I’m going to be traveling for the next few weeks. I’ll be at three different conferences: February 28th – March 4th: TED. I’ll be attending, plus doing a short (three-minute) audience member talk about my 30 day challenges. March 8-10th: SMX West. I’m doing a session called The Spam Police and a panel called Ask [...]
There have been a number of patent filings and whitepapers from the major search engines over the past 5 or 6 years that describe how they might break a page into blocks or segments to understand things like the main topic or topics on a page, which block might be the most important for [...] [...]
If Google decided to include a facial recognition search as part of the Visual Search described in a Google patent application a couple of weeks ago, a couple of questions need to be addressed by the search engine. One is, where would they get the pictures to power that facial recognition software (hint [...] Related [...]
A couple of years back, Google was granted a patent on an approach to identifying synonyms by looking at and comparing queries that searchers used to find information. The patent was Determining query term synonyms within query context, and I covered it in my post How Google May Expand Searches Using Synonyms for Words [...] [...]
Google Goggles lets you search by taking a picture of landmarks, books, business cards, artwork, product labels, logos, and text. It can use Optical Character Recognition to transform text in an image to searchable text on the Web, reads barcodes, finds similar images in databases of artwork and landmarks and other databases. But, we’re [...] [...]
I often write large walls of text, rarely adding images to the words that I post to these pages, and I think that’s a mistake. A meaningful image can draw the eye, capture the imagination, and often explain more in a single glance than hours of reading and reflection. Imagine if Babe Ruth kept [...] [...]
Google just launched two-factor authentication, and I believe everyone with a Google account should enable it. Two-factor authentication (also known as 2-step verification) relies on something you know (like a password) and something you have (like a cell phone). Crackers have a harder time getting into your account, because even if they figure out your [...]
I sometimes hear people say “Remember when Google launched and the results were so good? Google didn’t have any spam back then. Man, I wish we could go back to those days.” I know where those people are coming from. I was in grad school in 1999, and I remember that Google’s quality blew me [...]
If you want to post some JPEG pictures but you’re worried that they might have metadata like location embedded in them, here’s how to strip that data out. First, install exiftool using this command: sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl Then, go into the directory with the JPEG files. If you want to remove metadata from every [...]
If you took a look at Google’s patent portfolio recently, you might ask yourself, “What kind of company is this?” Is it a search engine or a smart phone company, a memory module manufacturer or a server maker? Does this company really own the rights to a weight loss patent titled, “Method Of Assaying [...] [...]