Google Programming Contest Winner 229
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."
if i'd only known (Score:2, Interesting)
The winning idea was cool, but the rest looks
like free development for google rather
than something novel.
I see one being implemented soon (Score:5, Interesting)
This may help to defeat the current practice of overloading the PageRank results of a given key word as to point to a given page by having people link to that page with a link containing that keyword, aka "Googlebombing". I do think that the winner is a very interesting and useful project, this latter one will probably be implemented ASAP.
404 Page Not Found ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shouldn't Google automatically check results that a user follows and flag those that cannot be displayed ?
Re:Geographical Approximation (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be cool, would be the option to right click on the hyperlink and have the option "Find alternative location".
Or even cooler, have IE (or your favourite browser) on putting up the 404 message have a hyperlink which does the same. Hell, easy enough to do with apache.
Re:404 Page Not Found ? (Score:3, Interesting)
What should they do if a page is unavailable, though? What if it's only down for a few seconds?
Wow (Score:1, Interesting)
Miscellaneous Projects
1995 - ongoing: Free Software
I wrote and maintain Gale30, an open source instant messaging system. Other free software projects of mine include Airhook, Liboop, and some XML processing tools.
2001 - ongoing: Sweetcode
I am the sole proprietor of Sweetcode, a web site that reports interesting free software. Sweetcode receives thousands of visitors daily; media reports include NTK, memepool, the Linux Weekly News, and others.
2000 - ongoing: SeattleWireless
I maintain the Node Map, a simple XML-based GIS which uses public mapping engines to display the location of community 802.11b wireless nodes in Seattle.
Daniel Egnor's "Iocaine Powder" (Score:4, Interesting)
In a weird coincidence, I just spent a half-hour last night lecturing about Daniel Egnor's Iocaine Powder [ofb.net], winner of the First International RoShamBo Programming Competition [ualberta.ca]. Credit this guy with two award-winning pieces of extreme programming cleverness!
Not all well-ranked sites for common words cheat (Score:3, Interesting)
This statement is easily refuted. Type "linux". The 10 sites you see all belong there, and I can guarantee you that most of them are not engaging in cheating.
But since you admit that you work for a company that engages in this practice, perhaps it helps you sleep at night to believe that "everybody does it".