Google Programming Contest 636
AccordionGuy writes: "Google has just announced its first annual programming contest! The objective is to write a program that will do something "interesting" with the about 900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides. In addition to writing the program, contestants also have to convince the judges why their program is interesting (or useful) and why it will scale (that is, handle a constantly increasing load of data that grows as the Web grows). The prize is US$10,000 in cash, a V.I.P. tour of the Google facility in Mountain View, California and possibly a chance to run their program on Google's complete billion-Web-page store."
A program that deletes pages. (Score:4, Funny)
Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't go for $10k. Perhaps $100k, or perhaps $20k plus some percentage of future revenue attributable to my invention.
Got to hand it to them, though, it's an innovative way to receive hundreds of ideas and get a working prototype. Only one person wins but they probably retain the rights to develop their own code that accomplishes the ideas submitted by everyone else.
Basically, they want a cool idea for something innovative but their brainstorming sessions haven't come up with anything new...
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:4, Interesting)
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them. At the risk of sounding like a "me too" post - I still think that this would be something fun to be involved in if I had the creativity or the passion to persue something of this sort.
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, but if you read the submission requirements, you have to submit your source, a Makefile, and use only GPL or other open source libraries, so they've covered their butt there.
I hope anybody who does decide to participate in this contest realizes the implications of it. $10K is nothing for Google to pay to get ideas, source code, etc. Also note, in the submission requirements, any entry made to Google becomes their sole property. Christ, I can afford $10K, a tour of my house, allow somebody to run their prize winning code on the data on my computers if somebody's going to give me this kind of intellectual property. I really think that its a pretty raw deal for the developer.
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
They might get a good idea, but if you don't win the contest they don't really have much of a legal leg to take your idea, so you're pretty safe unless you're the winner, in which case you get $10k for hacking together a script that you never could have afforded to run anyways. (It's only concept they want, not the polished results of a 2-month dev process.)
It honestly sounds like a good deal to me. I hack for a night or two on a project that I find interesting. If I lose, no big deal. If I win I get 10k USD (3 months wages for me, I get paid in Canadian $s) and I'd be famous in exactly the circles who are looking to hire a coder with good ideas...
People go on about the value of ideas all the time, but really, without proper backing ideas are a dime a dozen. I've said many time "Hey, how about a
This is why patents on wide ideas are so damaging. Any idiot can have a good idea every now and then, but it takes more work (and funding unfortunately) to make them fly. If you let someone with an undeveloped idea block off a whole field it does a great disservice to the people with the ability to follow through, who likely had the idea independently.
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them.
Well, they *have* been running the best search engine on the web FOR FREE for the past 3 years. They don't clutter their main page with flashing X10 ads, or the the irritating news+sports+weather+financialnews+email combo that everybody seems to think people want. This might not be a bad way to give something back to the company that's saved us so much time and effort finding information.
And to the guys out there who wouldn't bother with this contest for less than $100K: if your idea is so good, go develop it yourself! Get a lawyer, and work out a deal with Google that suits you better.
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Pardon me for asking but... what are you doing developing, maintaining or otherwise promoting a system for not even free beer?
If a chance to provide usefull code for a worthy cause (google being still the best search engine out there and that still doesn't plaster your screen with pop-up adds), spend a couple of weeks on it and get paid 10K doesn't sound attractive, what would?
Good way to get a job at Google! (Score:3, Funny)
How about one... (Score:4, Funny)
I know what someone should make! (Score:4, Troll)
Oh, and the ability to find one non-fake Britney porn pic.
Re:I know what someone should make! (Score:3, Interesting)
You might have been kidding, but you've got a really good idea there.
How about semantic searching: equip Google with a database that organizes words in a relational hierarchy from the general to the specific. For example, "orange" is a more specific form of "fruit," and also a more specific form of "color."
When you search for "orange," Google might also have the ability to search for "fruit" and "color," depending on how broad you want your search to be.
Just a thought.
Re:I know what someone should make! (Score:3, Insightful)
Erik
Strange but true.. (Score:5, Funny)
fat misgets fucking
into google....
Google knew exactly what he meant....
Re:Strange but true.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Strange but true.. (Score:5, Funny)
I've had friends like that too.
The average color of the WWW (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideas?
Re:The average color of the WWW (Score:4, Funny)
Well this is strange (Score:3, Insightful)
Jus' being paranoid.
Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th..) (Score:2)
Hey Google! Why not make the agreement state that all entries go under the GPL?
Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Notice their contest agreement? (was Re:Well th (Score:2)
One thing I do wish was part of the rules was that if they used your code/algorithms, etc. that they notify you. After all, you may think your idea is great, but it would be a big endorsement if Google used it, even if you didn't win. If anyone in charge of this contest reads this, I'd urge doing that anyway--it would be a good cheap way to reward more talented programmers.
Re:Well this is strange (Score:4, Insightful)
Always think of the potential of hiring people with good ideas, rather then buying the ideas outright.
Geese and golden eggs, and all that.
This is brilliant (Score:2, Insightful)
Get hundreds of people to crank out code for you, pay a paltry sum to one of them, keep all the code. Pay $10K for millions of dollars in potential technology.
That's about the slickest thing I've ever seen. You have to admire them for their evil. Microsoft could learn a thing or ten from them.
Re:This is brilliant (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is brilliant (Score:3, Insightful)
What's evil about it? Smart maybe, but evil?
Anybody who would enter such a contest is primarily motivated by the challenge, I would think. Getting the $10K gives you bragging rights is all.
Sure, Google gets some value, but a lot of highly motivated programmers get a challenging problem.
If all good programmers were primarily motivated by money, there'd be no Linux, BSD, Apache, Emacs, Vim...
I reserve evil for things that actually hurt someone. This seems like a win-win to me.
Re:This is brilliant (Score:5, Funny)
Now that's evil!
Re:This is brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is brilliant (Score:4, Insightful)
Riiight... (Score:5, Insightful)
J.
Re:This is brilliant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is brilliant (Score:3, Insightful)
Usefulness? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, here's an idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Shayne
Re:Well, here's an idea.. (Score:4, Informative)
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor. I'm sure there are many tools out there that can do this rather quickly. If this were actually implemented by Google, so sites with bad HTML were ranked below all other sites, imagine how much cleaner the web would get!
Re:Well, here's an idea.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, here's an idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor.
That's not really what I had in mind... HTML errors are nowhere NEAR as annoying as pr0n sites that pop open ads all over the place, resize your browser, bookmark themselves, etc, etc. That's what I mean by annoyance, the kind of site that makes Joe Sixpack (as well as me) get upset when he gets stuck in a loop that for every window he closes two pop open. I'm more worried about discouraging sites from using bad behavior than I am encouraging them to use proper html. Of course, malformed html should ADD to the annoyance factor, but not be the only thing counted. That's my opinion anyway.
Shayne
What a coincedence! (Score:2, Interesting)
Just a thought...
Googlewhacking (Score:4, Informative)
Ingenius!
-Waldo Jaquith
Don't post them or they'll be Googlewhackwhacked (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... (Score:3)
Make sure we get a slashdot posting so a bunch of geeks with programming skills will enter.
The only thing I'd want is for google to stay just the way it is though, don't bloat. Great service, maybe I'm just pessimistic but sites rarely do everything well.
Kjella
Free Programming(or nearly free)... (Score:2, Insightful)
Some Inspiration (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this could be spammed, but as I said, a human could filter the results every day; besides, it would be hard to create a very large number of unique links from different servers pointing to a page. I'm sure Google is already doing some of this to prevent spamming their search-order algorithm anyway.
Re:Some Inspiration (Score:2, Informative)
have a sort of "Top 40 Links of the Day" page, regularly updated to include only new and unique stuff. You could use an
algorithm similar to the one used by
It's Called Google Zeitgeist.
It is at: [google.com]
Zeitgeist[Google.com]
Re:Some Inspiration (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool, but..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.
What then? You have no claim to a part of their profits. I guess that's just a part of competing to give your ideas to a company.
-mike
Re:Cool, but..... (Score:2)
Hey... it worked for Microsoft (Their 'Compression' contest)
Re:Cool, but..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.
If you're that good, they'll probably hire you to at least consult for them to maintain the code you wrote.
So basically... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.
Perhaps this is the evolution of a new buisness model... Either way, I don't really care as long as Google remains free, fast, and useful!
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Informative)
That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.
So basically, google doesn't own your code, only the right to use it. GPLing your code would satisfy the worldwide, perptual non-exclusive license grant.
