Cyber-archeology - a science of the future

A thought just struck me this morning - does anyone know how many "dead" sites are actually out there on the Net. Sites which perhaps google has stopped indexing or dropped from its index. Blogs which have been left, forums which someone niavely tried to set up. None of my research can come up with an answer ot this. Can you?
This information could be very useful in a sort of what went wrong scenario - the same way as experts going looking for black boxes when an aircraft crashes to try and find out the cause.
Now that it is so easy to create a website - or be present on the net for want of a better word and a myspace account is also presence on the net as is a Twitter account and other social media sites - would it not be interesting to know the actual biography of a website from its birth to its death. The success of a website can, I believe, be measured by many criteria but one common one must be visitors. Can I call my website a success if I have zero visitors. Yes you can if you only want a website to try and create the most magnificent banners, formats etc and do not care who sees them apart from yourself. This, I assume makes up a minority of the current website owners. For bloggers and tweeters one of the main reasons for having a site is to communicate with others. This equally requires visibility. Lastly commercial websites without visitors - need I say more?

That is what I mean by cyber-archeology. Looking at these cyber ruins of the past with a view to understanding their downfall. Was it the war of the search engines in the 20th century which caused its downfall? Was it conquered and colonized by Amazon or Google in the 21 century? Questions of interest to me would be ones like how long do people try to get visibility through their websites before giving up? How long do people blog for before giving up as no one reads their blog? And lastly what is the percentage of sites on the net that basically are dead - a criteria for me would be a site which has not been updated in the past 10-12 months. Your comments would fascinate me!

Google Wave - impressive!

Last week saw the unveiling at Google IM of Google Wave, already being called the future of email. It is strange that we forget that email was invented long before the Internet and teh first email was sent over 40 years ago. Still today this is the most popular form of communication on the Internet. 40 years after. Now Google has unveiled a very impressive tool which combines main of the original forms of communication,  i.e. instant messaging and email. The Rasmussen brothers from Google who, incidentally, were the authors of Google maps, are the authors of Wave. To see their presentation of Google Wave click here.

Search technology - no future?

I just made a strange observation on the web. Being interested in the future of search engine technology I put this phrase into several search engines and the results I cam up with were very disppointing in terms of when it was written. The most recent I could find was an interview with Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, and this was dated July 2007. In his opinion the priorities (then) were voice recognition and automatic translation.  Other guru`s - dated earlier, spoke of being able to search videos. Now that I completely fail to understand - why would I want to search a video? That's probably why I am not an Internet millionaire - however.
Personally, having been involved for some years in machine translation; particularly in the 1990's, this is more than a difficult topic. Basically the original excitement around machine translation has long disappeared. Big money has been spent on cracking this nut but the results have been anything but glorious. And I find the reason to be simple. We as humans underestimated entirely the complexity of language and, secondly, until technology can recognise context, translation will be in hot water. By that I mean we can use the same words in different situations but they will have a different meaning precisely because the context in which they were said differ.
But back to my original scepticism. Try a search yourself on the future of search technology and see if you come up with something a little more recent.

Drive using only the rear-view mirror!

That's what Google does, folks. Know why? Because the road in front has never been explored before and not even the Google gurus know what it looks like. They simply have to guess through looking at where we have come from and this you can only do while driving by using a rear view mirror.
The truth is search technology is a VERY new and unexplored scence. Today scientists know more about the human brain or the life of the ant than they do about the future of search technology. There is no literature to guide you. Sure there are plenty of informed and interesting guesses where the journey is going and also from very informed travellers but the fact still remains that no one has been there.
Equally this opens the question of the overall influence of the Internet on our future lives. 15 years ago most of us did not have an Internet. Today its absence is unthinkable. What impact will it have on our daily lives in another 15 years? We come form the Stone Age of dail-up connections, of   54MB storage, of  "hotbot" and our humble attempts at creating HTML pages. Remember?
I believe that the future on the Net is difficult if not impossible to predict. The pace of technological innovation on the Net has been fast and is getting faster by the day on account of the financial stakes and the "big boys" out there. It is the billion dollar advertising market that is driving this change. In this scene, the Net economy is no different from any other economic model. It's money that makes the Net go round.

