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An exclusive look inside the Google search algorithm

The March 2010 issue of Wired features “an exclusive look at the algorithm that rules the Web.” It’s a fascinating three page article that reveals much about Google’s tireless drive to improve itself, but most significant are the hints as to what hidden ‘signals’ determine what websites end up at the top of a search query – and the realization that Google’s system is ever-changing.

Wired Magazine – Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Web search is a multipart process. First, Google crawls the Web to collect the contents of every accessible site. This data is broken down into an index (organized by word, just like the index of a textbook), a way of finding any page based on its content. Every time a user types a query, the index is combed for relevant pages, returning a list that commonly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The trickiest part, though, is the ranking process — determining which of those pages belong at the top of the list.

That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious.

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Command & Conquer's E.V.A. game installer

I had almost forgotten how awesome the game installation program for Command & Conquer was. Now reminded care of the Bombcast, here it is again in all its DOS and SoundBlaster 16 glory.

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Workplace Law: About to be fired? Read this

Just a quick repost of some legal advice from occasional National Post columnist Howard Levitt, counsel to Lang Michener LLP and author of The Law of Dismissal for Human Resources Professionals.

Financial Post – Workplace Law: About to be fired? Read this

These days, when the employee-employer relationship goes sour, the employee knows it. Most companies follow standard protocols for warning employees if they don’t shape up they will be fired. Employees should be careful how they deal with such situations. Here are a few things to heed:

Don’t demand finality. When you are told you have no future with the company, the instinct is to demand resolution and request specifics, including your last day of employment. That is short-sighted. Dismissals must be, as the courts put it, “specified, definite and unequivocal.” It’s in your interest to delay the day of reckoning. The severance clock does not start ticking until you are given a termination date.

Don’t defame your employer, manager or co-workers. It’s imperative you do nothing that provides your employer with an opportunity to fire you for cause and pay no severance. No matter how tempting revenge is, this is when you are most reliant on your employer’s goodwill and generosity regarding severance and references.

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Santander: The most conservative – and profitable – bank in the world

I meant to post this a while back (or maybe I did and forgot), but a BusinessWeek post about overoptimism for Spanish banks reminded me about Banco Santander SA, which today received an “outperform” rating by Credit Suisse.

While we’ve been overwhelmed for months now by stories of banks engaging in risky behaviour in order to turn bigger-than-ever profits, Santander stands out as one that’s largely stuck to traditional products and still manages to satiate its stockholders.

Time.com – Santander: The Most Boring Bank in the World

Spend an hour in Santander City and it’s easier to understand Banco Santander’s unlikely march during the last quarter century from sixth biggest bank in Spain to largest bank in the euro zone. Since Emilio Botín took over from his father in 1986, Santander has spent more than $60 billion buying banks in Spain, Latin America, Europe and, more recently, the U.S.

But it’s not just about being the biggest. By sticking to old-fashioned banking practices, while shrewdly employing the firm’s sophisticated banking software, Botín has also made Santander the most profitable bank in the world outside China, earning close to $25 billion in the last two years, even as the world’s economies teetered on the brink.

In Santander City the functional is exalted and the fancy eschewed. The bank runs the same way, thanks to Botín’s commitment to banking’s stodgiest virtues: conservatism, patience and the sort of loans that don’t need to be sliced and diced into nonsensical instruments like those that caused the meltdown on Wall Street.

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What caused the U.S. federal deficit?

Graphs care of The Economist. Not being an American taxpayer myself, I blame my ignorance of the staggering implications of the Bush-era tax cuts on the “need to know” rule.

This is something Barack Obama has been at pains to point out, as Republicans have attacked him as a profligate spender and runner of deficits. Most of today’s borrowing, he has said, is attributable to factors beyond his control. He is essentially pointing people to charts like the one at right.

That’s a damning chart. It implicates a lot of people, including some of the same Congressional Democrats who are now joining Republicans in assailing the president for budgeted deficits, but who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Politically, this is a pretty important chart.

That said, these most recent contributions to the federal debt appear to be irrelevant when looking at the long term:

That massive increase there at the end is due to two things: growth in spending on Medicare and Medicaid, and growth in interest payments on the debt. But the real problem is Medicare and Medicaid. By about 2070, spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will outstrip revenues.

In the end, who caused what deficits when isn’t important. What is important is finding some way to avoid that spike. And both parties seem to be a long way away from having anything like a serious discussion about that challenge.

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Regional Shares of Canada’s GDP

From the Canada West Foundation’s discussion paper Look Before You Leap comes a rather compelling reason why Canadians should consider “the importance of the oil and gas industry to the Canadian economy [and to take] into account when debating how to address greenhouse emissions in Canada.”

