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"Beyond the Charts"
Bruce Haring sets out to tell the amazing story of how the MP3 movement turned the recording industry on its head, but misses the beat.
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[03/23/00]

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[03/22/00]

My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!
Ad-fat magazines like the Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and the Red Herring have swelled to telephone-book size. But who has time to read 3,000 pages a month?
By Katharine Mieszkowski
[03/21/00]

Technology: View from the top
Vote naked in the privacy of your own home!
While Arizona Democrats cast online ballots in the primary, Election.com CEO Joe Mohen patrolled the virtual booths for illegal hanky-panky.
By Lydia Lee
[03/20/00]

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Give my regards to broadband
High-speed access is great -- but it doesn't turn the Internet back into TV.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/17/00]

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Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both in their mid-20s, started the company in 1998 after three years of graduate research at Stanford University. Page and Brin quickly pulled in Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim as an investor. Stanford has also put money into Google, and last year's $25 million round of equity funding, led by venture capital powerhouses Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has deepened the company's rosy glow.

One reason for this torrent of cash is that Google works. It's fast and accurate, with an uncanny ability to put the thing you most wanted to find directly under your nose. The technology that makes this happen is equal parts rocket science and peer review. Google's hypertext-based system for ranking search results uses a mathematical algorithm to rate Web sites based on the number of other sites linking to them, then factors in how heavily linked those sites are. The result is a form of objectivity that springs directly from the Internet community, translating its distributed judgments into a quick, precise read of what matters and what you can do without.

Google's latest initiative is the integration of its own search technology with the Open Directory Project, the Web's largest human-edited directory. Melding such disparate tools into a single search service is hardly a no-brainer -- particularly when, like Google, you enjoy the kind of devoted following that recoils at the slightest interface tweak. Add to that the sometimes uneven editorial quality of the all-volunteer ODP, toss in the chance that both search results and user experience might suffer in the wake of the integration, and you could anticipate an upset stomach or two at the company's Mountain View offices.

But while Georges Harik, the software engineer (and "director of directories") who led the integration project, had been up until 7 a.m. the night before the March 16 launch, he was all smiles -- and with good reason. As aficionados of Google's no-nonsense interface were relieved to discover, the company has managed to roll in the new functionality with hardly a ripple. It's still as fast as ever. The difference is that there are now targeted directory entries among the search results, providing both intelligible context and lateral, topic-based browsing, with your results as point of departure. If you search on "Eric Raymond," for example, you get links to sites associated with the open-source advocate, plus a selection of relevant directory categories, including "Computers > Open Source > Advocacy."

As Harik explains it, the decision to go with Open Directory -- just one player in a space that includes Yahoo, LookSmart and Excite, among others -- had two main drivers. One was the licensing -- it's pretty hard to argue with "free," whether you're talking software, beer or content. The ODP's evolving editorial culture was also a plus, said Harik. "We like the way submissions are made to the Open Directory, and we think it has the potential to be more accurate and more timely than other directories. The people who contribute to it care about what they're doing." The truly decisive point, though, was the Open Directory's potential to scale in parallel to the Web's hypercharged expansion.

That potential scalability derives from the "open content" aspect of the ODP. The premise is familiar to anyone who has followed the phenomenal rise of the Linux operating system: A highly motivated, globally distributed community of contributors, each with particular talents and expertise, can out-code and out-debug any corporate engineering team on Earth. The trick, though, is to evaluate and integrate those parallel, semi-anarchic efforts.

Different "open" projects take different approaches, from the benign despotism of Linus Torvalds (who, as he puts it, personally "sprinkles holy penguin pee" over each new Linux release) to the barely moderated laissez faire of the discussion site Slashdot. While it's clear that "to many eyes, all bugs are shallow," it's not so obvious how to keep new bugs out of each new mix. And if that's true of software, where "Does it work?" provides an unbending benchmark, it's doubly true of the Open Directory's attempt to map and rank the online universe.

Next page | Google's greatest challenge? Convincing its users it's not on the take