I went to bed last night trying to recall what is it that I was looking for a few days back when I thought "Umm... Google is pretty useless..." Looking back at my @kulesh I believe it must have been something to do with i18n and I recall finding what I was looking for from Stack Overflow instead.

Yesterday I found three discussions on the same topic:

• Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail
• Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
• The End Of Hand Crafted Content
• Why Social Beats Search
• Search and the social graph

We constantly try hard to get better ranking for our content and products at Digital Assembly. Therefore, I have some vested interest in search engines and their ranking of content. More on that later.

When the keywords you're looking for return lots of advertisements on Google, rest assured the search results are pretty useless. In such cases I move on to localize my search to expert sites like Consumer Reports, Stack Overflow, and the like. Sometimes I use Google itself with site:www.example.com [my keywords] to carry on but most of the time I am on the site itself. Given that Google knows which keywords are popular among advertisers, I am sure Google can help make this process a bit easier on their users. The question is how and what can Google do that is hard to game.

Edit: Lot more conversations happening since I posted this. I have added a couple of more links above.

Every year The New York Times editors look back in their rearview mirror and pull out "the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world."  I have missed a bunch of them this year and haven't heard about them until now. For example, did you know cows with names make more milk? Didn't think so.

Here are some of my favorites:

1. Cows With Names Make More Milk
2. The Glow-in-the-Dark Dog
3. Massively Collaborative Mathematics
4. Advertisement That Watches You, The
5. Artificial Car Noise

Here is the entire list. Certainly worth spending some time reading all of them.

[This is a copy of a previous post. I was testing Zemanta. Zemanta doesn't support Posterous; So, ended up posting this from Gmail, and had to hand-edit HTML. Defeats the purpose at the moment. Will try a few more times before quitting.]

Earlier today Google announced Google Public DNS. Change your DNS settings to use servers 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4 to use this service. I am sure lot of people have already chimed in their analysis and opinions. For what it's worth, here is mine:

One of Steve Jobs favorite quotes is "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware" by Alan Kay. I don't know when exactly he said it but I'd say early eighties when he was at Apple. That's exactly what Apple has been doing since and it has worked well for them. Note that Apple didn't stop at hardware and software they also made languages and frameworks that help make software for their hardware; for example, Open CL and GrandCentral Dispatch.

That's the eighties and the nineties. Now if we extend Alan Kay's insight to 2010, "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware and (network) infrastructure." I believe this is exactly what Google is doing with this DNS offering.

DNS is not just name resolution. You can do wonders with and people have done wonders with it; including making it carry MP3s. It is one of the best protocols to carry meta data on the web. So, Google has its own browser, Google has its own OS, Google has its own productivity line, supposedly Google is also making its own phone (hardware). Only piece of the puzzle that's missing was infrastructure and I believe GPD is the first step towards that. It's about user experience and what you need to control to provide the best user experience.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Predictions: The Fabulous 5 for 2010 (gigaom.com)
• Introducing Google Public DNS (googleblog.blogspot.com)

Earlier today Google announced Google Public DNS. Change your DNS settings to use servers 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4 to use this service. I am sure lot of people have already chimed in their analysis and opinions. For what it's worth, here is mine:

One of Steve Jobs favorite quotes is "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware" by Alan Kay. I don't know when exactly he said it (there is no wireless in NYC Subway) but I'd say early eighties when he was at Apple. That's exactly what Apple has been doing since and it has worked well for them. Note that Apple didn't stop at hardware and software they also made languages and frameworks that help make software for their hardware; for example, Open CL and GCD.

That's the eighties and the ninties. Now if we extend Alan Kay's insight to 2010, "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware and (network) infrastructure." I believe this is exactly what Google is doing with this DNS offering.

DNS is not just name resolution. You can do wonders with and people have done wonders with it; including making it carry MP3s (again, no wireless in NYC subway). It is one of the best protocols to carry meta data on the web. So, Google has its own browser, Google has its own OS, Google has its own productivity line, supposedly Google is also making its own phone (hardware). Only piece of the puzzle that's missing was infrastructure and I believe GPD is the first step towards that. It's about user experience and what you need to control to provide the best user experience.

Think about it?

Sent from an iPhone.

It's not everyday your doctor complains about his pains. Well, mine did, for a good half an hour. He is not a run-of-the-mill, your pulse is good you will survive till our next appointment, now get the hell out of my office kind of doctor. He spends a lot of time chatting with his patients. We usually talk about not eating too much red-meat or stress or something mundane about me. Yesterday he talked about his "pain".

 You probably heard that medical records are going electronic. Electronic medical records or electronic health records (EMR/EHR) is just a matter of time. Experts will tell you that is the case becuase big companies like Google and Microsoft has begun to invest a lot of money in this area. Most of the investment is for addressing the many problems EMR/EHR will bring along. If you have a decent amount of confidential or personal electronic files you are already familiar with some of these problems. The problem my doctor has is one that anyone would have moving from analog to digital. Simply put, what do you do with the analog data?

 Now that he is moving to EMR he has two records for each patient: all latest records are in electronic form and all history is still on paper. How big of a "pain" is this for a physician? Apparently, on average a physician has about 3,000 patients. Each patient, on average visists a doctor about 4 times a year. Doctors have to keep records of a patient for seven years. Each record, at the minimum, has two pages. So, on average a physician has to manage (3000x4x7x2) about 168,000 pages! This doesn't include any lab reports etc. There are about 600,000 physicians in the U.S. Apparently, there is no easy way to transfer this stack of papers into electronic form.

 The solution doesn't need to be fancy either. The minimum useful product just need to scan the paper forms, associate the records with that in electronic form, chronologically (just by year to begin with) sort and file the scanned pages. No need to OCR handwritten prescriptions (pheew!!) or provide search or anything fancy. Need to OCR date and patient name (or ID), however. Paper forms have a standard format is what I am told.

 The current pain is the following: Expensive and laborious to maintain some records in paper and some in electronic form. Having a foot in analog world and the other in digital slows down workflow when they need patient history.

 I have not done any research or even a search for that matter to see whether there are products/solutions to address this "pain." But, no one ever been so discriptive and quantitative about their pain!

 If your looking to solve a "pain" you might want to consider this. But, please do some (re)search first for any existing solutions. Please leave anything you find in the comments to help others.

  

 Sent from an iPhone.