Google Programming Contest Winner

asqui writes "The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it."

Re:404 Page Not Found ?

[DrSkwid]

#

Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky, for their project, Robust Hyperlinks. Traditional hyperlinks are very brittle, in that they are useless if the page later moves to a different URL. This project improves upon traditional hyperlinks by creating a signature of the target page, selecting a set of very rare words that uniquely identify the page, and relying on a search engine query for those rare words to find the page in the future. For example, the Google programming contest can be found using this link.

Re:About the "Former Microsoft Employee" bit..

[GT_Alias]

Christ, give it a break. I know there's an anti-anti-Microsoft backlash here, but for fuck's sake all he did was mention the previous employer with absolutely NO bias or connotations. If the guy had been employed at XYZ University, I'm sure it would have still shown up.

Re:404 Page Not Found ?

[LinuxHam]

Shouldn't Google automatically check results

I would much prefer to see them improve the ease of browsing their cache. Specifically, if a cached site is 404, then present a cached version of the site where all clicks within the site simply link to the cached version, unlike today where all clicks are native (and therefore lead to more 404's). Granted that wouldn't be of any use for links to dynamic pages, but anything is better than what they have today.

Re:more details

[Matey-O]

There's code available now that does this for zipcodes. see http://www.zipmath.com/ (And using Mapquest as the black box, street addresses too.) Tieing it into google is a nifty bit o kit tho'.

Re:Service already exists

[MullerMn]

The difference is that the service you're thinking of probably works from a pre-specified list of locations for the businesses it covers.

The cool thing about the winning google entry is that it actually deduces the location of the search result by finding and parsing any address information that appears on the site!

I think that's pretty clever. - Does anyone know if it's limited to the US?

--
Andy

Re:more details

[Lars T.]

Sounds like this improvement isn't much use outside the US.

Smooth Move Google

[Uttles]

Did you all read the honorable mentions? Google stands to make some good money off of the ideas and implementations these folks have come up with. I'm assuming that all entries now are owned by Google, and man they might have some really cool new features after seeing the projects that were submitted. I only hope that they give at least some royalties to the developers.