Re:So basically... (Score:2)
Finding Programmers! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that's it!
According to this article [yahoo.com] Google is getting deluged by resumes, this is just a way for them to weed out the 600+ resumes they get a day.
The winner of this contest (and maybe a few of the runner ups) will most likely get a job offer as well. Beats having to weed through 4200 greatly exagerated CVs every week...
-Russ
The biggest Dictionary (Score:4, Interesting)
I know! (Score:2, Interesting)
Even Stupider: Not only easy, but it could allow google to create static result pages for common searches: it would just update the result page when the cache CRC changes.
map of the internet, using the internet... (Score:3, Interesting)
this would be just like those mosaic photos, only much nerdier. thinkgeek execs are drooling already....
How about a FPS game? (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the web, I allways though it would be cool to make a game based on the same concept, but use web pages instead of your hard drive directory.
I'm just throwing out ideas.
Re:How about a FPS game? (Score:2)
Google Press Release (Score:5, Funny)
Winner of the First annual Google Programming Contest creates greatest porn spider ever.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - December 11, 2001 - Google Inc., developer of the award-winning Google search engine, today announced it's first winner of the Annual Google Programming Contest. Winner I. C. Porno has created a program to help catalog and organize google cache of the Internet, also refered to as the World Wide Web of Porn.
"This announcement is an important step in Google's ongoing effort to provide search services that are fast, easy to use, and that help people find the information they need," said Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of Products. "To search our collection of 3 billion documents for porn by hand, it would take 5,707 years, searching twenty-four hours per day, at one minute per document. With I. C.'s new program, it takes less than a second."
World's Largest Collection of Porn
Google users now have the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of porn right at their fingertips and can immediately primal urges using the following services:
Google Web Porn Search: The company's newest search service now offers more than 2 billion documents - 25 percent of which are non-English language web pages. Google Web Search also offers users the ability to search for numerous non-HTML files such as PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel documents. Google's powerful and scalable technology searches this comprehensive set of information and delivers a list of relevant porno in less than half-a-second.
Google Porn Groups: This 20-year archive of Usenet porn conversations is the largest of its kind and can serve as a powerful reference tool, while offering more porno than the Internet. Google Groups was released from beta today with 700 million postings in more than 35,000 topical porno categories.
Google Image Search: Comprising more than 330 million nude images, Google Image Search enables users to quickly and easily find porn images relevant to a wide variety of topics, including pictures of celebrities and popular travel destinations. Advanced features include search by image size, format (JPEG and/or GIF), coloration, and the ability to restrict searches to specific genre's of porn.
About Google Inc.
With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. Google's technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards; two WIRED magazine Readers Raves Awards; Best Internet Innovation and Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech from TIME magazine; and Editor's Pick from CNET. A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, AOL/Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. More information about Google can be found on the Google site at http://www.google.com.
Re:Google Press Release (Score:2, Funny)
For all that Corel formatted porn out there...
Re:Google Press Release (Score:3, Funny)
one word (or maybe two): spellcheck (Score:4, Interesting)
anyway, someone there emailed me back basically saying it was an interesting idea, but not something on their agenda.
maybe someone out there can work up a scalable google spellchecker that i can run my big-ass database-driven website through (which is a major pain to spellcheck, considering the client simply refuses to do when they provide the content)
Create a gene sequencer (Score:2)
Restoring meta-tags (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is roughly to refuse to index sites which engage in keyword/description abuse.
Hmm.. (Score:2, Informative)
They want someone to develope a system and get paid less than $10k for it. Screw that.
What about a program to get rid of frontpage? (Score:3, Funny)
Go Google! Get rid of the fake HTML goons!
The entire internet on a floppy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The entire internet on a floppy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if using USENET is such a great idea. While there are some areas where it has a great signal to noise ratio and intelligent commentary, there are a ton of places where it's simply awful. It's loaded with misinformation, flameage, and proof of the correctness of Godwin's Law. I doubt that I'd be very excited about chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the USENET archives.
OTOH, you might be able to do some very clever work on using the page cache as a knowledge store for a chatbot. You'd just take the incoming message, try to find some keywords in it (probably using previous parts of the conversation to help) and use them to search Google for relevant information. Then you'd reformat the information you found into something like a conversational reply and send it.