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All the investment advice you’ll ever need (in just one blog post)

In short: A panel of experts brought in by Google to advise their employees pre-IPO recommended buying index funds, not actively managed mutual funds. Their reasoning? The statistical improbability of outperforming the market is less than 100:1, and the amount you beat the market by gets eroded anyways by the higher fees you’ll be paying for the service of having a human fund manager.

An added gem: There’s a great link in the article to a Mutual Fund/ETF Expense Analyzer, which lets you compare up to 3 funds for their performance upon an amount and term length you enter.

San Francisco Magazine – The best investment advice you’ll never get

As Google’s historic August 2004 IPO approached, the company’s senior vice president, Jonathan Rosenberg, realized he was about to spawn hundreds of impetuous young multimillionaires. They would, he feared, become the prey of Wall Street brokers, financial advisers, and wealth managers, all offering their own get-even-richer investment schemes. Scores of them from firms like J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Presidio Financial Partners were already circling company headquarters in Mountain View with hopes of presenting their wares to some soon-to-be-very-wealthy new clients.

One by one, some of the most revered names in investment theory were brought in to school a class of brilliant engineers, programmers, and cybergeeks on the fine art of personal investing, something few of them had thought much about. First to arrive was Stanford University’s William (Bill) Sharpe, 1990 Nobel Laureate economist and professor emeritus of finance at the Graduate School of Business. Sharpe drew a large and enthusiastic audience, which he could have wowed with a PowerPoint presentation on his “gradient method for asset allocation optimization” or his “returns-based style analysis for evaluating the performance of investment funds.”

But he spared the young geniuses all that complexity and offered a simple formula instead. “Don’t try to beat the market,” he said. Put your savings into some indexed mutual funds, which will make you just as much money (if not more) at much less cost by following the market’s natural ebb and flow, and get on with building Google.

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Christmas In New Zealand 2009

I spent my Christmas holidays in New Zealand with my girlfriend and her family. We flew Air New Zealand from Toronto -> Vancouver -> Auckland, and Auckland -> Los Angeles -> Toronto on the return trip. It’s an breaktakingly beautiful country in the middle of its summer season – coming back to -25C weather was rough.

I’ve still got a few photos left to post from my last couple of days there, but here’s 9/10ths of what we snapped. Enjoy!

If the slideshow embedded into the page doesn’t show up above, click this link to view it in its own window.

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Tweet as FBI Agent Francis York Morgan

[image]https://yllus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/francis_york_morgan.png[/image]
[link]https://yllus.com/tweet-as-fbi-agent-francis-york-morgan/[/link]
[description]As a regular visitor to the video game database/review website GiantBomb.com I found myself eagerly anticipating the Endurance Run: Deadly Premonition episodes the staff of GB released nightly.

As a tribute to what I consider to be one of the most interesting and compelling characters in any video game I created the Tweet as FBI Agent Francis York Morgan page, which allows people to anonymously post to the Twitter account @yorkmorgan.[/description]

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Icelanders rebel, refuse to bail out distressed national banks to the tune of $6 billion

Unlike most of the world, it appears that Iceland’s failed banks won’t be bailed out using public funds. The situation is unique and unprecedented – but while the Icelandic taxpayer may have made the right moral choice, they’re probably doing the wrong thing in realistic terms: As badly as their bankers may have behaved, this is not the right time to display to the world the fact that your money is not safe and secure in your country’s banks.

Another good point made in the article (one I haven’t quoted below): These failures occurred at “the hands of inept politicians, bumbling regulators, a farcical central bank, abuse of deposit insurance and the adventurous world of currency traders,” not at the behest of a free market/laissez-faire system. Like all scams, the Icelandic one was a timebomb, a plot derived from greed and ignorance.

The Iceland rebellion

In many countries, taxpayers are rightly cranky over the idea that their governments are bailing out banks and others — including their own regulators and central bankers — who helped create the 2008 global financial meltdown. Iceland appears to be setting a new standard of taxpayer response that politicians everywhere might want to note.

Under pressure from voters and taxpayers, Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, this week refused to sign a bill to reimburse almost $6-billion to Britain and Holland for money paid to depositors who put money into two high-flying Icelandic banks that failed in 2008. The president was responding to taxpayers who are essentially rebelling against being forced to pick up the tab for a financial bailout of depositors, regulators, foreign governments and even their own government and politicians.

It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that the people of Iceland are refusing to pay for all the schemes of private bankers and public officials who, over the course of the last decade, drove the whole of Iceland into bankruptcy.

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