Caffeine for the new google - have we been drinking decaf?

Google has announced it's next step to keep ahead of the search engine battle - no doubt there is little coincidence that this comes at a time when Yahoo and Microsoft have stated their intention of giving Google a run for its money in the search technology race. It is interesting to note what Google officially says what it is going to focus on with the new Caffeine technology:

size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.
. These sparse words from Google are of course open to all sorts of interpretation but you do not have to be a rocket scientist to make some educated guesses at what they mean. "Size" probably is a hidden admission of Google that it is having a hard time to keep up with the number of web pages in existence and that they have to index more in a shorter period of time. This also ties in well with the reference to indexing speed as this would point to the importance of fresh content. It has become a web cliche that "content is king" but this statement from google would seem to infer that new rich content is what they are looking for. This could be good news for the little guy as it is already very evident, particularly with the increase in blogging, that there is a lot of fantastic content out there in every conceivable niche but it is hard to find as the small sites do not have the visibility of thh larger sites on search engines i.e. good content is not getting the search rewards it deserves. The use of the term "accuracy" would seem to back up this statement - info is becoming less generalised and more pinpointed - google wants to get at this rich info and give more accurate results for its users.
This overall strategy could see a major step in the maturing process of search engine technology. There are many already who believe that many of the traditional SEO criteria are redundant - i.e. keyword desnity. Google is perhaps going to take the emphasis off the importance of the number of inbound links and focus more on the relevancy and quality of the information it finds. That of course is going to be easier said than done.

Google's quiet revolution - Caffeine

Just discovered that dear old google has been busy - never rests, poor thing, but according to Matt Cutts, their search guru, this has been the biggest change over recent years. It's called Caffeine and although I don't understand what they have done, it is making google search even faster and more accurate. It seems to be a reaction to the competition and more specifically tot BING.COM the real competition from Yahoo and Microsoft who are making a serious attempt to take on Google in the search technology world.
Anyway, I believe that competition is healthy and that Google has had it too good for too long. Yesterday I got my Google Adsense account banned - allegedly click fraud. There is no way I can prove my innocence (and I am innocent) so instead like most people I just sigh and look for another advertising system like Kontera or Adbrite to try and make a few bucks with my website.

Just for the record.

Today I received an exciting little email from google Adsense informing me that my Adsense accoutn had been suspended as I was suspected of click fraud. Good morning Vietnam.I have actually 10 blogs which for advertising purposes depend upon Adsense to make a little income. I can appeal the decision - but as they point out - this by no means infers that my accoutn will be reinstated. So what did I do wrong. problem is NOTHING!
I am not stupid enough to click on the ads, not stupid enough to get my extended family to click on the ads, not stupid enough to pay others to click on my ads. Mind you I had noticed over the past days that I was getting a fair number of clicks. Obviously too many for the Google monster's liking as it seems to have woken up and bitten my head off.
What can I do about it. Basically nothing. I can wait for the judgement of the Google appeals panel against my execution because that is what it is in financial terms. Ideas nre than welcome.

Why google doesn't need a crystal ball!

We will all be immensely relieved to learn that google does not need a gypsy and a crystal ball to tell us what the future holds as far as search technology is concerned. Their mathematicians can work that out themselves! And, apparently, with amazing accuracy. Basically my understanding is that by looking at the trends of the past they can extrapolate on these to find out what we will be searching for up to 12 months from now. Next motn will be pretty accurate in their calculations with increasing error up to 12 months but still fairly safe predictions. The only serious question I have is why would they want to do this - and I bet there are a million answers!
Naturally you coudl have to be a psychic to tell of upcoming scandals and events in the coming 12 months which will stake the world of news and which are impossible to predict but by and large the trends overall search can be predicted with up to 80% accuracy. Travel, fashion, etc. all big search areas and they will remain so. But I wonder what is the overall use for google in being able to predict such search behaviour?