Why not (Score:3, Funny)
jargon watcher (Score:5, Interesting)
Regular Expressions! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true that Emacs et al. support a richer language than what's offered by traditional regular expressions (as can be implemented on DFA or NFA) but that's because the languages are *not regular*. It has nothing to do with the distinction between DFA and NFA.
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Informative)
In general, it's not wise to learn about computer science from O'Reilly books!
The languages that can be expressed with NFA, DFA, and Regular are the same. I promise I know what I'm talking about; I've taught this material to undergraduates in fact. It might be the case that O'Reilly has a word for something in Perl or Python, and they call it "Nondeterministic Finite Automaton", but whatever that is, it isn't a real NFA. NFA also cannot capture back-references or counted sub-expressions; they are subject to the same shortcomings as DFA. But, it might be an abuse of the terminology "NFA", just as everyone calls the (non) regular expressions that perl uses "regular expressions". Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused... no big deal.
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or Slashdot, for that matter...
Spam page deleter (Score:3, Interesting)
six degrees of google-ation (Score:5, Interesting)
Free Labor - Tom Sawyer Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, how many contests have you seen on the back of a cereal box to "create a new slogan!" or "write an essay"? Just a cheap way to create some buzz and get your customers to write your advertising copy for you. Heck, the most blatant scams in memory are HBO's Project Greenlight (trolling for scripts - you don't even want to know what the Writers' Guild thought of this) and the Lego Film Contest [lego.com] (trolling for complete commercials).
Hardly new stuff. Remember Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer? There's a bit where he holds a "contest" to see which kid can whitewash the fence he's supposed to paint fastest. I'm sure that even as Twain wrote that bit, even he thought "I better be sure to give the fence painting thing a unique spin so it works. After all, it's an awfully old idea..."
Not exactly Free... (Score:2)
Bah to their definition of 'interesting'. (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally think it'd be coolest to turn it into an art project.. imagine you had a repository of the consciousness of an entire race and could run a script on it. Things like the map of the internet. Or the web collage [jwz.org]. Or use it to power some kind of AI chatterbot [google.com].
I dunno. Their webpage on it didn't seem to do much to promote being creative; they just want to pay someone 10k to develop a new way to make more relevent search results.
Useful or interesting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Examples of a few interesting non-useful things I can come up with just off the top of my head:
Google Poet: Generate rhyming poetry from randomly rhyming sentances on the webpages in the database.
Googlesaic: Input a picture and scavenge the webpages for pictures from which to create a large mosaic of the input picture.
Google Map: Create a picture/graph of all the website connections (links) in the webpage list, perhaps add 3d/naviations. Perhaps perform graph opererations and maybe find the longest path one can travel through the links and still stay within the Google search results/database.
These are just a few, I'm sure plenty of other people can find much more exciting/interesting things to do, but they won't always be useful to the google company.
Re:Useful or interesting = find person (Score:3, Insightful)
Search Engine Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a party game. The basic idea is that a bunch of people are in the game, and it goes around in turns. On your turn, you type in a few words to search for. The game goes and queries google for the first hit on that search, and sends everyone's browser to that page. Then the other players get 100 seconds to guess which words you searched for. The first player to guess correctly gets points for the amount of time remaining.
It's written using BYOND [byond.com], which you'll have to download if you want to play.
Yeah, But for 10K, Google owns it (Score:2, Informative)
If you are selected as a contest winner, you agree that Google may publicize your name, likeness, and the description of work you did to win the contest. Apart from the prizes associated with being selected as a winner, Google shall not be obligated to compensate you in any way for such publicity."
So in other words, google buys the next great thing for $10K. The only upside of the above is that it's a non-exclusive license which means you could go and sell it to a competing search engine too...
Of course, good luck finding a competing search engine
Why are you posting you ideas? (Score:2)
Re:Why are you posting you ideas? (Score:2)
Re:Why are you posting you ideas? (Score:2, Insightful)
Non-exclusive license (Score:2)
The LICENSE (Score:2)
JWZ Has the winner, and the runner up... (Score:5, Interesting)
Webcollage [jwz.org] -- slowly builds a random collage of images from the net.
DadaDodo [jwz.org] -- generates random sentences based on word probabilities in pages on the net.
My program (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious feature everyone would use (Score:3, Redundant)
57mb Download (Score:2, Interesting)
This many people with Cable/DSL downloading that file, and its not even slashdotted.
