gone down since the financial breakdown. The current number is 266 and growing.
The owner of this site is probably one of the very few men that have gained something from the breakdown that has swept the whole world.

Themes in igoogle

Are you familiar with igoogle? http://www.google.com/ig Well it is a very nice tool to customize your own home page with whatever gadget and/or information you would like to have.

I started using it for RSS feeds from the blogs I read, for news and weather information and for other general stuff.

A nice new feature is the theme of igoogle, making it somewhat more enjoyable. I set the puppies theme, which shows me a different puppy each time I enter the site.

Aren't they adorable?

Riddle 1 - chess board

Let's say you have a normal chess board, like in the picture to the right. It is obvious that you can use domino tiles to fully cover the whole board, where each tile covers two squares of the chess board.

But what if I take down two squares - a8 and h1 (top-left and bottom-right)? Can the board still be fully covered with domino tiles (that do not co-exist on any square)? If so - give me your solution. If not - prove that it can't be done.

behind the lines

What's the idea behind the name of my blog you ask?
Well "behind the lines" is one of my favorite songs of my favorite band - Genesis.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Lines_%28Genesis_song%29

Last build

It's back; the week of the last build. Frenzy but quite, irritating but fulfilling.

Every four months or so, we, ClickSoftware R&D, publish a new release of Service Optimization. The last month of every release is a time of war – Engineering and QA battle out against the almighty bugs. We usually lose some fights and win others. The final battle is the week in which we must secure the last build. QA has the task of approving every single bug that was fixed for the release, making sure that no bug reappears suddenly. Engineering is supposedly out of the loop – looking into the next release and writing down trainings and documentation. But as we all know – something always goes wrong.

A bug in the last build week turning into a feature.

The week starts optimistic, stating that we are going to create the last build on the first day of the week, and spend the rest of it double checking. It usually takes about three to four hours when suddenly Olivier comes round and asks whether the "Internal Error" he just got is deliberate. Then there are the support calls that were opened two months ago, but just recently came across Engineering. A one minute look at the problem and Amit already knows that this is a bug that wasn't fixed yet, not even in the release we are trying to close. We are already three days into the week when an urgent meeting takes place to decide what to do with the importance 1 bug that was found by accident, when trying to call an SXP that has always worked (but never been used recently).

The only acceptable bugs during the week of the last build.

Thursday morning (I am reminding you that we are located in Israel and work from Sunday to Thursday) comes and last night's build has a great number – 3703. We must turn it into the last build and not ruin this no matter what! But then Lirit finds a problem in the documentation – stating that we round up the seconds instead of rounding down. A quick huddle in the corridor between Miriam and Lirit debating whether to fix the code or fix the documentation turns into a new bug, but at least it's a WORD bug that does not need to recompile and adjust the release number to 3704.

Lirit editing the documentation; if a bug is not a feature, then maybe it's just a documentation bug?

Thursday evening – it's all behind us. The release is already packaged and there is nothing we can do anymore. Just occasional temp fixes here and there…

Win-win

Who wants to lose? Nobody - that’s why a win-win resolution is so important. The same applies to the contradicting goals in the service chain. On one hand, every customer is important and we must make sure to handle as much requests as possible. On the other hand – we must not break the cost effectiveness of our operation – handling requests in a costly manner would have serious consequences. So how do we find the “golden path” – how can we have a win-win situation so that both our cost and the customer satisfaction are met? In the clip below you can see Michael Scott’s way of finding a win-win-win resolution.
Some may say – find a compromise: don’t handle tasks that are costly (for example). But is a compromise as good as a win-win? Surely it isn’t. A compromise will not give a reasonable solution since it does not make any side ‘happy’. In a compromise, all sides of the equation lose face – the goal is not met as it should be. As opposed to a compromise, a win-win resolution finds the way to obtain both sides’ goals, without losing face.
So how is this done? There are several known ways of how to obtain such a situation. You can find a systematic way in here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporating_Cloud . But let’s go back to our service chain. How do we find a win-win solution to the problem of handling cost effectiveness as well as customer satisfaction? Come to think of it, there are much more goals within the service optimization – how can we find this “golden path”? This is what the Optimizer is for. The Optimizer does not look for compromise. Instead it follows all the objectives of the service, making sure that none lose face. Only by rechecking again and again that all of the objectives are satisfied, do we find this hidden path, this win-win situation.