Marc Gayle

Some background for those of you who don't build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.)

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

They recently published, essentially, the state of Afghanistan in April 2010 in Pictures. Below you will find some of my favorites.

(download)

Click here to download:

afghanistan-in-april-2010-in-photos-szskzHEAojwJGhyCemzx.zip (810 KB)

Have I mentioned how much I love Boston Big Picture? The truth is, I saw the name of their latest article and didn’t even see the pictures, but I knew I had to write a post about it. They are always that awesome, that I never pre-screened it and picked the images as I went along. I had to restrain myself from including more from the post, because there are so many awesome ones.

Do yourself a favor, go and check it out, you will thank me later.

Oil and Gas MENA produced a very interesting infographic that breaks down the buyers of Iranian Oil – and other interesting information.

To read the full post, check it out here.

Ok…hate is such a strong word. I don’t exactly hate them…I don’t hate anyone actually (not that I can think of ). However, the image below illustrates why they have fallen from grace, and shows what is fundamental wrong with them.

To explain, I just finished doing a fresh install of XP for a friend and am installing the pre-requisite stuff. Acrobat (PDF reader) was one of them, just because I needed something to read PDFs and that’s the first thing that comes to mind. So I google ‘Acrobat Download’ and am given a link that takes me to their download page. I click download and the screenshot captures what happens next (click to view fullscreen):

As you can see….they force me to download ‘Adobe Download Manager’ plug-in by ‘getPlus’ (who the hell is getPlus? – That’s rhetorical, I don’t know and don’t care they are also in my bad books) for Firefox. Then, I have to restart Firefox, which then loads Adobe Download Manager, which then hits me with a ton of banner ads that slide from side to side (that I can’t close or block) and, while downloading Acrobat – which I then have to install. On top of that, once acrobat is installed, they also installed ‘Adobe Air’. It could have been that they gave me the option to opt-out, but I was so pissed by this install process that I glossed over it, but it just made the entire process even worse.

Is Adobe joking? This reminds me of some shady ‘third-party’ app site. I will not be going through that process again, that’s for sure.

The worst part is, Acrobat isn’t even the best free PDF reader. Next time I will go with my usual default.

Adobe…stop worrying about Apple’s 3.3.1 change in their iPhone TOS and start focusing on your own customers and improving their experiences and lives. Maybe if you did that, and made Flash better people wouldn’t allow Apple to get away with the shafting they are now giving you and many other developers.

In their latest book, Rework [Amazon], one of their many principles are ‘pick a fight’. They also talk about having a point of view. So that’s exactly what I did. I read their book, was impressed by how they followed their own advice, and while I agreed with most of their points there was one that I strongly disagreed with. That is their notion that companies should stay small and not aim to grow. I believe we have a moral obligation to grow the companies/ideas that have the ability to do so. Be sure to check out the comments, as the discussion continued.

I can only assume that the reason they say you should pick a fight or have a point of view is that you stand out and get attention (because many companies don’t take sides/positions). If I am wrong, DHH or Jason, please feel free to correct me.

As a result of my fight picking, I saw a huge bump in traffic. I submitted the article to HN and nothing much happened – I had expected a bigger bang, but it puttered out the gate and fizzled in the HN-upcoming story graveyard. Then as a last ditch effort to generate some traffic I simply sent out a tweet, and both DHH & Jason Fried responded. JF retweeted it, and DHH responded on the actual article.

Here are my traffic graphs:

(download)

Click here to download:

traffic-results-from-picking-a-fight-with-37signals-wHsmDripIBcHqFejrDsk.zip (112 KB)

I don’t understand why the bulk of the traffic referrals come up as ‘direct’ when I know that many of them came from either twitter or the bit.ly URL created by Jason Fried and tweeted out.

So, once you have a point of view, and someone else to pick a fight with…doing so can get you some amount of attention.

P.S. Image 1 courtesy of Kay Vee.INC on Flickr.