I havn't untared the file yet. But I wonder just how many people it takes to run google. How many are on staff? And how many work on the actual code that powers such a huge site?
How about... (Score:5, Funny)
Or has someone done that already?
Stamp out dead sites tool (Score:3, Insightful)
--John
I'm feeling really lucky (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe something like pressing I'm feeling lucky with no search string?
Haven't seen it yet
What about copyright? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the cost-savings involved in running such a contest, I expect the fact that they only have to pay $10,000 will be more than offset by the fact that they'll have to sort through a mountain of crappy submissions. That'll take a lot of people a lot of time.
Sort results by W3C standards conformance (Score:5, Interesting)
Then, maybe webmasters will stop doing IE-only pages.
Scrabble (Score:4, Funny)
I've got one:
Lets take all 900,000 pages, and look at the statistical distribution of the frequency of appearance of each letter of the alphabet. That way we could check to 10 decimal places that the letter values in scrabble are REALLY correct...
I wish I could code this (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope Google reads these pages and gets some free ideas from it. At least take mine! Please. God knows that I don't have the coding chops to do it myself. I sent this same idea to Allaire (remember them) a long time ago and I had a couple of software engineers write me back, but nothing ever came of it. My guess is that this is a hard problem.
I want a browser control/plugin/whatever that harnesses a backend of web information to make my surfing more productive/predictive.
The gist would be to have a hover option for links which would give you information about what is behind the link without having to actually follow it. While browsing, the user would just hover over an link in a page and information pertaining to the page beyond the link would show up in a hovering menu or a sidebar (this would be great with mozilla, but I could see an activex control as well).
The types of information is where it gets useful. Using some of the more advanced summarization algorithms out there, it would pull up the summaries of those pages if they were in the offsite database (Allaire, Google, and the WayBack Machine being possible backends). Based on your preferences a short, medium or long summary would be displayed. If it wasn't in the cache, it could be summarized on the fly and then presented after some delay (the new summary now being cached).
It would also list, in an orderly way and subject to preferences, links from the page on the other side. That way the user could follow one of those if it turns out that she only needed the summary and a link. It would also list the elements of the page, like graphics, and give their specs (i.e. dimensions and estimated download times and ALT tag entries if present) and give the option to display them on a page by page basis. All of this would be nested, of course, so that a user could hover over links in the summary pages and get the same information all over again for that link (which is why I see it more as a "sidebar" feature). Theoretically a user could just surf by these summaries if they wanted.
Now, I realize that this would pose some problems like trusting the summaries and so forth. However, the nice thing about it would be features that could be built into the user's preferences. For instance, you could make it so that the user could have certain words or phrases set that would then be scanned for during the summarization process. You could then either relax the amount of summary for the entire page or, better yet, still pull the cached summary but also pull a user-definable number of lines before and after their keywords (best of both worlds).
Each summary could also list a numeric rank of where that page fits in "status" (like google's ranking system) based on the summary (generically) or the keywords of the user (specifically). Finally, it could pay for itself with text advertising (small and innocuous like the ones seen on Google).
If you start to think about it for a while, there are all sorts of things you could do with this and it would help cut through the "padding" that you usually go through while looking for informaition on a certain subject. I think it would be great! It is kind of based on the idea of the "magic spyglass" that was heralded almost a decade ago, but never implemented in any OS that I know of.
Like I said, I can't code it, but I would love to see it done. So have at it if you think it is good. Google's cache of pages and images and its ranking technology make it perfectly suited for this type of problem and they have enough PHD's that the summarization issue should prove an "interesting" problem to solve.
Then again, it might suck. If you do implement it, let me know. I would love to beta-test it. I called the whole thing the Clairvoyant Browser Plugin... but you could use what you want.
Re:Can _you_ count? (Score:2, Informative)
This is what it reads:
Google is providing a selection of about 900,000 web pages in pre-parsed and raw format
That is what you get for the 57Mb or five cd's.
The billion-Web-page store is what your program might be ran on if it wins.
Re:Very good (Score:5, Insightful)
That's 10000/(8*40) = $31.25 per hour.
Annualized that would be a salary of $65,000.
Even in IT, that's nothing to sneeze at. But I'd say the benefits of winning a contest like this go beyond the money.