Spam Conference Trip Report

Yesterday was the first ever Spam Conference and it was held at MIT.  First off I have to give huge kudos to Paul Graham the organizer.  In a little over a month he put together a truly outstanding conference --- and the interest level was astonishing.  They expected "50 to 60" and instead 560 signed up.  And since the room was basically full and it held 566 by number of seats, I'd say roughly 520 to 540 actually made it.  And don't think that these were all local MIT geeks either; I sat next to a researcher from IBM Zurich, had lunch with people from Cloudmark (San Francisco), met the founder of pobox (Philadelphia), spoke with Tony Bowden at length (England) and others.  Presentations came from BrightMail, Popfile, Microsoft France, MIT, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, ShopIP, MessageLabs and others.

Most of the discussions focused on "Naive Statistical Bayesian Classifiers" such as iFile and Popfile (although many other systems were represented including other types).  If I can find the papers online I'll post links to them.  Otherwise Google for them from the info at the Spam Conference page.  More on the conference later or tomorrow.

Did you know that LiveJournal is probably the largest weblog service around? Their users seldom read weblogs outside LiveJournal, which is what makes them less visible to outsiders. Here's a company profile from late 2002 which states that

LiveJournal boasts a total of 782,000+ users. Of these users, 64% are female, 93% are free accounts, and a large majority of the users are between 15 and 21 years of age. The 729,000 free accounts are made possible because of the 37,000 users that pay. When a user pays, they are contributing a little over $2 a month to pay for LiveJournal and the extra features they have access to.

In case you want to see the impressive growth curve, here's a little zipped Excel file for you: LiveJournalStats.zip, based on the data here. I've estimated that if their membership continues to double every year, their user base will surpass in number the population of Canada around 2008.

And here's another post on LiveJournal demographics at Unbounded Spiral, a blog that you'll surely enjoy if you like reading (or writing!) Ross Mayfield's weblog.

Google's own page about Googlebot:

Googlebot is Google's web-crawling robot. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. On this page, you'll find answers to the most commonly asked questions about how our web crawler works.

As one of the premier search sites on the web, Google focuses on providing the highest-quality search results for our own users and for corporate partners such as Yahoo!, Netscape, and the Washington Post.

-- [Google]

Web Robots Page on Googlebot

Tool to analyze the visit of Goolebot to you site.

Googlebot META Tag Discussed.

Google Fan Email, News and Links
A site with 18 members that provides a summary of Google News listed elsewhere, links across the web to sites talking or doing interesting things with Google.

I Help You Services
This site has 2,049 members at the time of writing. This community has a heavy dose of SEO population and many discussions are about how to get around the rules of Google. A good one to watch to hear what the average website owner is thinking. Many small websites who are not getting good results in Google represented here.

Cre8asite Forums
A new community started August 2002 and seems to be a well run community. There are 384 registered users and most seem quite active in discussions. Discussions range from Google to anything about creating websites.

Search Engine Forums (Jim World)
There are many people here in discussion. The site does not indicate how many people. A good number of topics mostly about getting better showing in Google by webmasters.

Webmaster World
Perhaps the most dignified of all the forums. A good number of members (although actual number undisclosed) who have generated 350,000 messages and more. Google section is highly acclaimed with an excellent knowledgebase on Google.

Google Groups
There are a number of discussion groups in the main Google Groups arena. The largest of these is google.public.support.general, and the others include: google.public.translators, google.public.web-apis, and all the lab discussion groups google.public.labs.webquotes, google.public.labs.google-viewer, google.public.labs.glossary, google.public.labs.sets, google.public.labs.voice-search, google.public.labs.keyboard-shortcuts, alt.internet.search-engines.

Spider Food Forums
Approximately 1,350 people subscribe to forums in this general group. There is a specific forum for Google that produces a good number of messages a day.

Search Engine Optimisation Forums
While this is not directly on Google, many messages do discuss Google from time to time. There are some interesting tips and tools in this forum, including Chris's Desktop Toolbar Google.

SitePoint Forums
SitePoint has 20,070 members with more than 4,500 messages discussing Google directly, while there are other messages related to search engines that equally apply to Google out of a total of 650,000 messages. This is worthwhile looking at from a Google perspective.

Google Chat
A lovely forum of about 127 members that is serious about Google. Keep an eye on this forum it has great potential.

Work out your page rank:

I originally made this page to help people determine their Google PageRank. There was a time in the distant past where the Google toolbar was not giving a number when someone moused over it. I made the original graphic for this page to help people assign a number to their page by looking at where the green line ended under the words "PageRank". For example - if the green bar stopped right under the "n" in "Rank" - that page was a 9, and if it stopped between the "g" and "e" in "Page" it was a 4. Google has since fixed this bug and now a simple mouseover is all you need to determine your PageRank. Sometimes this seems to stop working, but in general - most people don't have a problem.

Here is a link to the Original PageRank Figurin' Guide if you want to use that graphic again.

-- [Google Page Rank Figurin' Guide]

GoogleBrowser

"Google! Everything you always wanted to know, but didn't have time to find out" May 2002

May 29, 2002 : A presentation by LLOPS Internet SIG members: Judy Broom, Betsy Chessler, and Katherine Foster

Very cool tool - Top 10 Google Results completely via Email -- plus number of listings returned for that listing.

To use this service you just have to send an email at google@capeclear.com and put the text of your query in the Subject line.

Description (translated) on German site at-web.de.

Because GoogleMail has proved popular, Cape Clear recently introduced AmazonMail (amazon@capeclear.com), which lets users search the Amazon site.

A tutorial on using search engines, with Google alongside others:

Because the Web is not indexed in any standard manner, finding information can seem difficult. Search engines are popular tools for locating web pages, but they often return thousands of results. Search engines crawl the Web and log the words from the web pages they find in their databases. Because some search engines have logged the words from over 1 billion documents, results can be overwhelming. Without a clear search strategy, using a search engine is like wandering aimlessly in the stacks of a library trying to find a particular book.

Successful searching involves two key steps. First, you must have a clear understanding of how to prepare your search. You must identify the main concepts in your topic and determine any synonyms, alternate spellings, or variant word forms for the concepts. Second, you need to know how to use the various search tools available on the Internet. For example, search engines (e.g., AltaVista) are very different than subject directories (e.g., Yahoo). Even search engines themselves can vary greatly in size, accuracy, features, and flexibility.

This tutorial presents an easy-to-follow process on using search engines and subject directories for finding what you need on the World Wide Web. Specifically, this course will enable you to:

• Use subject directories and describe the difference between a subject directory and a search engine.

• Use implied and full Boolean logic, phrase searching, truncation, and field searching effectively.

• Identify key concepts, synonyms, and variant word forms in your search topic.

• Use key search engines effectively including AltaVista, Google, All the Web/FAST, and HotBot.

• Use meta-search engines.

• Use specialty databases when appropriate.

• Apply search strategies and techniques in a scavenger hunt exercise.

-- [Web Search Strategies]