Olivier Travers

You read it first: Google is going to acquire Splunk in the next 18 months, and it’s going to cost them. They’ll ship it as an appliance for enterprise customers as well as give no-nag freebies to (geek) consumers. Well, I don’t know that they will, but they should. Splunk 3.2 just got released and [...]

Look, Google, I actually know how to spell Chile, ok? Stemming “Chile” into “Chili” and polluting my queries with recipes and rock bands that have NOTHING TO DO WHATSOEVER with the country of Chile is not helping. I am not writing my queries in French (Chile is spelled Chili in that language). I seem to [...]

Seems Anil Dash is actually widely analogous. Who Knew? Judgment passed on you by the internet can be worse. Nice work, Philipp Lenssen.

I can only describe my attempts at improving our performance with Adsense as intensely frustrating. First there was the poor, canned customer support. The incomplete reporting (want to track ad channel performance over time? Tough luck, gotta buy third-party software). The spammy gateway advertisers with absolutely no content on their site (automated Adwords/Adsense arbitrage would [...]

This graph is definitely impressive. Kudos to the Google team for creating so much wealth, and to people buying at IPO time. I’m not one of them, I thought it would rocket and crash, so I’ve given up on pretending I know anything about what I’m talking about in this industry. Or is the stock [...]

In an interview with Gary Price: "The beautiful thing about a relational database is that its structure tells you a lot about what is important. Database designers have been brilliant at optimizing databases (both the organization of the information as well as the algorithms) to best exploit this regularity. When you flatten out a database, [...]

The new Google interface to Usenet has Atom feeds for every newsgroup (add /feeds to a group URL) and features membership more prominently, with shortcuts such as favorites groups and bookmarked threads. Some of the display modes work better than others, but where did the ability to sort search results by date rather than (dubious) [...]

Since John Battelle is hyping it like the new slicebread and everybody is getting excited, let me throw a few links from my archives, just follow the trail: Creating a Personal Web Notebook (a post about Udi Manber’s work, dated 10/17/00) Amazon hires algorithm guru (11/08/02) Will Search Engines Learn from Our Fumbling? (02/24/04, about [...]

Gary is the guy [*]. See what he listed in March. Among others, this patent was granted to Microsoft: Retrieval of relevant information categories. [*] A previous version of this post mistakenly attributed this to Tara Calishain, sorry about the confusion. Both Gary and Tara are great!